[128] When the nobles abandoned their earlier roles as national political leaders, their places were quickly filled by equally ambitious and newly prestigious professionals -- the letrados. As the letrados increasingly gained control over the Castilian monarchy's political policies, they also assumed the intellectual leadership of Castilian society, substituting their own theories and values for those of the caballeros. The change in political leadership became apparent at the Cortes of Toledo in 1480 when Fernando and Isabel made one of their most famous reforms of Castilian political institutions: they changed the size and composition of the consejo real, which previously had a majority of caballeros, so that henceforth seven of its twelve members were to be letrados. The consejo real, which had traditionally been dominated by the military aristocracy, would now be dominated by the legal profession. Furthermore, the Catholic Monarchs expanded the duties and prerogatives of the consejo real so that many important matters previously handled personally by the monarchs now came under the jurisdiction of the consejo.

Historians have long believed that this change from government by the aristocracy to government by a meritocracy is a watershed in the political and intellectual history of Castile.⁽¹⁾ Politically, the new consejo's centralization of the administration is supposed to mark the end of the corrupt caballero society of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern state. This new monarchy, in turn, is supposed to have created the social world necessary for introducing the Renaissance into Spain. The traditional assessment of Isabelline Spain as a period of political [129] revival and vigorous pursuit of Renaissance ideals depends largely on our assessment of the changes brought about by the reforms of 1480.

For historians of early modern Spain, the question of the reforms of 1480 is part of one of the most compelling problems in Spanish history, both in its own right and as an example of the increasing dissonance between our traditional views and the conclusions arising out of modern research in archival materials. Such research shows that the greatest increase in the number of letrados in royal service occurred during the reigns of Juan II and Enrique IV, and that Fernando and Isabel simply formalized this new composition of the royal administration.⁽²⁾ This research also shows that the fiscal reforms of 1480 regularized and confirmed the nobility's right to portions of the royal income, rather than depriving them of it as had previously been believed.⁽³⁾ Furthermore, the documentary evidence does not corroborate the tradition that the caballero administration before 1480 was corrupt; and there is an outright contradiction between the stereotype of the reformed consejo real and the well-known evidence of corruption in the consejo during the sixteenth century. Preliminary conclusions drawn from this research rather than from tradition indicate that the reforms of 1480 confirmed the patterns of pre-Isabelline Castile: a political life remarkably free of civil war and bloodshed; expansion of the ruling dynasty into Aragon and Naples; the shifting of appellate legal jurisdiction from the personal justice of the king in council to the professional Audiencia and other royal judges; and, most important, the institutionalization of the bonds of loyalty and cooperation between the monarch and the aristocracy.

As a result of studies based upon archival evidence, the Castile formed by the caballero administration before 1480 appears more and more as a vigorous and stable society. Whatever the moral character of the caballeros may have been -- and this is still a matter of prejudice and speculation -- the evidence does not support the belief that the caballero administration before 1480 was degenerate, corrupt, or chaotic.

This new evidence about pre-Isabelline Castile in itself casts doubt upon the traditional assessment of the letrado administration. Historians have believed that the significance of the reforms of 1480 lies in the shift in personnel -- that by transferring power from the aristocracy to a meritocracy the Catholic Monarchs ended corruption in government. The assumption behind this tradition -- that the legal profession is less susceptible to the temptations of corruption and avarice than the military profession -- was one that even letrados themselves could not accept. Dr. Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal (1472-1532), the most eminent jurist on the new consejo real, warned Charles V against trusting certain members [130] of the consejo who were both letrados and corrupt.⁽⁴⁾ The warning appears to have been in vain. Although we do not yet know the details of the operation of the consejo during most of the fifteenth century, we do know that during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and throughout the sixteenth century, bribery, extortion, and nepotism were typical of the consejo's operations.⁽⁵⁾ In "reforming" the consejo real, the Catholic Monarchs had created a majority of letrados -- not of incorruptibles.

Although the reform of 1480 did not achieve a change in practices, it did achieve a significant change in ideals. This revolution in expectations, more than any other single factor, shaped sixteenth-century attitudes toward the Castilian past. It still shapes popular ideas about the Renaissance in Spain.

The letrados in the royal council of Fernando and Isabel brought to their positions a coherent and rational concept of the goals of the government and of their role in it, the concept developed by don Alfonso de Cartagena and his students long before the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. This letrado concept of the history and nature of the Spanish monarchy, based on medieval scholastic political theory and Roman law, formed a sharp contrast to the assumptions of previous royal councils. The consequences of this change in the consejo's ideals were all-encompassing for, as we have seen, the letrados started from the assumption of a rational universal order. Their ideas about history and politics were part of a total system whose values extended into every aspect of daily living. Their sense of right and wrong would be applied to every field of endeavor. Even those who, like the Mendoza, were not engaged politically would feel the pressure of their growing influence.

The letrados took their assumptions about the nature of historical change from the medieval chronicles of Spain.⁽⁶⁾ In the medieval chronicles, history is regarded as the working-out of God's will -- the verification in the affairs of man of God's revelation. For the letrados, military and political disasters must have been the products of man's sins and God's judgment. In order to make the numerous disasters of Spain's history fit in with this point of view, the letrados became preoccupied with fixing blame. Since the same sins are repeated century after century in the medieval chronicles -- kings fail to fight the Muslims, nobles rebel, clerics become lax -- the letrados presented a view of Spanish history as a steady decline or, at best, stasis. Even when these historians get caught up in their millenarian fantasies about the Catholic Monarchs, the personalities and individual actions of the monarchs are subordinated to this pattern, and the letrados' history of this reign becomes an undifferentiated series of royal good works rewarded by divinely mobilized good [131] fortune. Whereas the caballeros regarded historical change as the result of adaptations to changing conditions, the letrados regarded change as providential punishment or reward.

On the subject of religion, don Alfonso de Cartagena and his father, don Pablo de Santa Maria, were exceptionally rigid. Scholars have recently become interested in the substance of the arguments these two conversos turned against their former coreligionists, but the tracts they wrote against the Jews are as significant for their method of argument as they are for their content. Both don Pablo's "Scrutinium Scripturarum" (1432) and don Alfonso's Defensorium Unitatis Christianae (1449) are among the first attacks on the Jews, they are the only ones written in Latin, and don Alfonso's work is perhaps the first thorough theological treatment of the subject in Castile.⁽⁷⁾

This concern for theology, far from being typical, is one of the most significant innovations in Castilian intellectual life in the fifteenth century. It appears in Castile for the first time in don Pablo's work; and until 1500, it was peculiar to the Cartagena household and a handful of Castilians who had studied theology at Paris. Don Alfonso's work was not adequate to provide the foundation for Castile's theological needs in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, but it does indicate the degree to which don Alfonso and his students were inclined to break with the Castilian tradition of a pietist, eclectic, and nonintellectual approach to religion. Don Alfonso and his students, in sharp contrast to the caballeros, became preoccupied in their written works with the problems of right-thinking and sought to answer these problems through theology.

