Antonio de Nebrija

Antonio Martínez de Cala y Xarana or Antonio de Lebrija(Lebrija, 1444-Alcalá de Henares, July 2, 1522) known as Elio Antonio de Nebrija or de Nebrixa, was a Spanish humanist who enjoyed great fame as a student at the Royal College of Spain in Bologna. He occupies a prominent place in the history of the Spanish language for being the author of the first Castilian grammar (the Gramática castellana), published in 1492 (three months before the arrival of Christopher Columbus's fleet in America), from a first Latin-Spanish Dictionary that same year and from his Spanish-Latin Vocabulary around 1494, well in advance within the scope of the so-called common languages. His legacy served as a model for the elaboration of the first grammars and vocabularies in indigenous languages in Latin America and the Philippines.

As a polymath and gifted, as well as a philologist of the Spanish language and classical languages (Latin, Greek and Hebrew), he was a historian, educator, grammarian, translator, exegete, teacher, professor, linguist, lexicographer, printer, editor (own and others' works), royal chronicler, writer and poet. His career as a teacher and author was very extensive for the time, as it spanned more than half a century, from 1470 to 1522, the year of his death at the age of seventy-eight. old.

Biography

He was born in the old Nebrissa Veneria, in Spanish Lebrija, in the province of Seville, in the street then called Los Mesones, in a house that was still standing in 1632 when Rodrigo Caro visited the city and noted in his Antiquities and principality of the most illustrious city of Seville which was venerated "as a holy thing". He was the second of five siblings: three men and two women. His father was Juan Martínez de Cala the Old Man and his mother, Catalina Martínez de Jarana, well-to-do farmers of medium status and not serfs, according to what Nebrija would say in his Elegia de patriae antiquitate. According to the controversial thesis of Américo Castro in La realidad histórica de España his father would be from a possible Marrana family and his mother from a Sevillian Jewish family converted to Catholicism as a result of the violent anti-Jewish massacres of 1391. Due to the climate of Christian anti-Semitism of the XV century in Castile, Nebrija should never write about his origins, although his in-depth study from Hebrew would show that ancestry, according to those who defend the Jewish-converted origins, although —as Pedro Martín Baños warns—, subjected to inquisitorial process, the inquisitors did not invoke or use that condition as an aggravating factor for the accusation and his son Sancho, in 1506 (the same year in which his father suffered the inquisitorial process in Salamanca) was able to present the proofs of purity of blood that were required of him to enter the College of the Spanish in Bologna, to which the father had also belonged. All the witnesses said they knew his parents and grandparents, whom they coincidentally considered to be old Christians, both "by their knowledge and by evidence of their ancestors," according to one of those witnesses, Pedro Tejero, a resident of Lebrija, who knew that their ancestors declared under oath before the apostolic notary. They are old Christians and they are not Moors or Jews or converts nor do they have any part with them, and for such they are found and kept in this said town". certain degrees, a prohibition that never affected Nebrija, nor would the same prohibition approved for the University of Alcalá in 1519.

However, without discussing the data provided by Martín Baños, Juan Gil believes it is possible to still maintain the suspicion of convert origin, having discovered that one of his daughters, Sabina de Solís, married the bachelor Juan Romero, a Sevillian convert, given the characteristic inbreeding of this group.

Antonio de Nebrija imparting a grammar class in the presence of Juan de Zúñiga. Introducciones Latinae, B.N.E., Madrid.

