JUAN LUIS VIVES WORKS and DAYS* Enrique González González

JUAN LUIS VIVES WORKS AND DAYS* Enrique González González The humanist Juan Luis Vives (Valencia, Spain, 1492/93—Bruges, Bel- gium, 1540) died before reaching the age of fi fty. Nevertheless, he was able to write a copious body of works which found interested readers in all of Europe and even the European possessions of America and Asia. Without a doubt, as a result of his renown biographers and bibliogra- phers rose up who sought to record facts about his life and especially to make an inventory of his writings. In this task two Spaniards stood out, the Sevillian Nicolás Antonio, in the corresponding chapter of his Bibliotheca Hispana (Rome, 1672) and the Valencian, Gregorio Mayans in his Vita Vivis, published at the beginning of his edition of the Opera omnia of Vives (Valencia, 1782–1790). Mayans devised a chronology of the life and works of his fellow countryman which later scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries accepted almost without objection. Now, beginning in the last three decades of the past century, numerous studies and documents have shed new light on the formative years of the humanist, a period which we could situate between his birth and the year 1520. This period of time comprises his childhood and adolescence in his native city, his academic peregrinations to the Uni- versities of Paris and Louvain, and coincides with the appearance of his fi rst writings. To such an extent has our information been recently enhanced that it has been necessary to formulate a general revision of the biographical framework developed by Mayans and his followers. The fi rst part of my essay proposes to reconsider the initial years of his life and works. The mature years of the humanist can be circumscribed to the two decades from the year 1521 to his death in 1540. This period opens with the publication of the learned Commentary on St. Augustine’s City of God, and it corresponds to the years in which his most outstanding works were produced. It is then that his writings begin to be published * Translated into English by Alexandre Coroleu and Charles Fantazzi. 16 enrique gonzález gonzález and read in numerous cities but, paradoxically, we know very little about his life in this twenty-year period. In recent years no new documents have been published, and little can be added to the biography written by Carlos G. Noreña in 1970. For that reason, in the fi nal part of the present essay I limit myself to reviewing, sometimes critically, the principal studies and sources that have supplied us with information about the later years of Vives, and I give a brief survey of his principal activities, giving an account also of his writings during that period. From Homeland to Court: The Early Years (1492/3–1520) Until recently the childhood and early years of Juan Luis Vives were described following the script written long ago, in 1782, by Gregorio Mayans in his Vita Vivis.1 Over a century later, in his famous mono- graph of 1903, Adolfo Bonilla introduced minor changes to Mayans’ account without, however, fundamentally challenging it.2 According to this outline, become classic by force of repetition,3 Vives was born in Valencia in 1492 to a noble, or at least well-to-do family. From 1507 to 1509 he studied at the newly-founded local university, a period which was followed by a sojourn in Paris from 1509 to 1512. At the University of Paris he studied under the guidance of Jan Dullaert and Gaspar Lax, champions of the most “decadent” forms of scholasticism. In 1512 Vives settled in the Low Countries for a time, fi rst in Bruges, before moving to Louvain at an uncertain date. In Louvain, after making the acquaintance of a group of young followers of Erasmus, he converted to humanism. In Lent of 1514 (still according to the traditional account) Vives travelled to Paris, where he published his fi rst writings under the title Iesu Christi Triumphus before returning to Louvain. New minor works were published in 1518, in particular, the In pseudodialecticos, a diatribe in which Vives regretted the “lost” years he spent in Paris learning sophisms. Vives’s settling of scores with his 1 It prefaces the Opera omnia, Valencia, 1782–1790, 8 vols. This 220-page Vita, with its own page numbering system, constitutes a patchwork of information and critical assessments drawn from countless scholars. 2 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, Luis Vives y la fi losofía del Renacimiento (Madrid, 1903). Bonilla’s study includes biographical and analytical chapters. 3 Signifi cantly, the article on Vives in the Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, edited by Paul F. Grendler (New York, 1999), 6 vols, still adheres to this traditional point of view (Vol. 6, pp. 281–83)..

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