Don Alfonso's approach to the problem of the Jews is similar to his approach to the question of proper religious practices, laid out in a response to Guzmán's inquiry on the subject.⁽⁸⁾ Guzmán had judged the piety of religious practices by the purity of the Christian's motives; don Alfonso judged them by their Biblical authenticity or their theological correctness. These ideas were not just speculation on don Alfonso's part: he tried to put them into practice both in his private life -- which, in contrast to the private lives of the Mendoza prelates, was irreproachable -- and by sponsoring reforms in the religious houses of his diocese. The reforms to which he lent his authority were of such an extreme, eremitical nature that they aroused the antagonism of the people of Burgos, who resorted to violence to break up the reformed cells.⁽⁹⁾ But by the end of the fifteenth century, concern for correct religious practices had become one of the most popular aspects of the monarchy, with tragic consequences for the conversos.

The same concern for universal standards of correctness which had [132] infused the letrados' attitudes toward history and religion also shaped their esthetic standards. Almost all of their prose works were written in Latin; and their style, whether in Latin or Spanish, was modeled on the elegant periods of Cicero. Don Alfonso made the first Spanish translations of the "Rhetorica ad Herennium" and of Cicero's "De Inventione," "De Officiis," and "De Senectute."

Because of their enthusiasm for Cicero and because the letrados broke with the historiographical traditions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by writing their histories in Latin, just when the Italian humanists were also writing histories in Latin, don Alfonso and his students are often hailed as humanists or precursors of the Renaissance.⁽¹⁰⁾ It should be noted, however, that the letrados' esthetic standards were imitative of those of the Italian humanists. They developed neither an esthetic standard of their own nor one that could be considered peculiarly Spanish. Just as they minimized the Roman period of Spanish history, they rejected the style of the "Spanish" Romans and tried to meet the Italians on their own terms. Because the letrados were addressing an international audience, rather than the Castilian audience of the caballeros, they adopted the language and the style most widely appreciated outside of Castile.

Although they adopted the decorative elements of Italian humanism, the letrados rejected the substance of the Italian humanists' rhetorical approach toward the classics. Don Alfonso, for example, attacked Bruni's translation of Aristotle on the grounds that by aiming for elegance Bruni had violated the rational character of Aristotle's thought. Specifically, don Alfonso objected to Bruni's substitution of a Ciceronian vocabulary for the vocabulary of the medieval translation. Don Alfonso's attack was based not on a superior knowledge of Greek, which he did not know at all, but on his assumptions that the medieval and ancient worlds were so closely linked that tampering with one would violate the other and that a theology based on the rationalism of Aristotle was central to the Christian faith.⁽¹¹⁾ This was the only issue on which don Alfonso openly attacked the humanists; but in all their written works, the letrados rejected the most basic religious and historiographical assumptions of the humanists.

Don Alfonso and his school were clerics deeply involved in the problems of the fifteenth-century papacy, and it was to the papal court that they directed their works. In order to impress that audience, they wrote not only in Latin but in the Ciceronian style that became popular among Italian humanists after the discovery of Cicero's rhetorical works. Don Alfonso and his students were probably the most adept Ciceronians of [133] fifteenth-century Spain, and scholars have been misled by this fact into believing that their ideas were also humanist. For this reason, and because the caballero writers have never received their due as Renaissance humanists, don Alfonso and his students have been regarded as the focus of Renaissance humanism in fifteenth-century Castile.

In a sense, however, don Alfonso was the head of an anti-Renaissance movement. He and his disciples were introducing into Castilian intellectual life a sophisticated theory of divine-right monarchy that had never been either practice or theory, not even in theoretical works as imperialistic as those of Alfonso el Sabio. Although Spain was the scene of much of the translation that provided the basis for the great scholastic works and the juristic treatises of both the Christian and Muslim worlds, the Castilians never incorporated the scholastic discipline into their intellectual life. When they borrowed from the Arabs, they chose to imitate or translate encyclopedic works of practical knowledge or collections of fabulae that provided moral precepts. It was these that interested them rather than the logical or juridical proofs that are the great accomplishments of Muslim scholasticism.

The scholastic works of thirteenth-century Castile, the Chronicon Mundi (c. 1236) by el Tudense (Lucas, bishop of Tuy); the De Rebus Hispaniae (1243) of El Toledano (Rodrigo, archbishop of Toledo); and the Planeta by el Toledano's disciple, Diego de Campos, canciller mayor of Castile, are notable works that draw heavily upon scholastic methods -- but all three authors were educated outside Spain.

As far as we know now, none of the scholastics writing in Castile from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries was educated in Castile. The scholasticism and theology that aroused Petrarch's ire in France and Italy were almost nonexistent in Castile. Ayala's famous outburst of scorn for scholastics was not directed against Spanish theology, but against the scholastics at Avignon whose casuistry and petty wrangles exacerbated rather than solved the pressing ecclesiological problems of the century. When don Alfonso and his disciples returned from the Council of Basle and began to write Latin works in defense of the Castilian monarchy based on scholastic argument and bolstered with theology, they were introducing a new type of argument and a new political theory. The fact that don Alfonso and his students were both letrados and converso clerics suggests that their educational and religious background made them more receptive to the method and substance of scholastic argument than to the Renaissance humanism they encountered at Basle.

The early education of these letrados followed the same pattern as [134] that of the caballeros: young boys were taught reading, writing, and grammar while living at home; they were then sent to live in the household of a prelate, where they mastered Latin; read the classics, theology, and law; and served in the prelate's household and chapel. At about the age of eighteen -- long after the age when a caballero ended his formal academic training -- a young cleric, supported by a benefice acquired through the efforts of his patron, went to a university where he followed the course of study for the licenciate in civil or canon law.⁽¹²⁾

Once the student matured and an appropriate post became vacant, the patron secured an appointment for his student, and that ended the student's university career. Those students who had powerful patrons did not take the degrees for which they had supposedly been studying: many of them did not even matriculate in the university; and a few of them pursued their studies in Italy or France while they were waiting for their patrons to find posts for them. Technically, they were not letrados because they did not take higher degrees in law, but they regarded themselves as letrados.

Don Alfonso and his students were an ecclesiastical elite -- fluent in Latin, trained to argue in the categories and logic of the scholastics, filled with admiration for Roman law. Little of this higher education was relevant to secular life in Castile, but it did give don Alfonso and his students a facility with the language and methods of the theology developed in France and with the few Latin works that had been produced in medieval Castile. Don Alfonso, his family, and his students -- as clerics and converts -- may also have felt a special affinity with the religious attitudes of medieval works. The medieval Latin chronicles -- from Isidore to el Toledano -- were written by clergy combatting the heresies of their own days and determined to enlist the monarchy as an ally in their crusade. Whether the religious enemy was Arian, Adoptionist, Muslim, or Jewish, the medieval clerical historians and the letrados assumed that correct religious beliefs were efficacious in reforming society.

The Mendoza's failure to produce histories that would counterbalance the letrados' tendency to mix history and religion opened the way for the letrados to become the uncontested formulators of Castilian religious policy. The Mendoza had been eclectic, pietistic, and tolerant in their religious beliefs in the early fifteenth century; and as we shall see, they continued to hold these attitudes throughout the Trastámara period. But while the Mendoza held to this moderate position, both popular sentiment and official government policy shifted to a more intolerant attitude. The pace of popular uprisings against Jews and conversos quickened in the politically turbulent years after mid-century; and in the riots of [135] 1449, 1467, and 1474 the crown had to use all its military and persuasive powers to defend Jews and conversos from popular persecution.

