Gerardus Vossius

[1] He was the son of Johannes (Jan) Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus (the Latinized form of Gerrit) was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585.

Here in Dordrecht the son received his education, until in 1595 he entered the University of Leiden, where he became the lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius, and studied classics, Hebrew, church history and theology.

The year before he had published his Historia Pelagiana, a history of the Pelagian controversies; at the time it was considered by some to favour the views of the Arminians or Remonstrants.

Among his other English correspondents were Brian Duppa, Dudley Carleton, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the prelates James Ussher and Richard Sterne, and Christopher Wren.

[2] Others: A person also called Gerardus Vossius, a Roman Catholic who made annotated Latin translations of Gregory Thaumaturgus and Cicero and died in Liège in 1609, was a distant relation.