Tudor school-boy life: the dialogues of Juan Luis Vives. Juan Luis Vives
J. L. VIVES: A SCHOLAR OF THE RENASCENCE
1492–1492
Erasmus was born in 1466, Budé (Budaeus) in 1468, and Vives in 1492. These great men were regarded by their contemporaries as a triumvirate of leaders of the Renascence movement, at any rate outside of Italy. The name of Erasmus is now the most generally known of the three, but in one of his letters Erasmus stated his fear that he would be eclipsed by Vives. No doubt Erasmus was the greatest propagandist of Renascence ideas and the Renascence spirit. No doubt Budé, by his Commentarii Linguae Graecae (1529), established himself as the greatest Greek scholar of the age. Equally, without doubt, it would appear to those who have studied the educational writings of Erasmus, Budé, and Vives, the claim might reasonably be entered for J. L. Vives that his De Tradendis Disciplinis placed him first of the three as a writer on educational theory and practice. In 1539 Vives published at Paris the Linguae Latinae Exercitatio, i.e., the School Dialogues which are for the first time, in the present volume, presented to the English reader.
Juan Luis Vives was born, March 6, 1492 (the year of Columbus’s discovery of America), at Valencia, in Spain. His father was Luis Vives, of high-born ancestry, whose device was Siempre vivas. Similarly his mother, Blanca March, was of a good family, which had produced several poets. Vives himself has described his parents, their relation to each otherviii and to himself, in two passages in his De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1523). This work was translated into English (c. 1540) by Richard Hyrde. As the two passages contain all that is known of the parents, and give a short but picturesque idea of the household relations, I transcribe them from Hyrde’s translation: “My mother Blanca, when she had been fifteen years married unto my father, I could never see her strive with my father. There were two sayings that she had ever in her mouth as proverbs. When she would say she believed well anything, then she used to say, ‘It is even as though Luis Vives had spoken it.’ When she would say she would anything, she used to say, ‘It is even as though Luis Vives would it.’ I have heard my father say many times, but especially once, when one told him of a saying of Scipio African the younger, or else of Pomponius Atticus (I ween it were the saying of them both), that they never made agreement with their mothers. ‘Nor I with my wife,’ said he, ‘which is a greater thing.’ When others that heard this saying wondered upon it, and the concord of Vives and Blanca was taken up and used in a manner for a proverb, he was wont to answer like as Scipio was, who said he never made agreement with his mother, because he never made debate with her. But it is not to be much talked in a book (made for another purpose) of my most holy mother, whom I doubt not now to have in heaven the fruit and reward of her holy and pure living.”
Vives states that he had the intention of writing a “book of her acts and her life,” and no one who reads the foregoing passage will be otherwise than regretful that he failed to carry out this purpose. As it is, we must content ourselves with another passage.1
ix
“No mother loved her child better than mine did; nor any child did ever less perceive himself loved of his mother than I. She never lightly laughed upon me, she never cockered me; and yet when I had been three or four days out of her house, she wist not where, she was almost sore sick; and when I was come home, I could not perceive that ever she longed for me. Therefore there was nobody that I did more flee, or was more loath to come nigh, than my mother, when I was a child; but after I came to man’s estate, there was nobody whom I delighted more to have in sight; whose memory now I have in reverence, and as oft as she cometh to my remembrance I embrace her within my mind and thought, when I cannot with my body.”
Vives went to the town school of Valencia. The outlines of the history of this school have been sketched by Dr. Rudolf Heine.2 The foundation of the school dates back to the time of James I. of Aragon, when Pope Innocent IV. gave privileges to the newly founded school in 1245. The school, Dr. Heine says, was first a schola, then a studium, then a gymnasium, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was known as an academy, the name by which Vives describes schools in the Colloquies. In 1499 new statutes were drawn up for the Valencia Academy, ordaining the teaching of grammar, logic, natural and moral philosophy, metaphysics, canon and civil law, poetry, and “other subjects such as the city desires and requires.”
The spirit of scholasticism reigned supreme in the Valencian Academy when Vives was a pupil. The dominant subject of study was dialectic, and the all-controlling method of education was the disputation. Vives thus received a thorough drilling in dialectic and disputation. When Vives became a convert to the Renascence interest of literature and grammar, xhe was thus well prepared by his experience in the Valencian Academy for an effective onslaught on the old disputational methods. How deeply interwoven these methods were in the school instruction may be seen in Vives’ own words:—
“Even the youngest scholars (tyrones) are accustomed never to keep silence; they are always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost in their minds, lest they should seem to be giving up the dispute. Nor does one disputation or even two each day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner. They wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast; before supper they wrangle, and they wrangle after supper. … At home they dispute, out of doors they dispute. They wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating-room, in the church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private; at all times they are wrangling.”
The names of two of Vives’ schoolmasters are preserved, Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso. Amiguetus was a thorough-going scholastic, teaching by the old mediæval methods, and a stalwart opponent of the Renascence. Spain generally resisted the Revival of Learning, and wished to have a ban placed even on the works of Erasmus. But in the person of Antonio Calà Harana Del Ojo, better known as Antonio de Lebrijà (or Antonius Nebrissensis), a doughty champion of classicism appeared and raised a Spanish storm. In 1492, the year of Vives’ birth, Antonio published a grammar and a dictionary, and had the hardihood to present his learning in the Spanish language. About 1506 it was proposed to introduce Antonio’s Introductiones Latinae into the Valencian Academy. This suggestion was strenuously opposed by Amiguetus. With the enthusiasm of a school-boy of fourteen years of age, Vives espoused the side of his teacher, and by declamation and by pen supported the old methods.xi But when he published his De Tradendis Disciplinis (1531) more than a quarter of a century afterwards, he paid Lebrijà the praise which as a school-boy he had withheld, recognising his varied and broad reading, his intimate knowledge of classical writers, his glorious scholarship, and his modesty in only claiming to be a grammarian.
Of Vives’ school-life little more can be gathered, except indeed what in his writings may be surmised to be the reminiscences of his own boy-life. We find glimpses of this kind in the Dialogues. For example, in the twenty-second Dialogue—which expounds the laws of school games—he describes his native town and early environment.
In 1509 Vives went to Paris to continue his studies. Amongst the teachers under whom he studied here was the Spanish John Dullard. Vives tells us that Dullard used to say: Quanto eris melior grammaticus, tanto pejus dialecticus et theologus!3 Nevertheless, Paris had awakened Vives to the unsatisfactory nature of a one-sided training in dialectic. In 1512 he proceeded to Bruges. He became tutor in a Spanish family, by name Valdaura. One of the daughters, Margaret, whom he taught, he afterwards (in 1524) married. He speaks of the mother of the family, Clara Cervant, in the highest terms, and regarded her—next to his own mother—as the highest example of womanly devotion to duty he had ever known, for she had nursed her husband, it is said, from their marriage day for many years through a severe and obstinate illness. Whilst at Bruges his thoughts gathered strength in the direction of the Renascence. In 1514 he suggests that Ferdinand of Spain would do well to get Erasmus as tutor in his family, for he says Erasmus is known to him personally, and is all that is dear and worthy. It is thus certain xiithat Vives was confirmed by Erasmus in the study of classical literature as transcending all the old mediæval educational disciplines.
From 1512 onwards, with breaks, Vives’ main quarters