Glorie antiche e moderne : il Democrates di Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

Ancient and Modern Glories. The Democrates of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
Over the last years research on the theories and concepts of Empire has proven to be a particularly lively and fruitful area of scholarship. However, many recently published contributions in this area that focus on imperial Spain still seem to underrate the importance of the ideological confrontation that opposed the rhetoric of the civilizing mission (of Aristotelian and Stoic imprint) and the theological discourse of conversion to Christianity. This article ex- amines the theses put forward by the sixteenth-century humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (theorist of the Indios’ natural slavery) and tries to explain his isolation within the Spanish intellectual arena, where scholastic theology maintained its hegemony throughout the century and beyond.