The main objective of the Course is to outline the characteristics, methods of implementation and management of the complex feudal system present in the modern Mezzogiorno, as a peculiar expression of European feudalism and, in particular, its Mediterranean form.
For students attending the Course the program of study includes the history of legal, political-administrative and economic-productive dynamics of feudalism in the "provinces" of the Kingdom of Naples, in particular that of Molise and Abruzzo during the modern age. Historiographic studies are planned.
Non-attending students will have to add to their program of study a consideration of southern feudalism in the modern age and an in-depth study of some significant socio-economic and political-institutional topics related to the history of the Kingdom of Naples in the seventeenth century, where feudal baronage was of strategic importance and fundamental in the social and political dynamics of the Kingdom of Naples, due to the implementation of the compromises of the so-called "Neapolitan path to the modern State" sanctioned by Charles V during the sixteenth century. The Kingdom was then subject to the control of the Spanish sovereign Phillip IV, of the Habsburg dynasty and was part of the Italian subsystem and of the broader Spanish imperial system.
