The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Religious Studies,
#3451
Laurence Clarkson
1615 - 1667 (52 years)
Laurence Clarkson , sometimes called Claxton, born in Preston, Lancashire, was an English theologian and accused heretic. He was the most outspoken and notorious of the loose collection of radical Protestants known as the Ranters.
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John Kyparissiotes
1310 - 1378 (68 years)
John Kyparissiotes or Cyparissiotes , called “the Wise” by his contemporaries, was a Byzantine theologian and the leading Anti-Palamite writer in the period that followed the deaths of Nikephoros Gregoras and of Palamas himself . Of all the fourteenth-century opponents of Gregory Palamas, he was the most systematic theologian, and perhaps the ablest. Most of his works remain in original manuscripts, unedited; none has ever appeared in translation in a modern language. Although editions of some of his works have been made since the 1950s, most of them, published in small printings in Greece, a...
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Eustratios of Constantinople
Eustratios or Eustratius was a hagiographer, theologian and priest of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Eustratios was a native of Melitene. He was a pupil of Patriarch Eutychius of Constantinople , whose biography he wrote. It is a basically factual account, although not lacking in rhetorical flourish. It is an important source for the Second Council of Constantinople and for Eutychius' exile in Amaseia .
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Josias Simmler
1530 - 1576 (46 years)
Josias Simmler was a Swiss theologian and classicist, author of the first book relating solely to the Alps. Life The son of the former prior of the Cistercian convent of Kappel , he was born at Kappel, where his father was the Protestant pastor and schoolmaster till his death in 1557. In 1544 Simmler went to Zürich to continue his education under his godfather, the reformer, Heinrich Bullinger. After having completed his studies at Basel and Strasbourg, he returned to Zürich, and became pastor to the neighboring villages.
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John Warner
1581 - 1666 (85 years)
John Warner was an English churchman, Bishop of Rochester and royalist. Life and career Son of Harman Warner of London, merchant tailor, he was baptised at St. Clement Danes in the Strand on 17 September 1581. He became demy of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1599, and was elected fellow there in 1604. He proceeded M.A. in 1605, and D.D. in 1616. He was rector of St. Michael's, Crooked Lane, London, from 1614 to 1619, and was nominated prebendary and canon of Canterbury in 1616. He was instituted rector of Bishopsbourne, Kent, in 1619, rector of Hollingbourne, Kent, in 1624, and rector of St. Di...
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Petrus Mosellanus
1493 - 1524 (31 years)
Petrus Mosellanus Protegensis was a German humanist scholar. He is best known for the popular work on rhetoric, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis, and his Paedologia. He became professor at the University of Leipzig. He gave the opening Latin oration at the 1519 Leipzig Disputation between Johann Eck and Martin Luther.
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Francis X. Talbot
1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Francis Xavier Talbot was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who was active in Catholic literary and publishing circles, and became the President of Loyola College in Maryland. Born in Philadelphia, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1906, and was educated at St. Andrew-on-Hudson and Woodstock College. He taught for several years in New York City and at Boston College, before entering publishing as the literary editor of America magazine in 1923, of which he became the editor-in-chief in 1936. While in this role, he was also active in founding and editing several academic journals, including Thought, and establishing various Catholic literary societies and book clubs.
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Arlotto of Prato
1201 - 1286 (85 years)
Arlotto of Prato was an Italian Franciscan theologian. He became Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor at the end of his life. Arlotto is known also for the Quaestio de Aeternitate Mundi, and as a Biblical scholar. He compiled a Bible concordance, of the Latin Vulgate. This is sometimes cited as the first such. It was in fact based on an earlier thirteenth century work of Hugh of St. Cher. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that Arlotto's work was then used as a model for a Hebrew Bible concordance, by Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus.
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John Henry Hopkins
1792 - 1868 (76 years)
John Henry Hopkins was the first bishop of Episcopal Diocese of Vermont and the eighth Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. He was also an artist , a lawyer, an ironmonger, a musician and composer, a theologian, and an architect who introduced Gothic architecture into the United States.
