Dimas de Miguel and the Lullist Jargon of Universality

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the figure of Dimas de Miguel, namely his brief treatise Breve y compendioso compendio de la arte de Raymundo Llull, as partaking in a debate around the notion of universality. Dimas de Miguel belonged to the intellectual circle around Juan de Herrera, associated with King Philip II in the last decades of his reign. While this circle preserved many of the original missionary aspects of Lullism, it ultimately focused more on the way Llull’s Art promised a universal logic for the organization of the disciplines. This article focuses on three points of analysis of this universality: the way catalogues of Llull’s works serve to map the spread of his legacy across numerous institutions and libraries; the establishing of a vocabulary of universality in Dimas’s aforementioned treatise; and the defense of this form of universality in opposition to its academic and ecclesiastic detractors.