The young Nebrija studied at the University of Salamanca. When he was nineteen years old, he moved to Italy. He himself says it in the publication of his Vocabulario (c. 1494): «so that at the age of nineteen he went to Italy», where he entered the College of San Clemente de Bologna on March 2, 1463, thanks to a scholarship from the bishopric of Córdoba, to study Theology. He continued his studies until 1470. Back in Spain, he adopted the nickname "Elio" and worked for Archbishop Fonseca in Seville, where he created a school. He taught between 1470 and 1473 in the Granada chapel, located in the courtyard de los Naranjos of the Cathedral of Seville, according to his own testimony, collected by Martín Nieto: "In the tornada I was invited by letters from the Very Reverend Father Alonso de Fonseca, Archbishop of Seville". In 1473 he obtained the position of Grammar teacher and Rhetoric at the University of Salamanca, and in that same year he married Isabel Solís de Maldonado, according to his own statement in his Aenigma juris civilis: «Fate willed that incontinence precipitate me into marriage». When he got married, the Church withdrew his economic allowance and, since the salary of a university professor did not provide him with enough to support his family, in 1487 he left Salamanca and entered the service of the Master of Alcántara, Juan de Zúñiga. Thus he was able to consecrate himself by devoted entirely to philological studies, which culminated in his famous Grammar, dedicated to Queen Isabel the Catholic.

His first printed book was Introductiones latinae (Salamanca, 1481), a true European best-seller, printed and edited more than a hundred times during Nebrija's lifetime, not only in the Iberian Peninsula (in Spanish and Catalan), in cities such as Salamanca, Burgos, Alcalá, Logroño, Barcelona, Granada, Seville, Antequera, Zaragoza, Toledo, Pamplona, Madrid or Valencia, but also in a large part of Europe (they were printed several times in printers in Paris, Venice, Antwerp, Deventer -The Netherlands-, Lyon, Bordeaux, Limoges, Toulouse or Cologne), being one of the most widely used Latin grammar manuals in European education of the century XVI.

In 1502 he took part as a Latinist in the translation work of the future Biblia poliglota complutense, sponsored by Cardinal Cisneros. The motto Tanto monta, Fernando el Católico's personal motto, was suggested to the monarch by Nebrija, alluding with it to the Gordian knot that, according to legend, would make Asia the owner of whoever was capable of undoing it and which, finally, was cut down by Alexander the Great with his sword, adding nothing matters. He thus implied that it is the same to undo it as to cut it and that the monarch cannot stop in the face of difficulty. It was not until the 19th century when the second component was added, Tanto mounts, mounts both, Isabel and Fernando , in the mistaken belief that the phrase had been used as a currency by the Catholic Monarchs to signify the balance between the kingdoms.

He died in Alcalá de Henares (in the current province of Madrid) in 1522.

Places where Nebrija lived

Antonio de Nebrija spent fourteen years in his native Lebrija, twenty-three years in Salamanca (discontinuous, with interruptions: 5+11+3+4: five years as a student, eighteen years as a teacher and professor), five years in Bologna (1465-1470), four years in Coca (1470-1473), seventeen years in Extremadura (in Alcántara and in the region of La Serena, both in Zalamea de la Serena and Villanueva de la Serena, (1487-1504), two years in Seville in 1490 and 1498, and the last ten years in Alcalá de Henares.In between, he had some periods half relocated with stays in Medina del Campo, in Brozas (he spent brief periods in the house of his son Marcelo between 1518 and 1522), Logroño (in 1507 to supervise his Apologia with the printer Arnao Guillén de Brocar) and in Granada in the year 1500, the city where his son Sancho de Nebrija (c. 1481-1556), born in Salamanca and died in Granada, Doctor of Law, Governor of the Canary Islands, later judge and printer in Granada and also also the brother of this Sebastián de Nebrija (also deceased in Granada in 1560), who always followed his brother Sancho de él throughout his life, as his assistant in the Canary Islands and Granada.

Antonio de Nebrija's Grammatical Ideas

Although Nebrija drew on the work of Latin grammarians such as Prisciano, Diomedes Grammaticus and Elio Donato, his own ideas led him to disagree with them on some points. In addition, Nebrija considered that grammar was the basis of all science. For Nebrija, grammar was divided into: spelling, prosody, etymology, and syntax. This division has lasted until the Modern Age. And likewise another Nebrijana distinction lasts until recently: the one that considers that the parts of the sentence are eight: name, pronoun, article, verb, participle, preposition, adverb and conjunction, and in its notes it adds an infinite gerund and participial name.

