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Résumé
The University of Salamanca's faculty of canon and civil law made an important, though often overlooked, contribution to the growth of sixteenth-century humanist scholarship. Paradoxically it also contributed to the decline of humanist teaching. When Italian humanism entered Castilian universities late in the fifteenth century it was centered chiefly in the faculties of languages and theology. But without law (Salamanca's largest faculty) humanism would not have had nearly as large or enthusiastic a university audience. Salamanca's jurists helped to make the glories of Greek and Roman culture and the vita civile prominent themes in Castilian academia, not as subversive alternatives to traditional Scholasticism, but as complements to it. The jurists, however, did not consider humanistic learning an end in itself, and their support was ultimately too weak to sustain genuine humanist reforms in the university curriculum. By the later sixteenth century legal studies had effectively crowded out humanist studies in Salamanca.
The career of Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva (1512-1577), a prolific jurist and amateur humanist scholar, embodies both the intermingling of humanism and academic law in sixteenth-century Castile, and the eventual failure of academic humanism. Unlike the more famous Antonio de Nebrija and Juan Luis Vives, who were educated abroad, Covarrubias was a home-grown Spanish humanist, trained solely at Salamanca. His education reveals the strengths and weaknesses of humanist education in Castile's greatest university in this period. The humanist revolution claimed by some scholars is mainly a myth; though Salamanca boasted some outstanding humanist teachers, Covarrubias's humanistic upbringing relied heavily on family support and private instruction, advantages unavailable to most Castilian students.
Covarrubias left academic life in 1548 for a career in royal government and the Church. As Bishop of Segovia in 1560, and as President of the Council of Castile in the 1570s, he was charged with overseeing the "reform" of university affairs in the crown's name. Royal reformers in the early sixteenth century had worked to expand and improve humanist education, but Covarrubias's later efforts as royal reformer shows how the humanities, while neither persecuted nor actively discouraged, took second place to the interests of the law faculties.
