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Johannes Campensis

Christian Hebraist (1490–1538)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 4, 2026
Entity authorityQ6265913 ↗
Source-derived summary

Jan Van Campen, Latinized Johannes Campensis (c. 1490–1538) was a Christian Hebraist from the Habsburg Netherlands who taught Hebrew in Leuven and Kraków.

Life

Campensis was born at Kampen, Overijssel around 1490. He may have learned Hebrew from Johann Reuchlin, and from 1520 to 1531 taught the language at the Collegium Trilingue attached to the University of Leuven. In 1528 he published a work on Hebrew grammar with Dirk Martens, based on the writings of Elias Levita, which went through several editions. At Nuremberg in 1532 he published a paraphrase of the Psalms based on the Hebrew text, and his paraphrase of Ecclesiastes was published in Paris the same year.

After 1531 he travelled through Germany and Poland to consult rabbis and other experts. For a while he taught at Kraków on the invitation of Prince-Bishop Piotr Tomicki. He also spent two years in Venice and visited Rome. On his return journey to the Low Countries he contracted the plague, dying at Freiburg im Breisgau on 7 September 1538.

Publications

Ex variis libellis Eliae grammaticorum omnium doctissimi, huc fere congestum est opéra Johannis Campensis, quidquid ad absolutam grammaticam hebràicam est necessarium (Leuven, 1528; Kraków, 1534; Paris, 1539, 1543).

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Johannes Campensis” is christian Hebraist (1490–1538). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Johannes, Campensis and Christian, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1490, 1538, 1520, 1531—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1490-01-01. For this dossier, Johannes, Campensis and Christian is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “christian Hebraist (1490–1538)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6265913. VIAF identifies the subject as 54157271. The Library of Congress control number is n86113662. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1490, 1538, 1520 and 1531.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Johannes Campensis” 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.