Benito Feijoo
Spanish Benedictine monk, essayist and scholar (1676–1764), born in Casdemiro, in Galicia, professor for decades at the University of Oviedo, where he acted as the great populariser and introducer of Enlightenment thought and the new European experimental science into eighteenth-century Spain, at a time when the country remained largely wedded to late scholasticism and stagnant academic thinking. His magnum opus, the Teatro crítico universal (nine volumes, 1726–1740), is a vast encyclopaedia of short essays written in a clear, plain style, deliberately addressed to a broad readership rather than an exclusively academic one, in which Feijoo subjected an overwhelming range of Spanish popular beliefs, superstitions, historical myths and traditional medical practices to rational critical scrutiny — from miraculous cures and supposedly supernatural phenomena to prejudices against women and false medicinal remedies — always applying a method grounded in empirical observation and methodical doubt of Cartesian and Newtonian ancestry. He complemented it with the Cartas eruditas y curiosas (five volumes, 1742–1760), in the same popularising and critical spirit. Feijoo was not originally a professional philosopher or experimental scientist but a Benedictine friar who turned his vast erudition as a reader into a pedagogical project of systematic combat against ignorance, credulous acceptance of authority, and the 'vulgo' — a term he used to designate both the uneducated populace and the scholars who uncritically repeated the authority of the classics. His work generated considerable controversy and earned him numerous attacks from conservative quarters, but it enjoyed explicit royal support — Ferdinand VI prohibited by royal decree any publication against Feijoo without prior licence — a decisive factor that allowed him to continue his work. Regarded as the most important precursor of the Spanish Enlightenment, Feijoo is remembered as the figure who opened Spain's intellectual door to modern scientific and critical thought.