Juan Luis Vives was born in Valencia in 1493 to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism. He attended the Estudio General of his hometown until 1509, when he moved to Paris and enrolled as a freshman in the faculty of arts. He began his studies at College de Lisieux where Juan Dolz had just started a triennial course, but moved soon to College de Beauvais where he attended Jan Dullaert’s lectures. From the fall of 1512, he started following Gaspar Lax’s course at College de Montaigu.
In 1514, Vives left Paris without having taken any formal academic degree and moved to the Low Countries.
He settled in Bruges, where he would spend most of his life. About this time, he was personally introduced to Erasmus and appointed as preceptor to Guillame de Croy. From 1517 until Croy’s premature death in 1521, he lived in Louvain where he taught at the Collegium Trilingue. From this period stem Fabula de homine (1518), a seminal version of his views on the nature and purpose of man; De initiis, sectis et laudibus philosophiae (1518), a short essay on the history of philosophy; In pseudodialecticos (1520), a lively and trenchant attack on scholastic logic; as well as a critical edition, with an extensive commentary, of Augustine’s De civitate Dei (1522).
Between 1523 and 1528, Vives divided his time between England, which he visited on six occasions, and Bruges, where he married Margarita Valldaura in 1524. In England, he attended the court of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and was tutor of their daughter, Mary. He also held a lectureship at Corpus Christi College in Oxford and associated with English humanists such as Thomas More and Thomas Linacre. During these years, he published De institutione feminae Christianae (1524), in which the educational principles pertaining to women are defined; the extremely popular Introductio ad sapientiam (1524), a short handbook of morals blending Stoicism and Christianity; and De subventione pauperum (1526), a program for the organization of public relief that he dedicated to the magistrates of Bruges. In 1528, he lost the favor of Henry VIII by siding with Catherine of Aragon in the matter of the divorce. He was placed under house arrest for a time, before being allowed to return to Bruges.
The last 12 years of Vives’ life were his most productive and it was in this period that he published several of the works for which he is known today. These include De concordia et discordia in humano genere (1529), a piece of social criticism emphasizing the value of peace and the absurdity of war; De disciplinis (1531), an encyclopedic treatise devoted to an extensive critique of the foundations of contemporary education, as well as to a program for its renewal; and De anima et vita (1538), a study of the soul and its interaction with the body, which also contains a penetrating analysis of the emotions. De veritate fidei Christianae, the most thorough discussion of his religious views, was published posthumously in 1543. He died in Bruges on May 6, 1540.
World History
