Antonio Martinez de Cala y Jarana or Elio Antonio de Nebrija was born in 1444 in Lebrija and died in 1522 in Alcalá de Henares. He was one the most prominent figures of Spanish Humanism, nowadays recognized as the author of the first grammar of a vernacular language, Gramatica castellana (1492), and the person who established the first rules that would shape modern Spanish language. In his time, he was a recognized Grammaticus, a Latin teacher, who fed the dream bringing cultural flourishing and splendor to his nation by recovering the Latin tradition contained in the classic texts. His wit, new methods and enterprising personality ensured his success as a teacher and businessman (he was also a printer and bookseller) with links to royal power and the Church.
The first years of education in Salamanca gave Antonio the possibility to decide the name that would be his until his adulthood, when the name Aelius Antonius Nebrissensis burst on the Spanish publishing scene as the author of the Introductiones Latinae in 1481. The original name during his school years was always Antonius de Lebrixa. As a young adult, Antonio was sent to Bologna to study theology for five years, not ten as the he affirmed it in his prologue of the Vocabulario, but his real interests, since he was passionate about classic languages and letters, led him to the study of rhetoric and grammar. His education included the analysis of manuscripts and the first printed books of classic authors, setting the background for his future career as an important linguist, grammarian, teacher, professor, lexicographer, translator, writer, poet and royal chronicler.
Antonio returned to Castile in 1470, with him he had the conviction that changes could only be attained in his motherland through the transformation of the basis of society, and his weapon against barbarism was the education in Latin. The studia humanitatis meant the knowledge and mastery of the Latin language and hence, the key to have access to the meaning of ancient texts. According to him, the path to reach humanism was through the recovery of Latin as the unifying language of society and the eradication of the elements that had stained the culture and values in his motherland. To accomplish his ambitions, Antonio de Lebrixa decided to attack barbarism where it was most dangerous, at the universities. As one of the heirs of Italian humanism, Nebrija saw the flaws in the way in which Latin was taught at the universities and became a teacher himself at Salamanca University, one of the most prestigious in Spain and Europe, to implement his own didactics. At the university, the young teacher obtained two chairs: one to teach grammar and the other to teach poetics, and exceptionally, the university granted him the two corresponding salaries. His first enterprise as a teacher was producing a new method able to make the learning of Latin easier.
The Introductiones Latinae had a total of 203 editions, 80 of them were printed out of Spain since it was sold everywhere in Europe. The popularity of his bestseller gave him the required reputation to be introduced to the court where, through Fray Hernando de Talavera, he would meet Isabella la Católica. Gastañaga Ponce de León (2015) affirms, “to Nebrija, the leap from the university to the court must be a necessary step to prove the validity of his ideas and methods”, especially in a time where the Crown promoted and sponsored intellectual efforts aimed at reinforcing national cohesion and the diffusion of cultural values. Under the advice of her highness, Nebrija produced a particular edition of the Introductiones in 1486. This was a bilingual (Latin-Castilian) version for "religious women and virgins dedicated to God, without the participation of men, could know something of the Latin language".
Nebrija’s success was such that his works were not only published widely throughout Europe, they were also pirated which made the control over the editions practically impossible. This struggle made him find a way to become one of the first authors in obtaining the privilegio, or copyright, to have absolute control over the reproduction of his work.
A few years later, Nebrija would publish Grammatica Castellana, the first grammar of a vernacular language and the product of his concern over the fact that the language spoken was not attached, or reduced, to any rule. He believed that the lack of a proper literary tradition would lead to discrediting the Castilian language and the Castilian nation in the international context. As Gastañaga Ponce de León (2015) explains, to afford the authority of the language, the Castilian language needed authors and Nebrija understood that the fights against barbarism would not only be held with swords but also with pen. For better or worse, its publication occurred in 1492, a year marked by the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, the prospect of the Catholic monarchs to get rid of the arabic influence and the claim over the territories across the Atlantic by Columbus on behalf of the Spanish Crown and the Catholic church.
In the pages of Grammatica Castellana dedicated to Queen Isabella, Nebrija makes his allusion to language as companion of the empire. One could say that Nebrija’s work depicts what William Baer (1985) calls language policy, and Grammatica Castellana became a tool of the nationalist movement promoted from the institutions in which power resided since the unification of the regions of Aragon and Castile under one crown in 1479. “Language policy becomes the social glue through which… governments seek to bond these human fissures into a stable political and social whole” and the monarchs knew that to ensure the stability of their authority in their territories, it was required to bring all the different groups together under one language and one religion.
In the same year, Nebrija published another important work, Dictionarium latino hispanicum. An ambitious project in which the author’s main purpose was to overcome all “the vices and maladjustments” that he had been observing in the most widespread lexical repertoires of his time. By reducing the long explanations to just the equivalent in Castilian, removing the words that did not come from canonical authors and increasing the number of lemmas significantly, Nebrija renovated the decaying lexicographic system. His innovative work broke with the medieval tradition of other books of words of his time, it was modern and its utility was reflected in the number of editions printed.
A few years later, around 1494 or 1495, a second dictionary with similar characteristics was printed in the same city and apparently with the same press. The Dictionario hispano latinum, “with twenty-two thousand five hundred entries”, became a complementary work of the dictionary of 1492 and the first dictionary in Castilian. Pedro Alvarez de Miranda (2014) affirms that Nebrija not only prepared the path for monolingual lexicography, but also had an impact on the lexicography of other vernacular languages in Europe thanks to the structure used in it: an explanation in vernacular language and its equivalent in Latin.
The editorial success of these two dictionaries was due to their main purpose, the learning of the Latin language. Both dictionaries were practical tools for their users when decoding and coding the classic language; this led to the printing of a single volume containing both dictionaries in 1503, just as if it were a bidirectional bilingual dictionary. The Dictionarium latino hispanicum and Dictionario hispano latino were edited in 1513 and repeatedly reprinted all along the 16th and 17th centuries.
In 1509, Nebrija became chronista regio after his chair at the university of Alcala was taken from him due to his absenteeism. In 1517, after 25 years of the publication of Gramatica castellana, Nebrija published Reglas de orthographia en la lengua castellana, a work that completes the principles and rules proposed in the grammar. Antonio de Nebrija died in Alcalá de Henares, victim of a paralysis or apoplexy on the 2nd of June, 1522.