WE ARE HIRING: Researcher in Political Philosophy, Moral Theology or Similar

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The Salamanca Team is looking for a new researcher to work with us on the forthcoming Dictionary of the Juridical-Political Language of the School of Salamanca. If your expertise is in political philosophy, history of political ideas, philosophy of law, moral theology or similar of the early modern period, we would love to hear from you!

All the details of the position and the application are here:

https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794849/FB08___Philosophie_und_Geschichtswissenschaften

(text in German and English, scroll down for the English version).

If you have any questions concerning the project, the team, the position or the application process, please don’t hesitate to drop a line to Christiane Birr, the project’s coordinator: birr@lhlt.mpg.de. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Word frequencies in the Digital Collection of Sources in the Works of the School of Salamanca.

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The fundamental importance of the School of Salamanca for the early modern discourse about law, politics, religion, and ethics is widespread among of philosophers and legal historians. These early modern texts extend beyond the core authors, and serve to analyze the history of the Salamanca School’s origins and influence, as well as its internal discourse contexts within the context of the future dictionary entries.
Especially on the topic of dictionaries, the idea to test and explore our corpus with modern NLP applications came up in the project a long time ago. We often asked ourselves which lemmas or information we could find with help of a text analysis, and above all how complex this realization would be with our data. Thus, in 2021 we started a natural language processing task (word frequency distribution) by using the Python programming language to explore our corpus and establish groundwork for further text mining. Continue reading “Word frequencies in the Digital Collection of Sources in the Works of the School of Salamanca.”

Back to analog: the added value of printing TEI editions

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(Talk given at TEI 2022 conference in Newcastle University, https://zenodo.org/record/7101456)

The topic of this year’s TEI conference and members’ meeting — “text as data” — addressed a growing amount and diversity of textual data produced by the humanities projects. With the increase of data there is also an expanding need for its quality assurance. Several research data projects have already assigned specific teams to tackle the task of standardizing the continuous quality management. I refer, for example, to the task area “Standards, Data Quality and Curation” within the NFDI4Culture consortium, or the KONDA project at the Göttingen State and University Library. The XML data production is in fact a process of a continuous validation, correction, and improvement, involving, inter alia, ODD, RelaxNG, and XML Schemata; custom Python and R scripts; the XSLT, XQuery and Schematron routines integrated into a test-driven development frameworks such as XSpec.

In my talk I addressed a rather unconventional way of testing the TEI data, namely printing it. TEI production workflows frequently presuppose HTML and PDF export, the issue I focused on is the diagnostic value of such prints for the quality control.

Continue reading “Back to analog: the added value of printing TEI editions”

Salamanca Colloquium: Luis de Molina on African Slavery

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On Wednesday, May 11, 14.30, we invite all interested researchers to the next Salamanca Colloquium which will focus on “Luis de Molina on African Slavery“.

Jörg Tellkamp (UAM, Mexico City), together with Daniel Schwartz (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): “Luis de Molina on slaves as subjects of rights”

Anne-Charlotte Martineau (CNRS): “Reading Molina’s Disputationes on slavery through an international legal lens“

Continue reading “Salamanca Colloquium: Luis de Molina on African Slavery”

The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.

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Since its beginning in 2013, the Salamanca Project has been developing a text editing workflow based on methods and practices for sustainable and scalable text processing. Sustainability in text processing encompasses not only reusability of the tools and methods developed and applied, but also long-term documentation and traceability of the development of the text data. This documentation will provide an important starting point for future research work. Moreover, the text preparation must be scalable, since the Digital Source Collection comprises a relatively large mass of texts for a full-text digital edition project: in total, it will involve more than 108,000 printed pages from early modern prints in Latin and Spanish, which must be edited in an efficient and at the same time quality-assured manner.

In the following, I will introduce the sequence of stages that each work in the Digital Source Collection goes through, from locating a suitable digitization template in a public library to metadata and the completion of a full text in TEI All format, enriched with the project’s specifications. Continue reading “The School of Salamanca Text Workflow: From the early modern print to TEI-All.”

New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period

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Text: José Luis Egío

The “discovery” of America, a continent without precedents in the history of the Western culture, had a major impact on the way in which knowledge was produced by European scholars. Topics such as the impact of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century geographical discoveries on early modern Iberoamerican natural history, cosmographical, and medical knowledge and the parallel extension of empiricist imperial techniques in the Iberian monarchies during the sixteenth century have been already well established in historical research. On the contrary, scholars have approached only superficially the way in which other “discoveries” – of peoples, customs, practices, and normativities – affected legal thought.

Analysing in detail the writings of jurists and moral theologians trained at Salamanca or at the recently created Spanish American Universities, José Luis Egío shows in his most recent publication how the experience of the foreign lands became Continue reading “New Publication: “Travelling Scholastics” – The Contribution of Salamanca Scholastics to the Emergence of an Empirical Normative Authority in Early Modern Period”

New Publication: “International Law” according to the Spanish Scholastics (cf. Brill Companion)

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The character of the law of nations is a complex issue for authors of the School of Salamanca. There are debates about the ground of its validity and of its obligatory force. In particular, authors re-worked the just war doctrine, elaborating notions of self-defense, of punishment and of what we would call today humanitarian intervention. However, the discussions did not limit themselves to the single issue of legitimate use of military force: while the Spanish Scholastics identified criteria of such legitimate use, they also ventured to establish sets of precise, substantial norms and rights, both of states and individuals. Thus, topics as the freedom of the seas and certain subjective rights of natural persons, such as the right of access to citizenship, must feature in a discussion of Salmantian notions of the law of nations.

