During the last decades, a growing number of studies on the history of science, philosophy, theology, and law have highlighted the importance of the so-called “School of Salamanca”. These studies apply a multiplicity of approaches from a variety of disciplines (legal history, economic and political history, theology, ethnohistory, etc.) and have also renewed the debate about the definition and the scope of the School itself. Traditionally, the School has been identified as a comparatively small group of theologians, students and professors at the renowned Castilian university, starting with Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. However, the importance of the School, its literature, methods, and the community of its scholars extended far beyond the small university town on the banks of the river Tormes. In recent years, the global profile of the School has become ever more evident. The decisive role played by its writings in the emergence of colonial normative regimes and the formation of a language of normativity on a global scale has been emphasized by studies in fields as diverse as the history of the university of Salamanca itself, colonial and imperial history, as well as the study of international law and of legal history.

However, even in this broader picture, American and Asian actors usually appear as passive recipients of normative knowledge produced in Europe. It is this fundamental misconception of the agency in the so-called peripheries of the Iberian world that this book seeks to revise. Its case studies and analytical approaches highlight the closely knit structures of personal, academic, and intellectual exchange between far-flung regions of the globe, revealing an epistemic community and a community of practice that cannot be fixed to a single place.

The eleven chapters of this book propose a conceptual reorientation of the research on the School. The opening chapter (Thomas Duve) sets out the methodological foundation on which the following case studies and analyses are based, exploring the School of Salamanca as a phenomenon of global knowledge production. Geographically, the case studies comprise such diverse regions of the Iberian world as México (Virginia Aspe, José Luis Egío), Guatemala (Adriana Álvarez), Portugal (Lidia Lanza/Marco Toste), Tucumán, part of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Esteban Llamosas) and the Philippines (Marya Camacho, Natalie Cobo, Dolors Folch, Osvaldo Moutin). The topics range from university history and historiography (Adriana Álvarez, Enrique González González, Lidia Lanza/Marco Toste, Esteban Llamosas), governance and ecclesiastical legislation (Natalie Cobo, Osvaldo Moutin), the highly debated question of indigenous dominium (Virginia Aspe) to the sacraments of marriage (José Luis Egío) and penance (Natalie Cobo). The global dimension of the biographies and careers of the members of the School are the subject of various contributions. As examples of these careers linking Salamanca with the Iberian world across the globe serve Alonso de la Vera Cruz as one of the most important American authors of this globally understood School of Salamanca (discussed by Virginia Aspe, José Luis Egío and Dolors Folch) and Domingo de Salazar, a Salamanca-educated theologian who went on to become the first bishop of Manila (see Osvaldo Moutin’s contribution).

The authors of the chapters take up recurring themes in order to offer a consolidated, interconnected treatment of the School of Salamanca as a phenomenon of global knowledge production that the School of Salamanca was. The volume’s Argentinian, British, German, Italian, Mexican, Portuguese, Philippine, and Spanish contributors represent different disciplines, such as legal history, cultural history, social history, philosophy, and canon law. Most of them took part in the conference “La Escuela de Salamanca, ¿un ejemplo de producción global de conocimiento?” (Buenos Aires, October 24–26, 2018). Other contributors joined this book project as a result of their contacts with the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History¹ in Frankfurt and the project “The School of Salamanca. A Digital Collection of Sources and a Dictionary of its Juridical-Political Language”, a collaboration between the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, the Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.

We are very grateful to the Academia Nacional de la Historia de la República Argentina in Buenos Aires for hosting our conference in October 2018, as well as to the Biomedicine Research Institute of Buenos Aires, the conicet-Partner Institute of the Max Planck Society (IBioBA-mpsp), who generously hosted a one-day workshop dedicated to enabling researchers to share experiences in creating and working with digital editions and discuss perspectives in the use of Digital Humanities in the field of legal history. Special thanks go to the president of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (aahd), Gimena del Rio Riande (secrit-iibicrit, conicet). Drawing together such an international group of experts requires a lot of resources, and therefore we are very grateful to the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History as well as to the Goethe University, Frankfurt, for their generous financial support, in the case of the latter through the university’s program promoting academic exchange with Latin America. The concept of the conference as well as the book was discussed with many of our colleagues from the project “The School of Salamanca”, Goethe University and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. We would like to thank especially Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Juan Belda Plans, Manuela Bragagnolo, Natalie Cobo, Otto Danwerth, David Glück, Nicole Pasakarnis, Christian Pogies and Andreas Wagner.

We are grateful to them and many colleagues from the Goethe University and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History for the opportunities to present and critically discuss our ideas.

Thomas Duve, José Luis Egío, and Christiane Birr

Frankfurt am Main, September 2020