VI People in Portrait, 46 Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617)

Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) are today's best-known members of the major 16th- and 17th-century intellectual movement known as the ‘School of Salamanca’ or the ‘second scholastic’. Both were by profession theologians, not lawyers (although Suárez had studied canon law), and both spent most of their lives in a university milieu.1 A large part of their intellectual endeavour was dedicated to the renewal and systematization of Catholic theology, especially moral theology, as part of the Counter-Reformation Church's effort to...