The “Secunda Scholastica”

Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, between “practi­cal jurisprudence” and humanistic jurisprudence, and at a time when the first results of the “reception” of Roman law in 1495 were becom­ing clear, attitudes toward the ius commune were undergoing constant review.

If we look to Spain, however, and in particular to Salamanca, the picture changes radically. In the early sixteenth century a totally new and original legal culture formed and developed in Spain, which then expanded and took hold throughout Europe among the dominant currents of legal thought.

This new jurisprudence was based on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and on the theoretical approach that had long been known as scholasticism. Historiography thus calls this revival “Late Scholasticism” or “Second Scholasticism”—the “Secunda Scholas­tica.” I prefer the latter term because it removes all ambiguity con­cerning the profound novelty of Spanish legal doctrine in the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries.

These were, what is more, the centuries in which Spain was the most important area of all Europe. Between the late fifteenth century and the seventeenth century Spain truly lived its golden age—El Siglo de oro—not only for the splendor of the reigns of Isabella of Castile (1451-1504) and Ferdinand of Aragon (1452-1558) and later for the power and size of the empire of Charles V (1500—58) and Philip II (1527-98), but also for its wealth, accumulated by plundering the sub­jected “savage” populations of West Africa and the “Indies” (the Americas) and from the extraordinary profits it made from the slave trade and the exploitation of the economic resources of the “new worlds” (gold, and especially silver).

There is no better observation point for understanding what was new on the European scene between the late fifteenth and the six­teenth centuries or for getting an overall view of Europe than the Spain of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, and Philip II. This is par­ticularly true if we use that privileged vantage point not to return to the history of the Mediterranean and the European continent but rather to understand how general problems (legal problems in partic­ular) fitted into the mentality and the culture of the leading figures in the broad span of imperial history when, for the first time, they found themselves face to face with unknown lands and “savage” and “infi­del” peoples.

One thing is certain: not only in the economic sphere but also in social thought, Spain felt the pull of the “Indies,” which Christopher Columbus had discovered and claimed in the name of Castile in 1492, and of Africa, circumnavigated by Vasco da Gama in 1498.

It may be that the discoverers’ first thought regarding the “Indians” on the other side of the Atlantic and the “savages” of Africa was for the health of their souls and for their eternal salvation rather than for their destinies in this life. Theology was a branch of knowledge that was cultivated intensely: the problems of colonialism gave it an an­thropological tinge, but as a discipline it was honored all the more as the political thrust of imperial expansionism in Europe met with resistance from what had become sovereign states and clashed with religious reform on the part OfLutherans and Calvinists in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland.

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