Nebrija considers Latin as a language superior to the others, and for this reason, the closer a language is to Latin, the more perfect it is. This makes his Castilian grammar a Latin-style grammar. However, Nebrija's originality is patent, bringing authentic innovations in its genre, long before the rest of the vulgar languages. He also intuited the origin of the Castilian language from a corrupted Latin brought by the Goths and influenced by other languages.

His work had great influence in the Spanish and European university world, being one of the summits of humanism in Spain. He collects the classical legacy to revitalize the study of living languages. But the feat to which he owes a first-rate position in history is having composed the first Castilian Grammar (1492), also the first among Romance grammars, for which he will serve as a model. Nebrija He wrote his grammar in the Extremaduran town of Zalamea de la Serena.

Nebrija saw the Spanish language as a unifying factor of the various territories of the Catholic Monarchs, in the same way that Florentine figures such as Cristoforo Landino or Lorenzo de Medici had defended that the Tuscan language would serve to unify Italy. Hence Nebrija's well-known phrase in his Gramática saying that "language was always a companion to the empire".

Nebrija, printer

Statue of Antonio de Nebrija by Anselm Nogués, outside the National Library of Spain, in Madrid.

Antonio de Nebrixa in the collection of «Portraits of the illustrious Spanish» printed by the Real Imprenta de Madrid from 1791 to 1806. Recorded by Simon Brieva by drawing by Francisco Javier Ramos.

In addition to his philological achievements, Nebrija was crucial in bringing the printing press to Salamanca, since the second book to be published in this city was his Introductiones, and he may have also directed the printing press, a situation that an attempt was made to cover it up, because mercantile business would have been incompatible with his academic position. However, both his son Sancho de Nebrija and his grandson Antonio de Nebrija became printers, and most of the incunabula published in Salamanca were by Nebrija or by authors in his circle. That first printing press in Salamanca was located in what has since been called Calle de Libreros. Likewise, he was the first author to claim copyright in Spain and the Western world, long before the 1709 Queen Anne Charter of the United Kingdom or the disputes of 1662, in which the Union of the Crowns interfered.

His work as a printer was continued by three generations, who held the privilege of printing the works of the illustrious grammarian.

Antonio de Nebrija and the Inquisition

He demonstrated his knowledge of Hebrew in his work De literis hebraicis (1515), the first phonetic transcriptions of Hebrew into Latin and Spanish. His interpretations of the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek originals and not from Latin, with the support of other Hebraists of Jewish origin, created numerous problems for him with the ecclesiastical and academic authorities of Salamanca and, later, Alcalá. In fact, after the death of his protector, Queen Isabel of Castilla, Nebrija was prosecuted by the Inquisition so that he would not continue his philological studies with which he proposed to return the biblical texts to their original state, free of interpolations, counting for the case of the Old Testament with the help of the rabbis, while the Inquisition wanted to wrest that task from the philologists and leave it to theologians, although, Nebrija argued, almost none of them knew Hebrew.

The start of the inquisitorial process of the Court of the Holy Office against Nebrija was directed by the Inquisitor General Diego de Deza, contrary to Nebrija's theses in favor of translating and interpreting the Bible from the originals. If it was closed, without Nebrija reaching the inquisitorial jails, it could be because in 1507 Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros replaced Deza as head of the court. Nebrija addressed his Apologia to Cisneros himself, edited by Arnao Guillén de Brocar in Logroño, probably in the summer of 1507.

Works

Rules of orthographia in the Castilian language (1517) was the first book on Spanish spelling.

