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The wise were forced to live as the mad were accustomed, in order to shun death, such that the greatest lunatic now possesses the royal burdens. The wise now lived alone with their wisdom, behind closed doors, applauding only in public the others’ mad and twisted caprices.

-Tommaso Campanella

On this date in 1603, freaky-deaky Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella drew a life sentence — avoiding execution by dint of a painfully convincing performance of insanity.

Campanella had some problematically heterodox notions about the sun (namely, that it was going to consume the earth) and everything under it, and had had a recent scrape with the Inquisition.

What really got him in trouble was trucking with a Calabrian conspiracy to overthrow Spanish domination, apparently a product of the monk’s millenarian anticipation of a sort of proto-communist revolution.

Campanella was a strange guy, but this was quite a far-out plot.

As Joan Kelly-Gadol writes in this fine tome,

This took place, let it be noted, after he had written two works advocating a Papal monarchy for Italy and the world and two works promoting the interests of the Spanish Empire also in Italy and throughout the world.

Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. Once the conspiracy was betrayed,

Campanella was imprisoned … in the Castel Nuovo, one of the principal fortresses in which the Spaniards maintained a military garrison. He was arraigned before the civil tribunal for rebellion and before the ecclesiastical tribunal for heresy. His “examination” which began in January 1600 was gruesome. He claimed innocence in his first interrogation before the civil tribunal, was thrown into a dungeon, actually a cleft in the bedrock of the Castle, to remain there for seven days. Then followed torture. He “confessed,” admitting that he preached about the coming political upheaval but denying that he was part of a conspiracy to bring it about …

His desperation at this point can be gauged by the fact that by April of 1600 he began to feign madness. The ecclesiastical action against him began now, and he persisted in this attitude of insanity through three interrogations, including an hour of torture … On the fourth and fifth of June 1601, he was subjected to the cruel torture of “the vigil” to test whether his insanity was genuine. This was the usual torture of the rope, suspending the body of the victim by his tied hands over a blade which cut into his flesh whenever he yielded to the strain of holding himself in the air; but the vigil refined this cruelty by continuing it for forty hours. Campanella endured the ordeal without breaking.

And it wasn’t just a feat of toughness to beat the torturer at his own game, impressive as it is on those terms alone: Campanella pulled off a genius gambit exploiting the Inquisition’s own legal machinery to duck the separate capital charges he faced in civil and ecclesiastical court.

Joseph Scalzo’s “Campanella, Foucault, and Madness in Late-Sixteenth Century Italy”,* an academic paper that reads like a thriller, narrates Campanella’s “dangerous competition” with his persecutors.

In fine: on Easter Sunday 1600,** as he was approaching conviction and condemnation in his state trial for treason, Campanella began his insanity ploy, successfully forcing a delay in that case and initiating his separate church trial for heresy.

Then, by remaining stubbornly committed to what most of his examiners believed was a charade, Campanella won … by forcing them to inflict that juridically determinative 40-hour “vigil” torture.

the jurisprudence of the time accorded torture so much force, such as to annul all other proofs and “to purge circumstantial evidence”; if the torture had been vigorous and unusual. The accused came, all the more to avail himself of the result obtained, according to the scholarship of the criminologists most in vogue. Thus, Campanella had judicially to be regarded as insane, although everyone was persuaded that he probably simulated insanity. The consequence, in the tribunal of the Holy Office, was not indifferent: He was a “relapsed heretic,” and even if repentant, he would have been disgraced and consigned to the secular court of justice, which would have executed him; being mad, he could no longer suffer condemnation, and in the circumstance in which he might already have been condemned, he would have been spared the death penalty, to reason and repent.

(this is Scalzo’s quotation of Luigi Amabile, an Italian who wrote the book on Campanella; I have been unable to find the Amabile original online.)

Home free.

Having reached this judicial safe haven, Campanella soon — in fact, according to the man who tortured him, literally on the walk from the vigil back to his cell — resumed a recognizable rationality.

He’d languish in prison until 1626 (a few years after he got out, he had to flee to France), but he made the most of it. Campanella wrote his magnum opus, the utopian City of the Sun, while awaiting his sentence in 1602. A number of other works on a wide array of subjects — science, philosophy, theology, political governance (he returned to giving the Spanish empire supportive advice), a vigorous defense of Galileo — were also composed during his 27 years under lock and key.

Campanella’s visionary anticipation of radical egalitarianism would, like Thomas More’s, help shape the utopian literary genre. But Campanella’s take, while still a theocratic one, lent itself to distinctly more subversive interpretation.†

For example, this Brezhnev-era Soviet essay‡ (unearthed and translated by Executed Today friend and sometime guest-blogger Sonechka) decants the Dominican’s heretical notions into Marxist orthodoxy.

How many times were the communists denounced by their enemies for this “commonality of wives”! Scientific communism, certainly, is not responsible for the figments of a monk like Campanella. But it is instructive to penetrate his logic. It is not commodification or dehumanization that hides behind Campanella’s “commonality of wives”. The women of the “City of Sun” have the same rights as men … The “commonality of women” is equivalent to the “commonality of men” on the basis of mutual equality. That is why, though [we are] decisively rejecting this type of family-free communism, it is necessary to consider who stands on the higher moral grounds — Campanella’s woman, alien to deceit and pretense, or a false bourgeois woman, whose lot in life is adultery and legalized prostitution.

