ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship tends to substantiate the impression of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Salamanca as a Catholic, Spanish, and imperial space and lecture hall of the Catholic monarchy. Girolamo Da Sommaias Diario suggests that Salamanca appealed to some born and bred in the lap of Italian humanist culture and polities not least because of its extra-curriculum. The Diario identifies Salamanca as a place where the Spanish monarchythis patchwork of European, American, and Asian polities, possibly the most complex and Baroque of early modern body politicsappeared rooted and in fact able to transcend some of the challenges intrinsic to its structure. The Irish at Salamanca provide a useful point of reference in this respect. The foundation of the Real Colegio de San Patricio de Nobles Irlandeses in 1592 established Salamanca as one of several educational and ideological centres of the Irish secular and clerical elite well into the seventeenth century.
