Joan Lluís Vives
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joan Lluís Vives (6 March 1492-6 May 1540 in Valencia) is a famous Spanish scholar and humanist. According to the 1997 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as a teenager he saw his entire family wiped out by the Inquisition. He left Spain never to return, but how he escaped and why he was spared the Britannica does not say.
He studied at Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at Catholic University of Leuven. At the insistance of his friend Erasmus he prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII. Soon afterwards he was invited to England, and acted as tutor to the Princess Mary, for whose use he wrote De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae (1523) and, ostensibly, De Institutione Feminae Christianae.
While in England he resided at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy. Having declared himself against the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he lost the royal favour and was confined to his house for six weeks. On his release he withdrew to Bruges, where he devoted the rest of his life to the composition of numerous works, chiefly directed against the scholastic philosophy and the preponderant unquestioning authority of Aristotle. The most important of his treatises is the De Causis Corruptarum Artium, which has been ranked with Bacon's Organon.
A complete edition of his works was published by Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar (Valencia, 1782). Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin's Luís Vives y la filosofla del renacimiento (Madrid, 1903) is a valuable and interesting study which includes an exhaustive bibliography of Vives's writings and a critical estimate of previous monographs. The best of these are AJ Namèche, "Mémoire sur la vie et les écrits de Jean Louis Vives" in Mémoires couronnis par l'Académie Royale des sciences et belles-tettres de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1841), vol. xv.; A Lange's article in the Encyklopädie des gesammten Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesens (Leipzig, 1887), vol. ix.; Berthe Vadier, Un Moraliste du XVIieme siècle: Jean-Louis Vives et son livre de l'éducation de la femme chrétienne (Geneva, 1892) ; G Hoppe, Die Psychologie von Juan Luís Vives (Berlin, 1901).
[edit] Major works
- Contra Pseudodialecticos
- De Disciplinis
- De Causis Corruptarum Artium
- De Subventione Pauperum sive De Humanis Necessitatibus (1526)
- De Institutione Feminae Christianae (also published as The Instruction of a Christian Woman in 1529, with an English translation by Richard Hyrd)
[edit] See also
- Sheena Cain
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
