[231] The Renaissance goal of placing education in the service of the state triumphed in the universities of Castile, but not through the medium the humanist authors had originally envisaged. They had regarded the study of the liberal arts as the ideal preparation for the "vita activa e civile," but for the majority of students in the estudios generales, the classics served only as a background for professional training. Law, the subject with the widest opportunities for advancement and prestige, was also the subject most in demand.

Tied to the interests of lawyers, the universities gradually acquired a highly conservative bent. As centers for the training of important officials, Castile's rulers attempted to make certain that the universities would be free from all heretical and revolutionary ideas, a policy which led to the active discouragement of curricular innovation and change. ⁽¹⁾ Before these considerations reigned supreme, however, that is, before the second half of the sixteenth century, scholarship at the universities had been relatively dynamic and free. The universities, in fact, stood at the forefront of Spanish intellectual life. Adaptable to the new ideas which the Renaissance had spawned, they also met head-on the intellectual problems posed by the emergence of imperial Spain. So it was that Salamanca, late in the fifteenth century, welcomed the proposals of Columbus, who sought a new route to the East, and later taught the theories of Copernicus on the place of man in the universe. Alcalá, responding to the humanists' call for studies of sacred texts in their original languages, gave Europe its first institution -- the Colegio Trilingüe -- wholly dedicated to the study of classical languages, an effort that resulted in that monumental piece of scholarship, the Polyglot Bible, with parallel texts in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldaic. Habsburg expansion overseas also found an original legal and philosophical base in the writings of university scholars such as Martin de Azpilcueta, Domingo do Soto, and Francisco de Vitoria. At the same time the fundamental questions which this expansion raised -- the enslavement of the Amerindians, church policy toward peoples who had never heard of Christ, and the natural rights of sovereign states -- and the problems created by it (including the relationship of bullion imports to [232] inflation) were readily discussed and debated in the lecture halls. ⁽²⁾ Classical scholarship was also advanced by masters such as Nebrija, Hernán Núñez, "El Pinciano," and Francisco Sánchez "El Brocense," while Spanish theologians, headed by Melchor Cano, a professor at Salamanca, led the forces of a resurgent Catholic church at the Council of Trent. ⁽³⁾ Then too the arts found a home at the university; Fray Luís de León, one of Spain's greatest poets, was a professor at Salamanca for many years. ⁽⁴⁾

But the most significant contribution of the universities during these early years, at least for the subsequent history of Castile, was the formation of a new social class: the letrados, serving as the mainstay of the new Habsburg state. Yet in this class also lay the seeds of the universities' decay. Legally trained prelates, councillors, magistrates, and statesmen remained at the core of Castilian government for over three centuries. Concomitantly, there emerged a bureaucratic elite, comprised of the letrado dynasties who occupied key posts in the monarchy, and these families, governing the universities through their positions on the Royal Council and their control of the colegios mayores, were in a position to fashion higher education as they saw fit. Their goal of office-holding as a means to obtain and to preserve power, riches, and prestige became that of the university, particularly as students and professors from other backgrounds sought to emulate the letrados' spectacular careers. Thus the study of law inundated the lecture halls, forcing other disciplines into retreat or into the hands of the regular clergy and the circles of gentlemen dilettantes.

Left only with the interests of the letrados, the universities gradually lost contact with the wider context of Castilian life, and with it they lost their ability to absorb new ideas, teach new theories, and devise new social and academic goals. The universities were in this sense consumed by an overriding passion for the study of law and the formation of letrados, blind to whatever additional contributions they could have made. Accordingly, the advancement of the liberal arts, of scientific learning, practical and pure, studies in political economy, modern languages, and the like escaped the universities' ken. And just as the letrados hankered back to the aristocratic ideals of ages past, the universities were unable and unwilling to rid themselves of medieval statutes and a curriculum that was long out of date, totally mindless of those who, like Diego de Torres Villarroel, [233] professor of astronomy and mathematics at Salamanca, warned that they must change, since "The world is of a different character from that when the University of Salamanca was established. The men of this epoch aspire to other maxims and studies that are more in conformity with the temper of this century." ⁽⁵⁾

But change they did not, with the result that as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, critics began to attack their outmoded teaching and antiquated methods of instruction. Pedro Simón Abril, a noted grammarian, suggested that the universities teach in the vernacular and provide training in "practical" subjects such as mathematics, agriculture, architecture, and the techniques of war. ⁽⁶⁾ But the universities held tight to their ancient ways; Simón Abril's suggestions for reform were just as valid two centuries later when many of his proposals reappeared in the writings of Feijóo, Torres Villarroel, Olavide, and Jovellanos. Buttressed by a conservative inquisition and by religious orders equally intent upon keeping new ideas out of Spain, the universities themselves did nothing to modernize from within.

