Vives, Juan Luis (1493-1540) De Officio Mariti Liber Unus. De Institutione Foeminae Christianae Libri Tres. De Ingenuorum Adolescentum ac Puellarum Institutione Libri Duo.
Basel: [Robert Winter, 1540].
Octavo, several manuscript signatures to title page; final leaf blank but for colophon and printer's woodcut device present in this copy; bound in later green morocco with marbled paper boards, 5 3/4 3 5/8 in.
Vives's work "[Has] more kinship to what we today call psychology or the phenomena of consciousness and behavior. [...] Vives looks for the causes of human behavioral functions in the physiology of the human body. [...] [H]is emphasis on human impulses, drives, emotions and affects which underlie the motivations determining man's individual and group behavior [...] is the cornerstone of empirical, observational psychology, as contrasted to the earlier moralistic or philosophic psychologies with their emphasis on the formal nature of the soul and its moral responsibility in most classes of human acts. (Quoted from Physiological-Psychological Thought in Juan Luis Vives by Raymond D. Clements, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 3, July 1967, pages 219-312.)
The present collection includes works on the office of the husband; an instructional work on the duty of Christian women commissioned by Catherine of Aragon for the instruction of her daughter, Mary Tudor; and writings on the education of girls. In De Institutione Feminae Christianae , Vives lays out a chastity code for women that includes details on "gender order, restrictions on women's physical freedom of movement, regulations and instructions regarding women's clothing, and various rules for women's outward conduct. [...] Vives advocated a very traditional, patriarchal view of women, exhorting very strict gender segregation and female seclusion. He prescribed very tight restrictions on women's freedom, with a view to controlling female sexuality." (Quoted from Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist's Female Shame, Male Honor: The Chastity Code in Juan Luis Vives' De institutione feminae Christianae, published online in the Journal of Family History, January 18, 2012, Volume 37, Issue 2.)
