The School of Salamanca: A Case of Global Knowledge Production

Over the past few decades, a growing number of studies have highlighted the importance of the ’School of Salamanca’ for the emergence of colonial normative regimes and the formation of a language of normativity on a global scale. According to this influential account, American and Asian actors usually appear as passive recipients of normative knowledge produced in Europe. This book proposes a different perspective and shows, through a knowledge historical approach and several case studies, that the School of Salamanca has to be considered both an epistemic community and a community of practice that cannot be fixed to any individual place. Instead, the School of Salamanca encompassed a variety of different sites and actors throughout the world and thus represents a case of global knowledge production.

Contributors are: Adriana Álvarez, Virginia Aspe, Marya Camacho, Natalie Cobo, Thomas Duve, José Luis Egío, Dolors Folch, Enrique González González, Lidia Lanza, Esteban Llamosas, Osvaldo R. Moutin, and Marco Toste.

Thomas Duve is Director at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main) and Professor for Comparative Legal History at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on the legal history of the early modern age and the modern era.

José Luis Egío is researcher of the research project The School of Salamanca (AdW Mainz, MPIeR Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt). He has published monographs, translations and articles on the history of philosophy, law and theology in early modern Spain, France and Mexico.

Christiane Birr is Coordinator of the research project The School of Salamanca (AdW Mainz, MPIeR Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt). Her research areas are Spanish late scholasticism, canon law, taught law, and constitutional law (14-16th centuries).