“Sexual Freedom and New World Conquest in Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis and John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress going to bed,’” Notes and Queries 69, no. 3 (2022): 231–33.

I aim to demonstrate that John Donne appropriated a number of metaphorical conceits in his elegy ‘To his Mistress going to bed’ (ca. 1590s) from Francisco de Vitoria’s Latin lecture De Indis, which was written in 1537–38 and delivered the following year in 1539. I maintain that Donne rejected Vitoria’s view of propriety in sexual relations, arguing instead for the importance of sexual freedom outside of the bounds of matrimonial and canon law. Vitoria was a Spanish jurist and Dominican theologian, and a founding thinker of the School of Salamanca, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century group of thinkers in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish Netherlands who engaged with questions of international law and jurisprudence—including topics relating to European expansion in the New World. In De Indis, Vitoria proposes three questions: ‘first, by what right (ius) were the barbarians [of America] subjected to Spanish rule? Second, what powers has the Spanish monarchy over the Indians in temporal and civil matters? And third, what powers has either the monarchy or the Church with regard to the Indians in spiritual and religious matters?’¹ In response to these questions, Vitoria maintains that neither the American peoples’ unbelief nor their refusal to convert to Christianity is grounds for the Spanish to deny the native peoples their property and civil rights: ‘however probably and sufficiently the faith may have been announced to the barbarians and then rejected by them, this is still no reason to declare war on them and despoil them of their goods’.² Additionally, Vitoria maintained that Christian princes and the pope have neither legal nor moral authority to force the American peoples to convert to Christianity, nor may they be punished for their refusal to convert: ‘Christian princes, even on the authority of the pope, may not compel the barbarians to give up their sins against the law of nature, nor punish them for such sins.’³