Introduction

Abstract

The life and work of Juan Luis Vives of Valencia (1493–1540) embraced extraordinary contradictions and tensions. Uprooted in his early youth, he spent his life among the mists and chill of England and the Low Countries, perpetually homesick for Spain. The son of conversos¹ who were burned as relapsed Jews by the Inquisition, he kept their fate a secret and his anguish to himself and clung fervently to his Catholic faith. He was destined, like so many of his young contemporaries, for scholastic training and probably for orders, but he rejected these for humanism and for marriage. And though he was celebrated for his work on education and psychology, a large part of his reputation must rest on the major role he played in the struggle between humanist dialectic and Parisian logic, in a kind of sixteenth century version of the Battle of the Books.