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The School of Salamanca, and Iberian late Scholasticism in general, had the merit of transposing the wisdom of medieval scholasticism into the coordinates of early modernity. Due to the economic growth after the discovery of America, economic terms and moral problems become a central focus for moral theologians. In this article, I consider important key economic concepts that deliver a surprising wealth of insights into the modernization brought about by the leading scholars of the time. Social mobility, the principle of majority decision, the inviolability of property, human rights of the person, limited political power of the pope, and other key concepts that were decisive for the development of democracy and modernity are to be found in the works of the School of Salamanca in connection with economic issues.
Matías De Paz and the introduction of thomism in the Asuntos De Indias: a conceptual revolution
(2018)
Most of the writings dedicated to assessing the contribution of the Spanish Second Scholasticism to the controversial issue of infidels’ dominion began their analyses with the well-known Francisco de Vitoria’s Relectiones (1532). This article offers a reconstruction of the history of the theological and juridical debates on this key issue on the Iberian Peninsula since the late 13th century. Special attention is paid to friar Matías de Paz, who was asked to offer his advice on the early patterns of rule and domination imposed on the Native Americans at the Junta de Burgos (1512), introduced to the discussions about asuntos de Indias the Thomist conceptual framework later employed by Vitoria, Soto, Suárez and many other prominent members of the so-called School of Salamanca. The article shows that it was, in fact, De Paz who first considered the Amerindians infidels affected by an "invincible ignorance", and he tried to curb some of the many abuses committed against them by applying the distinctions between different types of dominium and principatus.
Legal pluralism calls into question the monopoly of the modern state when it comes to the production and the enforcement of norms. It rests on the assumption that juridical normativity and state organization can be dissociated. From an early modern historian’s perspective, such an assumption makes perfect sense, the plural nature of the legal order being the natural state of affairs in imperial spaces across the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This article will provide a case study of the collaborative nature of the interaction between spiritual and temporal legal orders in Spain and its overseas territories as conceived by Tomás de Mercado (ca. 1520–1575), a major theologian from the School of Salamanca. His treatise on trade and contracts (1571) contained an extended discussion of the government’s attempt to regulate the grain market by imposing a maximum price. It will be argued that Mercado’s view on the bindingness of economic regulations in conscience allowed for the internalization of the regulatory power of the nascent state. He called upon confessors to be strict enforcers of state law, considering them as fathers of the republic as much as fathers of faith. This is illustrative of the "collaborative form of legal pluralism" typical of the osmotic relationship between Church and State in the early modern Spanish empire. It contributed to the moral justification of state jurisdictions, while at the same time, guaranteeing a privileged role for theologians and religious leaders in running the affairs of the state.
The conquista of the Americas confronted Spanish jurists educated in the legal concepts of the European medieval tradition with a different reality, pushing them to develop modern legal concepts on the basis of the European ius commune tradition. Traditionally, the School of Salamanca, theologians and jurists centred around the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria are credited with this intellectual renovation of moral and legal thought. However, the role earlier authors played in the process is still insufficiently researched. The Castilian crown jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios is one of the most interesting authors of the early phase in the conquest of the Americas. His treatise about the Spanish dominion in the Americas is a central text that shows how at the beginning of the 16th century the knowledge and the experiences of the European past were applied to the American present and, in the process, were shaped into modern ideas.
Historical scholarship on the sixteenth-century neo-scholastic debate about American Indians generally centers on the thought of Francisco de Vitoria. Focusing on Alfonso de Castro’s short treatise Utrum indigenae (1543), this paper challenges both an exclusive concentration on Vitoria as well as the received contention that the thought of the School of Salamanca rendered a single, unified view of Amerindians. In Utrum indigenae, Castro argued that American Indians should be instructed in liberal arts and theology thus constructing a strikingly different image of the peoples of the New World as compared to accounts by Vitoria or Francisco Suárez. While the historian Martin Nesvig has recently proposed an Erasmian humanist contextualization of Castro’s treatise, I argue that the image of American Indians presented in Utrum indigenae testifies to an alternative, novel way of writing about American Indians from within the framework of the School of Salamanca which has so far remained unnoticed.