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”

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

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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”

Otto Danwerth: Erasmus, christlicher Humanismus und Spiritualität in Spanien und Neu-Spanien (16. Jahrhundert)

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We are happy to announce the publication of the latest instalment in our series “The School of Salamanca Working Papers” (ISSN 2509-5080):

Otto Danwerth: ERasmus, christlicher Humanismus und Spiritualität in Spanien und Neu-Spanien (16. Jahrhundert)
(2020-01)

Abstract

The writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69–1536) exerted a significant influence in 16th-century Spain. Based on classical and recent historiography, the present essay examines this religious and cultural phenomenon, with side glances at Luther: After sketching out the life and work of the Christian humanist, the second part deals with Erasmianism in Spain from its widespread reception in the 1520s (at the royal court, at universities and in translations) to the inquisitorial persecution of its followers since the 1530s. Thirdly, newer research trends are discussed that both correct and further develop the classical image shaped by Marcel Bataillon, also with regard to the ambivalent relationship between scholasticism and humanism. To demonstrate Erasmus’ influence in New Spain (Mexico), the final part of this essay turns its attention to the attitudes of (arch)bishops and friars as well as to early colonial case studies.

Continue reading “Otto Danwerth: Erasmus, christlicher Humanismus und Spiritualität in Spanien und Neu-Spanien (16. Jahrhundert)”

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

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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”

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

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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.