As the riots became more violent, however, the government's actions became less successful; and in 1478, the crown instituted a new policy designed both to protect the innocent and to allay the suspicions of the zealous. In its efforts to protect conversos from popular race prejudice, the government established the Inquisition -- a judicial institution that would assess a converso's Christianity on the basis of his beliefs and practices rather than his race. It is no coincidence that this judicial solution to a religious problem occurred just when the letrados, with their views of an all-powerful state, their legal training, and their concern for correct religious beliefs and practices replaced the aristocracy as the principal advisers of the crown.

The first efforts at establishing an Inquisition were made by Enrique IV, without success. But the Catholic Monarchs, with the cooperation of the pope, placed the Inquisition in the hands of the Dominicans and Franciscans, directly responsible to the monarchs and claiming jurisdiction in all parts of the kingdom, whether on royal, episcopal, or seigneurial lands. The establishment of the Inquisition is the first issue on which letrados and caballeros displayed overt opposition. Clearly there was a conflict of interest, since seigneurial lands would now be subject to a judiciary responsible to the crown instead of the señor and to a written law instead of the customary justice typical of the seigneurial jurisdictions. It was not the nobles but the letrados -- especially the graduates of the Colegio de San Bartolomé at the University of Salamanca -- who would profit from the Inquisition.⁽¹³⁾

On a more subtle level, the establishment of the Inquisition posed a serious challenge to the Mendoza's Renaissance religious attitudes; for the Inquisition was operating in response to and in accordance with a growing emphasis on works in Spanish religious life. This enthusiasm for works, typical of the rest of Europe in the same period, has been imperfectly studied in Spain; but it seems to have had its earliest expression in attempts at monastic reform, expanded in episcopal efforts to reform the secular clergy, and reached its most popular expression in the Inquisition, which extended the new standards of correct works to the laity.

There had been attempts to reform the monastic orders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which often went to extremes of austerity and devotionalism. Pedro de Villacreces (d. 1422), initiator of the Observant reform among the Franciscans around Valladolid and Burgos, advocated an introspective and nonspeculative piety similar to the Imitatio Christi:

[136] I received the master's degree at Salamanca, which I didn't deserve, for I learned more weeping in the darkness in my cell than studying by candle in Salamanca or in Toulouse or in Paris.... How foolish we are studying our sciences and being curious about the sins and defects of others and forgetting our own.... I would rather be a simple old man with the charity of the love of God and my neighbor than to know the theology of Saint Augustine and of Scotus the subtle doctor.⁽¹⁴⁾

Villacreces, like his contemporary, Pedro López de Ayala, rejected theology as an approach to the religious life; but in contrast to Ayala's humanist assumption that biblical passages "where intricate questions occur" had been corrupted through centuries of miscopying and could be clarified by comparison of texts and the application of critical linguistic standards, it did not occur to Villacreces that there might be error in the texts. He assumed that error arose from misinterpretation, and he regarded this with such horror that he enjoined his followers from engaging in any theological interpretation at all.

This emphasis on austerity as a form of good works and the refusal to cultivate theology are typical of the reforms of the Augustinian and Benedictine orders at the same period and are closely related to the adoption of the Devotio Moderna by the newly founded Jeronimites. Austerity combined with an aversion to theology seem also to have been important elements in the reform efforts of the fifteenth-century Dominicans around Burgos who had been supported by don Alfonso de Cartagena.⁽¹⁶⁾

All of the reform efforts in the orders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are characterized by their devotional spirit, their adoption of an [137] extremely austere life, often of an eremitical nature, their rejection of theology, and their lack of coordination with one another, even within a single order. They remained scattered both geographically and chronologically throughout the fifteenth century, despite the efforts of powerful and dedicated men like don Alfonso de Cartagena and cardinal Juan de Torquemada to unify and standardize them. Even cardinal Cisneros's famous reform of the Franciscans did not long survive him.⁽¹⁷⁾

During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, many prelates, influenced by the reform movements in the orders, attempted to reform the regular clergy and settle the jurisdictional disputes that persisted between cathedral chapters and their bishops. The archbishops of Toledo and Seville repeatedly tried to reform the administration and judiciary of their dioceses and to improve the education of their clergy by improving cathedral schools. The government also tried to reform the secular clergy. In every succession crisis and every regential conflict after 1367, the Trastámara kings naturally attempted to mobilize the church's resources in support of their dynastic interests. Enrique IV in 1473, Isabel in 1480, and Fernando in 1512, all convened synods at a moment of crisis in an attempt to use the church's influence as political leverage. All of these synods were called under the pretext of clerical reform, and all of them issued reform edicts, but none of these synods was successful either in reforming the clergy or in substantially aiding the monarchy.⁽¹⁸⁾

By the end of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, neither the regular clergy nor the secular had been successfully reformed, but the reform of lay religious practices came to be regarded as a valid and desirable function of the letrados, operating through legal structures -- the government, the church hierarchy, and the Inquisition. Throughout western Europe in the late fifteenth century, reformers were trying to meet the rising religious expectations of lay and clergy, while popular religious enthusiasms and anxiety encouraged the proliferation of good works -- pilgrimages, relics, cults, indulgences. In Spain, much of the leadership of both the reform effort and the emphasis on works was assumed by the letrados, who through the Inquisition focused the attention of their informants and their judicial officials on examining the religious practices -- the works -- of the accused. The old attitude of the Mendoza -- that good works and correct religious practices were not efficacious if they were not prompted by sincere piety -- was now suspect.

The Mendoza religious tradition and their position as the intellectual and cultural leaders of society were also weakened by new developments in education during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. All through the Trastámara period, the universities fulfilled their function of training [138] lawyers for the royal courts and administration, while the royal and noble households were the intellectual centers of society. In the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the universities experienced a quantitative and qualitative expansion: the number of colleges and students multiplied, and the curriculum expanded to include the humanist disciplines. Then, as the Inquisition moved from the earliest, most visible cases of suspected judaizing and began to take up the more complex problems of the Alumbrados and Erasmians, the universities responded by adding theology to their curriculum. By the early sixteenth century, the universities had become the centers of both humanist and religious studies for the first time. To a great degree, the universities were filling a vacuum left by the decline of the noble and royal households as educational institutions.

Education in noble households had shaped two of the most significant humanist developments of the early fifteenth century -- the translation of the classics and the development of the vernacular as an effective rhetorical tool. In their search for classical models of political thought and persuasion, the caballeros were active readers, collectors, and imitators of the classics. At this point, however, the defects in their education became a handicap and led to innovation. Without a good grasp of Latin, the caballeros found it difficult to understand the very works they were trying to imitate, much less to appreciate their syntax. To solve this problem, they commissioned translations they could use as supplements -- cribs -- in reading the Latin originals.

