This volume is a comprehensive account of the second Scholasticism emanating from the Hispanic sphere of influence, and radiating through varied disciplines and topics, that offers both an introduction to, and an updated study of, the revival of the medieval philosophical-theological movement, mainly from c.1500 to c.1700. However, it is not circumscribed or limited only to authors of Spanish descent but includes both the medieval antecedents in the subjects studied, as well as the doctrinal and historical impact these authors had contemporaneously or later in Europe and elsewhere.

We are presented with a rich tradition while, at the same time, endowed with an internal complexity that is articulated above all from different religious orders and charisms (Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, Augustinians, etc.) and, in turn, characterized on some occasions by heated doctrinal debates between representatives of these orders. The volume includes an extensive catalog of authors and primary sources (both in first editions, as well as in other contemporary critical editions and in unpublished manuscripts). Moreover, these Scholastic authors and their works have been the subject of numerous theological, philosophical, or juridical studies produced in the last century.

Logically, neither the editors nor the authors have attempted to be exhaustive in their contributions, nor would such a work be possible. Along with an overview of the intellectual, academic, and social contexts in which these authors developed their teaching, the various topics are organized into eight parts (Theology, Philosophy, Ethics, Politics, Law, Economics, Sciences, and the Senses). The studies offered by the twenty-seven contributors to this volume examine the primary sources (in some cases in a very broad and comprehensive manner), as well as the reception and significance these works have received in historiography, especially in recent years, and give indications of research in progress or to be undertaken for exploration in this field. It should also be noted that the contributors are outstanding specialists, some with very extensive publication records in this field. For the most part, they represent research conducted in Central Europe or the United States, with a smaller presence from southern Europe.

Undoubtedly, this type of collection is a cultural necessity. Having partly overcome the prejudices of some modern humanists or enlightened thinkers (and of some neo-Scholastics who question the value of their main authors, such as Suárez), we are now in a better position to deepen our knowledge. As we know, the value of this tradition has often been marginalized as something that does not belong to modern culture. We need, therefore, both a return to these sources and a debate on their historical significance, and even more, on their contribution to the understanding of our present civilization and to show other possible paths of European modernity(ies). This study of the second Scholasticism is a field that still needs a recovery of both printed and manuscript sources, especially their translations into contemporary languages.

A question of great hermeneutical relevance in order to gain access to this tradition is the understanding of its scope and the configuration of its own limits, and even the way in which it is to be defined as a whole. In the introduction, Harald E. Braun echoes this: Is it Spanish Scholasticism, Iberian Scholasticism, Ibero-American Scholasticism, or Escuela de Salamanca (Belda, Egío, among others), or the Salamanca schools (Anxo Pena), or Second or Late Scholasticism?

The contributions to this volume collectively take no final position on how to nominally define this area of study. However, they do allow for a common way of accessing the tradition, which is presented from the nucleus of Hispanic Scholastic authors, who, from a certain paradigmatic imprint or teaching by the Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria, who, accompanied in turn by his companion in the order, Domingo de Soto, generated a process of renewal of academic and pastoral knowledge, as well as the social sense of the same, and which radiated from the University of Salamanca.

However, this center, in fact, was also enriched by the renewal of Scholasticism at the University of Paris, where Vitoria, and Soto in part, were formed. Nor was this renewal exclusive in Spain to Salamanca, since university colleges such as those of Valladolid and Alcalá de Henares also contributed; above all, there was a circulation of ideas, works, and professors, especially intense among the universities not only in Spain but in Portugal, such as universities in Coimbra and Évora. Nor should we forget the connection with the Italian centers, primarily through the Spanish Jesuit teachers at the Roman College, which allowed, in turn, a European circulation of ideas. Thus, the process of renewal and conformation of the second Scholasticism is presented in a polycentric way from Europe, although with a decisive contribution from the centers of southern Europe.

This broadening of Spanish Scholasticism is precisely what can be seen in the volume’s studies. Along with the works contributed by the first masters of this school, who renewed medieval Aristotelian Thomism, and the authors of the second or third generation, such as Melchor Cano, Domingo Báñez, Bartolomé de Medina, Luis de Molina, Francisco Suárez, Gabriel Vázquez, and Tomás Sánchez, we frequently find in these chapters ideas of non-Spanish authors, such as Leonardus Lessius, Robert Bellarmine, Pedro da Fonseca and Manuel de Gois, among others, who were nevertheless connected to Spanish Scholasticism. Other centers from which Spanish Scholasticism radiated throughout Europe were numerous Jesuit colleges, for although there was no official declaration of any Jesuit authority to follow, the Spanish Jesuits, among them Suárez, occupied an important place in the development of commentaries in various disciplines. (Another major factor contributing to the European extension of this tradition is the reception of Suárez’s metaphysics—omnium metaphisicorum papa—in various Protestant centers of Europe, as historiography since the end of the nineteenth century has recognized).

