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

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)

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)”

Article publication: Tomás de Mercado and the Global Transfer of Goods and Norms. Emergence of Probabilism and a Differentiated Mercantile Ethics

We are happy to announce the publication of the article written by José Luis Egío, “Tomás de Mercado y la transfretación global de bienes y normas. Emergencia del probabilismo y una ética mercantil”, in: Cauriensia. Revista anual de ciencias eclesiásticas 15, 169 – 201 (2020).

The research on probabilism and its emergence, which for the last few decades seemed to be exhausted subjects and restricted to the niche of a highly specialized philosophical literature, has recently been revitalized by the publication of the monographs of Stefania Tutino (2017) and Rudolf Schüßler (2019). As a complement to these recent investigations, this article deals with the important role – not taken into account by the old and new historiography – that Tomás de Mercado, a theologian trained in Mexico and Salamanca, played in the emergence of probabilism as a philosophical current and as a proposal for the renewal of the methods practiced in the moral theology of the time. Continue reading “Article publication: Tomás de Mercado and the Global Transfer of Goods and Norms. Emergence of Probabilism and a Differentiated Mercantile Ethics”

TEI XML to Zenodo service published: Automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at a long-term archive

The idea: automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at Zenodo

[Update 2023-01-25: There is a recording of an e-editiones workshop. However, the TEI2Zenodo platform mentioned in the article and in the workshop is unfortunately no longer reliably available.]

We have been using the github-zenodo integration for a while already with our source code releases. This allows us to deposit our code, update the deposit with new releases and get a persistent identifier for each of the versions. Since we are facing similar requirements for our TEI XML files, I have investigated how we could take profit of this or a similar mechanism. The crucial difference is this: The integration as it is makes deposits from releases/snapshots of the whole github repository, i.e. of all the files that are in the version control system. This is good for software, where all the files depend on each other and make sense only in the context of an encompassing application. But for our TEI sources, it would be better to have deposits for individual files (and persistent identifiers for them) rather than for the collection as a whole.

So I have developed a “TEI2Zenodo” service (in the following just “t2z”) that can take care of uploading our files to zenodo. The idea is that a project or an institution that regularly wants to commit TEI XML files to long-term archival can host an instance of it and do its uploads via this instance. I have used it to upload 16 of our source TEI files automatically from our github repository.

Continue reading “TEI XML to Zenodo service published: Automatic depositing the project’s TEI files at a long-term archive”

Book publication: Conceptos, autores, instituciones. Revisión crítica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008-19) y bibliografía multidisciplinar

Last April, Conceptos, autores, instituciones, authored by Alejandra Ramírez Santos and José Luis Egío was published by Dykinson Editors in Madrid. The book offers a panorama on the research on the School of Salamanca carried out in the last decade. In this period a great renewal of research methods took place, together with the growing interest of various disciplines in Salamanca’s scholasticism, its internationalization as a field of study and the launching of various research projects and initiatives of publication of important scholastic sources aimed at broadening previous research perspectives, until recently very focused on the study of natural law, the law of nations and some theological and metaphysical themes. Ramírez’s and Egío’s critical review of the recent research on the School of Salamanca takes its main conclusions from a wide bibliography of 2.176 academic writings having being published between 2008 and 2019. These writings are ordered according to an exhaustive list of thematic descriptors, which make it easy to locate the publications dedicated to a certain author of the School of Salamanca, concept, research topic or institution (mendicant orders, Universities, …). Continue reading “Book publication: Conceptos, autores, instituciones. Revisión crítica de la investigación reciente sobre la Escuela de Salamanca (2008-19) y bibliografía multidisciplinar”

The School of Salamanca: New Digital Editions of Nebrija’s “Lexicon Iuris Civilis” and Diego de Avendaño’s “Thesaurus Indicus”, vol. 3, now online

In March and April, two new important sources of the Digital Collection of Sources of the School of Salamanca were published:

The Lexicon Iuris Civilis, written by Nebrija in 1506, has been edited according to the printed version of Frellaeus (Lyon, 1537). Part of a big encyclopaedical project undertook by Nebrija to offer the learned community of his time systematic vocabularies of disciplines such as medicine, natural history, theology and law, Nebrija’s Lexicon Iuris Civilis integrated 600 lemmata. Continue reading “The School of Salamanca: New Digital Editions of Nebrija’s “Lexicon Iuris Civilis” and Diego de Avendaño’s “Thesaurus Indicus”, vol. 3, now online”

Before Vitoria. Birr’s and Egío’s Contribution to the Brill Companion to Early Modern Spanish Imperial Political and Social Thought

Christiane Birr and José Luis Egío’s chapter in the recently published Companion to Early Modern Spanish Imperial Political and Social Thought focusses on a number of 15th-century writings by the jurist Alfonso de Cartagena and the theologian Bernardino López de Carvajal, both of whom were very active in Castilian diplomatic circles. While Francisco de Vitoria is often seen as having played the pioneering role in identifying the new historical dilemmas entailed by the ‘discovery’ of new, pagan peoples in the Americas, the ideas underlying these issues can only be understood in their full complexity if we look back into the 15th century. Continue reading “Before Vitoria. Birr’s and Egío’s Contribution to the Brill Companion to Early Modern Spanish Imperial Political and Social Thought”

The School of Salamanca: New Digital Edition of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s “Apologia” now online

After Bartolomé de las Casas, his adversary in the Valladolid debate, the humanist and historian of Charles V, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, is now also represented in the Digital Collection of Sources: with his “Apología pro libro de iustis belli causis” (1552). Continue reading “The School of Salamanca: New Digital Edition of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s “Apologia” now online”

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.

The School of Salamanca: New Digital Edition of Diego de Avendaño’s “Thesaurus Indicus, Vol. 1” now online

Diego de Avendaño (1594-1688) was born in Segovia. During his studies in Seville, he met Juan de Solórzano Pereira and accompanied him to the New World. Avendaño continued his studies in Lima at the Colegio San Martín of the Jesuits, joined the order himself and taught and led the Jesuitic colleges and universities in Cuzco, Charcas and Lima in the following decades. After, as he himself said, “almost fifty years in Peru” he published his main work, the six-volume Thesaurus Indicus, in which he discusses a wealth of questions of secular administration and spiritual practice. All six volumes will appear successively in the Digital Collection of Sources of the project “The School of Salamanca”. A start has now been made with the first volume devoted to the questions of the secular regiment of Peru in the 16th and early 17th centuries.