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”

The School of Salamanca: New Digital Edition of Juan de Solórzano Pereira`s ‘Politica Indiana’ now online

The latest publication in the Digital Collection of Sources edited by the Salamanca project was one of the standards works of reference regarding the colonial administration of the Spanish Americas: Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s Politica Indiana draws the sum of the author’s rich experience in administrative and judicial matters in the Spanish colonies. The full text of this seminal book (printed in Madrid in 1648) is now available online and in open access on the project’s website.

The School of Salamanca. A Digital Collection of Sources and a Dictionary of its Juridical-Political Language is a joint project of the MPIeR, the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz.