About this Event
This is the third of the series of events promoted by the Spanish Embassy in UK and the Instituto Cervantes to mark the 500th Anniversary of the “School of Salamanca”, at the origin of global thinking and international considerations on education, society, economy, politics and law, including human rights. Join us at the Jesuit Centre in Edinburgh to hear presentations and discussions on the influence of this School on Scottish thought by Francisco T. Baciero Ruiz and Fermín del Pino-Díaz, two of the authors of the book: (Brill, 2022), and Robert A. Maryks, editor of the series Jesuit Studies.
PROGRAMME
16:00 Welcome
Santiago Miralles Huete, Consul General of Spain in Edinburgh
Cristina Gonzalez-Longo, University of Strathclyde and convenor of the Scottish Catholic History Association
16.10 Suarezian readings in Seventeenth Century Scotland and England: the cases of Samuel Rutherford and John Locke
Francisco Tadeo Baciero Ruiz (Universidad de Salamanca)
16.30 The Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta (1590), philosophical source of the History of America (1777) by the Scottish historian W. Robertson
Fermín del Pino-Díaz (former CSIC)
16.50 Recent Historiographical and Methodological Turns in the Study of Early Modern Scholasticism Jesuit Scholastics, Digital Humanities, and the Converso Question
Robert Aleksander Maryks (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
Break
17.30 Round Table
Chair: Cristina Gonzalez-Longo (University of Strathclyde and convenor of the Scottish Catholic History Association)
Francisco Tadeo Baciero Ruiz (Universidad de Salamanca)
Fermín del Pino-Díaz (former CSIC)
Robert Aleksander Maryks (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
18.30 End
ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
Suarezian readings in Seventeenth Century Scotland and England: the cases of Samuel Rutherford and John Locke
According to J. P. Sommerville (Royalists and Patriots. Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640, 21999, 77), Suarezian Gedankengut on the morality of taxation borrowed from his De legibus ac Deo legislatore (1612) was quoted in Latin, alike by absolutist and parliamentarian politicians, in the Commons of 1628 at occasion of the discussion of the possibility of the king levying taxes without parliamentary consent. The political philosophy of Suárez (as explained in the De legibus and the Defensio fidei christianae adversus anglicanae sectae errores, 1613) was indeed a source reference for political issues and debates all over the seventeenth century in England and in Scotland. The case can be exemplified by the treatise of the Scottish presbyterian Samuel Rutherford Lex Rex (1644) as well as by the philosophy of Law and, in general, the political philosophy of John Locke.
Francisco T. Baciero Ruiz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Aesthetics of the University of Salamanca. He has been visiting researcher at Dresden University, Université Catholique de Louvain and Passau University. His main research subject focuses on the philosophy of Francisco Suárez and the School of Salamanca, and its reception in modern European philosophy, especially in the juridical and political British thought in the seventeenth century. He has published numerous studies on the topic, among others: “Lecturas escocesas de Suárez en la primera mitad del XVII: el debate entre John Maxwell y Samuel Pufendorf”, Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, 2022; “Francisco Suárez and John Locke: Notes on the Diffusion of Suarezian Thought in Seventeenth-Century England”, in Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law and Rights. Brill, 2023; “Francisco Suárez y Jacobo Arminio sobre la vida divina” Hipogrifo. Revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro, 2025.
The Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta (1590), philosophical source of the History of America (1777) by the Scottish historian W. Robertson
Enlightenment historiography in Scotland revived European interest in the New World, drawing upon early Spanish sources to gain a solid understanding of metropolitan governance and indigenous societies, ultimately aiming to construct a new and ambitious history of humanity. Among these sources, the work of Acosta (Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville, 1590) held a privileged place, attracting the interest of other English authors such as Grimstone, Bacon, Locke, and Smith. They proposed a new, more empirical approach to understanding ancient human history and the emergence of the modern global economy.
Acosta possessed extensive missionary experience in the viceroyalties of Peru and Mexico (1572–1587) and, through Jesuit channels, was familiar with the new missions in China, India, and Japan. This background enabled him to formulate a new philosophy of human history linked to the diverse applications in missionary work. Robertson frequently cited Acosta in his History of America, particularly when discussing the cultural capacity of American people. However, the Scottish historian allowed himself to be swayed by Locke’s negative views, denying that any American peoples had attained a level of civilization, a stance that provoked a critical reaction from Enlightenment intellectuals in the Americas, including Jesuits like Clavijero and statesmen like Jefferson.
Fermín del Pino-Díaz has been a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) since 1968 (retired since 2013). He served as president of the Madrid Anthropology Association (1989–92). His primary interest has been the Spanish contribution to the history of anthropology, particularly during the 16th-century within the field of the Crónicas de Indias (Chronicles of the Indies), focusing on figures such as Polo de Ondegardo, Bartolomé Álvarez, José de Acosta, and Bernabé Cobo, whose critical editions he has helped produce. He has also devoted significant attention to Enlightenment-era expeditions to the New World, as well as to 19th-century and contemporary Spanish anthropology (including the exiles of 1939). Major works: Ciencia y contexto histórico nacional en las expediciones ilustradas a América (1988); Lecturas y Ediciones de Crónicas de Indias (2004); Josef de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (2008); Entre textos e imágenes: representaciones antropológicas de la América indígena (2009); El Quadro de la historia del Perú (1799), un texto ilustrado del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (2014); “Traces of the Jesuit José de Acosta in the Scottish Enlightenment Thinker William Robertson” in Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law and Rights (2023).
Recent Historiographical and Methodological Turns in the Study of Early Modern Scholasticism Jesuit Scholastics, Digital Humanities, and the Converso Question
This talk surveys the historiographical and methodological reorientations now reshaping the study of early modern Scholasticism, with particular attention to the Jesuit Scholastics. Two developments sit at its center. The first is the impact of the computational humanities — text encoding, network and graph-based analysis, prosopographical databases, and LLM-assisted reading of large corpora — which is changing how we trace textual transmission, intellectual genealogies, and institutional networks. The second is the converso component of a number of Jesuit Scholastics: the documented Jewish ancestry and kinship networks that men of converso descent carried from fifteenth-century Iberia into the Society of Jesus, and whose role in shaping Jesuit governance, pedagogy, and moral theology has only recently come into focus. Drawing on volumes published in Brill's Jesuit Studies series, the talk argues for a methodologically plural, source-rich approach to a field long dominated by doctrinal and confessional narratives.
Robert Aleksander Maryks (PhD, Fordham University, New York) is a historian of early modern Society of Jesus. He is Full Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he directs the Jesuit Studies Laboratorium. He is the author of Saint Cicero and the Jesuits (Ashgate, 2008) and The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews (Brill, 2010) and the Editor-in-Chief of Brill's Jesuit Studies series, as well as founder/editor of the Journal of Jesuit Studies. His current project reconstructs fifteenth-century converso kinship networks using graph databases and computational text analysis.
EDINBURGH JESUIT CENTRE
Event venue & nearby stays
Lauriston Hall, Jesuit Church of the Sacred Heart, 28 Lauriston Street, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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