Instead, pointing to the past and to a long list of famous leaders with an even longer list of achievements and offices attached to their names, the universities and their overseers on the Royal Council could see little reason why they should break from a tradition that had done so much in order to institute changes which promised neither certain nor immediate advantages. Although they were able to recognize the need for administrative tinkerings in order to shore up what was an already decaying situation, in doing so they refused to take their inspiration from the present, but continually harked back to aged constitutions and statutes, the proper observation of which was supposed to bring prosperity anew. Rather than create a new university with new goals, they attempted to revive the university of the "Golden Age." The restoration of mythical glories out of the past and the continuance of practices sanctioned by time were integral to the politics and thinking of early modern Spain. ⁽⁷⁾ And the university, mentor for so many of Spain's leaders, was no doubt partly responsible for such ideals. These were reinforced by the fact that membership in the governing class was more of a test of blood than of knowledge or technical expertise; therefore, there was little or no concerted pressure, either from the elite, or from those seeking entrance to it, to force either the universities to change or the monarchy to reevaluate its aspirations and [234] goals. Spain's letrados looked back, not ahead; they pointed to precedents out of the past, not aspirations on the horizon; and the universities, dominated by viewpoints similar to these, merely stood still. As a result, they were allowed the luxury of remaining as they were and of leaving the hard work of educational innovation to other institutions: the Seminario de Nobles, preceded by the Colegio Imperial, and the royal academies for history, law, medicine, and the arts, all products of the eighteenth century. Intellectual leadership in Spain subsequently deserted the university for the academy, leaving the former to toy with the interests of vocationally-minded students and the social aspirations of the rich.

Yet even with this express purpose, the universities fell short of expectations. University-educated clerics were supposed to have healed the breaches in Christendom, and even though the threat of internal religious dissent had diminished by the seventeenth century, Protestant heretics were still at large and dangerous. University-educated lawyers, wielding their manuals of Roman law, were supposed to have helped the monarchy to unify its realms, yet the problems raised by local traditions and customary law in the Basque country and Catalonia in the seventeenth century were more troublesome than ever before. And once economic decline became apparent, for many contemporaries the universities, like the grammar schools, only added to the nation's woes by encouraging young men to enter the economically unproductive cadres of officials, lawyers, and priests. One who felt this way was the Bishop of Badajoz, Fray Angel Manrique. He wrote in 1624 about the excess of bachilleres in Castile, while complaining that "the abundance of licentiates who ignore necessary jobs is not good for the Republic." ⁽⁸⁾ In his opinion, four universities, in addition to twenty-four grammar schools, would be sufficient to meet Spain's requirements for educated men. Even the Cortes, a body usually in favor of university education, expressed alarm in 1627 at the overabundance of estudios generales in Castile. ⁽⁹⁾

There were other complaints as well. Throughout the sixteenth century the Cortes of Castile repeatedly criticized the universities for their failure to prepare adequately students for the magistracy, maintaining in 1528 that "when the letrados leave the universities, they cannot handle judicial business properly nor even understand the law well enough to make proper judgments." ⁽¹⁰⁾ One reason for this was the universities' reluctance to teach Spanish law. Such instruction began only in the middle [235] of the eighteenth century, and then only after thirty years of prodding by Philip V. In spite of this advance, an English visitor to Spain in 1774 commented that law students learned only "corruption and royal edicts." ⁽¹¹⁾

In the other faculties, teaching was even worse. Fray Benito Feijóo, writing in the early eighteenth century, claimed that medical study was nothing more than a joke, and his opinion was corroborated by a friar named Norberto Caino who visited Spain in the 1750s. He reported that the topic of discussion in one public thesis in the medical faculty at the University of Sigüenza was "Of what utility or of prejudice would it be for a man to have one finger more or less?" And this was followed by another imponderable: "If, in order to enjoy good health, it is necessary when cutting one's fingernails to begin with the right hand or the left?" ⁽¹²⁾ He reserved the following comment for a theology thesis at Salamanca:

The Latin is of the oddest, most barbarous, most detestable, most stupid style that I have ever heard. It is a mixture of ridiculous and insipid phrases recklessly taken from the texts of the Bible and the Holy Fathers, put together without order or method: a strange mixture of Latinized Spanish and Arabic words arranged topsy-turvy. And thus they speak Latin at Salamanca; what would it be like where there is no university? ⁽¹³⁾

The continuing dominance of the colegios mayores exacerbated an already decaying situation. Using university chairs primarily for reasons of appointment and prestige, they brought the law faculties to their lowest ebb. And thanks to their influence and example, the university as a whole emulated the careers and interests of the colegial.

