Rmo. admodum patri Mro. D.D. Fr. Mauro Izquierdo, ex-generali candidatae Cisterciensis familiae sequentem ex tractatu de legibus thesim...

by Florencio Rodriguez

Salamanca: María Luisa Villagordo (Villargordo; Villargómez), [1794]

1 silk broadside | 530 x 380 mm

A thesis announcement for Mauro Izquierdo offered by "his most humble client Florentius Rodriguez." The defense is to take place at the University of Salamanca on 13 February 1794, "at the usual morning hour" (manè hor. solit.). The topic of his defense appears broad on its face—tractatu de legibus—but we suspect this refers to Francisco Suarez's De legibus (1612), "a vast treatise...in which he attempted to construct a doctrine of law and society that consented to the justification for the institutions and the norms of natural law through rational principles" (Padoa-Schioppa). Saurez himself was closely affiliated with the University of Salamanca, and especially the School of Salamanca movement that formed around it in the 16th and 17th centuries. The legal philosophy born from this intellectual movement had a profound and enduring influence, evidenced not least by this thesis on one of its key treatises, defended nearly two centuries later, long after Spain's Golden Age. ¶ The enduring academic tradition of announcing thesis debates dates at least to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, and it had become common at many European universities by the 17th century, where theses and dissertations were variously produced as pamphlets and broadsides. Unlike this example, they frequently included a list of the particular points to be defended. A few copies of such broadsheets may indeed have been posted as a public notice, but most were probably distributed to friends, family, and colleagues, or even made available during the disputation itself as a kind of program or souvenir. It may come as no surprise that the early modern university typically bore no cost of their production. The candidate's family commonly handled the bill, though here it was a cliens of Izquierdo (a student or some other beneficiary?) More extravagant versions might include an illustration, and the most opulent ones, wholly engraved bespoke productions, have come to be known as thesis prints. Ours has no such illustration, though the text is surrounded by a very large decorative border, and of course printing on silk was a true luxury flex—like printing on vellum or colored paper, though much more delicate. ¶ This item comes from the press of María Luisa Villagordo, about as rare a woman-owned press as you'll find. We trace just two other items bearing her imprint: an Oracion funebre and a Relación física de las comedias, both of ca. 1796, neither of which is held by any North American institution. Perhaps she's related to fellow Salamanca university printer María Eugenia Villagordo, who inherited the press of Antonio and Nicolás José Villagordo. ¶ Survival rates for items printed on silk are predictably low, and we predictably locate no other copies of the present.

CONDITION: Printed on one side only of a large sheet of beige silk, the central text surrounded by a large decorative multi-piece woodcut border. Old stitching forms a hem along the right side. ¶ Soiled, with faint traces of offset ink; scattered small holes, several of them affecting text, but nothing terribly offensive; top and left edges a bit ragged; a single hard crease across each dimension. Really a remarkable survival in remarkable condition.

REFERENCES: Antonio Padoa-Schioppa (Caterina Fitzgerald, tr.), A History of Law in Europe (2017), p. 283 (on the School of Salamanca: "Thoroughly knowledgeable not only of theology, but also of Roman law and the law of their time, their purpose was to explore the congruence of positive norms with the principles of natural and divine law"), 285 (cited above); David Lantigua, "Catholic Reform, Law, and the School of Salamanca," The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law (2024), p. 141 ("the University of Salamanca was the epicenter of legal studies during Spain's Golden Age"); Fernando Herrero Salas, Actas capitulares del Císter en el monasterio de Palazuelos. II parte: Documentación (2006), p. 1203 (noting a Mauro Izquierdo as an abbot of Madrid's Santa Ana monastery in 1787); Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang, "For the Love of the Truth: The Dissertation as a Genre of Scholarly Publication in Early Modern Europe," KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 5.1 (Spring 2021), p. 130 (“institutional requirement aside, the degree signified such a monumental moment, and practical value, for the candidate that his family was willing to invest financial resources in printing the dissertation”), 133-135 (focusing on pamphlet theses: “The printed dissertation was a commissioned publication…The candidate received the printed copies of the dissertations before the disputation and then submitted a number of copies to certain offices and persons as regulated by his university…Then the student sent copies to opponents appointed to his disputation, other professors or private lecturers at the university, and his family members, patrons, fellow students, and friends. He probably also provided free copies to the audience of the disputation. The actual print run varied from one university to another…Generally speaking, in eighteenth-century Germany, 200 copies were considered sufficient, and 300 abundant.”); Louise Rice, “Jesuit Thesis Prints and the Festive Academic Defence at the Collegio Romano,” The Jesuits (University of Toronto, 1999), p. 148 (“It was in the colleges run by the Jesuits for the education of noble boys that the thesis print first emerged as a distinctive category of engraved image. The vogue quickly spread to the universities and other institutions of higher education…Popular throughout Catholic Europe from the beginning of the seventeenth century through the third quarter of the eighteenth, the thesis print fell out of fashion around the time the Society itself was suppressed in 1773.”), 149 (because the time and place typically appeared on these, “it is sometimes assumed that the broadsheet functioned primarily as a kind of advertisement, announcing the event in advance and inviting attendance. But although it may have been common practice to post one or two copies of the sheet ahead of time, publicity was not its primary purpose. Rather, the booklet or sheet was distributed to the members of the audience during the defence itself; it served as a kind of program, which enabled the audience to follow the progress of the disputation, and was taken home as a record or souvenir of the event.”); Louise Rice, “Pomis sua nomina servant: The Emblematic Thesis Prints of the Roman Seminary,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 70 (2007), p. 197 (“Unfortunately, thesis broadsheets have a poor survival rate. They were often very large and their size made them awkward to store”); Sandra Establés Susán, Diccionario de mujeres impresoras y libreras de España i Iberoamérica entre los siglos XV y XVIII (2018), p. 493-494 (for María Eugenia), 495-496 (for María Luisa)

Item #776