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Aeschillus Petraeus
1593 - 1657 (64 years)
Æschillus Petræus was Bishop of Turku in 1652–1657. Biography Petræus was lecturer and Dean of the grammar school in Turku. He was also the first professor of theology at Turku Academy and Rector of the University. Petræus was from the Swedish-speaking part of Sweden, but well versed in the Finnish language. He, among other things, led a Bible Translation Committee and published the first grammar of the Finnish language, Linguae Finnicae brevis institutio in 1649. On 20 October 1652 he was appointed Bishop of Turku and was consecrated on 24 October at the Storkyrkan in Stockholm.
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Johann Friedrich Ludwig Volckmann
1758 - 1815 (57 years)
Johann Friedrich Ludwig Volckmann was a German theologian, lawyer and animal rights writer. Volckmann studied theology and law in Leipzig. He worked in his hometown of Arnstadt as a bailiff and later as a government and court advocate. In 1794, he founded the Verein der Literaturfreunde zu Arnstadt .
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Benedetto Justiniani
1550 - 1622 (72 years)
Benedetto Justiniani was a Jesuit theologian and Biblical scholar from Genoa, in what is today Italy. Justiniani entered the Jesuit noviciate at Rome in 1579 and later taught rhetoric in the Roman College, and then theology at Toulouse, Messina, and Rome. For more than twenty years, he served as head of the Roman College and regens of the Sacra Poenitentiaria . He also filled the post of Chief Preacher to the Pope. Pope Clement VIII appointed him theologian to Cardinal Thomas Cajetan, during his legation in Poland. Justiniani died at Rome in 1622.
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Conrad Porta
1541 - 1585 (44 years)
Conrad Porta was a Lutheran pastor of Mansfeld, and author of theologian tracts of the first generation following Martin Luther. His most notable work is the Jungfrawen-Spiegel of 1580 which he wrote on the request of the widowed Margareta von Mansfeld-Hinterort, duchess of Braunschweig-Lüneburg .
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Jacques-Hyacinthe Serry
1659 - 1738 (79 years)
Jacques-Hyacinthe Serry was a French Dominican Thomist theologian, controversialist and historian. At the University of Padua from 1698, he taught theology based more closely on Biblical and patristic authority.
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Krzysztof Crell-Spinowski
1622 - 1680 (58 years)
Krzysztof Crell-Spinowski was an Arian theologian, pastor of the church of the Polish Brethren. Christopher Crellius was the middle generation of three Socinian theologians: he was son of Johannes Crellius, and father of Samuel Crellius-Spinowski. Krzysztof Crell-Spinowski was educated first where he was born, at the Racovian Academy, then following the forced closure of the Racovian Academy in 1639, at the University of Leiden.
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Gabriel Piguet
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Gabriel Piguet was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, France. Involved in Catholic resistance to Nazism, he was imprisoned in the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp in 1944. He has been honoured as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial.
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William Archibald Spooner
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
William Archibald Spooner was a British clergyman and long-serving Oxford don. He was most notable for his absent-mindedness, and for supposedly mixing up the syllables in a spoken phrase, with unintentionally comic effect. Such phrases became known as spoonerisms, and are often used humorously. Many spoonerisms have been invented and attributed to Spooner.
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Geart Aeilco Wumkes
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Geart Aeilco Wumkes or G.A. Wumkies was a Protestant West Frisian language Bible translator, historian, and preacher of the Dutch Reformed Church. Major work His major work was the translation of the Bible into West Frisian, with the New Testament being published in 1933 and the Old Testament in 1943. The Old Testament was completed with the help of E. B. Folkertsma. The complete Bible was published in 1943.
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Johan Magnus Almqvist
1799 - 1873 (74 years)
Johan Magnus Almqvist was a Swedish theologian and parliamentarian. Biography Almqvist was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to civil servant and vicar and Gustava Brandelius. He began his studies at Uppsala University in 1819 and thereafter studied at Lund University, receiving his master's degree in philosophy in 1823. The following year he was ordained. In 1830, Almqvist became vicar of Skärstad Church near Jönköping and remained so until his death. From 1844 to 1866 he was a contractual provost and member of the Riksdag of the Estates. As a politician, he was a liberal and belonged to the opposition party within the clergy against its conservative majority.
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Jakob Martini
1570 - 1649 (79 years)
Jakob Martini was a German Lutheran theologian and philosopher. Biography Jakob Martini was born at Langenstein in the hill country to the west of Magdeburg. Adam Martini, his father, was a pastor.
