Melchor Cano was a Spanish Scholastic theologian. Cano's most important theological work was his posthumously published De locis theologicis, a major contribution to the New Scholasticism of the Salamanca school.

The School of Salamanca is an intellectual movement of 16th-century and 17th-century Iberian Scholastic theologians rooted in the intellectual and pedagogical work of Francisco de Vitoria. From the beginning of the 16th the traditional Catholic conception of man and of his relation to God and to the world had been assaulted by the rise of humanism, by the Protestant Reformation and by the new geographical discoveries and their consequences. These new problems were addressed by the School of Salamanca. The name is derived from the University of Salamanca, where de Vitoria and other members of the school were based.