The School of Salamanca Takes Part in the Kick-off Meeting of the New Max Planck Partner Group in Trento

On November 28, 2023 there was a kick-off meeting of the Max Planck Partner Group ‘The Production of Knowledge of Normativity and the Early Modern Book Trade’ led by Dr. Manuela Bragagnolo (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, University of Trento). The meeting took place at the School of International Studies of the University of Trento and was organised in cooperation with the permanent seminar ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’, hosted by the Department ‘Historical Regimes of Normativities’ (mpilhlt), as a part of a joint workshop ‘From the Age of the Printing Press to the Digital Age: How Knowledge of Normativity is Produced in Books’.

Project team members Christiane Birr and Polina Solonets presented their joint digitization work in the Salamanca project to the partner group members in a talk entitled ‘From Paper to Screen. Luis de Molina’s ‘De Justitia et Jure’ between Printing Press and Digital Edition’.

The kick-off meeting was followed by an away session of the seminar ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’ on 29 November, where Natalia Maillard Alvarez (University of Seville) gave a very interesting and practice-oriented presentation on ‘Social Network Analysis for Historians: Origins, Uses and Challenges’.

The School of Salamanca presents at DARIAH Annual Event 2023 in Budapest

Polina Solonets and Maxim Kupreyev,  members of the project team, participated in the poster presentation as a part of the DARIAH Annual Event 2023 taking place on June 6th to June 9th in Budapest. This year the conference topic was ‘Cultural Heritage Data as Humanities Research Data?’. Polina and Maxim introduced their approach to sustainable workflow organisation when working on a large scale edition and presented a poster entitled: ‘Sustainable Practices for the Large-Scale TEI Editions at the School of Salamanca Text Collection’.

Continue reading “The School of Salamanca presents at DARIAH Annual Event 2023 in Budapest”

The ‘Assertive Edition’. Seminar with Georg Vogeler, 25.7.2023

In the last months, the Salamanca team has joined forces with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt a.M. to set up the Permanent Seminary ‘Legal History Meets Digital Humanities’. As our own work centers on creating digital editions of the Salamancan authors, we are especially happy that Georg Vogeler from the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz (Austria) followed our invitation and will be our guest on July 25, 2023, 15.00-17.00.

Academic disciplines such as philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence tend to regard the mediality of texts as a matter of secondary importance, because they understand them primarily as a means of discussing concepts and the relations between them, using established terminologies in the debate. For these purposes, philological editing methods appear to be relevant only when there is “substantial” variance, which means a textual variance that generates different concepts and changes their relationships.
Historians go even further when they want to critically compare the facts reported in the texts. In this case, linguistic variance becomes even less significant. Therefore, Vogeler would like to discuss with the participants of the seminar: a) whether it is also possible to investigate the factual referents behind the linguistic expression in legal history and b) whether the methods he has proposed to capture the level of meaning in texts seem feasible in editing practice.

Georg Vogeler is a historian with an interest in the Late Middle Ages, particularly medieval administrative documents and diplomatics. His research encompasses Digital Scholarly Editing, Semantic Web technologies, Data Modelling, and application of Data Science to the Humanities.

The event is organised in a hybrid mode. Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.de/e/the-assertive-edition-hybrid-event-tickets-667358044877?aff=oddtdtcreator

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

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

  • 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”

Salamanca Colloquium: The invention of Custom and the School of Salamanca

Date: 02.09.2020
Time: 14.30-16.00
Organisation: Christiane Birr, José Luis Egío, Andreas Wagner
Place: Video Conference

After the summer break, the Colloquium of the research project The School of Salamanca relaunches with the presentation of Dr. Francesca Iurlaro (EUI Florence), “The invention of Custom and the School of Salamanca”. Although formulated in terms different from current lawyers, custom was already present in early modern European debates on natural law and the law of nations. Iurlaro’s research – soon available in the book “The Invention of Custom. Natural Law and the Law of Nations, 1550-1750”, Oxford University Press – retraces precisely the neglected history of the debates on the concept of custom in the ius gentium tradition, from Francisco de Vitoria to Emer de Vattel. According to Iurlaro, the moral-theological writings of important members of the School of Salamanca such as Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Domingo Báñez and Francisco Suárez should be considered as important milestones in the progressive crystallization of a notion of customary international law.

