Johannes Schefferus (February 2, 1621 - March 26, 1679) was born in Strassburg, the present Strasbourg, in present-day France (at that time it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and outside of France).
Schefferus came from a patrician Strassburg family (Scheffer), studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
He was one of the most important Swedish humanists of his time. Schefferus also spent time on philological and archaeological studies. His De orbibus tribus aureis became the first publication on Swedish archaeology. The story of the Saami, Lapponia (1673) became popular around Europe but was not translated into Swedish (as Lappland) until 1956. His posthumous publication, Suecia literata ("The Learned Sweden") (1680) is a Swedish history of science bibliography.
He was late in life involved in an intellectual dispute with (in particular) Olof Verelius (1618-1682) over the localation of the Temple at Uppsala. He argued that the temple should be found near the current location of Helga Trefaldighets kyrka (Church of the Holy Trinity) in Uppsala. It is today known that his opponents usually used forgery to meet his argumentation (this was presumably the cause parts of the largest survived Gothic text, Codex Argenteus, were retouched.)
In 1648, he married Regina Loccenia, the daughter of a previous (1628-1642) professor skytteanus, Johannes Loccenius, and had two sons (see Scheffer). He died in March 26, 1679.
Schefferus was born in Strasbourg but was summoned in his youth to Uppsala in Sweden and the Skyttian professors' chair in rhetoric and politics.
As Schefferus had never been to Lapland, De la Gardie attended to the matter of making sure that the priests of the northern districts wrote down accounts of the Lapps in their parishes.
Schefferus had access to the collections of De la Gardie and Antikvitetskollegiet, both of which he treated as his private museums for the study of objects from Lapland.
Schefferus came from a patrician Strassburg family ( Scheffer), studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
In 1648, he married Regina Loccenia, the daughter of a previous (1628-1642) professor skytteanus, Johannes Loccenius, and had two sons (see Scheffer).
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