Philosopher, educator, and psychologist Juan Luis Vives (1492‒1540) was an early humanist, educational theorist, and Renaissance man. He was born in Valencia into a wealthy family of Jewish tradesmen. His family had been forced to convert to Catholicism so as to safeguard their lives and property and to avoid being expelled from Spain. They nonetheless continued to practice Judaism in a private synagogue in their home. In 1482, a decade before Juan Luis Vives was born, the Inquisition caught them in the middle of a Jewish service, and the persecution of the family began. In 1509 Luis Vives left for Paris to study arts. He soon rejected the markedly dialectic approach and the controversies prevalent in the university and embraced the new doctrines of humanism. By 1514 he moved to Louvain, where he became acquainted with the major humanists of his time: Desiderius Erasmus, Guillaume Budé, Juan de Vergara, and Thomas More. In 1523 he moved to England, where he became professor of rhetoric at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was appointed an advisor to King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, but he left England at the time of their divorce. In 1528, he returned to the Netherlands and settled in Bruges (present-day Belgium), where his outstanding skills as a humanist and virtues as a Christian were revealed. These were his years of artistic maturity. Luis Vives put forward innovative ideas regarding various matters related to philosophy, education, and politics. He made proposals to promote world peace, the unity of Europe, and assistance to the poor. In the field of education, his views were those of a pioneer and a reformer. He maintained that the education system should take into consideration the natural aptitudes and skills of each student. In his texts he also articulated the need to relate the practical and the theoretical aspects of the learning process. Opuscula aliquot vere catholica ac imprimis erudita (Some catholic and mostly learned booklets) gathers some of his most important works on the education of youth. The book is intended not only as a manual for teaching Latin, but also as a guide to behavior. Luis Vives died in the city of Bruges in 1540, at the age of 48, after a long and painful illness.