The Biographical Dictionary of Spanish elite college fellows (DBCM~e) includes 1,227 biographies of the 1,511 students admitted during the period 1560-1650 to the seven Spanish elite colleges (3 of them were admitted to two colleges) as fellows, or as ‘de facto’ fellows in the guise of chaplains or boarders. The 281 who did not leave any trace of their lives save their having been named fellows of the colleges have been omitted. They either died prematurely or, as far as we know, did not hold any position while being in the college or after leaving. A complete list of those individuals is included in the ‘Fellows Omitted’ section. Thus, the main purpose of this Dictionary is to offer the prosopography work that I have carried out for four decades to gauge the role played in the State and Church bureaucracies, universities included, by the fellows of the San Bartolomé, Oviedo, Cuenca and Arzobispo Colleges of Salamanca, the Santa Cruz College of Valladolid and the San Clemente -or the “Spanish”- College of Bologna.
There are great, middling, and lesser characters among the fellows, but as a whole they allow us to draw a profile of the members of the Spanish elite colleges during that ninety-year period. The biographies are not lengthy, either because others have already written about them, or due to the scarcity of available sources, or in some cases because they would have exceeded the purpose of the dictionary. This is thus more like a British Who is Who than a full-scale biographical dictionary. In fact, it would have been more proper to speak of Materials than of a Dictionary, but I have wanted to keep the latter as I do not lose hope that, as time goes by, the dictionary that we are presenting now, fundamentally based on the research carried out by a single individual, will become a ‘project in progress’ thanks to the contributions of other scholars. Both the Figuerola Institute, host of this e-publication, and I would like this to become an open collaborative project incorporating information and observations collected by other historians in the course of their research.
With this aim in mind I invite those willing to collaborate to send their comments and/or their contributions to dadelara@ext.uv.es. They would of course be properly credited in the corresponding biographies.
The project has been presented in 2018 at the 8th Heloise Atelier in Lisbon and in 2021 at the Institute for Legal History Research of Buenos Aires.
Dámaso de Lario
September 2021
