Book contents
Critical note on texts and translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The texts
This anthology consists of unabridged translations, arranged in chronological order, of five of Vitoria's thirteen surviving Relectiones theologicae (On Civil Power, I and II On the Power of the Church, On the American Indians, and On the Law of War); three articles from On Dietary Laws, or Self-Restraint; and extracts from Vitoria's lecture-cycle on Aquinas' Summa theologica I-II. 90–105 (On Law). In the appendices we give a passage from Vitoria's lectures on ST II-II. 10, and four of his letters (the latter being the only texts written in Spanish).
As explained in the Introduction, none of these works appeared in print during Vitoria's lifetime. The only surviving witnesses for the great cycles of Vitoria's ordinary lecture-courses (lectiones) on Lombard's Sentences and Aquinas' Summa theologica, which as Prime Professor of Theology he was required to deliver daily for over twenty years, are MSS known as reportationes: that is, notes taken down by students from the master's dictation in the Salamancan lecture-halls. Some twenty such MSS survive, the most important being those of Francisco Trigo and Juan de Barrionuevo; they remained unpublished until this century, when they were edited by Beltrán de Heredia. The texts on ST I-II. 90–105 and II-II. 10 translated here are taken from reportata of the lecture-courses of 1534–6 preserved in Vatican MS Ottob. 1000 and Salamanca University MS 43 (edited in Vitoria 1952: 11–93, and Beltrán de Heredia 1928: 185–203).
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- Information
- Vitoria: Political Writings , pp. xxxiii - xlPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991