The translator, in order best to assist the reader with the Latin original, made a literal translation without aiming for poetry or elegance. As a result of this practice, some of the earliest -- and worst -- translations of the classics were made for fifteenth-century caballeros. To the caballeros, it did not matter that these translations were depressingly awful as vernacular literature. They used them as aids to reading the Latin classics; and although they were sensitive to the form and structure of the classics and imitated them with remarkable success, they were not linguistically equipped to appreciate the niceties of philology or linguistic criticism. The marquis of Santillana did not feel confident in Latin; so he maintained Dr. Pedro Díaz de Toledo in his household as secretary and translator and commissioned translations of the Aeneid, Ovid, and Homer from both Enrique de Villena and his own son, the cardinal. Yet it was Santillana, not the translators, who wrote excellent vernacular imitations of the Odes of Horace.⁽¹⁹⁾

The caballeros' defective education also had a profound -- but more positive -- effect on their own vernacular prose. In contrast to the [139] letrados, the caballeros wrote exclusively in the vernacular; and they modeled their prose on that of Seneca, partly out of national pride because he was a Spaniard and partly in the belief that Seneca's sentences were short and pithy. After the days of Alfonso X, el Sabio, brevity became the rhetorical ideal of the aristocracy; and one of the highest praises a caballero could make of another was that he could express profound ideas in a few words. Guzmán, for example, criticized Vergil for covering a minimum of wisdom in a maximum of verbiage.⁽²⁰⁾ Guzmán and his fellow caballero authors were not prepared to write in Ciceronian periods, even in the vernacular. Nevertheless, their mastery of imagery, pace, and structure in the writing of poetry enabled talented men such as Ayala or Guzmán to create masterpieces of rhetorical persuasion without a complex syntax whenever the political situation demanded it. Through their system of education, a family such as the Mendoza could hand down its family traditions -- the deeds of ancestors, rhetorical ideals, and aesthetic preferences. By the end of the century, this tradition had lost its innovative quality and no longer served to produce literary geniuses.

The most famous educational institution of the fifteenth century was the "poetic court" of Juan II of Castile. It is a tradition of Spanish intellectual history that the sons of the nobility were educated at the royal court and that the poetic court of Juan II encouraged letters during the first half of the fifteenth century. When we examine the historical evidence for the royal court as a center of literary activity and as an educational center for the nobility, the theory turns out to have little substance. Juan II's reputation as a patron of the arts rests upon the fact that Guzmán said he was fluent in Latin and the Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni wrote to him praising his love of study and the protection he gave to erudites. But Juan II did not produce any work of literature, nor did he maintain any humanists at his court, nor did he commission the works dedicated to him by Italian humanists. They seem to have been beguiled into dedicating works to him by Juan's representatives at the Council of Basle, especially by don Alfonso de Cartagena, who has never received full credit for being one of the world's great public relations men.⁽²¹⁾

Since the received version of fifteenth-century Spanish history was developed by don Alfonso and his students, their view of Juan II as a patron of letters became embedded in the traditional historiography of Spain. In the late nineteenth century, a French nobleman wrote a literary history concentrating on three poets of the reign of Juan II -- Enrique de Villena, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, and the marquis of Santillana -- [140] and called his book La Cuor littéraire de Don Juan II.⁽²²⁾ This title seems to have influenced later scholarship on the period: it seems never to have occurred to later scholars to ask what connection these three poets had with the court of Juan II. In point of fact, they had very little to do with it. Enrique de Villena, when he lived at court, lived in the royal court of Aragon. Guzmán produced his written works when he was living in his village of Batres, exiled from the royal court by the disfavor of don Alvaro de Luna. The marquis of Santillana spent a total of three or four months at the court of Juan II -- to make sure that the king kept his political promises.

Dazzled by the supposed poetic court of the king, historians have simply assumed that the royal court was an important educational institution for the development of fifteenth-century humanism. But this too turns out to be without substance. No sons of the nobility that I have been able to trace were educated at the royal court. I have found only those who went as hostages for their families' good behavior in moments of political tension; and this hardly seems like a favorable condition for humanist education at a court which did not have any humanists.⁽²³⁾ The only aristocrat educated at court that I have been able to find is don Alvaro de Luna, Juan II's favorite. As the son of an illegitimate branch of the Aragonese family of Pedro de Luna, the antipope Benedict XIII, he was sent to the Castilian royal court at the age of eighteen to be a companion to the young Juan II.

Don Alvaro produced a respectable body of lyric poetry, received a torrent of favors from his king, became constable of Castile, and received a noble title. The traditional theory holds that the sons of the nobility were educated at the royal court to tie their families to the crown; but the only case we have shows just the opposite: a child from the petty aristocracy -- and an illegitimate one at that -- became a nobleman because of the crown's ties to him.⁽²⁴⁾ In some cases, orphans of aristocratic lineage went to the court for patronage: the future poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, and the future Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, for example, went to the court of the Catholic Monarchs at about the age of eighteen to win military posts because they had no family connections to work through.

Two humanists are traditionally considered to have been educated at the court of Juan II. The first was the chronicler, Diego de Valera, the son of a converso physician, who went to the court about the age of fifteen and served as a page for several years. As we have seen, however, Valera moved from the royal court to the household and army of Santillana before he was twenty-one. For the next forty years, he served [141] in private households and in foreign countries as representative of the king. His writing was done within the context of these noble households rather than within the royal court.

The second humanist was Hernando del Pulgar, who was probably educated in the royal secretarial school in circumstances much less glamorous than those of a poetic court. The secretarial schools exercised a greater influence on fifteenth-century political theory and had a greater impact on modern Castilian historiography than anyone has suspected. By far the most important royal secretary of the fifteenth century was Dr. Fernán Díaz de Toledo (d. 1457), a converso who took his degree in law. By the end of his life, he held the offices of royal refrendary, secretary, oidor, notario mayor de los privilegios rodados, and relator. In his own day, he was one of the most highly respected and active members of the royal household -- much favored by Juan II and frequently mentioned in the chronicles as an administrator and member of the consejo del rey. He has recently and justly become famous for his arguments against the Statutes of Toledo, which excluded conversos from public office. In his own household within Juan II's ambulatory court, the relator maintained a school for training secretaries. This is probably where Pulgar received his training, for Pulgar tells us that he began serving in the king's court at an early age and that he remembers the way the boys were educated in the relator's household.⁽²⁵⁾

Typically, the secretarial education consisted of learning to write legibly, spell correctly, and properly compose the royal documents. The training in the relator's household must have been exceptional in its Latin education, for the secretaries educated in his household included some of the Latin erudites of fifteenth-century Castile. These included Dr. Alonso de Montalvo; the relator's sons, Dr. Pedro Díaz de Toledo, Luis Díaz de Toledo, and Fernando Diaz de Toledo; and Hernando del Pulgar. Pulgar, in turn, claimed that he himself had educated more than forty boys in his own household.

