Juan Luis Vives drafted Europe's first plan for public help to the urban poor
In 1526 a Valencian humanist living in Bruges wrote On Assistance to the Poor, the first Western treatise to propose a state policy for urban poverty: public relief plus craft training for the unskilled. Juan Luis Vives also studied emotions so closely that later historians called him the father of modern psychology.
Vives was born in Valencia on 6 March 1493 to a converso family, Jews who had converted to Christianity. The Inquisition shadowed them: his mother Blanquina was questioned in 1491 and acquitted, but around 1524 his father and other relatives were executed for secretly practising Judaism, and around 1528 his mother's remains were dug up and burned. Vives, a sincere Catholic, had left Spain in 1509 and never went back; the news reached him while he was staying in Thomas More's house in Chelsea, and he sank into deep depression.
After studying in Paris from 1509 to 1512, he became professor of humanities at Leuven in 1519. At Erasmus's urging he wrote a commentary on Augustine's City of God, dedicated to Henry VIII in 1522, which brought an invitation to England. He tutored Princess Mary, lectured at Oxford, and wrote a manual on educating Christian women for Catherine of Aragon. When he openly opposed the annulment of Henry's marriage in 1528, he lost royal favour and spent six weeks confined to his house.
Back in Bruges he attacked blind deference to scholasticism and Aristotle; his De Causis Corruptarum Artium has been ranked alongside Bacon's Novum Organon. Bruges had asked him in 1525 how to handle poor relief, long left to church alms. His answer denied any right to laziness but made relief a public duty. The city waited until 1557 to act, yet his ideas shaped poor laws in England, the German Empire and Spain during the 1530s. He also showed through close reading of its language that the Letter of Aristeas must have been written by a Jewish author long after the events it describes.
Vives interviewed people and noted how their emotional displays related to their words and topics, leading Gregory Zilboorg to call him a godfather of psychoanalysis. He cared less about what the soul is than about how it works: understanding, remembering, reasoning and judging. Erasmus predicted that Vives would eclipse his own fame. His views on women were conventional, though; he said they should not teach, and the book written for Mary ruled out the very role of reigning queen she later filled. He died in Bruges in 1540, aged 47.
Source: Juan Luis Vives
