Juan Luis Vives
Valencian humanist, philosopher and educator (1493–1540), born in Valencia into a family of converso Jews harshly persecuted by the Inquisition —his father was burned at the stake in 1524 and his mother's remains exhumed and burned posthumously— a circumstance that drove him into exile while still young and led him to pursue his entire intellectual career in Flanders, England and France, never returning to Spain. Trained at the Sorbonne, where he soon rejected the decadent scholasticism he found there, and later settled in Bruges and Louvain, he was part of Europe's most brilliant humanist circle, a personal friend of Erasmus —whom he helped edit Augustine's City of God— and of Thomas More, and tutor to Princess Mary Tudor at the court of Henry VIII of England, a post he lost after publicly opposing the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. His work is extraordinarily diverse and pioneering across several fields: De anima et vita (1538) is a groundbreaking treatise on empirical psychology that studies human emotions through direct observation rather than abstract scholastic speculation, anticipating methods of modern psychology; De disciplinis proposes a complete reform of the educational curriculum based on active methods, the direct study of nature and attention to individual differences among pupils; and, above all, De subventione pauperum (1526), written for the Bruges city council, is the first systematic treatise on social policy and public assistance to the poor in Europe, arguing that caring for the needy is the responsibility of organised civil authority, not merely individual ecclesiastical charity —a text that anticipates by centuries the foundations of the modern welfare state and has earned him recognition as a precursor of contemporary social work.