Juan Luis Vives

Works

• 1526On Assistance to the Poor

  A proposal to the city of Bruges that the civic authority register the poor, provide work and education, and organise relief instead of leaving it to begging and private alms.

• 1538On the Soul and Life

  A treatise on the soul that sets aside the question of its essence and describes its operations – memory, learning, emotions – from observation.

Position

Vives is on the map as a humanist who turned the criticism of scholastic learning into a programme of reform. “Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians” (1519) attacked the logic of the Paris schools as empty verbal dispute; “On the Disciplines” (1531) traced the corruption of the arts and outlined a curriculum oriented to use, experience and the common good. “On Assistance to the Poor” (1526) is an early argument that a city should register its poor, find them work, teach their children and fund relief from publicly supervised means; it entered a wider debate in the Low Countries and in Spain, where Domingo de Soto objected in 1545 to restrictions on begging. “On the Soul and Life” (1538) studies memory, learning and the emotions from observation; in 1915 the historian Foster Watson called Vives the father of modern psychology, and historians of education see him as a forerunner of Comenius. His book on the education of women held that girls should learn to read and study, but within a strict ideal of chastity and domestic virtue, which modern readers note as its limit. He was in close exchange with Erasmus, though the relationship cooled in later years, and in writings to Charles V and the princes of Europe he called for concord among Christians.

Life & context

Juan Luis Vives was born in Valencia on 6 March 1493 into a family of conversos, merchants of Jewish descent, whom the Inquisition persecuted: his father was burned at the stake in 1524, and his mother, already dead, was condemned posthumously a few years later. Vives left Spain in 1509 to study arts in Paris and settled in 1514 in Bruges, among the Valencian merchant community. From 1517 to 1521 he lived in Leuven, tutored the young cardinal Guillaume de Croÿ and lectured; at Erasmus’s suggestion he wrote a commentary on Augustine’s City of God, printed in Basel in 1522. In 1524 he married Margarita Valldaura in Bruges. Between 1523 and 1528 he divided his time between Bruges and England, where he lectured at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was close to Thomas More, and wrote on the education of women and girls for Queen Catherine of Aragon and Princess Mary. Having sided with the queen over the divorce, he lost the king’s favour in 1528, was briefly placed under house arrest and returned to Bruges, where he wrote his major works on peace, learning and the soul. He died in Bruges on 6 May 1540, without ever returning to Spain.

Further main works

• Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians (In pseudodialecticos, 1519)
• The Education of a Christian Woman (De institutione feminae Christianae, 1524)
• On Concord and Discord in Humankind (De concordia et discordia in humano genere, 1529)
• On the Disciplines (De disciplinis, 1531)