Das ‘Universal Vocabulario’ Des Alfonso Fernández De Palencia (1490) und Seine Quelle

Two years before the Dictionarium ex sermone Latino in hispaniensem of the great humanist Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522), there appeared in Seville the Vniversal vocabulario en latin y en Romance collegido por el cronista Alfonso de Palentia. This dictionary is printed in two columns; the left-hand column contains a Latin-Latin lexicon, the right-hand one a Latin-Spanish lexicon. The latter is not an independent work; rather the Latin interpretations are here simply translated into Spanish. The authors of both dictionaries state expressly their intention of ‘rooting out’ the corrupt medieval Latin and providing a means of returning to a good form of classical Latin. However, a closer examination of the sources of the Vniversal vocabulario shows that it is based exclusively on a medieval lexicon of the 11th century, namely, on the Elementarium Doctrinae rudimentum of a certain Papias, about whom nothing further is known. The similarity between the two dictionaries is so great that the Vniversal vocabulario can simply be regarded as a reasonably faithful version of the Elementarium Doctrinae rudimentum. As a result, the achievement of Alfonso Fernández de Palencia is reduced to that of a mere translator.