• Latin introductions (1481). Introductions latinae, Salamanca [with successive reprints; third editorial, Salamanca, 1495 [known as Recognitio]; last edition corrected by the author: Alcalá, Arnao Guillén de Brocar, 1523]. Facsimile edition: Salamanca, University, 1981, with presentation of P. Amat and proemio de E. de Bustos.
• Materies grammaticeSalamanca, [only two leaves are preserved in Oxford, which can, however, correspond to the homonymous work of Nieto] (c. 1485).
• First repetition [chuckles]De membris et partibus grammaticae] [loss] (c. 1485).
• Secondary repetition [chuckles]De corruptis ignorantia quarundarum litterarum vocibus], Salamanca (1486).
• Pilgrimage of the King and Queen to Santiago [chuckles]Peregrinatio Regis et Reginae ad Sanctum Iacobum], Salamanca (1486)
• Introducciones Latina contrapuesto el romance al latin (c. 1488) Edition with introduction of Miguel Angel Esparza and Vicente Calvo. Nodus Publikationen, Münster. 1996.
• Differentiae excepte ex laurentio valla Nonio marcello & servio Honorato, Salamanca (c. 1489).
• Anotationes in libris pandectarum [chuckles]Ms.] (c. 1489). Modern edition: Madrid, Instituto Nacional de Estudios Jurídicos, 1965; A. García y García (ed.) and A. Domingo (trad.), Salamanca, University, 1996.
• Sample of Spanish Antiquities (c. 1491), Burgos, Fadrique de Basel. Modern edition: González Llubera, London, Oxford University Press, 1926.
• Art of the Castilian language (1492).
• Latin-Spanish dictionary (1492).
• Spanish-Latin Vocabulary (1494).
• Cosmographia, Salamanca, s. n., (c. 1498).
• Orationes (1500).
• Apology, Logroño, Arnao Guillén de Brocar (1507).
• De liberis educandis libellus (1509).
• De literis hebraicis (1515). Full title: From literis hebraicis cum quibusdam annotationibus in scripturam sacramAlcalá, Arnao Guillén de Brocar (c. 1515).
• Table of the diversity of days and hoursAlcalá, Arnao Guillén de Brocar (c. 1516). Modern edition: Fundación Antonio de Nebrija, 2001.
• Treaty on the Diversity of Days and Hours and Hours (1516 or 1517).
• Rules of spelling in the Castilian languageAlcalá de Henares, Arnao Guillén de Brocar, (1517)
• Medicineli matterAlcalá, Arnao Guillén de Brocar (1518).
• Latin-French DictionaryParis, Rénauld Chaudière (1519).
• In Reuclinum Phorcensem et Erasmum RoterdanumAlcala de Henares (1522).
• ThalichristiaAlcalá, Arnao Guillén de Brocar, (1522).

Posthumously published:

• Rules of spelling in the Castilian language (1523).
• Artis rhetoricae compendiosa coaptatio (1529)
• Dictionarium medicumAntwerp (1545). Modern edition: Dictionarium medicum: Elio Antonio de Nebrija Medical Dictionary, introduction, edition and glossary of Avelina Carrera de la Red, Salamanca, Universidad, 2001.
• Rerum a Fernando & Elisabe Hispaniarum felicissimis Regibus gestarum Decades duas; necnon belli Nauariensis duos, Granada, Sancho de Nebrija (1545).

Nebrija also wrote minor works on pedagogy, weights, measurements, numeration, cosmography, theology, medicine, law, etc.

Specialists in Nebrija

Among the specialists in Antonio de Nebrija in Spanish, mention should be made of Antonio Fontán, author of a celebrated book entitled Antonio de Nebrija, Prince of Spanish Humanists (1992), Félix G. Olmedo, Pedro Lemus and Rubio, Eugenio de Bustos Tovar, Carmen Codoñer, Miguel Ángel Esparza Torres, Juan Antonio González-Iglesias, José Jesús Gómez Asencio, Antonio Quilis, Hans-Josef Niederehe, Francisco Rico, Emilio Ridruejo, Alonso Zamora Vicente, Aurora Egido, Teresa Jiménez Calvente, Pedro Martín Baños, José Antonio Millán or Lola Pons Rodríguez.

