Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas

Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1523–1600), also known as El Brocense, and in Latin as Franciscus Sanctius Brocensis, was a Spanish philologist and humanist.

There he served Queen Catherine I and King John III of Portugal and remained in the court of the Portuguese kingdom until the death of the princess in 1545.

This appears in his Arte para saber latín (1595), in the Grammaticæ Græcæ compendium (1581) and, above all, in the Veræ brevesque Latinæ institutiones (1587), where he corrected Nebrija's method.

[1] While the first grammarians of Humanism (Lorenzo Valla or Antonio de Nebrija) were still writing normative grammars based on the usus scribendi of the ancient authors, el Brocense took ratio (reason) as the cornerstone of his grammatical system.

He was determined to make everything fit within rational schemes, and in his grammatical interpretation gave a very important role to ellipsis, an essential tool of his system.

He had a mainly formal understanding of literary beauty, as revealed in his rhetorical treatises De arte dicendi (1556) and Organum dialecticum et rethoricum cunctis discipulis utilissimum et necessarium (Lyon, 1579).

He favoured Erasmus of Rotterdam and in his scientific works shows the encyclopedic inclinations that were characteristic of Humanism, as in Declaración y uso del reloj español (1549), Pomponii Melæ De situ orbis (1574) or Sphera mundi ex variis auctoribus concinnata (1579).