La humanitas hispana aims to full the research about the Spanish humanism, which has been deficient between the scholars’ interests. In this book J. García Gibert exposes a meticulously justified defence of the Spanish humanism, in the context of the European current. As the author distinguishes the Iberian from the continental movement in that he argues that the first one did not break with the past as the French or the Italian movements did, he analyzes the historiographic debate about this subject.
He also distinguishes the Spanish from the European humanism because the first one aimed to popularize the knowledge while the humanists from other regions did not do so, as he emphasyzes along the book. The author also analyzes other differences, such as the mutual influences between the national and the continental movement, especially in reference to Italy, as proved by examining individual cases.