Konrad Pellikan
Old Testament scholar and a correspondent of Desiderius Erasmus
Konrad Pellikan (German: Conrad Kürsner; Latin: Conradus Pellicanus; sometimes anglicized as Conrad Pellican; 8 January 1478 – 6 April 1556) was an Alsatian Protestant theologian, humanist, Protestant reformer and Christian Hebraist who worked chiefly in Switzerland.
Life
Pellikan was born on 8 January 1478 in Rouffach, Alsace. His German surname, "Kurscherer" ("Kürsner") was changed to "Pellicanus" by his mother's brother, Jodocus Gallus, an ecclesiastic connected with the University of Heidelberg, who supported his nephew for sixteen months at the university in 1491-1492. On returning to Rouffach, he entered the Franciscan convent. There he taught gratis at the convents school in order he might borrow books from the library, and in his sixteenth year resolved to become a friar. This step helped his studies, for he was sent to Tübingen in 1496 and became a favorite pupil of the guardian of the Minorite convent there, Paulus Scriptoris, a man of considerable general learning.
He taught Hebrew, Greek, mathematics and cosmography at the Franciscan monastery of St. Katherina in Rouffach, in the upper Alsace. He subsequently taught at Pforzheim and Tübingen. There seems to have been at that time in southwest Germany a considerable amount of sturdy independent thought among the Franciscans; Pellikan himself became a Protestant very gradually, and without any such revulsion of feeling as marked Martin Luther's conversion.
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This entry incorporates text from “Konrad Pellikan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.