The Salamanca Working Paper Series
'The School of Salamanca. A Digital Collection of Sources and a Dictionary of its Juridical-Political Language' is a project building a digital text corpus including more than 120 works of the Salmantine jurists and theologians in selected prints from the 16th and 17th centuries and a complementary historic dictionary of circa 300 essential terms of the Salmantine School's juridic-politic language, bringing together international and interdisciplinary research perspectives. It is funded by the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, and hosted at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History and the Institute of Philosophy at Goethe-University, both in Frankfurt/Main.
The Project's peer-reviewed Working Paper Series aims to reflect the thematic and disciplinary variety of the School and the transnational history of its reception. It features research articles by the project staff as well as of other authors.
More information is available at http://salamanca.adwmainz.de/
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2021, 01
The "Suma de tratos y contratos" (1569-1571) by Tomás de Mercado is the first legal treatise on trade that explicitly takes into account the specificities of Spanish trade with the Indias. Tomás de Mercado was faced with very profound changes in trade: long distances, large convoy sizes, the need for large amounts of funding, high risk, variations in prices and the value of money...
From a theological-legal point of view, these upheavals posed new and complex questions.
Mercado, advisor to the merchants of Seville and an excellent knowledge of New Spain, analyses the sudden transformation of economic and juridical practice with finesse and realism. The 'Suma' is thus an extraordinary real-time testimony to the profound transformations taking place in 16th century commerce.
Moreover, faced with fundamental questions of moral order and juridical legitimacy, Mercado proposes legal solutions of high equilibrium in which theological imperatives are masterfully reconciled with the needs of transatlantic commercial practice.