The Italian philosopher, political theorist, and poet Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was persecuted for his attempts to achieve utopian reforms.

Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born at Stilo in Calabria on Sept. 5, 1568; he assumed the name Tommaso when he entered the Dominican order about 1583. In Naples he made his first contact with the anti-Aristotelian doctrines of Bernardino Telesio. In 1592, after his first ecclesiastical trial, he was sentenced to return to his province and to abandon his Telesian sympathies. Campanella instead set out for the north, sojourning briefly in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Padua. Between 1593 and 1595 he suffered several minor trials and periods of imprisonment on a number of charges.

After Campanella was released from prison in 1595, he passed the next few years in apparent quiet in a small monastery at Stilo. But this was actually a period of febrile secret activity. Campanella became the head of a conspiracy to overthrow...