12 Facts About Hieronymus Wolf

Hieronymus Wolf was a sixteenth-century German historian and humanist, most famous for introducing a system of Roman historiography that eventually became the standard in works of medieval Byzantine history.

Hieronymus Wolf's father, allegedly of noble origin, was an office clerk and much impoverished.

Hieronymus Wolf studied, on and off, in Wittenberg and was very impressed with Melanchthon and directly exposed to Lutheran teaching.

Hieronymus Wolf's translation was published in 1549 by well-known publishing house Oporinus, which made his name known to the Fugger family in Augsburg.

Hieronymus Wolf got a position as a secretary and librarian of Fugger Library in 1551.

Hieronymus Wolf made his reputation as a scholar of Isocrates and first published an edition of him at Paris in 1551.

Six years later, Hieronymus Wolf was appointed first rector of Gelehrtenschule in the building of St Anne Carmelite cloister, subsequently known as St Anne Gymnasium.

Hieronymus Wolf was a sick man throughout his life.

Hieronymus Wolf's initiative led to the hiring of two outstanding faculty: Georg Henisch and Simon Fabricius.

Hieronymus Wolf continued to work in Augsburg's library, but his life's work was outside the traditional fields proposed by humanism.

Rather, interest was stirred from a different direction, that of discovering and explaining the history that led to the conquest of much of eastern Europe by the Ottomans, whom Hieronymus Wolf lived to see during their Siege of Vienna.

Hieronymus Wolf focused primarily on Greek history, and published his work in 1557 under the title Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, which was more a collection of Byzantine sources than a comprehensive history.