At the same time, I must explicitly recognize the interest in, and potential of, research in the field of Ibero-American Scholasticism. Today, it appears to us as a small-scale and only recently explored field, but necessary to complement the paths opened in the recovery of works and studies in the tradition. In this area, it is not merely a matter of Iberian “imperial” projection on the colonies (as is often presented in a reductive and metonymic way by many researchers of the so-called decolonial turn), but of an opening to the new context and to the social, political, religious, and legal challenges raised by the interaction between native peoples, the church, private agents, and colonial authorities, also mediated by the will of dialogue and negotiation with the native communities, as well as by the concern for knowledge of the native languages. Thus, in the first decades of the existence of the Ibero-American universities, there was a presence of authors originally from the Iberian Peninsula who were trained there, but who developed their teaching in the Americas. To highlight just a few, we can point to Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Pedro de Oñate, Diego de Avendaño, and António Vieira, who made important contributions to humanizing the colonial presence in defense of the most vulnerable communities and confronting the forms of slavery in the New World. In turn, works written from the New World were also received, and sometimes even published in Europe, as exemplified by the work of the Jesuit Antonio Rubio, Logica mexicana (Cologne, 1605). Some of these contributions are treated in this volume. I would like to recognize the significance of these works, and their authors, not merely as marginal products from the periphery of the non-European world but also as vehicles through which we can acquire knowledge, at least to some extent, from the otherness of the non-European world, about the open, dialogical, and multifaceted character of the tradition of Spanish or Iberian Scholasticism.

In this context, it is helpful to mention a few relevant contributions made in recent decades within Iberian and Ibero-American circles, which are generally little known to European and US researchers yet are referenced on several occasions in this volume. Thus, we must recognize the value and scientific interest of the Corpus Hispanorum de Pace (first and second series, 1963–2013), developed thanks to the efforts and scholarly guidance of Professor Luciano Pereña and his team of collaborators (Eleuterio Elorduy, Carlos Baciero, Vidal Abril, García Añoveros, and others). They have collected in nearly fifty volumes the contributions of more than twenty Spanish authors mainly from the field of juridical and theological inquiry, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. These are the first scholarly critical editions with introductory studies, accompanied by some unpublished documents, that help us to better understand the meaning and scope of these treatises within the historical and doctrinal contexts in which they were written.

In a similar vein to Pereña, who needed to broaden with an axiological key the doctrinal context that expanded from the University of Salamanca to the whole of Spain, Pedro Calafate (University of Lisbon) and his collaborators give new impetus to this project of Spanish historiographical recovery. As such, they broadened their scope and named the tradition Escuela Ibérica de la Paz, in an attempt to include the recovered works created at the universities of Coimbra and Évora. This perspective gave birth in the last decade to the Corpus Lusitanorum de Pace, which recovers neglected Portuguese sources. It is also worth mentioning another complementary project, conimbricenses.org, perhaps better known in Anglo-Saxon circles. And we should not forget another emerging project, Scholastica Colonialis, led by Roberto Hoffmeister Pich and Alfredo Santiago Culleton, which focused on colonial philosophy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in several Latin American countries.

In the remaining part of this review essay, I would like to make a few brief comments and a few clarifications regarding the historical context of Iberian Scholasticism.

