Satire as an Epistemic Device: The Collezione Eroicomica and the Construction of Economic Authority in the Milanese Monetary Controversy of 1762

This article re-examines the Milanese monetary controversy of 1762 through Pietro Verri’s Collezione Eroicomica, a largely unpublished collection assembled in 1764. It argues that the dispute concerned less a clash between separate monetary doctrines than different ways of ordering and assigning epistemic status to a partly shared repertoire of monetary reasoning. Carpani embedded proportional relations within a broader field of prudential, commercial, legal, and institutional considerations; the Pugni increasingly treated proportional relations as objective features of monetary order and general principles as privileged criteria against which legislation and political judgment should be assessed. Satire sharpened this asymmetry by recasting rival premises as arbitrary, confused, or intellectually inadequate. Read relationally, the Collezione reveals satire as an epistemic device through which analytical innovation and polemical delegitimation jointly constructed economic authority by redistributing credibility and the burden of justification.