Antonio de Nebrija o el rastro de la verdad

Elio Antonio de Nebrija was known among us above all for his misunderstood phrase 'language was always a companion of the empire'. From his chair in Salamanca he wanted to increase the knowledge of Latin, the lingua franca of European culture. He wrote a Spanish grammar (the first published of a vulgar language) and produced Latin-Spanish and Spanish-Latin dictionaries, and an orthography of our language. He was interested in the phonetics of Spanish, Latin and Hebrew, and lamented the cultural catastrophe of the expulsion of the Jews. Because of his desire to delve into the work of the classics, he is comparable to the Italian humanists, with whom he was trained. He was concerned with practical and scientific questions, such as the real value of ancient measurements, at a time when Columbus was disputing in Salamanca about the size of the globe. His critical spirit led him to revise the canonical translation of the Scriptures. When Nebrija detected problems in his transmission (following the textual trail), the Inquisition tried to silence him. Nebrija was one of the first European authors to write almost exclusively for print, and the first to use the new copyright protection structure provided by royal privileges and fees. This biography wants to erase the imperial traits in the received Nebrija, and instead give us the proud and brilliant humanist, who did not hesitate to face his time in his search for the truth.