He studied at the historical city of Granada; in his ecclesiastical career, he was chaplain of the illustrious cardinal and archbishop of Toledo, Fray Gonzalo Ximénez de Cisneros, and priest of the parish of San Miguel in his hometown. Herrera had two brothers, no less notorious than him in his time.
Hernando Alonso de Herrera, the elder, was the first professor of rhetoric at University of Alcalá, and Diego Hernandez Herrera, the second, excelled in music and was the first organist of the Church of San Ildefonso (Alcalá).
His family and personal connections placed him within the most select and progressive intellectual circle of the humanist movement of his time. His work emerged in tandem with the movement for a profound renewal of cultural frameworks and Cisneros’s reformist concerns; this would have a decisive influence on the way he expressed both his ideological and literary ideas. The work of the illustrious chaplain—who wrote in our native language, founded the University of Alcalá de Henares, and served as a disseminator, initiator, and patron of the first work of agriculture.
After the first printed edition of his work, he made other trips that allowed him to make a considerable addition to his previous publication.
His eminence, Cardinal Cisneros, who had so many initiatives for the achievement of the aggrandizement of Spain, with the understanding that the main foundation of prosperity in a country such as ours should be farming and animal husbandry.
It was already known that Latin editions of Columella’s work existed, as well as Spanish manuscripts in Arabic by distinguished writers, as we have seen, but a translator was needed to gather these scattered elements and render them into Spanish so that agricultural problems and their solutions could be disseminated throughout the country.
Cisneros commissioned his learned chaplain, G. Alonso de Herrera, to write this work. Paid for by the distinguished cardinal, the first edition was published in Alcalá de Henares, and at his expense, free copies were distributed in all the cities, towns, and villages of his archdiocese of the agricultural work by the learned priest and geoponic expert, written in folio format, a volume of 354 pages; it contains a detailed account of everything a farmer must do on a daily basis and the goals he must pursue, and for this reason, this great book was preserved and passed down as a family heirloom.
It is true that, as the Count of Campomanes wrote, asking whether Herrera, just as he was familiar with the works of the Greek and Roman authors, or our Columela and some of the Arabs, he would have known Abu Zacaria Iahia; his work would have had more character of agriculture, national.
As for ignorance, dispensed with crops that only in a few European countries, like ours, are given and which are a huge sum of wealth. Even with this capital defect, he held the book of Herrera, a great influence on the progress of agriculture and national livestock.
Another issue of interest, highly scientific, offers the work of Agriculture Herrera, giving it the common Spanish names of many plants that for the first time are given earlier than in any other book.
