Juan Luis Vives March (; ; ; 6 March 6 May 1540) was a Spanish (Valencian) scholar and Renaissance humanist who spent most of his adult life in the Southern Netherlands. His beliefs on the soul, insight into early medical practice, and perspective on emotions, memory and learning earned him the title of the "father" of modern psychology. Vives was the first to shed light on some key ideas that established how psychology is perceived today. Early life Vives was born in Valencia to a family which had converted from Judaism to Christianity. As a child, he saw his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, as well as members of their wider family, executed as Judaizers at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition; his mother, born 1473, was acquitted but died of the plague in 1508, when he was 15 years old, shortly thereafter, he left Spain never to return. After damnation, the corpse of his mother, Blanquina, was unearthed and burned, 31 Jan 1530. While still in Spain, he attended the University of Valencia, where he was taught by Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso. The school was dominated by scholasticism, with the dialectic and disputation playing a central role in the delivery of education. Even the youngest scholars are accustomed never to keep silence; they are always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost to their minds, lest they should seem to be giving up the dispute. Nor does one disputation, or even two a day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner. They wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast; they wrangle before supper and they wrangle after supper. At home they dispute, out of doors they dispute. They wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating room, in the church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private. At all times they are wrangling. Academic career Vives studied at the University of Paris from 1509 to 1512, and in 1519 was appointed professor of humanities at the University of Leuven. At the insistence of his friend Erasmus, he prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England. Soon afterwards, he was invited to England, and acted as tutor to the Princess Mary, for whose use he wrote De ratione studii puerilis epistolae duae (1523) and, ostensibly, De Institutione Feminae Christianae, on the education of