Vives y Moro. La amistad en tiempos difíciles by Enrique García Hernán (review)

There were many affinities between these two great intellectual figures of the Renaissance: their wide learning, their educational ideals, their holiness of life, but they were very different in temperament, as García Hernán notes on the opening page, the one, More, alegre y entretenido (cheerful and entertaining), the other quejoso y sufridor (querulous and long-suffering). They differed very much in civil status as well, More a powerful statesman and a man of considerable wealth, Vives an outsider and a struggling scholar. For this reason I do not quite agree with the author's summation that they complemented each other in such a way that in Vives we find More and in More Vives. They shared an interest in the education of women, illustrated in More's letter to William Gonell, but this can hardly be compared with Vives' Education of the Christian Woman, the first systematic study to address the universal education of women and to recognize the equal intellectual capacity of women, even to say that women often surpass men in this respect. During his residence in Chelsea More demonstrated his concern for the poor, establishing a house for the sick and the aged, whereas Vives wrote a treatise on the relief of the poor to alleviate the urgent problems of poverty in Bruges, where he was living, which became a milestone in the history of social welfare.

More's good friend Erasmus first took notice of Vives in a letter to Juan de Parra, tutor of the young Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, in 1519 recommending him with lavish praise as a supervisor of his studies, and again soon afterwards he lauds the young humanist for his virtuoso performance against the logicians of Paris in his In pseudodialecticos. More was also impressed by Vives' exceptional skill in eloquence and philosophical debate and wrote a generous encomium of his own in a letter to Erasmus. Thus began the friendship with More, which was nurtured in the many trips of Vives to Oxford and his visits to More's home.

In speaking of Vives' works, García Hernán blithely attributes to Vives a very important document that relates the trial and execution of Thomas More, Expositio fidelis de morte Thomae Mori, a Latin translation of a French report of those tragic events. It is dated July 23, 1535, and was printed by Froben at Basel early in October of that year. The only proof of authorship provided to the reader is simply the content of the document, which is of course no proof at all. No attempt is made, for example, to analyze its style, that of an official report, far from the florid, reiterative Latin of Vives, which is often difficult to decipher. Few people have ever made this attribution, most recently Francisco Calero, who also makes the outlandish claim that Vives is the author of the famous Spanish picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. Yet García Hernán constantly quotes from this book to compare Vives to More. He also attributes two other books to Vives, one an Apologia sive confutatio, a defense of Catherine of Aragon, and a Parasceve sive Adversus improborum quorundam temeritatem, a defense of matrimony, both published in the fictitious city of Lunenberg.

The book is rather rambling and quotes freely from Vives and More without giving sources. It ends with a whimsical remark of More's when he was taking leave of a friend, "Goodbye, my horse is calling me."