Journals and the sciences in the provinces of the Kingdom of Naples, 1780s-1790s

Learned and scientific journals underwent many changes between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. Specialized journals multiplied. Popularization for the lay, not necessarily for the scientifically minded or educated, public became one of the aims of a meaningful part of periodicals. In what follows, I will examine learned journals in a specific European local context, the Kingdom of Naples, and in a rather brief chronology—just a decade at the end of the 18th century, the 1780s and early 1790s. I will use scientific cases and journal articles from the 1780s and the early 1790s in order to show how the provinces became important in the last decades of the 18th century, both as loci of scientific observation and experiences as in their quality of recipients of foreign news.