The charters of most universities of colonial Spanish America say that they have the same organization and privileges as the University of Salamanca. For an understanding of the social purpose and function of the Spanish American colonial university then, this is an important work even though there is no indication in it that anyone even remotely connected with Salamanca was aware of the existence of Spanish American universities. Perusal of Addy’s book might even repay the many authors of the last half-dozen years who have tried to explain the background of student participation in the control of modern Latin American universities with the bromide that Salamanca derived from Bologna rather than Paris and was thus a student-controlled rather than a teacher-controlled university. Many of the problems of Salamanca described here strongly suggest contemporary difficulties in Spanish American universities, but student control or even active participation in administration is not among them.
After four introductory chapters concerned with administrative and academic organization, curriculum, and town-gown relationships, Addy offers us a detailed chronicle of the University of Salamanca during the Enlightenment, based solidly and almost solely on the archives of the university. The result is not so much a portrait of the university as a series of X-rays of its more important organs at several stages in its life between 1739 and 1808 as revealed by its Libros de Claustros. The interrelation of these parts to form a living mechanism is so well explained that the assiduous reader of the complete study and its appendices will emerge with a clear idea of the university’s anatomy and physiology from early in the seventeenth century through the first decade of the nineteenth. One can say only that it took a lot of consultation but very little medicine to prevent rigor mortis. There may even be some hidden lesson here for the study of geriatrics.
This book offers an example of straightforward, well-written, descriptive history in which the main thread of the narrative is drawn from one archival source, the Libros de Claustros of the university. Insofar as the author has a thesis it seems to be that the changes in the University of Salamanca were not totally imposed from without but were largely generated inside the university community. This study, made from within the primate university of Spain, does not provide me with any evidence that the country was ever a part of the Enlightenment in the sense of generating ideas, giving new directions to a line of thought or substantially helping philosopher-scientists elsewhere in Europe to open up new areas of knowledge. For Salamanca the question was simply how much of the new could be accepted without unduly altering the basic pattern of society and the atrophied version of scholastic thought on which it was based. Apart from a few informed but not notably creative gadflies the only basic efforts for change within the university both in the 1760s and during the first decade of the nineteenth century came from some professors of medicine and from the ministers of Charles III and Charles IV operating through the Council of Castile, the ultimate governing body of the University of Salamanca.
