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.