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Fernando Castro Palao
1581 - 1633 (52 years)
Fernando Castro Palao was a Spanish Jesuit theologian. Life At the age of fifteen, in 1596, he entered the Society of Jesus. He taught philosophy at Valladolid, moral theology at Compostela, and scholastic theology at Salamanca.
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Joseph von Zhishman
1820 - 1894 (74 years)
Joseph von Zhishman was an Austrian lawyer and specialist in canon law. Zhishman was born in Ljubljana and baptized Josephus Zhishman. He attended high school and the Lyceum in Ljubljana. In 1839 he went to Vienna to study law and graduated in 1843. He continued his studies in oriental languages, obtained his doctorate, and worked in the philology and history department at the University of Vienna until 1851. After he passed the state examination in history, geography, Latin, and Greek for all high school classes in 1851, he taught at the Trieste State High School. In 1853 he was transferred to the Theresianum in Vienna.
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Pierre Fallon
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Pierre Fallon was a Belgian Jesuit priest, missionary in India, Professor of French literature at the University of Calcutta. In 1950 he founded the dialogue centre Shanti Bhavan in Calcutta; in 1960 the similar Shanti Sadan in North Calcutta; and later took charge of Shanti Nir.
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Asa Burton
1752 - 1836 (84 years)
Asa Burton was an American minister and theologian. Asa Burton was born on August 25, 1752, in Stonington, Connecticut, to Rachel and Jacob Burton, the sixth child in a family of thirteen. His family moved to Preston when he was very young. When he was about fourteen, his father moved again to Norwich, Vermont.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz was a Protestant theologian and writer. Life Bautz studied theology in Münster, Bethel , Berlin and Tübingen. From February 1939 he was pastor in the Franz Arndt-Haus, a war invalid home in Volmarstein, and later pastor in Kriescht and Annarode. From 1954 to 1958 he worked for the Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft as a publishing editor and at the same time as a parish representative at the parish of the Dorfkirche Stiepel. In 1959 he took over a sick leave in Heven . In the Stadt- und Landesbibliothek Dortmund as well as in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münst...
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany
1807 - 1876 (69 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany was a German Lutheran theologian, historian, librarian and publicist. His rationalist outlook, influenced by Georg Friedrich Daumer, forced him to retire from his post as vicar at St. Aegidius parish in Nuremberg. He became city librarian in Nuremberg in 1841. His early publications are pamphlets against Lutheran bigotry, specifically agitating against the Old Lutheran president of the Lutheran assembly in Munich, Friedrich von Roth. In 1855, Ghillany moved to Munich, but he did not succeed in finding employment as a civil servant or diplomat, and he went on to publish multi-volume works on European history.
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John Davies
1567 - 1644 (77 years)
John Davies, Mallwyd was one of Wales's leading scholars of the late Renaissance. He wrote a Welsh grammar and dictionary. He was also a translator and editor and an ordained minister of the Church of England.
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William Ince
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
William Ince was a British theologian. He was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, from 1878. Life Ince was educated at King's College School and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he took first-class honours in Literae Humaniores .
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Otto of Bamberg
1060 - 1139 (79 years)
Otto of Bamberg was a German missionary and papal legate who converted much of medieval Pomerania to Christianity. He was the bishop of Bamberg from 1102 until his death. He was canonized in 1189. Early life Three biographies of Otto were written in the decades after his death. Wolfger of Prüfening wrote his between 1140 and 1146 at Prüfening Abbey; Ebo of Michelsberg wrote between 1151 and 1159
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John Hales
1584 - 1656 (72 years)
John Hales was an English cleric, theologian and writer. An eminent if modest and critic, his posthumous works earned him the title of the "Ever-memorable". Early life He was born in St. James' parish, Bath, on 19 April 1584. His father, John Hales, had an estate at Highchurch, near Bath, and was steward to the Horner family. After passing through the Bath grammar school, Hales went on 16 April 1597 as a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and graduated B.A. on 9 July 1603. He came to the notice of Sir Henry Savile, and was elected as a fellow of Merton College in 1605. He took orders; shone as a preacher, though not for his voice; and graduated M.
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Basil Manly Jr.
