Jan Gruter

Jan Gruter or Gruytère,¹ Latinized as Janus Gruterus (3 December 1560 – 20 September 1627), was a Flemish-born philologist, scholar, and librarian.

Life

Jan Gruter was born in Antwerp. His father was Wouter Gruter, who was a merchant and city administrator of Antwerp, and his mother was Catharina Tishem from Norwich in England. ² To avoid religious persecution in the early stages of the Eighty Years' War, his parents emigrated to England while he was a child. For some years he studied at Caius College, Cambridge,³ after which he went to Leiden. In 1584 he obtained the degree of doctor iuris. He then left the Netherlands and commenced a period of travel that brought him to France, Switzerland, Italy and finally to North and East Germany. His Neo-Latin poems are published in Heidelberg at this time.²

In 1590, Gruter was appointed professor of history at the University of Wittenberg.⁴ As a Calvinist, he refused to subscribe to the formula concordiae, the authoritative Lutheran statement of faith, and lost his position as a result in 1592.² From 1589 to 1592, he taught at Rostock, after which he went to , where in 1602 he was appointed to the university. He died at Bierhelderhof, Heidelberg.