Methodology
The time frame of the college fellows included in the dictionary mirrors the one I applied in my first work (1980) centered on the Spanish College at Bologna. Its purpose was to study its fellows’ careers between 1560 and 1659, years that mark the beginning of Philip II’s so-called cordon sanitaire (1568) and the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), when that policy had elapsed. According to the book of statutes, during this period the fellows could not generally stay in a college for more than eight years. It thus made sense to me, from a methodological perspective, to begin the prosopography in 1560 and to end it in 1650. When I later added the six Castilian elite colleges to my research, I naturally focused on the same period.
The existing archival documents and bibliography included in the ‘Sources’ section of the dictionary allow one to draw lists of the fellows of San Clemente -or Spanish College-, San Bartolomé, Oviedo, San Ildefonso and Santa Cruz with reasonable accuracy. That is not always the case for the Arzobispo and Cuenca Colleges. At any rate such a shortcoming is of relative importance for the purpose of this dictionary, as it only includes the biographies of those fellows who had a career, large or small, either in universities, the State, the Church, the Inquisition or the religious orders, or who had published texts. Hence the exclusion of the fellows who died while in college or who failed to have a career of any sort in their later lives.
A special category of chaplains of the College of San Bartolomé –the so called ‘chaplains of the inner cloak’-, the paying fellows of San Ildefonso, and the chaplains of Oviedo, Arzobispo and Santa Cruz Colleges are included in the dictionary because they all were regarded as equivalent to the regular fellows.
Whenever the sources and/or the existing bibliography allow the biographies include:
1. Full name, college membership and main activity.
2. Biographical data.
3. Education, including chairs held when teaching was not the main activity.
4. Career.
5. Writings, when applicable.
6. Related bibliography, when applicable.
7. Sources, i. e., historical records, published texts before 1900 and modern texts available.
Each entry includes the name of the author and, when applicable, those of other contributors.