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
Basil Manly Jr. was an American Baptist minister and educator. He was one of a group of theologians instrumental in the formation of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in South Carolina. Early life and education Basil Manly Jr. was born December 19, 1825, in Edgefield District, South Carolina to Basil Manly Sr. , a prominent Baptist preacher and educator. He and his family moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, when Manly Jr. was 12 years old, as his father was president of the University of Alabama for nearly 20 years. He grew up in a planter's family; his father enslaved 40 people. In Tuscaloosa, Manly Jr.
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Maximilian van der Sandt
1578 - 1656 (78 years)
Maximilian van der Sandt, S.J. , known as Sandaus or Sandaeus, was a noted Dutch Jesuit theologian. Van der Sandt was born in Amsterdam, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. He entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, 21 November 1597; he taught philosophy at Würzburg and Sacred Scripture at Mainz. He became rector of the episcopal seminary at Würzburg.
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Erasmus D. McMaster
1806 - 1866 (60 years)
Erasmus Darwin McMaster, D.D. was a nineteenth-century American Presbyterian pastor, academic and theologian who served as president of Hanover College and Miami University. Along with Henry Ward Beecher, McMaster was one of the most vocal Presbyterian anti-slavery advocates in Indiana.
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Henri de Saint-Ignace
1630 - 1719 (89 years)
Henri de Saint-Ignace was a Belgian Carmelite theologian. Life A professor of moral theology, de Saint-Ignace participated in the controversies of his time on grace and free will. He professing himself a follower of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, but was also influenced by the views of Baius and Jansenius.
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John Hoppus
1789 - 1875 (86 years)
John Hoppus FRS , was an English Congregational minister, author, Fellow of the Royal Society, abolitionist and educational reformer. He was appointed the first Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Mind at the newly formed London University , a position he secured and held against his formidable opponents from 1829 to 1866.
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Henricus Franciscus Bracq
1804 - 1888 (84 years)
Henricus Franciscus Bracq was the 22nd bishop of Ghent, Belgium. Life Bracq was born in Ghent on 26 February 1804. He was ordained to the priesthood on 2 August 1827. From 1830 to 1864 he taught Sacred Scripture at the Major Seminary of Ghent, where he opposed the spread of the opinions of Lamennais. He was one of the founding editors of the Mémorial du Clergé and of De Vlaming, and an active contributor to the Journal historique et littéraire published in Liège. From 1836 to 1864 he was also confessor to the refounded Visitation Sisters of Ghent.
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Heinrich Grüber
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Heinrich Grüber was a Reformed theologian, pacifist and opponent of Nazism. Life Until 1933 Heinrich Grüber was born on 24 June 1891 in Stolberg in the Prussian Rhine Province . His parents were the teacher Ernst Grüber and Alwine Grüber, née Cleven from Gulpen, living in the Protestant diaspora among an else prevailingly Catholic population.
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Abner of Burgos
1270 - 1347 (77 years)
Abner of Burgos was a Jewish philosopher, a convert to Christianity and a polemical writer against his former religion. Known after his conversion as Alfonso of Valladolid or "Master Alfonso." Life As a student he acquired a certain mastery in Biblical and Talmudical studies, to which he added an intimate acquaintance with Peripatetic philosophy and astrology. What we know of his biography comes primarily from his own comments in his Moreh Zedek/Mostrador de justicia. According to that work, he stated that his religious doubts arose in 1295 when he treated a number of Jews for distress following their involvement in the failed messianic movement in Avila.
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Heinrich Joseph Floss
1819 - 1881 (62 years)
Heinrich Joseph Floß, or Floss , was a church historian and moral theologian in the 19th century. As a professor of theology at the University of Bonn, he edited a collection of the work of John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan theologian. During the Kulturkampf, Floss was constrained by the anti-Catholic legislation.
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César Malan
1787 - 1864 (77 years)
Henri Abraham César Malan was a Swiss Protestant minister and hymn-writer. Life Malan was born in Geneva, Republic of Geneva and was a believing Christian from childhood. After completing his education, he went to Marseilles, France, intending to learn business. But soon after, he entered the by then rationalistic Geneva Academy in preparation for the ministry. He was ordained in 1810.