At the University of Cádiz, the main research group on Humanism and Classical Tradition, directed by José María Maestre Maestre, is called, precisely, “Elio Antonio de Nebrija”.

Institutions called Nebrija

In Spain there are several institutions with the name of Nebrija, in honor of the humanist, linked to the education and culture sector. The Complutense University has an Antonio de Nebrija Residence Hall, founded in 1951.

The Antonio de Nebrija Foundation has existed in Madrid since 1987, the origin of the Nebrija University, created in 1995. It is the only university in the world that bears the name of Nebrija and, in addition to Spain, it is present with its Nebrija Institutes in Latin America, Jakarta (Indonesia) and Nanjing (China). Also in Madrid there is a Nebrija Hispanic Studies Center within the Nebrija Institutes, as well as the Nebrija Residences in three locations in Madrid, for university students.

In Alcalá de Henares, a CEIP Antonio de Nebrija was inaugurated in 1972, in the town where the famous grammarian lived and died. In addition, in Móstoles there is a secondary school. In Madrid there is also a Nebrija Rosales School. In Lebrija (Seville) there is an Antonio de Nebrija School, which emerged from an old High School founded in 1946. And another with the same name in the Region of Murcia, in a district of the municipality of Murcia called Cabezo de Torres. In Zalamea de la Serena, a town in Extremadura where Nebrija lived for a few years and wrote part of his Castilian Grammar , a secondary school bears his name.

In La Coruña there is a Nebrija Vocational Training Center and in Puentes de García Rodríguez, in the same Galician province, there was a Nebrija College (founded in 1950), now closed. It ceased its activity in 2002. Since 1972, there has been a School for Infant and Primary Education in Jerez de la Frontera called Antonio de Nebrija Jerez.

There is also a Nebrija Cultural Association in Spain, as well as a digital corpus on Nebrija and a cultural dissemination website called Corpus Nebrissense created in 2011 by Pedro Martín Baños. In 2016, the Elio Antonio de Nebrija V Centenary Foundation in order to promote the V Centenary of Nebrija's death, in 2022.

In Spain there are Antonio de Nebrija streets in: Madrid (2 streets, in Atocha and Travesía Nebrija, in Moncloa), Alcalá de Henares, Alcobendas, Valladolid, León, La Coruña, Logroño, Badajoz, Seville, in the neighborhood of the Hope of the Garden City, in Gines and Bormujos), Tenerife, Lebrija, Torremolinos, Berja and Utrera.

In the United States, south of Los Angeles (California), in Misión Viejo, in Orange County, there is a street called Nebrija Street, which connects Azorín street with El Greco street, as a Hispanic tribute to this Californian town founded as a city in 1960 on the site of the San Gabriel Mission, which Spanish ecclesiastics founded in 1771.

In Hermosillo (Sonora, Mexico) there is a Nebrija Residence, which functions as a nursing home, on Puerta del Real street. Also in Mexico, in Chihuahua, a Nebrija street, which connects L. Von Ranke street with Pedro de Oliveira street, was named in memory of the grammarian. In Cuenca (Ecuador) there is a Nebrija street, next to the Bilbao park.

In 1968, the Cine-Club Nebrija was founded in Alcalá de Henares, which was later renamed the Antonio de Nebrija Cultural Club.

V Nebrija Centenary

The V Centenary of the death of Elio Antonio de Nebrija has been declared in Spain an "Event of Exceptional Public Interest". The declaration of the anniversary supposes a support program that began from the entry into force of the 2021 Budgets and will last until December 30, 2023. As announced by the Presidency of the Government of Spain through its official portal La Moncloa, on October 13, 2021, the Inter-Administrative Commission for the V Centenary of Antonio de Nebrija, made up of fifteen institutions, was established in Madrid.

Correos issued, in 2022, a stamp on the occasion of this commemoration.

Acknowledgment

Since 1875 there has been a medallion dedicated to Nebrija in the Plenary Hall of the Alcalá de Henares Town Hall.