These issues are discussed extensively in a contribution to a collective volume that has appeared recently:

Andreas Wagner: “International Law”, in: Harald Braun, Erik De Bom and Paolo Astorri (eds.): A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics. Leiden: Brill, 2022. https://brill.com/view/title/31552

Continue reading “New Publication: “International Law” according to the Spanish Scholastics (cf. Brill Companion)”

(Español) Encuentro preparatorio de un Diccionario del Lenguaje Jurídico-Político de la Escuela de Salamanca en Frankfurt

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For the sake of viewer convenience, the content is shown below in the alternative language. You may click the link to switch the active language.

Autor: José Luis Egío

Entre el 25 y el 26 de octubre tuvo lugar en el Instituto Max Planck de Historia y Teoría del Derecho un importante Encuentro preparatorio del futuro Diccionario del Lenguaje Jurídico-Político de la Escuela de Salamanca. Estuvieron presentes destacadas figuras de la historia del derecho, la teología y la filosofía en la Primera Edad Moderna, venidos de Universidades italianas, españolas, francesas y danesas, en orden alfabético: Paolo Astorri (Copenhague), Juan Belda Plans (Pamplona), Manuela Bragagnolo (Trento), Luisa Brunori (Lille), Orazio Condorelli (Catania), Francisco Cuena Boy (Santander), Elena Danieli (Bologna), Lidia Lanza (Lisboa), María Martín (Salamanca), Faustino Martínez (Madrid), Joaquín Sedano (Pamplona), Idoya Zorroza (Salamanca), Pilar Mejía (Frankfurt), Ana Soler (Frankfurt).

Durante el Encuentro, en el que se alternaron como lenguas co-oficiales el castellano y el italiano, tuvo lugar la presentación y debate de una serie de borradores de las primeras voces del Diccionario, a cargo de Danieli (maleficium), Belda Plans (theologia) y Cuena Boy (contractus & quasi contractus). Andreas Wagner y José Luis Egío, miembros del proyecto de investigación sobre la Escuela de Salamanca en el que se enmarca el Diccionario, presentaron, por su parte, la voz infidelitas. Ambos hicieron especial énfasis en la estructura y características formales que deberían tener los distintos artículos del Diccionario para lograr conformar, andando el tiempo, una obra homogénea. Las diferentes presentaciones estimularon, además, un amplio debate sobre formas idóneas para integrar las fuentes escolásticas en las distintas voces, el desafío que representa un amplio listado de conceptos cuyas implicaciones y campos de aparición son diversos en las obras de teólogos y juristas o las potencialidades a esperar de la versión electrónica de las voces del Diccionario, estrechamente interrelacionadas con el Corpus de fuentes de la Escuela de Salamanca que, actualmente, está siendo editado.

https://www.salamanca.school/es/works.html

El Encuentro sirvió asimismo para que Christiane Birr (coordinadora del proyecto La Escuela de Salamanca) y Thomas Duve (director del mismo) ofrecieran un balance del estado de desarrollo del mismo y discutieran con los y las participantes las estrategias de investigación a implementar en el futuro. Fruto de los debates celebrados se profundizó, por ejemplo, en la criba del listado de lemas a incluir en el Diccionario del Lenguaje de la Escuela de Salamanca, sugiriéndose estrategias para subsumir algunos lemas dentro de otros con un espectro de significación más amplio o la incorporación de términos relevantes provenientes del ámbito del derecho mercantil.

Colloquium: Approaches to a Dictionary of the Juridical-Political Language of the School of Salamanca. Francisco Cuena Boy on “Contractus & quasi contractus”

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On Wednesday, July 7, 2021, Prof. Dr. Francisco Cuena Boy (Faculty of Law, Universidad de Cantabria) will present the first draft of the lemma Contractus & quasi contractus, one of the most important concepts treated in the future Dictionary of the School of Salamanca’s Juridical-Political Language. Taking into account the ancient and medieval legal background of Contractus, and reviewing the main juridical, political and philosophical debates in which this notion was mentioned by the members of the School of Salamanca, Cuena Boy provides a useful archetype that aims to facilitate the writing process of later lemmata in the dictionary.

Colloquium: The School of Salamanca on Slavery. From ius gentium to ius civile

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  • Date: Mar 10, 2021

  • Time: 14:30 – 16:00

  • Organisation: Christiane Birr, José Luis Egío, Andreas Wagner

  • Location: video conference

  • Room: For further information please contact salamanca@rg.mpg.de

After a several month break, the Colloquium of the research project ‘The School of Salamanca’ kicks off with a presentation by Prof Dr Francisco Cuena Boy (Faculty of Law, Universidad de Cantabria) entitled ‘The School of Salamanca on Slavery: from ius gentium to ius civile.’ Focusing on the theologian-jurists of the School of Salamanca (16th and 17th centuries), Cuena Boy problematises the traditional historiographical account according to which slavery is an institution of the law of nations. Continue reading “Colloquium: The School of Salamanca on Slavery. From ius gentium to ius civile”