Ultimately, this wild man not only got the high moral ground: he got to die in bed. Once in a while, we get a happy(ish) ending.

So although it actually has nothing to do with Tommaso, “La Campanella” — “Little Bell”, a Paganini violin concerto — allows us here at this blog (in common with our day’s hero) an atypically soothing* denouement.

* Joseph Scalzo, “Campanella, Foucault, and Madness in Late-Sixteenth Century Italy”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990)

** Campanella’s Easter 1600 madness was initiated only a few weeks after fellow intellectual omnivore Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy up the road in Rome. Strictly coincidence.

† Since so much of Campanella’s work was produced while the author was under duress — fighting capital charges, applying for clemency and release — it remains disputable just which parts of it can be taken to represent his real beliefs.

‡ L. Vorob’ev. “Utopija i dejstvitelnost”. (”Utopia and Reality”) in Utopicheskij roman XVI-XVII vekov (Utopian Novel of XVI-XVII century); Series “Biblioteka vsemirnoj literatury”, Khudozhestevnnaja literature, Moscow, 1971, p. 19.

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From the New York Times.

THE DEATH OF A PARRICIDE.

HANGING OF EDWIN HOYT AT BRIDGEPORT — PERSISTING TO THE LAST THAT HE WAS INSANE.

BRIDGEPORT, Conn., May 13. — The first administration of capital punishment in Fairfield County since 1809 occurred in this city to-day. Edwin Hoyt was hanged for the murder of his father, in the Town of Sherman, June 23, 1878. Hoyt was then 37 years of age, and had shown during his life a very ugly disposition. His wife, the mother of his five children, had experienced his temper in a manner which placed her life in danger, he having discharged a shot-gun at her and severely wounded her. On the Sunday of the murder he had nothing to exasperate him except the refusal of his brother-in-law to accompany him on a fishing trip. Having been refused, he went home, and, taking a butcher-knife from his house, told his wife that he was going to kill his father. He then returned to the house of his brother-in-law, where his father was at the dinner-table with the family. He appearad [sic] despondent, and said it would be better for him to die, but that there were two or three people he wanted to kill first. He then went to the porch and sat down with his father. A few minutes afterward he sprang up and stabbed his father several times, making a fatal wound in the neck. Hoyt was tried twice, the first time in October, 1878, and the second time in April, 1879. The State claimed that the motive for the killing was animosity toward his father, who had always exercised great severity toward him, and who, he believed, had decided to wholly disinherit him. The defense in both cases was that of insanity.

Hoyt had never believed that he was to be hanged until Wednesday evening, when the final attempt to save his life by means of a writ of error proved ineffectual. After this he was not despondent, but talked pleasantly with the Rev. Dr. E.W. Maxey, who baptized him according to the rites of the Protestant Episcopal Church about 7 o’clock in the evening. After the clergyman went away he ate a hearty supper, smoked a cigar, and wrote a letter to his brother George. The letter was finished by the time Judge Blydeuburgh, of New-Haven, and Mr. Taylor, of Danbury, Hoyt’s counsel, arrived. They were with him about an hour, during which time he delivered his will to them, saying that he wished to have it kept private. They suggested to him that he might desire to make a final statement. He had nothing to say, he answered, in addition to what he had said, for he was not responsible for the killing, having known nothing of it. After his lawyers had left him, the Rev. Dr. Maxey came to remain with him until the time of the hanging.

The hanging occurred in a yard on the west side of the jail, and was witnessed by about 500 people. The yard was nearly filled, and from the woman’s ward of the jail many spectators looked down on the gallows. The prisoners in the male ward were permitted to witness the hanging from their windows. At just 11:30 o’clock the procession to the gallows started. First came Sheriff Sanford; next came Deputies Bartram and Dann, and behind them walked Hoyt, the Rev. Dr. Maxey having his hand on his right arm. Deputies Wakeley and Hughes were in the rear of the prisoner, and behind them walked Drs. George R. Porter, Robert Lauder, and E.D. Noony, of Bridgeport, and Dr. Marshall, of Greenwich. Hoyt, on the scaffold, raised his face to the sky, but showed no emotion beyond that which was expressed in his pale face. He was dressed in the old clothing which he has worn in jail, having refused to change to a black suit sent to him by a friend. The streaks of gray in his otherwise black hair and mustache gave him the appearance of being at least 10 years older than he was. When he was placed on the trap Sheriff Sanford asked him if he had anything to say. He answered in a faint voice, “No, Sir.” Dr. Maxey then read prayers, after which the noose was arranged and the black cap adjusted. Sheriff Sanford shook hands with Hoyt, saying, “Good-bye, poor fellow,” and stepped to the spring near which one of his deputies was standing. The trap fell. There was no noise except that made as the body fell a distance of five and a half feet. Dr. Porter, who had been in charge of the bodies of Mrs. Surratt and the other conspirators executed at Washington, had his hand on the wrist of the condemned man as the rope straightened. The fall of the trap occurred at 11:35 1/2, and at 12:14 the body was taken down. Death was instantaneous, resulting from a dislocation of the neck. There was some muscular tremor, but it lasted only a second. After the body had been taken to the jail, the physicians applied electric batteries and produced muscular contortions of the face and limbs an hour and a quarter after death occurred. The body was given up to Hoyt’s sisters, and taken to Sherman for burial.

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