Juan Luis Vives

(1492 - 1540)

Born in Valencia and educated in Paris, Juan Luis Vives lectured in the humanities at the University of Leuven before being hired as a tutor and reader at the court of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in 1523. Four years later, when Henry attempted to divorce Catherine, Vives was imprisoned for supporting the queen. “He is versed in branches of knowledge of the first importance,” Thomas More wrote of him in a 1518 letter to Erasmus. “Who is there who surpasses Vives?”