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

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 Heidelberg, where in 1602 he was appointed librarian to the university. He died at Bierhelderhof, Heidelberg.^[4]

Gruter's chief works were:^[4]

• Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani^[a] (2 vols., Heidelberg, 1603)
• Lampas, sive fax artium liberalium^[b] (7 vols., Frankfort-am-Main, 1602–1634).

Bibliography

• Baynes, T. S.; Smith, W. R., eds. (1880). "Gruter, Jan" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (9th ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 226.
• "Gruter, Janus (GRTR577J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
• Fuchs, Peter (1966). "Gruter, Jan". Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German). Vol. 7 (Online ed.). pp. 238–240.

Attribution:

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Gruter, Jan". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 641.