Una república de lectores: Difusión y recepción de la obra de Juan Luis Vives by Enrique González González, Victor Gutiérrez Rodríguez (review) Hari Nair Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Volume 39, 2008, pp. 274-275 (Review) Published by Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2008.0024 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/540560/summary Access provided at 9 Jan 2020 15:07 GMT from the University of Connecticut 274 REVIEWS layman and scholar alike, as well as copies of some of the primary sources discussed. The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece is an impressive collection of essays that marry thorough scholarly research and the tireless efforts of conservators using the most state of the art technology, with the timeless work of Lorenzo Ghiberti, to produce an unprecedented contextual and technical view of the master’s artistic accomplishment. JENNIFER WEHMEIER, Art History, UCLA Enrique González González with Victor Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Una república de lectores: Difusión y recepción de la obra de Juan Luis Vives (México: IISUE-UNAM & Plaza y Valdés 2007) 400 pp. Una república de lectores: Difusión y recepción de la obra de Juan Luis Vives is a historical study in the diffusion and reception of the works of Luis Vives. It is the tale of a particular humanist tradition over the last 500 years within the republic of letters. Joan Luis Vives was born ca. 1492/3 in Valencia and died in Bruges in 1540. Despite the huge quantity of personal information contained within, this book is anything but a biography. Rather, it narrates how the agency of the reader influenced the commerce of printing, circulation, and reading of the works of Vives. The nucleus of the book could be summarized as responses to the questions: What was the fate of the works of Vives? How were they read from the ancien regime to our days? Vives initially gained his reputation as a writer by publishing prefaces to the works of eminent authors. Soon he became noted for his correspondence with famous figures like Erasmus and Budé. But what consolidated his fame were the commentaries on De civitate dei. The prestige of Vives extended to the general reading public with the publication of De institutione foeminae christianae and Introductio ad sapientiam in 1524. The former dealt with the concept of the ideal Christian woman, her role in training children and as a custodian of the family heritage. The latter comprised of manuals related to language training and moral education of children. Humanist and pedagogical priorities did not overshadow the socio-political interests of Vives. He repeatedly promoted peace in a strife-torn Europe, as revealed in his works, De Europae statu ac tumultibus (1526) and De concordia et discordia (1532). Vives proposed that public funds be used to sustain the poor in his De subventione pauperum (1526). His inclination toward social reconciliation compelled him to publish De communione rerum in 1536. This work argued against the brutal repression of insurgents in favor of distinguishing the role of the culpable leaders from that of their simple followers, who ought to be reintegrated. It was translated and published in 1937 after the Civil War in Spain, and again in 1974 during the Christian-Democratic regime in Italy. Following his failure to gain a foothold in the English court, Vives retired to a life dedicated to study. This phase, which was marked by a loss of political privileges, gifted him with a certain libertas philosophandi that enabled him to produce writings of lasting value. In his master work De disciplinis, he explored the causes for the decadent state of knowledge in European universities and suggested alternatives for the cultivation and transmission of the disciplines. REVIEWS 275 This work concluded with treatises on philosophy, logic, dialectic, rhetoric etc. Vives also proposed a general canon of authors for guiding the reading of classical literature. This was preceded by his critical opinion on Greek and Roman authors, which earned him a reputation for discernment. Vives’s popularity declined in the second half of the sixteenth century. Enrique González highlights the changing topography of the publishing industry in a Europe torn by religious strife. Venice and Lyon had lost their primacy as did Basel, Strasbourg, and Wittenberg. These were replaced by Lutheran cities like Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Nuremberg alongside their Calvinist counterparts like Leiden and Geneva. In the Catholic territories, Antwerp, Cologne, and Paris were the new leading centers for print. Within the European world of print, the circulation of Vives’s works is sketched out, from the second half of the sixteenth century until the end of the ancient regime. The third part of the book deals with the reception of the most well-known of Vives’s works, Linguae latinae exercitatio also known as Los diálogos. It was a text-book of Latin grammar that gained tremendous popularity among teachers and students of the language across Europe, America and Asia. The textbook was printed by Robert Winter in March 1539, and saw 250 editions before the end of the century. Enrique González and Victor Gutiérrez have traced more than 600 editions of this work. The fourth part of the book deals with methodological aspects of studying the diffusion of the works of Vives. It evaluates the work of various bibliógrafos of the scholar up to the twentieth century. Second, it deals with the problems that arise out of the tedious task of preparing an inventory of his works dispersed across continents. Third, it describes the method by which the authors have attempted to reconstruct the publishing mosaic of Vives’s works. All of these elements are vital in explaining the presence of a writer of the caliber of Joan Luis Vives in the tradition of European literature. The book’s conclusion deals with Vives’s reception during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vives was portrayed as pedagogue and a psychologist in Germany, a view that gained ground in Finland, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy, England, the United States, and Latin America. In Spain, liberals identified the humanist as an anti-scholastic, while nationalists appropriated his legacy and baptized him the father of modern philosophy. However, it was in Belgium that his philological legacy was recovered and a rigorous study of his texts was followed by the publication of critical editions of his works. The central conclusion of this book is that the true homeland of a writer is the republic constituted by his readers. The manner in which the author has digested a quantity of facts and figures across disciplinary paradigms over three continents in six modern European languages to enunciate an aesthetic principle reveals the complexity of the historian’s craft. Enrique González has skillfully demonstrated how the tradition of publishing and reading the works of Joan Luis Vives was established over the last 500 years. HARI NAIR, Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Richard Helgerson, A Sonnet from Carthage. Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007) iv+ 120 pp.