Historicidad, Juridicidad y Para-Literatura: En torno a Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546)

Abstract

This article focuses on the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), one of the most influential intellectual figures in the Early Modern transatlantic world, specifically on his Salamanca University courses commonly called Indian Lectures. This article engages with the complete bibliography on Vitoria. It recreates a few official celebrations in memory of the possible historical legacy inside the Spain of Primo de Rivera and outside. The epistemic assumptions of Early Modern and colonial history, literature and law (or the repressive culture) are analyzed. The notion of “para-literature” is proposed to thus take into account hermeneutic problems generated, for contemporary readers today, by this monastic and university-based construction of an expansive natural-law normativity that is parallel to the already existing book and print technologies. We look into the form and content, social function and consequences of the official rationale or legal logic (so called “titles”) of Western expansionism and the conquest and colonization of America.