Iberia by James Michener

Author:James Michener [Michener, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

BARBILDO : How did you get on at Salamanca?

LEONELO: That’s a long story.

BARBILDO: You must be a very learned man by now. LEONELO: No, I’m not even a barber.

BARBILDO: At least you’re a scholar.

LEONELO: Well, I’ve tried to learn things that are important.

Date a Dios en tierna edad; BARBILDO : Anyone who’s seen so many printed books is bound to think he’s wise.

LEONELO: I admit that printing has saved many talented writers from oblivion. Printing circulates their books and makes them known. Gutenberg, a famous German from Mainz, is responsible. But many men who used to have a high reputation are no longer taken seriously, now that their works have been printed.

Today the old classrooms, the cloisters, the marvelous library and the chapels can be inspected in the dignified buildings that enclose the plaza, and here one can catch a sense of what it must have been like to attend a university in the late Renaissance when ideas were exploding at such a furious rate. Each component at Salamanca is perfect, as if time had frozen the old patterns.

As a matter of fact, that is precisely what happened. Under pressures which will be made clear in this chapter, this grand university, light of Europe, began to grope and fumble. First, any student suspected of Jewish blood was excluded. Then it became difficult for bright boys from untitled families to gain entrance; vacancies were reserved for the nobility, who used the university as a kind of gentlemen’s finishing school. At the end of the sixteenth century Salamanca no longer taught mathematics in any form and fifty years later enrolled not a single student in medicine. The fine interchange of ideas that used to be carried on with Oxford and Bologna was halted, and the sharp debate that once characterized the intellectual life of the university was silenced. Registrations dropped from seven thousand eight hundred to a mere three hundred in 1824.

I know of no other educational institution in the world that started so high as Salamanca to fall so low. Its eclipse was one of the severest blows Spain ever suffered, for with its castration the spark of national vitality ebbed, and any nation today that wishes to attain similar results should start by closing down its equivalent of Salamanca. Of course, the university did not physically disappear; except for years of revolution and crisis it kept its doors open and admitted a few hundred students who mouthed cautious doctrine taught by frightened professors. During the hey-day of the Spanish empire students from Mexico and South America came to Salamanca so as to be able, when they returned to their colonial cities, to boast as scholars had for five hundred years, ‘I am from Salamanca.’ There was also an Irish College attached to the university, and here young Catholics who could not obtain an education at home studied for five or six years, a large proportion of them finally becoming priests, so that much of Ireland’s intelligence over long periods of time was trained in

Salamanca.

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