Corporeality and Performativity in Baroque Naples: The Body of Naples. Alessandro Giardino, ed. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. xiv + 144 pp. $90.

Abstract

A prudent state might devise taxes—according to Tapia, perhaps 5 to 10 percent of grain in kind during good harvests—and then store the grain against future necessity. Tapia thought this policy was superior to borrowing money or raising taxes during a crisis to buy wheat at home or overseas. He learned from Roman history that immediately expelling foreigners was wise policy during a famine, and he believed that fixing just grain prices was the best way to ensure supply and fair profits for farmers, wholesalers, and bakers, and bread for consumers. At times he seems to lament how important bread was in the Neapolitan diet and how other food sources (like acorns) should be utilized. Charity to the worthy was a necessary moral and practical duty to prevent deaths and disorders. Tapia knew that food supplies, despite all efforts, might be inadequate to the task. In those circumstances he posited a hierarchy of needs or triage, favoring saving the old over the young, the nuns over the male clergy, the noble poor over the ignoble—I think he means the truly poor and not leaving disgraceful nobles to starve, which in any case would not happen. He was too decent to feed the lawyers ahead of everyone else. The treatise is another modest example of a Renaissance humanist lawyer on the case.