These secretarial schools deserve a full-scale study, for Fernán Díaz and his successors formed one of the most influential intellectual schools of Spain. The relator drew up or composed the royal documents. Most of these, naturally, followed a set form, and any well-trained secretary could dictate them to a scrivener. But the reign of Juan II was one of legal and political innovation, and the secretarial staff were called upon to draw up royal orders for which there were no formularies. In this circumstance, it was the relator who provided arguments and rhetoric for unprecedented actions -- which then became the formulae followed every time the crown resorted to this same action. The relator's formulation [142] of royal documents became the official line of argument. Since Fernán Díaz educated two of the most influential interpreters of royal policy during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, it is not surprising that there is a consistency of political theory and rhetoric among the documents dictated by Fernán Díaz, the chronicles of Pulgar, and the legal redactions drawn up by Montalvo. The high level of erudition and Latinity in the relator's household was exceptional, and the educational level of secretaries trained after his death seems to have been much inferior. Francisco de los Cobos, who became not only secretary to Charles V but also one of his most powerful administrators, never learned Latin though he was educated in the court of the Catholic Monarchs in the household of an uncle who was a minor royal secretary.⁽²⁶⁾

As the private households and royal court failed to take the lead in education in the last years of the century, the universities took on a new role.⁽²⁷⁾ At no time during the early Trastámara period were the universities the centers or promoters of Castilian intellectual life. This was true partly because of the university's weakness as a financial and corporate entity and partly because of the limitations of its curriculum. From the time of their foundation in the thirteenth century until late in the fifteenth century, Spanish universities suffered financial, staffing, and enrollment difficulties almost continuously. Alfonso X el Sabio endowed the University of Salamanca in 1252, but his son, Sancho IV (1284-1295), discontinued the endowment; and the faculty went on strike so the university hardly functioned during his reign. Fernando IV (1295- 1312), reendowed the university, persuading the papacy to allow tithes to be used for this endowment, but later the papacy retracted this permission, the endowment lapsed, and the faculty struck again. In the mid-fourteenth century, the papacy itself endowed the university, established direct control over the curriculum, and licensed a new university in Valladolid. The universities continued to falter, and the reform initiative passed to the episcopate.

The one reform to have important impact on Spanish university life was the establishment of scholarship colleges within the university. The first of these was the Colegio de San Clemente, established in the University of Bologna by cardinal Gil Alvarez de Albornoz. Albornoz was zealous in his efforts to promote the better education of the clergy. As archbishop of Toledo, he had issued an order in 1329 giving each church in the archdiocese six months to send one out of every ten of its clerics away for higher studies, to conform with the decree of the provincial council of Valladolid in 1322. In his will, drawn up in 1364, he endowed the Colegio de San Clemente as a scholarship [143] college for thirty Spanish students to "obviate, by the setting up of this house, the ignorance of the Spaniards among whom the knowledge of letters and the number of trained men have been much reduced because of the crises of wars and innumerable disasters which befell this province in his own time."⁽²⁸⁾

This scholarship college, the model for university innovations, was itself modeled on colleges in southern France, which in sheer numbers and in proximity to the patronage of the Avignonese popes had probably been the most important centers of education for Spaniards in the fourteenth century. Albornoz himself had done his law studies at the University of Toulouse; and in the last decade of the fourteenth century, there were about three hundred thirty Spaniards studying in Avignon, Toulouse, and Perpignan.⁽²⁹⁾

Inspired by the success of these scholarship colleges abroad, Diego de Anaya, bishop of Salamanca, established a similar scholarship college for fifteen students at Salamanca in 1401. This Colegio de San Bartolomé became the most powerful and most prestigious educational institution in the peninsula; and by the sixteenth century, membership there was the surest route to a position in certain key government posts. During most of the fifteenth century, Spanish higher education remained as it had been at the time of Anaya's foundation -- two scholarship colleges of high prestige (one of them outside of Spain), a limited faculty, and a small number of graduates taking higher degrees. A new phase of university reform came in the last quarter of the century. In 1479, cardinal Mendoza received papal license for the Colegio de Santa Cruz in the University of Valladolid. This college provided twenty-seven scholarships and began functioning definitively in 1491. Cardinal Mendoza's college was the first of eight scholarship colleges founded in a burst of episcopal reforming zeal from 1479 to 1525. Of all these, only the Colegio de Cuenca, established in Salamanca in 1500 by Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa while he was bishop of Cuenca, came close to matching the Colegio de San Bartolomé in prestige; but the greatly expanded number of university graduates in Castile and their ability to gain access to the major governmental posts of the Hapsburg government made the universities, for the first time, important centers of education for public administrators in Castile.

While financial and organizational difficulties militated against the university's playing an important role in Castilian intellectual life during most of the fifteenth century, the university curriculum itself worked against the possibility of producing humanists. From the very beginning, the Castilian university was intended to promote the legal profession; [144] and through one reform after another, this is precisely what it did. Even though custom was the basis of most legal proceedings, the precepts of Roman law were regarded as the model of legal argument. The reading of Roman law, in its medieval redactions as canon and civil law, formed the core of the university curriculum. In order to equip the student for this reading, undergraduates were given a thorough training in Latin, lectures were given in Latin, and students were forbidden to use the vernacular in the classroom or during school hours. This, at least, was the ideal. In fact, papal and episcopal reformers repeatedly found that the students were using the vernacular, and sometimes even the lectures were being given in the vernacular. Still, since the vernacular had officially been the language of government and judiciary throughout the peninsula since the thirteenth century, the university was the only institution in Castile where Latin was spoken on a daily basis; and a university degree was associated, in fact and in the popular mind, with fluency in Latin.

Despite this proficiency in Latin, the universities did not provide an opportunity to study the language as a humanistic discipline. Nor did the Spanish faculty follow the philological methods the University of Bologna was applying to the study of the law in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There was a Trilingual chair at the University of Salamanca, but throughout the fifteenth century its lectures were given by faculty proficient only in Hebrew. Even this instruction seems to have been of poor quality, since the lecturers were not able to make the appropriate analogies with Latin grammar and rhetoric. Perhaps because of its mediocrity, there were never more than seven or eight students enrolled in the course. In 1511, the rector tried to give the Trilingual chair to Hernán Núñez, who was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin; but the faculty refused to accept this appointment on the grounds that the converso Alonso de Zamora, who had been giving the Hebrew lectures, would be thrown into unemployment after years of service. Given a choice between improving the quality of humanist education and protecting faculty tenure rights, the faculty chose to protect tenure.⁽³⁰⁾ As a result of these deficiencies, the universities had not produced humanists. The letrados were rightly regarded as Castile's masters of Latinity, but Castile's humanists had been caballeros, not letrados.

All of this changed during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. The presence of a large number of students selected solely on the basis of scholarship, the prestige of the colleges' patrons, the universities' publishing facilities, and the very good salaries they offered, attracted Spain's greatest humanists back from Italy to the Spanish universities as lecturers [145] in Greek, grammar, and rhetoric. This shift of patronage to the universities and away from the households of the nobility and prelates had a striking effect on the type of scholarship published in Castle. The old pattern of scholars spending their lives in the households of noblemen or prelates, shaping their research and literary production to suit the taste of their patrons, and adding the luster of their erudition to an intellectual tradition peculiar to each household was now exchanged for a pattern centered upon the international tastes and standards of the universities.

During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the "stars" of the new faculties were Antonio de Nebrija and Hernán Núñez, and their careers are indicative of the most important shifts in the intellectual focus of the period. Nebrija (1441?-1522) studied briefly at Salamanca and then spent ten years as a student in the Spanish College at Bologna.⁽³¹⁾ He returned to Spain about 1470 and entered the household of his patron, Alonso de Fonseca, archbishop of Seville. After Fonseca's death, Nebrija may have lectured at Salamanca for a few years. He then entered the household of don Juan de Zúñiga, where he remained until about 1493. In 1502, cardinal Cisneros appointed him to the team revising the Greek and Latin texts of the Polyglot Bible; but Nebrija quickly antagonized Diego López de Zúñiga, the head of the team, and then Diego de Deza, the inquisitor general. Deza seized Nebrija's papers, Nebrija left the Polyglot project and Alcalá; and in 1504, received the chair of grammar at Salamanca. He returned to Alcalá as lecturer in rhetoric in 1514 and remained in that university until his death in 1522. Nebrija was a contentious character with many pet peeves, and he was involved in so many academic conflicts during his career that he is described as "the Unamuno of his day."⁽³²⁾

Hernán Núñez (1470?-1553) studied at Valladolid and then at Bologna.⁽³³⁾ He probably spent eight years at Bologna, returning to Spain 111 1498 to serve in a ducal household in Seville. He later took his father's seat in the city council of Granada, where he enjoyed the hospitality and patronage of Tendilla. In 1512, he went to Alcalá as an assistant to a Greek professor where he became a member of the Greek and Latin team of the Polyglot Bible. The next year, he received the Trilingual chair at Alcalá; but he fell into disfavor because of his participation in the Communero revolt in 1520. In 1523, he received the chair of Greek at Salamanca and in 1527 the chair of rhetoric, which he filled until his retirement.

