Everything about Johann Albert Fabricius totally explained
Johann Albert Fabricius (
November 11,
1668 -
April 30,
1736), was a
German classical scholar and bibliographer.
He was born at
Leipzig. His father, Werner Fabricius, director of music in the church of St. Paul at Leipzig, was the author of several works, the most important being
Deliciae Harmonicae (1656). The son received his early education from his father, who on his deathbed recommended him to the care of the theologian
Valentin Alberti.
He studied under
J.G. Herrichen, and afterwards at
Quedlinburg under
Samuel Schmid. It was in Schmid’s library, as he afterwards said, that he found the two books,
Kaspar von Barth's compendium
Adversariorum libri LX (1624) and
Daniel Georg Morhof's
Polyhistor (1688), which suggested to him the idea of his
Bibliothecæ, the kind of works on which his great reputation was ultimately founded.
Having returned to Leipzig in 1686, he published anonymously (two years later) his first work,
Scriptorum recentiorum decas, an attack on ten writers of the day. His
Decas Decadum, sive plagiariorum et pseudonymorum centuria (1689) is the only one of his works to which he signs the name Faber. He then applied himself to the study of medicine, which, however, he relinquished for that of
theology; and having gone to
Hamburg in 1693, he proposed to travel abroad, when the unexpected tidings that the expense of his education had absorbed his whole patrimony, and even left him in debt to his trustee, forced him to abandon his project.
He therefore remained at Hamburg in the capacity of librarian to
J.F. Mayer. In 1696 he accompanied his patron to
Sweden; and on his return to Hamburg, not long afterwards, he became a candidate for the chair of logic and philosophy. The suffrages being equally divided between Fabricius and
Sebastian Edzardus, one of his opponents, the appointment was decided by lot in favour of Edzardus; but in 1699 Fabricius succeeded
Vincent Placcius in the chair of
rhetoric and
ethics, a post which he held until his death, refusing invitations to
Greifswald,
Kiel,
Giessen, and
Wittenberg. He died at Hamburg.
Fabricius is credited with 128 books, but very many of them were only books which he'd edited. One of the most famed and laborious of these is the
Bibliotheca Latina (1697, republished in an improved and amended form by
JA Ernesti, 1773). The divisions of the compilation are--the writers to the age of
Tiberius; thence to that of the Antonines; and thirdly, to the decay of the language; a fourth gives fragments from old authors, and chapters on early Christian literature. A supplementary work was
Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae Aetatis (1734-1736; supplementary volume by C Schottgen, 1746; ed. Mansi, 1754). His
chef-d'oeuvre, however, is the
Bibliotheca Graeca (1705-1728, revised and continued by
G.C. Harles, 1790—1812), a work which has justly been denominated
maximus antiquae eruditionis thesaurus. Its divisions are marked off by
Homer,
Plato,
Jesus,
Constantine, and the capture of
Constantinople in
1453, while a sixth section is devoted to canon law, jurisprudence and medicine.
Of his remaining works we may mention:
Bibliotheca Antiquaria, an account of the writers whose works illustrated Hebrew, Greek, Roman and Christian antiquities (1713);
Centifolium Lutheranum, a
Lutheran bibliography (1728);
Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica (1718). His
Codex Apocryphus (1703) is still considered indispensable as an authority on apocryphal Christian literature. The details of the life of Fabricius are to be found in
De Vita et Scriptis J.A. Fabricii Commentarius, by his son-in-law,
H.S. Reimarus, the well-known editor of
Dio Cassius, published at Hamburg, 1737; see also
C.F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber's
Allgemeine Encyclopaedie, and
J.E. Sandys,
Hist. Class. Schol. iii (1908).
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