The works of the Scholastics are often portrayed, especially those by Jesuit Scholastics, as being mere precursors of liberal foundations of law and state. There are indeed common elements between Scholasticism and the liberal tradition, such as contractualism. However, Scholasticism is guided by different premises, as Thomas Pink’s contribution “Final Causation” shows. Pink questions a common misunderstanding, sustained among others by Skinner, of the “Whig interpretation” of Suárez and other Jesuit authors as precedent to John Locke’s understanding of social purpose as interpreted in his so-called “social contract.” We must then face the question of in what sense Jesuit Scholastic thought was modern. It is certainly not a modernity that can be identified merely with liberal modernity. For example, even when there is a distinction between rational agents with respect to the rest of created beings, there is no dissociation from the whole of created reality. If, according to Locke, nature has been created by God for human utility (only), then nature and living creatures are devoid of any value in themselves. Nor is there any “community of the common good” possible between humans and living creatures. On the other hand, the pursuit of the good inscribed in the respective tendencies ordered in the nature of created beings, rational or not, makes it possible to recognize a certain “universal community of the common good.” This implies that there is no necessary opposition between the human good and the good of the rest of natural beings. To clarify and support this, I quote from an unpublished manuscript of Suárez, who, commenting on St. Thomas, points out: “All particular goods are ordered to the common good, which is taught by the experience of each one since each particular thing is ordered to the benefit of the whole universe” (De beatitudine, Valladolid, c.1579). This makes the Scholastic thought of early modernity the basis for another way of relating humanity to nature. It is precisely the contemporary expansion of utilitarian and nature-exploiting modernity that today generates the social debate on how to articulate social justice with ecological justice. Liberal ethics, due to its individualistic orientation and its defense of the dissociation between human beings and nature, deprives living creatures of any normative treatment, reducing them, together with nature as a whole, to a treatment guided solely by strategic rationality lacking a moral relationship with the whole of creation.

Another aspect of the volume on which I would like to comment regards Fernanda Alfieri’s contribution, “Love, Marriage and Sexuality.” There is a question surrounding the discussion of gender and the relationship with corporeality and sensuality/ sexuality in the Scholastic tradition, which despite its relevance, as she points out, has received little attention. And this is a challenge, because, according to Alfieri, the authentic otherness the (male) authors faced was not that of the Indies, but the alterity of the female. This was a result of their own maleness, the consequences of which are perceived in the formulation of their rights and duties. However, Tomas Sánchez opens up possibilities for another type of approach, such as the defense of the sacramentality of marriage, and the recognition of the two purposes of marriage, not only the procreative or reproductive ones. In spite of Sánchez’s view, the Scholastic tradition must be included in a historical, cultural, and religious vision that, to a large extent, degrades the condition of women to a subordinate and tutelary position, and which has a negative attitude toward pleasure and enjoyment in general, and sexuality in particular.

However, we can also find in the Scholastic tradition “surprising perspectives” if we take into account both the context of its time and the weight of the patriarchal historical tradition. Some recent works open paths in this direction, especially Mauricio Lecón’s “Acerca del derecho de la mujer a gobernar en Francisco Suárez” (Pensamiento 77 [2021]: 363–79); Giannina Burlando’s “Indicios de pensamiento pre-ilustrado en Francisco Suárez: Sobre la igualdad de los sexos” (An. Sem. His. Phil. 39, no. 2 [2022]: 513–22). These articles show an egalitarian understanding both in capacities and political rights between men and women in the work of someone as relevant to this tradition as Suárez. In this sense, we can say that the supposed difference between men and women in the “sexual contract” is not projected in the “social contract,” as Rousseau does. Moreover, the conception of the “sexual contract” in this tradition has yet to be explored to a large extent.

In this context, the neglected treatise on creation, De opere sex dierum (Lyon, 1621), and especially Book iii dedicated to the creation of man and woman and the state of natura pura should be taken into consideration. Even in Suárez’s work Conselhos e pareceres (Coimbra, 1948), we can find an interpretation of both family law and procedural law that places the rights of a woman at risk from her husband’s mistreatment before her marital obligations, as well as scrupulous respect for the manner of exercising procedural actions to assert her rights. It is an interpretation of the law that is in tune with what today can be called an interpretation from a gender perspective (see my review of History, Casuistry and Custom in the Legal Thought of Francisco Suárez (1548–1617): Collected Studies in Journal of Jesuit Studies 9, no. 4 [2022]: 613–14), doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-09040006-13.

Also in relation to the above, I would like to point out the inquiry into the concept of mystical theology in the Scholastic tradition. Here, again, we can find unexpected discoveries. If, for example, we turn to works that either have a systematic discussion of spiritual experience or a collateral treatment of it, we find recognition of the equal capacity of women for contemplative activity as the superior activity of religious life. We can also find presumably unexpected positions, held by authors as rational, methodical, and speculative as Suárez, who defended a mystical or affective orientation of spiritual practices.

I consider, in general, A Companion to the Spanish Scholastics to be a useful multidimensional and interdisciplinary collection that includes complex discussions integrating heterogeneous works in terms of their disciplines and the fields of inquiry that might seem unconnected. In short, we find ourselves with a valuable volume that helps to introduce us to this difficult and extensive subject, that informs us to a great extent of where investigations are advancing in different fields and topics, and that, certainly, can generate future debates necessary to advance in this field of Spanish or Iberian Scholasticism from the perspective of diverse disciplines.