In their extensive introduction to this volume, Leopoldo J. Prieto López and José Luis Cendejas Bueno make the case for the influence of Spanish Jesuit scholasticism on British thought, particularly in the realm of politics. They argue that seventeenth-century English Puritans drew upon the works of Francisco Suárez, SJ, especially his writings on the natural rights of man and resisting tyrants. As several essays in the collection make clear, these arguments were particularly useful in the half-century leading up to the execution of King Charles I.
This argument is laid out especially strongly in López’s own chapter, but Suárez is the recurring theme throughout the collection, including, for example, his influence on John Locke (chapters by Bueno and Francisco T. Baciero Ruiz). Other figures do occasionally appear, such as the influence of José de Acosta, SJ, on the Scottish Enlightenment thinker William Robertson (Fermín del Pino-Díaz’s chapter) and Francis Bacon (Francisco Castilla Urbano’s chapter), but as a number of contributors point out, it is often only hints of such influence as Puritans were loathe to credit Spanish Jesuits in the anti-Catholic climate of early modern Britain. This is why Baciero Ruiz’s discovery of Locke making it clear he was familiar with the work of Suárez is particularly noteworthy.
Such speculative work does mean that several chapters are just that – speculation. In addition, a couple of contributions are slightly tangential to the volume’s theme, while Alfonso Díaz Vera breaks out from the early modern to investigate Suárez’s influence on Hillaire Belloc in the twentieth century. As such, the collection sometimes feels as if it has a few contributions that strain at the edge of its chosen parameters. It is also a peculiarity that only one essay, that of Francisco Javier Gómez Díez, includes English Catholics in this exchange of influence, despite the likes of Thomas McCoog and Freddy Domínguez having shown the richness of such investigation.
Nevertheless, the volume chimes with Anthony Milton’s work to show that early modern English Protestantism was not cut off from continental Catholic debates and influences, no matter how much they might have pretended it to be.
