Over the past few decades, a growing number of studies have highlighted the importance of the 'School of Salamanca' for the emergence of colonial normative regimes and the formation of a language of normativity on a global scale. According to this influential account, American and Asian actors usually appear as passive recipients of normative knowledge produced in Europe. This book proposes a different perspective and shows, through a knowledge historical approach and several case studies, that the School of Salamanca has to be considered both an epistemic community and a community of practice that cannot be fixed to any individual place. Instead, the School of Salamanca encompassed a variety of different sites and actors throughout the world and thus represents a case of global knowledge production. Contributors are: Adriana Alvarez, Virginia Aspe, Marya Camacho, Natalie Cobo, Thomas Duve, Jose Luis Egio, Dolors Folch, Enrique Gonzalez Gonzalez, Lidia Lanza, Esteban Llamosas, Osvaldo R. Moutin, and Marco Toste.

Knowledge of the pragmatici sheds new light on pragmatic normative literature (mainly from the religious sphere), a genre crucial for the formation of normative orders in early modern Ibero-America. Long underrated by legal historical scholarship, these media - manuals for confessors, catechisms, and moral theological literature - selected and localised normative knowledge for the colonial worlds and thus shaped the language of normativity. The eleven chapters of this book explore the circulation and the uses of pragmatic normative texts in the Iberian peninsula, in New Spain, Peru, New Granada and Brazil. The book reveals the functions and intellectual achievements of pragmatic literature, which condensed normative knowledge, drawing on medieval scholarly practices of 'epitomisation', and links the genre with early modern legal culture. Contributors are: Manuela Bragagnolo, Agustin Casagrande, Otto Danwerth, Thomas Duve, Jose Luis Egio, Renzo Honores, Gustavo Cesar Machado Cabral, Pilar Mejia, Christoph H. F. Meyer, Osvaldo Moutin, and David Rex Galindo.