The move of Nebrija and Núñez from private patronage to the faculties of the universities was matched by a shift in their linguistic interests. [146] While in Tendilla's household, Núñez published a commentary on the Laberintho of Juan de Mena (1499 and 1505) and a translation of Aeneas Sylvius's Historia de Bohemia (1509). Both of these are Spanish works, and their publication reflects the literary taste of Tendilla. After Núñez moved to the university faculties, he published critical Latin editions of Seneca, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela. Nebrija made the same shift: while he was still in the household of don Juan de Zúñiga, he published his most famous work, the Gramática de la lengua española (1492); after be moved to the universities, all of his publications were in Latin -- critical editions of the early Christian poets, Prudentius and Sedulius, a history of Fernando's conquest of Navarre, and a translation of Pulgar's history of the early years of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.⁽³⁴⁾ Both Nebrija and Núñez were influenced by their noble patrons' preference for the "Spanish" Romans, but by making critical editions of the Latin, rather than translations into the vernacular, they addressed their works to an international community of scholars instead of a Castilian audience. The noble patrons, with their imperfect knowledge of Latin and their ignorance of the philological methods developed at Bologna, could not even appreciate the accomplishments of these humanists, much less participate in or give leadership to their efforts.

Private patrons were also excluded from an active role in intellectual life by changes in the university curriculum. Most of the colleges founded during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs simply expanded programs that were already strongly established in Castilian universities. The one significant innovation was cardinal Cisneros's insistence that at Alcalá the emphasis would be upon religion rather than law.

From the first university foundations in the thirteenth century until the first decade of the sixteenth century, theology had been neglected. In his theoretical work, the Siete partidas, Alfonso X el Sabio defined the university as a corporation of masters and students established in a specific place with the intention of pursuing knowledge in the arts -- including grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and astrology -- and the law. Alfonso believed that "the science of law is the fount of justice and the world benefits more from it than from any other science." This theoretical regard for the law above all other disciplines was reflected in hard cash. Alfonso's endowment of chairs in the University of Salamanca gave the highest salaries by far to the law professors. And no chair was provided in theology.

When the papacy assumed control of the curriculum a century later, an effort was made to introduce theology; and in 1355, a doctor of theology is mentioned as a member of the faculty for the first time. As [147] little as this may seem, more attention was being paid to theology in Salamanca than in the rest of the peninsula. Theology was not studied in the Portuguese university until the mid-fifteenth century.⁽³⁵⁾ The Aragonese University of Lérida, founded in 1300, had no faculty in theology or Scriptures until 1430. And the papacy, in its license granted in 1346, expressly forbade the teaching of theology at the University of Valladolid.

The first serious effort to establish theology as a regular discipline in the peninsula came in 1381 when the papal legate from Avignon, cardinal Pedro de Luna, instituted three chairs of theology in Salamanca. Either competent personnel were lacking to fill these chairs or there was not enough interest to keep them going, for in 1381 only one chair in theology was filled, and by 1393 they were all vacant.

Cardinal Luna's attempt to establish theology at Valladolid at the same time seems to have produced no result at all. As antipope Benedict XIII, Luna made a more successful reform in 1416, establishing two chairs of theology within the University of Salamanca and one each in the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries attached to the university. Despite these papal efforts, theology did not prosper in the Spanish universities. The great names among Salamanca's alumni were graduates in law, such as Alonso de Madrigal, el Tostado; and the only Spanish theologians of note during the fifteenth century, don Pablo de Santa María and cardinal Juan de Torquemada, received their theological education at Paris. The new scholarship colleges reinforced this emphasis on law. Cardinal Albornoz's Colegio de San Clemente at Bologna provided eight scholarships in theology and twenty-four in canon law. Cardinal Mendoza's Colegio de Santa Cruz had scholarships for six students of theology, thirteen in canon law, three in civil law, two in medicine, and three chaplains.

The first attempt to deviate from this traditional emphasis occurred in the reign of Fernando and Isabel when fray Alonso de Burgos, by the terms of his will, founded a college of theology -- San Gregorio -- at the University of Valladolid; but work on the building does not seem to have begun until after 1488; and the college suffered many difficulties before it finally began lectures some years later. The first successful shift from the law was made by cardinal Cisneros, who established the Colegio de San Ildefonso as the first of several colleges which opened between 1508 and 1528 and made up a new university, the University of Alcalá de Henares. Cisneros specifically wanted to avoid the emphasis on law that seemed to overwhelm the curriculum of the established universities because he wanted to educate the Spanish clergy in their religious role as pastors and missionaries. Typically Castilian and Observant, however, [148] Cisneros did not consider theology essential to religious education, and the theology college was one of the last to be added to the university.

The curriculum at San Ildefonso was distinguished from that of other universities in Spain principally by the absence of law courses and by an emphasis on biblical and patristic studies. Since these studies ideally required a knowledge of several ancient languages, Greek and Hebrew were emphasized in the arts curriculum, and the University of Alcalá reached its full development along these lines in 1528 with the opening of the Trilingual college. This college was dedicated to St. Jerome, the patron of biblical studies, and provided thirty scholarships: twelve in Latinity and rhetoric, twelve in Greek, and six in Hebrew.

Cisneros's attempt to combine humanist philological methods with biblical studies, however, caused serious problems. These began during Cisneros' lifetime in the work on the Polyglot Bible and continued to plague the university throughout the sixteenth century. Nebrija, as soon as he began work on the Polyglot, aroused the suspicions of the Inquisition by his strictly linguistic translation without regard to theology. Nebrija believed that his purpose on the Polyglot should be to find the true meaning and intentions of the Scriptures -- an attitude he never abandoned. In the dedication of his Prudentii Opera (1512), he defended this approach to the Scriptures, arguing that Christian doctrine should be made available in the most reliable editions and that all the Christian sources should be subjected to the same linguistic criticism applied to the pagan classics: their grammatical errors should be noted and their word usage should be analyzed in terms of its own time and place. The inquisitor general, Diego de Deza, saw this textual correction as an abuse that compromised the authority of the theologians and the tranquility of the church's theology. As we have seen, Nebrija was removed from the Polyglot project because of these attitudes, and the remaining team members complied with Deza's views.⁽³⁶⁾ The resolution of this dispute significantly hindered the development of a new humanist curriculum at Alcalá, without freeing theological studies from philological criteria. This confusion, combined with the typical Franciscan proclivity for rejecting intellectual pursuits in favor of the Observant life, produced alternating periods of caution and confidence in both humanist and theological studies at Alcalá throughout the sixteenth century.⁽³⁷⁾

Cisneros's fears of the power of legal studies to overwhelm any effort to emphasize religion in the university curriculum was justified in retrospect by the fate of the most serious attempt to make theology an important part of Spanish university life. This attempt was made by the prior of the Dominican house at the University of Salamanca, Juan Hurtado de [149] Mendoza (d. 1525).⁽³⁸⁾ Before he came to San Esteban, Mendoza had formed an Observant circle in the Dominican house in La Piedrahita (Salamanca), where he was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of a local beata, sor María. But he became so extreme in his austerity and spiritualism that the provincial, García de Loaisa, dissolved the group and disciplined Mendoza.

