Assignment: Read and review the material listed below. Then, consider the question at the bottom of the page.
Answer them in a short (1-2 pages) response paper, and upload it through this assignment.
1) Review sections 84, 85, and 86 in Medieval Iberia
2) Read Ivan Illich's brief description of Antonio de Nebrija's work on Castilian grammar, dedicated to Queen Isabella:
Empire Needs "Language" as Consort
"I shall translate and comment on sections of the six-page introduction to Nebrija's grammar. Remember, then, that the colophon of the GramáticaCastellana notes that it came off the press in Salamanca on the 18th of August, just fifteen days after Columbus had sailed.
My lllustrious Queen. Whenever I ponder over the tokens of the past that have been preserved in writing, I am forced to the very same conclusion. Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate. Together they come into being, together they grow and flower, and together they decline.
To understand what la lengua, "language," meant for Nebrija, it is necessary to know who he was. Antonio Martinez de la Cala, a converso, descendant of Jewish converts, had decided at age nineteen that Latin, at least on the Iberian peninsula, had become so corrupted that one could say it had died of neglect.
Thus Spain was left without a language (unalengua) worthy of the name. The languages of Scripture - Greek, Latin, Hebrew - clearly were something other than the speech of the people.
Nebrija then went to Italy where, in his opinion, Latin was least corrupted. When he returned to Spain, his contemporary Herñan Nunez wrote that it was like Orpheus bringing Euridice back from Hades. During the next twenty years, Nebrija dedicated himself to the renewal of classical grammar and rhetoric. The first full book printed in Salamanca was his Latin grammar (1482).
When he reached his forties and began to age -as he puts it - he discovered that he could make a language out of the speech forms he daily encountered in Spain - to engineer, to synthesize chemically, a language. He then wrote his Spanish grammar, the first in any modern European tongue.
The converso uses his classical formation to extend the juridic category of consuetudohispaniae to the realm of language. Throughout the Iberian peninsula, crowds speaking various languages gather for pogroms against the Jewish outsider at the very moment when the cosmopolitan converso offers his services to the Crown - the creation of one language suitable for use wherever the sword could carry it."
3) Next, check out the Complutense Polyglot, a massive Bible project sponsored originally by Fernando and Isabella.
https://www.wdl.org/en/item/10636/
4) Finish up watching John Green's Crash Course video about their grandson and successor, Charles
V. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYzW3BSj0I
Taken as a whole, what impression about the reign of Fernando and Isabella do these various projects (Conquest of Granada, Voyage of Columbus, Expulsion of the Jews, Nebrija'sGrammatica, and the Polyglot bible) give? Consider also, perhaps, two of the mottos of their reign: Pope Alexander VI, in 1493, gave them the title "most catholic majesties" (consider what the word catholic really means);
Nebrija is also said to have created one of their mottos, tantomonta, montatanto, which translates as "as much one, so much the other". Does Charles V tell us anything else about the goals and image of Fernando and Isabella?
So answer this question: Some historians have said they were attempting to create a universal monarchy (the leaders, if not the outright rulers, of all of Christendom) and that even if they didn't necessarily succeed, their grandson got pretty close. How do all of these elements suggest this agenda?