Juan Luis Vives

• 1. Introduction

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  Juan Luis Vives died in Bruges in 1540, at the age of 47, having never returned to Spain after leaving it as a teenager. He left behind a body of work that touched psychology, poverty relief, rhetoric, education, and medicine. A man who tutored a princess, was imprisoned by a king, watched his own father executed by the Inquisition, and still managed to write the first Western tract proposing that states had a duty to care for the urban poor. The questions his life raises are hard to set aside. How does a converso scholar from Valencia become one of the most original thinkers of the northern Renaissance? What drove a man whose family was destroyed by religious persecution to remain, by all accounts, a sincere Catholic? And why did historian of psychiatry Gregory Zilboorg call him a godfather of psychoanalysis more than four centuries after his death?

• 2. A Family Consumed by the Inquisition

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  Vives was born on the 6th of March 1493 in Valencia to a converso family. His mother's side had converted from Judaism to Christianity several decades before the Alhambra Decree, which made official the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The conversion did not protect them. His mother, Blanquina, born in 1473, was investigated by the Inquisition in 1491 for the heresies of being a Marrano and a Judaizer. She had been nine years old when her own mother insisted the family continue observing Yom Kippur after their conversion. At her hearing, Blanquina demonstrated she could recite the Nicene Creed and was acquitted. She died of the plague in 1508, when Vives was fifteen.

  Vives left Spain the following year, in 1509, and never came back. He would need that distance. Around 1524, his father, grandmother, and great-grandfather, along with other relatives, were convicted and executed by the Inquisition for Crypto-Judaism. The trigger was his uncle being caught hosting a secret synagogue inside his house. Around 1528, local authorities reopened the case of his dead mother. Based on her own testimony about the Yom Kippur celebrations, Blanquina Vives' corpse was exhumed and burned at the stake. Vives was living in Thomas More's house in Chelsea when he learned of this. He fell into what the sources describe as a severe depressive state.

• 3. Scholar at the Courts of Europe

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  Vives studied at the University of Paris from 1509 to 1512, where he encountered the scholastic tradition he would spend much of his career pushing against. At the University of Valencia, the atmosphere he later recalled was one of relentless, performative argument: scholars wrangling at breakfast, at dinner, in the bath, in church, in the countryside, in private, and in public. The dialectic was not a tool for finding truth; it was a social performance.

  By 1519, he was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Leuven. Erasmus, who had ties to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, urged him to write a commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei. That commentary was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England and led directly to Vives being invited to England. He acted as tutor to Princess Mary, the future Mary I, and wrote two works for her use: De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae in 1523, and De Institutione Feminae Christianae, which he dedicated to Queen Catherine of Aragon. While at Oxford, he was made doctor of laws and lectured on philosophy.

  In 1528, he sided openly with Catherine against the annulment of her marriage to Henry VIII. He was immediately confined to his house for six weeks. On his release, he returned to Bruges, where he spent the rest of his life writing.

• 4. Poverty and the Duty of the State

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  In 1525, the city of Bruges formally asked Vives to think through how to address relief for the poor. What he produced was De Subventione Pauperum Sive de Humanis Necessitatibus, a tract that scholars now consider the first of its kind in the Western world. Before Vives, poor relief in the medieval tradition was understood as a matter for the Church and for individuals giving alms. Vives argued instead that the state bore a responsibility to provide financial relief. He also called for craft training to be made available to the unskilled poor.

  His framework was not unconditional. He explicitly rejected what he called a right to laziness. The city of Bruges did not actually implement his suggestions until 1557, seventeen years after his death. Even so, his proposals influenced social relief legislation that was enacted in England, the German Empire, and the Spanish Kingdom during the 1530s, over the objections of other thinkers and theologians.

• 5. Psychology Before the Word Existed

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  Vives is considered the first scholar to analyze the psyche directly. He did extensive interviews with people and noted the connections between what they felt, the words they used, and the subjects they were discussing. Historian of psychiatry Gregory Zilboorg credited him as a godfather of psychoanalysis in his 1941 work A History of Medical Psychology. Foster Watson, writing in 1915, called him the father of modern psychology.