The colloquium will be held in English.

The colloquium will take place in hybrid form: for a restricted number of participants on-site at the MPIeR and for a broader audience as a video conference. For more information and for a draft of the chapter of Iurlaro’s book we are going to discuss, please send an email to birr@rg.mpg.de.

Juan Belda Plans: Presentación de la edición crítica y la traducción al español de la Relectio de Poenitentia de Melchor Cano

Date: 5.02.2020
Time: 14:30 – 16:00
Speaker: Juan Belda Plans (Valencia)
Organisation: Christiane Birr, José Luis Egío
Place: MPIeR
Room: Z01

After the introduction to his editing and translation project in March 2019 [https://blog.salamanca.school/de/2019/03/11/salamanca-kolloquium-observaciones-sobre-edicion-critica-de-melchor-cano-metodos-y-subsidios-para-el-trabajo/], Juan Belda Plans will be once again a guest at the Salamanca Colloquium. This time he presents the results of his work in Frankfurt: the completed critical edition of the Relectio de Poenitentia (1549) by Melchor Cano, published in 2020, with Spanish translation.

The Colloquium will be held in Spanish.

Boris Hogenmüller: Melchor Cano, De locis theologicis – some remarks on concept and reception of the Loci

Date: 15.01.2020
Time: 14:30 – 16:00
Speaker: Boris Hogenmüller (Würzburg)
Organisation: Christiane Birr, José Luis Egío
Place: MPIeR
Room: Z01

With his extensive and complex major work De locis theologicis, Melchor Cano layed the foundations of modern dogmatics in theology. A German translation of this work was carfried out from 2006 to 20014 in the DFG project “Melchior Cano De locis theologicis. Critical Edition of the Latin Text and German Translation” by Elmar Klinger, Thomas Franz and Boris Hogenmüller. Subsequently, Hogenmüller edited and translated the Melchiori Cani Vindicationes by the French Dominican François-Jacques-Hyacinthe Serry, published in 1714, with which Serry defended Cano and the Loci against various theological-literary attacks. In the colloquium Boris Hogenmüller will talk about Cano, his work and its reception in the early modern period and thus give an insight into the highly intense theological-scientific discussions of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Colloquium will be held in English.

Bruna Franceschini: Reflections on the Legal Subject in the Context of Latin American Colonialism

Date: 11.12.2019
Time: 14:30 – 16:00
Speaker: Bruna Franceschini (Coimbra)
Organisation: Christiane Birr, José Luis Egío
Place: MPIeR
Room: Z01

Bruna Franceschini will talk about her doctoral research project that aims to investigate some roots of the formation of the notion of subject of Law in the context of Latin American colonialism, mainly in Brazilian context. In fact, the work is an attempt to associate the contributions of Legal History to reflections of Philosophy of Law concerning the recognition of the other for the construction of legal intersubjectivity.

The Colloquium will be held in English.

Working Discussion „Translating Melchor Cano“

Date: 11.10.2019
Time: 11:00 – 13:00
Speakers: Juan Belda Plans (Valencia), Elmar Klinger (Würzburg/Herzogenaurach), Boris Hogenmüller (Würzburg), Thomas Franz (Würzburg)
Organisation: Christiane Birr (MPIeR)
Location: MPIeR
Room: Z02

Melchor Cano (1509-1560) is one of the most important authors of the School of Salamanca: at the age of fifteen he entered the Dominican Order as a pupil of Francisco de Vitoria in Salamanca. At the age of twenty-five he received his first theological chair in Valladolid; after the death of his academic teacher Vitoria in 1546 he took over the renowned chair of Theology in Salamanca himself. His main work, De locis theologicis, published posthumously in Salamanca in 1563, is the fundamental work of theological knowledge of modern times and represents the first complete programme of Catholic dogmatics as an independent discipline.

A Spanish translation of this pivotal and complex work of modern theology was presented by Juan Belda Plans in 2006; Elmar Klinger, Thomas Franz and Boris Hogenmüller completed a German translation, the publication of which is still pending. The discussion will focus on the special requirements for the interpretation and translation of theological texts of the School of Salamanca, the specifics of early modern Latin and the significance of translations in the modern reception of the School of Salamanca.

Discussion languages are Spanish and German.