Mendoza himself turned against the beata; and to combat the dangers of extreme pietism, began to emphasize the ministerial functions of the order. As prior of San Esteban after 1519, he made it into one of the most austere houses of the order, but he also actively sought out and brought into the order a growing number of bright young men whom he trained as scholars. Since the level of theological training in Castile was still elementary, he sent the most promising of his students to Paris for advanced theological degrees. The result was that the best of his students -- Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Francisco Suárez - returned from Paris brilliantly equipped to teach theology.

The tradition of legal studies was so strong in the Spanish universities, however, that theology became the servant of law, and the Dominican theologians began to apply the assumptions and methods of theology to the pressing legal and moral problems of the new Spanish Empire. This new infusion of the theology of Paris into the traditional legal curriculum was the glory of the University of Salamanca in the sixteenth century. By mid-century, the influence and skill of these Paris-educated Spaniards was so great that they were able to dominate the Council of Trent's deliberations on the crucial issue of justification.⁽³⁹⁾

These developments in the universities in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs had the greatest impact on the intellectual and religious life of Castile. The noble houses could not compete with the universities in offering lucrative salaries to the Italian-trained humanists who had educated the children of the aristocracy and added luster to the literary reputations of their patrons during the previous century. When the humanists moved to the universities, they left behind the literary interests and language of the private patrons and took up those of the professional scholars. The noble households were losing intellectual prestige while the universities acquired new stature as the training ground of government administrators and the most active publishing centers of Castile. The letrado theories would be embodied in the decrees of the consejo real, shaping the religious life of Castile through the Inquisition and becoming the most prestigious intellectual attitudes of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.

1. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 90.

2. These are the conclusions drawn by William D. Phillips, Jr., Enrique 1V and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, 1425-1480, Cambridge, Mass., 1978.

3. Antonio Matilla Tascón, ed., Declaratorias de los Reyes Católicos sobre reducción de juros y otras mercedes. Madrid, 1952, pp. 1-60. The same point is made by Stephen Haliczer, "The Castilian Aristocracy and the Mercedes Reform of 1478-1482," Hispanic American Historical Review, 55 (1975) 449-467.

4. Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal, "Informe que dió al emperador Carlos V sobre los que componían el Consejo Real de S.M.," Codoin, I, 122-127.

5. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos, Secretary of the Emperor Charles V, Pittsburgh, 1958.

6. The medieval chronicle that served as the principal model was Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, De Rebus Hispaniae in Opera, ed. Francisco Lorenzana, Madrid, 1793, reprint, Valencia, 1968, especially Lib. I, Capit. VII, VIII.

7. Albert A. Sicroff, Les Controverses des statuts de "Pureté de sang" en Espagne du XV^e siècle, Paris, 1960, pp. 31-62; Alfonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis christianae. Tratados en favor de los judíos conversos, ed. Manuel Alonso, Madrid, 1943.

8. In addition to Tate, see don Alfonso's covering letter to Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones, ed. Domínguez Bordona, pp. 217-219.

9. Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, "Los comienzos de la reforma dominicana en Castilla particularmente en el convento de San Esteban de Salamanca y su irradiación a la provincia de Portugal," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 28 (1958), 221-237.

10. See a summary and extension of this interpretation in Ottavio di Camillo, "Spanish Humanism in the Fifteenth Century," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1972.

11. See A. Birkenmaier, "Der Streit des Alonso von Cartagena mit L.B. Aretino," Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters 20, Heft 5 (1922), 129-236; Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism, Princeton, 1967, pp. 123-133; George Holmes, The Florentine Enlightenment, 1400-1450, New York, 1969, p. 114, where don Alfonso's argument is described as "the only serious attack on humanist philosophy from the scholastic camp which has come down to us."

12. Richard Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain, Baltimore, 1974.

13. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, New York, 1965; proposes the thesis that it was the nobility who initiated the Inquisition and profited from it at the expense of the bourgeoisie.

14. Cited by Melquíades Andrés Martín, Historia de la Teología en España, 1470-1570, Rome, 1962, pp. 102-103. On the Franciscan reforms in general, see Archivo Ibero-Americano. Las reformas en los siglos XIV-XV, introducción a los orígines de la observancia en España, Madrid, 1958; and Fidel de Lejarza and Angel Uribe, "¿Cuándo y dónde comenzó Villacreces su Reforma?" Archivo Ibero-Americano, ser. 2, 20 (1960), 79-94.

15. Andrés Martín, "Evangelismo," p. 7.

16. For a summary of recent work on fifteenth-century reform in Castile, see L. Sala Balust, "Espiritualidad española en la primera mitad del siglo XVI," Cuadernos de Historia, 1 (1967), 169-187. The Dominican reform in the late fifteenth century has been extensively studied by Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, "Los comienzos de la reforma dominicana en Castilla particularmente en el convento de San Estéban de Salamanca y su irradiación a la provincia de Portugal," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 28 (1958), 221-237; idem, Los corrientes de espiritualidad entre los Dominicos de Castilla durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI, Salamanca, 1941; idem, Historia de la reforma de la Provincia de España, 1450-1550, Rome, 1939.

17. Recent work on the reforms tends to reduce the significance of individual reformers, such as Cisneros, in contrast to earlier works which are summarized in R. Aubenas and Robert Ricard, L'Eglise et la Renaissance, 1449-1517, Histoire de l'Eglise, vol. XV, ed. Augustin Fliche and Victor Martin, Paris, n. p., 1951.

18. Azcona, La elección; Hubert Jedin, Council of Trent, I, 154; Cotarelo, Fray Diego de Deza, p. 131; Valdéon, Enrique II, p. 315; Azcona, "El tipo ideal," pp. 21-64.

19. On Santillana's use of Latin models, see Fernando Rubio, "De Regimine Principum de Egidio Romano en la literatura Castellana de la Edad Media, siglo XV," Ciudad de Dios [Real Monasterio de el Escorial], 174 (1961), pp. 658-662; Lapesa, "La cultura literaria," pp. 121-124. On translations commissioned by Guzmán, see Domínguez Bordona, Prólogo to Generaciones by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, pp. xxiii-xxvi. On Dr. Pedro Díaz de Toledo's translations, see Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, Ion, diálogo platónico, traducido del griego por Afanto Ucalego, Madrid, 1901, pp. ix-xxv; Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España, Mexico, 1950, I, 50-51.

