Das Leben des Tudor-Schuljungen: die Dialoge des Juan Luis Vives

These great men were regarded by their contemporaries as a triumvirate of leaders of the Renascence movement, at any rate outside of Italy. The name of Erasmus is now the most generally known of the three, but in one of his letters Erasmus stated his fear that he would be eclipsed by Vives. No doubt Erasmus was the greatest propagandist of Renascence ideas and the Renascence spirit. No doubt Budé, by his _Commentarii Linguae Graecae_ (1529), established himself as the greatest Greek scholar of the age. Equally, without doubt, it would appear to those who have studied the educational writings of Erasmus, Budé, and Vives, the claim might reasonably be entered for J. L. Vives that his _De Tradendis Disciplinis_ placed him first of the three as a writer on educational theory and practice. In 1539 Vives published at Paris the _Linguae Latinae Exercitatio_, _i.e._, the _School Dialogues_ which are for the first time, in the present volume, presented to the English reader. Juan Luis Vives was born, March 6, 1492 (the year of Columbus’s discovery of America), at Valencia, in Spain. His father was Luis Vives, of high-born ancestry, whose device was _Siempre vivas_. Similarly his mother, Blanca March, was of a good family, which had produced several poets. Vives himself has described his parents, their relation to each other and to himself, in two passages in his _De Institutione Feminae Christianae_ (1523). This work was translated into English (_c._ 1540) by Richard Hyrde. As the two passages contain all that is known of the parents, and give a short but picturesque idea of the household relations, I transcribe them from Hyrde’s translation: “My mother Blanca, when she had been fifteen years married unto my father, I could never see her strive with my father.…