Johann Albert Fabricius

[1] On returning to Leipzig in 1686, he published anonymously two years later his first work, Scriptorum recentiorum decas, an attack on ten writers of the day.

Fabricius then applied himself to the study of medicine, which, however, he relinquished for that of theology; and having gone to 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 left him in debt to his trustee, forced him to abandon this project.

[1] In 1693 he published a doctoral dissertation De Platonismo Philonis Judaei which contributed to Philo of Alexandria's losing his position as an "honorary Church Father".

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 post which he held until his death, refusing invitations to Greifswald, Kiel, Giessen, and Wittenberg.

Its divisions are marked off by Homer, Plato, Jesus, Constantine, and the capture of Constantinople in 1453, while a sixth section is devoted to canon law, jurisprudence and medicine.