  Vives expressed his core position clearly. He believed that understanding how the soul functions was more valuable than understanding what the soul is. He compared this to perceiving a painted picture: how we experience the image tells us more than simply declaring what the picture is. He rejected the deterministic view of human behavior, arguing instead that the mind and soul can modify behavior in ethical and social ways. He also touched on unconscious memory, observing that a person may hold a memory without being aware of it. Vives himself described an experience from his own life: as a child he had eaten cherries while ill with a fever, and as an adult, eating cherries again made him feel sick just as he had been as a child. He found this remarkable and concluded that memory can persist unconsciously for a very long time.

  On the subject of children and learning, he believed children learn quickly because their minds are less cluttered with the worries that fill adult minds. He advised that one should memorize something every day, even a useless quotation, because memory declines every day the mind is not exercised.

• 6. Medicine, Emotion, and the Body

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  Vives drew on Galen and Hippocrates for his thinking on the relationship between emotion and the physical body. He followed their view that different types of bile reflect different types of emotions, and agreed with Galen's recommendations about eating particular foods to suit different temperaments. He went further by suggesting that emotions, including negative ones, are in most cases genuinely beneficial. He believed there is potential to learn and grow from negative emotional experience, not just positive experience.

  His emphasis on animism, or animal spirits, was later credited by writer Clements with influencing Descartes. Vives categorized emotions as hot, cold, moist, dry, or combinations of these four. Personality disturbances rooted in emotion could, in his view, be addressed by applying the correct temperature to the body.

  On medicine more broadly, he urged that personal habits of cleanliness and temperance greatly affected health, and that the cleanliness of the body affected the welfare of both body and mind. He advocated for animal testing before applying medical procedures to people. His most direct statement on mental illness concerned the practice of putting those suffering from it on public display. He called using the mentally ill as a form of entertainment one of the most inhumane practices he had ever encountered, and argued that while some individuals who are mentally ill need medication, others need only friendly treatment. His work De anima et vita, published in 1538, brought many of these ideas together two years before his death.

• 7. Writing for Women, Defining Their Limits

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  De Institutione Feminae Christianae was commissioned by Catherine of Aragon for her daughter Mary and was published in 1523. Some recent feminist and gender studies scholars describe Vives as having steered a middle path among the many Renaissance treatises written for and against women. He was neither straightforwardly hostile to women nor an advocate for their equality.

  His text contains passages that sit uncomfortably alongside the biography of his patron's daughter. He argued that women should not be teachers, grounding the argument in the biblical account of Eve's seduction. He wrote that an unmarried young woman should rarely appear in public and questioned the respect owed to a man who is governed by a woman. The book, designed to instruct Princess Mary on the proper roles for her to embrace, expressly forbade the role of queen regnant, a role both Mary and her younger half-sister Elizabeth would later hold.

  His companion text for husbands, De los deberes del marido, runs to less than half the length of his advice for married women. It focuses substantially on how a Christian man should select and govern a good wife, rather than laying out standards for how he should conduct himself.

• 8. Legacy in Bruges and Beyond

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  Erasmus wrote that Vives would overshadow the name of Erasmus. Thomas More, in whose Chelsea house Vives had lived during the period of his mother's posthumous burning, was among the readers who admired his work. Vives may have directly influenced the essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, and through Montaigne may have reached Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas on children's education the work of Vives had long preceded.

  His major treatise De Causis Corruptarum Artium, which argued against the unquestioning authority of scholasticism and of Aristotle, has been ranked alongside Francis Bacon's Novum Organon. His philological analysis of the Letter of Aristeas led him to conclude that its author could not have been a contemporary ethnic Greek, but must have been a Jewish writer living long after the events described. That kind of textual criticism was itself a form of the empirical, evidence-first thinking that runs through everything he wrote.

  He was buried at St. Donatian's Cathedral in Bruges. Despite his influence in the sixteenth century, he now attracts minimal interest beyond specialized academic circles. In September 2013, two Belgian institutions for higher education, KATHO and Katholieke Hogeschool Brugge-Oostende, merged under the name Vives, partly in recognition of his regional connection to West Flanders, of which Bruges is the capital.