1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Antonio de Lebrija

ANTONIO DE LEBRIJA [Antonius Nebrissensis], (1444–1522), Spanish scholar, was born at Lebrija in the province of Andalusia. After studying at Salamanca he resided for ten years in Italy, and completed his education at Bologna University. On his return to Spain (1473), he devoted himself to the advancement of classical learning amongst his countrymen. After holding the professorship of poetry and grammar at Salamanca, he was transferred to the university of Alcalá de Henares, where he lectured until his death in 1522, at the age of seventy-eight. His services to the cause of classical literature in Spain have been compared with those rendered by Valla, Erasmus and Budaeus to Italy, Holland and France. He produced a large number of works on a variety of subjects, including a Latin and Spanish dictionary, commentaries on Sedulius and Persius, and a Compendium of Rhetoric, based on Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. His most ambitious work was his chronicle entitled Rerum in Hispania Gestarum Decades (published in 1545 by his son as an original work by his father), which twenty years later was found to be merely a Latin translation of the Spanish chronicle of Pulgar, which was published at Saragossa in 1567. De Lebrija also took part in the production of the Complutense polyglot Bible published under the patronage of Cardinal Jimenes.

Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, i. 132 (1888); Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, i. 410 (note); MacCrie, The Reformation in Spain in the Sixteenth Century (1829).