20. "Con singular elegancia, la poca e pobre substancia con verbosidad ornando," Loores, p. 209, cited by Romero, Sobre la biografia, p. 113. Alfonso X el Sabio had said, "Non convenie a rey de ser muy fablador... porque el uso de las muchas palabras envilece al que las dice," and "El home debe fablar en pocas palabras," Siete Partidas, II, 21-22. His nephew, don Juan Manuel, advised, "Et poniendo declaradamente cumplida la razon que quiere decir, ponelo con las menos palabras que pueden seer." Libro de los estados, cited by Faulhaber, Latin Rhetorical Theory, p. 74. For Spanish use of Seneca, see Karl Alfred Blüher, Seneca in Spanien: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Seneca-Rezeption in Spanien vom 13. bis 17. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1969.

21. Letter of 7 December 1435, in BN, MS 10.214, cited by Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, Fernando de Córdoba (¿1425-1486?) orígenes del Renacimiento filosófico en España: Episodio de la historia de la lógica, Madrid, 1911, p. 29. Don Alfonso also took the opportunity. while he was in Basle, to have his father's work, Scrutinium Scripturarum, "published." The library of the University of Basle possesses a manuscript of this, copied by Albert Löffler von Rheinfelden, Dominican, who included the following note: "Allata autem est materia huius libri per Hyspanos ad sacrum concilium Basiliense, quod viguit etiam tempere iam dicto." Cited by Romero de Lecea, El V centenario, p. 32.

22. Théodore, le conte de Puymaigre, La Cour littéraire de Don Juan II, roi de Castille, 2 vols., Paris, 1873; Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Poetas de la corte de don Juan II, Madrid, 1943.

23. See, for example, Suárez, "Problemas," p. 210.

24. Alvaro de Luna, Libro de las virtuosas e claras mujeres, ed. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, in Colección de libros publicados por la Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, Madrid, 1892, vol. 28; Green, Spain, I, 90-91.

25. Unless otherwise noted, the following section on secretarial education at the royal court is my own interpretation, based on the following: Nicholas G. Round, "Politics, Style and Group Attitudes in the Instrucción del Relator," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 46 (1969), 289-319; Crónica de Juan II; Juan Batista Avalle-Arce, "Los herejes de Durango," Homenaje a Rodríquez-Moñino, Madrid, 1966, I, 44-55; AGS, Registro General del Sello, Leg. 97, Segovia, 23 January 1475; Leg. 116, Seville, 20 January 1478; Leg. 379, Valladolid, 2 April 1475; Leg. 3339, Seville, 28 December 1477/1478/; Fermín Caballero, Elogio del doctor Alonso de Montalvo, Madrid, 1950; Hernando del Pulgar, Letras, Glosa a las coplas de Mingo Revulgo, ed. J. Domínguez Bordona, Madrid, 1929.

26. Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos, p. 7.

27. On the history of Spanish universities and colleges, see Alfonso X, Siete Partidas, Partida II; George M. Addy, The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca, Durham, N. C., 1966; C.M. Ajo González y Sáinz de Zúñiga, Historia de las universidades hispánicas: orígenes y desarrollo desde su aparición hasta nuestros días, vol. 1, Medioevo y renacimiento universitario, Madrid, 1957; Mariano Alcocer y Martínez, Historia de la Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, 1918-1922; Gonzalo de Arriaga, Historia del Colegio de San Gregorio de Valladolid, Valladolid, 1926; E. Esperabé Arteaga, Historia de la Universidad de Salamanca, vol. I, Salamanca, 1914; María Febrero Lorenzo, La pedagogía de los colegios mayores a través de su legislación en el siglo de oro, Madrid, 1960; Vicente de la Fuente, Historia de las universidades, colegios y demas establecimientos de enseñanza en España, vol. 1, Edad Media, Madrid, i885; idem, La enseñanza tomística en España; Noticia de las universidades, colegios y academias tomísticos con las fundaciones de ellas y sus cátedras principales. Madrid, 1874; Albert Jiménez, Historia de la universidad española, Madrid, 1971; Kagan, Students and Society; Josef Kohler, "Die spanische Schule von Salamanca im Siglo de Oro," Archiv für Rechts-und Wirtschaftsphilosophie, 10 (1916), 236 ff.; C. Lascaris Comneno, Colegios mayores, Madrid, 1952; Diego López de Ayala, "Constitutcíones del Colegio de Sta. Catalina de Toledo," BN, MS 933; José López Navio, "Don Juan de Fonseca, Canónigo Maestrescuela de Sevilla," Archivo Hispalense, 126-127 (1964), 83-128; José López Rueda, Helenistas españoles del siglo XVI, Madrid, 1973; Francisco Martín Hernández, La formación clerical en los colegios universitarios españoles, 1371-1563, Vitoria, 1961; idem, Los seminarios españoles: Historia y pedagogía, vol. I, 1563-1700, Salamanca, 1964; J. Puyols, El Colegio Mayor de Santa Cruz y los Colegios Mayores, Madrid, 1929; Gustave Reynier, La Vie universitaire dans l'ancienne Espagne, Paris, 1902; José de Rújula y de Ochoterna, Indice de los colegiales del mayor de San Ildefonso y menores de Alcalá, Madrid, 1946; Antonio de la Torre y del Cerro, La Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid. 1910; Félix González Olmedo, Diego Ramírez Villaescusa, (1459-1537), fundador del Colegio de Cuenca y autor de "Los cuatro diálogos sobre la muerte del prínciple don Juan," Madrid, 1944.

28. Cited in Marti, The Spanish College, pp. 31-32. See also Verdera, El Cardenal Albornoz y el Colegio de España.

29. Rius Serra, "Estudiants."

30. Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, "Nebrija y los teólogos de San Esteban de principio del siglo XVI," La Ciencia Tomista, 61 (1941), 37-65.

31. On Nebrija as a historian and professor, see B. Sánchez Alonso, "Nebrija historiador," Revista de Filología Española, 29 (1945), 129-152; I.G. González Llubera, Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua española, Oxford, 1926; Felix González Olmedo, Humanistas y pedagogos españoles: Nebrija (1441-1522), debelador de la barbarie, comentador eclesiástico, pedagogo, poeta, Madrid, 1942; idem, Nebrija en Salamanca (1475-1513), Madrid, 1944; P. Lemus y Rubio, "El maestro Elio Antonio de Lebrixa," Revue Hispanique, 22 (1910), 459-508; 29 (1913), 13-120.

32. Andrés Martín, "Evangelismo," p. 25.

33. For the life of Hernán Núñez see Helen Nader, "The Greek Commander Hernán Núñez de Toledo, Spanish Humanist and Civic Leader," Renaissance Quarterly, winter 1979; for his works see Maria Dolores de Asís, Hernán Núñez en la historia de los estudios clásicos, Madrid, 1977.

34. Bahner, La linguística española, pp. 36-63.

35. A.H. de Oliveira Marques. Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages, trans. S.S. Wyatt, Madison, Wis., 1971, p. 233; Friedrich Stegmüller, Filosofia e teologia nas Universidades de Coimbra e Evora no Sécolo XVI, Coimbra, 1959.

36. Bataillon, Erasmo y España, pp. 24-47.

37. Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, "La Teología en la Universidad de Alcalá," Revista Española de Teología, 5 (1945), 406-417; Andrés Martín, Historia de la teología, pp. 109-120.

38. Beltrán de Heredia, Corrientes, pp. 17-20; Aubenas, L'Eglise et la Renaissance, pp. 309-310.

39. See Chapter VIII, note 56.