Johann Heinrich Alsted

Johann Heinrich Alsted (March 1588 - November 9, 1638) was a German Protestant divine.

He was some time professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn, in Nassau, and afterwards at Weissenburg (present Alba Iulia) in Transylvania, where he remained till his death in 1638. He was a prolific writer, and his "Encyclopaedia" (1630), the most considerable of the earlier works of that class, was long held in high estimation.

In his "The New England Mind", Perry Miller writes about the "Encyclopaedia", "It was indeed nothing short of a summary, in sequential and numbered paragraphs, of everything that the mind of European man had yet conceived or discovered. The works of over five hundred authors, from Aristotle to James I, were digested and methodized, including those of Aquinas, Scotus, and medieval theology, as also those of medieval science, such as "De Natura Rerum"." ["The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century" (Harvard, 1982), pp. 102-103.]

Alsted has been called 'one of the most important encyclopedists of all time'. [ [http://magyar-irodalom.elte.hu/contentware/marci/alstedfr.htm] . "The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy", p.632, in the context of Calvinist metaphysics, states "In the works of authors like Clemens Timpler of Heidelberg and Steinfurt, Bartolomaeus Keckermann of Heidelberg and Danzig, and Johann Heinrich Alsted of Herborn there appeared a new, unified vision of the encyclopaedia of the scientific disciplines in which ontology had the role of assigning to each of the particular sciences its proper domain."]

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Further reading

* cite encyclopedia
last = Webster
first = Charles
title = Alsted, Johann Heinrich
encyclopedia = Dictionary of Scientific Biography
volume = 1
pages = 125-127
publisher = Charles Scribner's Sons
location = New York
date = 1970
isbn = 0684101149