It must be said at once that this publication is an extraordinary feat of scholarship. The young Lyon professor, Tristan Vigliano, has suddenly restored Vives to the attention of the French scholarly world. He demonstrates not only a masterly understanding of the encyclopedic content of this opus magnum of Vives, but also a thorough familiarity with all his works, as is attested in the multiple cross-references in the notes.

Vigliano prints the editio princeps of the work published by Michael Hillen (Antwerp, July 1531), the only one Vives supervised personally. The text of the original was continuous with very few paragraph markings and included brief captions in the margins indicating the subject matter. Vigliano has retained the latter and added modern paragraphing. Later editions, beginning with that of Joannes Gymnich and continuing up to the Valencia edition (1782–90) of Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, broke the book up into chapters and also introduced the excessive use of italics, which distort the text graphically and distract the reader. Vigliano chooses to omit the third part of Vives’s treatise, usually entitled De artibus, a measure that he justifies in great detail. In this he adheres to a tradition beginning with an English edition of 1612 and repeated in a Neapolitan edition of 1764. Similarly, in the Mayans Opera omnia the third part was relegated to a volume that contained the philosophical works of Vives. It makes excellent sense, therefore, to print just the first two books as pars destruens and pars construens of a unified work, the first a diatribe on the corruption of traditional learning, the second the transmission of a new curriculum, the savoir and enseigner of Vigliano’s title.

In the original Antwerp edition a group of essays on diverse subjects formed the third tome. This new section has an independent numbering as if it were a wholly separate treatise, as indeed it is. Vigliano cites a letter dated 15 July 1530 from Conrad Goclenius, a teacher in Louvain, to Erasmus, to illustrate how the work was taking shape. Goclenius reports that Vives gave two lectures in Louvain of a protreptic or exhortatory nature to promote the sale of his books. He also mentions that he was in dire financial straits, reduced to giving private lessons for a fee. In another letter of March 1531 Vives writes to his former student Honorato Juan that De disciplinis is in press and that he has deferred to a later time works on rhetoric, style, and language. This leads Vigliano to conjecture that Vives was already at work to add the third tome to the publication. He would have had to work very quickly to accomplish this. These circumstances help to account in part for the disorganization and dissymmetries that Vigliano finds in the work. Obviously Vives was not given the opportunity to publish a revised edition. The matter of his omitting the discipline of theology from his curriculum, which might well be considered a serious fault, is easily explained. As a Jewish converso, Vives avoided theological matters like the plague. Even in his commentary on Augustine’s City of God he concentrates instead on history and mythology, although when he rarely ventured into theological discussions in that work it merited him inclusion in the Index of Paul IV in 1559.

Vigliano expresses a very interesting insight into the declamatory tone of the De disciplinis, a certain theatrical quality, which demands that the text be read aloud instead of simply being read silently. It is well known that Vives’s abilities in the genre of declamation had drawn the accolades of both Erasmus and Thomas More. His Declamationes Sullanae, set in the time of the dictator Sulla, rivaled the ancient orators themselves, according to Erasmus, who also says that he knew of no one in whom you could find so much eloquence combined with such great knowledge of philosophy. Vigliano sums up both qualities in the phrase ex oratore philosophus, sed orator semper. He reproduces this oratorical style marvelously in his translation. The notes maintain the general excellence of the edition and an index locorum, in which Cicero and Quintilian have pride of place, is provided.