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John Henry Augustus Bomberger
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
John Henry Augustus Bomberger was a German Reformed clergyman. He was president of Ursinus College, and did a translation and condensation of the Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.
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William Julius Mann
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
William Julius Mann was an American Lutheran theologian and author, born in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied there and at Tübingen and was ordained in 1841. Three years later he was invited by his friend Dr. Philip Schaff to come to the United States and settled in Philadelphia. There he was assistant pastor and pastor of St. Michael's and Zion's Church. From its establishment in 1864 almost to his death he was professor of symbolics at the Lutheran Theological Seminary. With Dr. Schaff he edited Der deutsche Kirchenfreund. His daughter, Emma T. Mann, wrote his Life, . His german and englis...
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John Grisdale
1845 - 1922 (77 years)
John Grisdale was an Anglican colonial bishop in the late 19th century. Grisdale was born in Bolton, Lancashire, on 25 June 1845 and educated at the Missionary College in Islington. He was ordained in 1870.
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Nicholas Magni
1355 - 1435 (80 years)
Nicholas Magni was a late medieval theologian, a professor at Prague University and Heidelberg University. Life Born in Jawor, Silesia, he studied in Vienna and in Prague , where he lived in a Polish college and represented Polish nation. He studied under professor Matthew of Krakow . Before 1392 he received priestly ordination. From 1392 he served as a priest of St. Gallus Church in Prague - Old Town, from about 1395 he started with lectures on theology from 1397 as a professor of theology and rector of Prague University. In 1402, he went to Heidelberg, where he was likewise made rector in 1406.
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Georg Heinrich Häberlin
1644 - 1699 (55 years)
Georg Heinrich Häberlin was a Lutheran theologian of Germany. Life Georg Heinrich Häberlin was born at Stuttgart on 30 September 1644. He studied at Tübingen, became deacon in 1668, doctor and professor of theology in 1681, member of the consistory and preacher in 1692, and died on 20 August 1699.
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Ilsley Boone
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Ilsley Silias Boone was a charismatic speaker, a powerful organizer, a magazine publisher and the founding father of the American Sunbathing Association later reorganized as the American Association for Nude Recreation . As a publisher he distributed the first nudist magazine in the United States. That publication eventually led to a challenge to the U.S. Postal Service's ban against sending obscene materials through the mail. Boone took his challenge all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which struck down the ban.
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Innocent
1600 - 1683 (83 years)
Innokenty Gizel was a Prussian-born historian, writer, and political and ecclesiastic figure, who had adopted Orthodox Christianity and made a substantial contribution to Ukrainian culture. Innokentiy Gizel was a rector of the Kyivan Theological School. In 1656, he was appointed archmandrite of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Innokentiy Gizel is known to have supported the unification of Ukraine and autonomy of the Kyiv clergy, simultaneously. Innokentiy Gizel is generally credited for writing the Synopsis in 1674, but some researchers deny his authorship.
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Pierre François le Courayer
1681 - 1776 (95 years)
Pierre François le Courayer was a French Catholic theological writer, for many years an expatriate in England. Life Pierre François le Courayer was born at Rouen. While canon regular and librarian of the abbey of St Genevieve at Paris, he conducted a correspondence with Archbishop William Wake on the subject of episcopal succession in England, which supplied him with material for his work, Dissertation sur la validité des ordinations des Anglais et sur la succession des évéques de l'Eglise anglicane, avec les preuves justificatives des faits avancés , published anonymously in 1723 with a fake publication location of Brussels.
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William Barret
1561 - 1659 (98 years)
William Barret was an English divine. Life He matriculated as a pensioner of Trinity College, Cambridge, on 1 February 1579–80. He proceeded to his M.A. degree in 1588, and was soon afterwards elected fellow of Caius College.
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Johannes Vorst
1623 - 1676 (53 years)
Johannes Vorst was a Protestant theologian of Germany. Vorst was born in Wieselburg in 1623. He studied, at Wittenberg, and was appointed in 1653 rector at Flensburg. In 1655 the Rostock University made him a licentiate of theology, and shortly afterwards he was called to Berlin as rector of the Joachimsthal Gymnasium. In 1660 he resigned his position, and became librarian to the elector of Brandenburg. He died on 4 August 1676.
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