Johann Heinrich Alsted (March 1588 – November 9, 1638), "the true parent of all the Encyclopædias",[1] was a German-born Transylvanian Saxon Calvinist minister and academic, known for his varied interests: in Ramism and Lullism, pedagogy and encyclopedias, theology and millenarianism.

The following year he went to Basel, where his teachers were Leonhardt Zubler for mathematics, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf for theology, and Johann Buxtorf.

In 1629 he left war-torn Germany for Weißenburg (now Alba Iulia in Romania) to found a Calvinist Academy: the context was that the Transylvanian royal family had just returned from Unitarianism to Calvinism, and Alsted and Johannes Bisterfeld were German professors brought in to improve standards.

An unfinished encyclopedic project by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz began as a plan to expand and modernize it, and the famous diarist Samuel Pepys purchased a copy in 1660—thirty years after its initial publication.

[7] Although Jacob Thomasius criticised it for plagiarism for verbatim copying without acknowledgment,[8] Augustus De Morgan later called it "the true parent of all the Encyclopædias, or collections of treatises, or works in which that character predominates".

[1] 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.

"In his The New England Mind, Perry Miller writes about the Encyclopaedia: It was reissued as a 4-volume facsimile reprint, edited by W. Schmidt-Biggemann (Fromann-Holzboog Press, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1989–1990).

Is it true that the seven dialectical theories of method in use today, to wit, i) the Aristotelian, 2) the Lullian, 3) the Ramistic, 4) the Mixt, whether indeed in the manner of Keckermann or of Alsted, 5) the Forensic of Hotman, 6) the Jesuitic, and 7) the Socinian, differ mostly in respect to manner of treatment, not in respect to purpose?To which the pupil's answer was to be "yes"; as it was to be to the question "Is it true that a Mixt ought to be preferred to a Peripatetic, a Ramist, a Lullian, and the others?

[16] In 1610 he published the Artificium perorandi of Giordano Bruno;[17] and in the same year the Panacea philosophica, an attempt to find the common ground in the work of Aristotle, Raymond Lull, and Petrus Ramus.