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JOHANN ALBERT FABRICIUS (1668-1736)

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Originally appearing in Volume V10, Page 119 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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JOHANN

ALBERT FABRICIUS (1668-1736)  , German classical scholar and bibliographer, was born at
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Leipzig on the 11th of November 1668 . His
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father, Werner Fabricius, director of
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music in the church of St Paul at Leipzig, was the author of several
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works, the most important being Deliciae Harmonicae (1656) . The son received his early
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education from his father, who on his deathbed recommended him to the care of the theologian Valentin Alberti . He studied under J . G . Herrichen, and after-wards at Quedlinburg under
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Samuel Schmid . It was in Schmid's library, as he afterwards said, that he found the two books, F . Barth's Adversaria and D . G . Morhof's Polyhistor Literarius, which suggested to him the idea of his Biblioihecae, the works on which his
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great reputation was founded . Having returned to Leipzig in 1686, he published anonymously (two years later) his first
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work, Scriptorum receniiorum decas, an attack on ten writers of the day . His Decas Decadum, sive plagiariorum et pseudonymorum ceniuria (1689) is the only one of his works to which he signs the name Faber .

He then applied himself to the study of

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medicine, which, however, he relinquished for thatof
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theology; and having gone to
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Hamburg in 1693, he proposed to travel abroad, when the unexpected tidings that the expense of his education had absorbed his whole patrimony, and even
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left him in debt to his trustee, forced him to abandon his project . He therefore remained at Hamburg in the capacity of librarian to J . F . Mayer . In 1696 he accompanied his
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patron to Sweden; and on his return to Hamburg, not long afterwards, he became a
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candidate for the chair of logic and philosophy . The suffrages being equally divided between Fabricius and Sebastian Edzardus, one of his opponents, the appointment was decided by, lot in favour of Edzardus; but in 1699 Fabricius succeeded Vincent Placcius in the chair of rhetoric and ethics, a
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post which he held till his
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death, refusing invitations to Greifswald,
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Kiel,
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Giessen and
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Wittenberg . He died at Hamburg on the 3oth of
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April 1736 . Fabricius is credited with 128 books, but very many of them were only books which he had edited . One of the most famed and laborious of these is the Bibliotheca
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Latina (1697, republished in an improved and amended form by J . A . Ernesti, 1773) . The divisions of the compilation are—the writers to the age of Tiberius; thence to that of the Antonines; and thirdly, to the decay of the language; a
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fourth gives fragments from old authors, and chapters on early Christian literature .

A supplementary work was Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae Aetatis (1734–1736; supplementary

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volume by C . Schottgen, 1746; ed . Mansi, 1754) . His chef-d'ceuvre, however, is the Bibliotheca Graeca (1705-1728, revised and continued by G . C . Harles, 179o-1812), a work which has justly been denominated maximus antiquae eruditionis thesaurus . Its divisions are marked off by Homer,
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Plato, Christ,
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Constantine, and the capture of Constantinople in 1453, while a
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sixth section is devoted to
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canon law, jurisprudence and medicine . Of his remaining works we may mention:—Bibliotheca Antiquaria, an account of the writers whose works illustrated
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Hebrew, Greek,
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Roman and Christian antiquities (1713); Centifolium Lulheranum, a Lutheran bibliography (1728); Bibliotheca Ecclesiastica (1718) . His Codex Apocryphus (1703) is still considered indispensable as an authority on apocryphal Christian literature . The details of the
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life of Fabricius are to be found in De Vita et Scriptis J . A . Fabricii Commentarius, by his son-in-law, H .

S .

Reimarus, the well-known editor of Dio Cassius, published at Hamburg, 1737 ; see also C . F .
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Bahr in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopeidie, and J . E . Sandys, Hist . Class . Schol. iii . (1908) .

End of Article: JOHANN ALBERT FABRICIUS (1668-1736)
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