Thus the universities of Castile turned away from society at large to focus on the colegios mayores, the study of law, and the acquisition of letrado jobs. Their teaching helped to impart out-dated ideas to generations [236] of officials, and, in turn, these helped to perpetuate the social and political ideals of the Middle Ages in a rapidly changing world. Government leaders, schooled in the legal traditions of the past, drew their inspiration from it as well, attempting to recapture a Golden Age of Spanish glory instead of striving to create the foundations of a new age. It is not that the universities of other European nations were more up-to-date, but Spain, almost by reason of its archaic string of universities, was fated to fall behind much of the rest of Europe in the march toward the scientific and industrial world.

The letrado elite, insulated from the wider world through censorship, class exclusiveness, and the Latinized culture which they represented, moved away from the higher, humanist ideals of service in which they had first been trained. In the sixteenth century they had given to the monarchy the legal expertise needed to create a strong, centralized government and a society that was eventually to be dominated by a rule of law. By the eighteenth century, however, the letrados lacked the expertise that Spain's ailing empire required. Turning their back on higher education in the national interest, this elite used the university to promote its own narrow ends. Strangled by this control, the leading universities of Castile would not revive until more enlightened leaders forged a new set of educational goals and granted them a measure of autonomous, independent life, free of strict ministerial censorship and control.

But ultimately, the history of the Castilian university lay in the way members of the university community, both students and teachers, viewed themselves and their place in Castilian life. Having chosen to emphasize the production of letrados or, at the very least, of gentlemen lightly schooled in the law for reasons of practicality and prestige, the fate of the university rested with the market it served, the classes for whom it catered. Lacking the protective family ties of the colegios mayores and the spiritual allies of the religious colleges, the university of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fell apart as its market contracted and the bulk of its following turned to alternate forms of education and careers. Its revival had to be achieved on the basis of a new and less restricted clientele, the product of improved primary and secondary schooling. It depended too on the emergence of larger and more diffuse labor markets and on the diffusion of bourgeois values which placed a new emphasis on the education and advancement of the young. But the beginnings of these special conditions, all products of the nineteenth century, were slow to develop in Spain, marking this country's belated and often turbulent entrance into the modern world.

1. On the standardization of texts, see Esperabé Artega, Historia Pragmática é Interna de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1914), 1: 536, 553-54, 613, 661.

2. See above, pp. 162-63.

3. Biographies of these and other famous professors exist, but they are far too numerous to list here. Many are listed in the bibliographies provided in Bell, Luis de León, and volume 1 of Ajo, Historia de las Universidades Hispánicas (8 vols., Madrid, 1957-72). Beltrán de Heredia, Cartulario de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1971), vol. 3, contains a number of brief sketches of the lives and writings of Salamanca's most notable sixteenth-century scholars. Spanish theologians at Trent are listed in C. Gutiérrez, Españoles en Trento (Valladolid, 1951).

4. See Bell, Luis de León.

5. Cited in Julio Mathiás, Torres Villaroel, Su Vida, Su Obra, Su Tiempo (Madrid, 1971), p. 35. This scholar's autobiography, Vida, ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza, y aventuras del Dr. D. Diego de Torres Villarroel... Escrita por él mismo... (Madrid, 1743), deals extensively with life at Salamanca in the eighteenth century.

6. Pedro Simón Abril, "Apuntamientos de cómo se deben reformar las doctrinas y la manera del enseñallas...," Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid, 1875): 293-96.

7. On this point, see J.H. Elliott, "Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe," Past & Present 42 (February 1969): 35-56.

8. Socorro del clero al estado, escrito por un religioso en 1624," cited in Zarco Cuevas, "El Lic. Miguel Caja de Leruela, y las Causas de la Decadencia de España," in Estudios sobre la ciencia española en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1935), p. 527.

9. Cortes de Madrid, 1627, vol. 45, p. 332.

10. Cortes de Madrid, 1528, pet. 30. For later criticism of the quality of university graduates, see the Cortes de Valladolid, 1542, pet. 20; de Valladolid, 1548, pet. 39; de Madrid, 1551, pet. 2; de Toledo, 1559, pet. 10; de Madrid, 1570, pet. 49; de Madrid, 1576, pet. 8; de Madrid, 1583-85, pet. 16; de Madrid, 1600, pet. of Juan de Lugo.

11. Cited in García Mercadal, Viajes de Extranjeros por España y Portugal (Madrid, 1962), 3: 677.

12. Ibid., 3: 401.

13. Ibid.

14. BNP: Ms. Espagnol 261, folio 6.