Jan Gruter or Gruytère,[1] Latinized as Janus Gruterus (3 December 1560 – 20 September 1627), was a Flemish-born philologist, scholar, and librarian.
His father was Wouter Gruter, who was a merchant and city administrator of Antwerp, and his mother was Catharina Tishem from Norwich in England.
[2] To avoid religious persecution in the early stages of the Eighty Years' War, his parents emigrated to England while he was a child.
He then left the Netherlands and commenced a period of travel that brought him to France, Switzerland, Italy and finally to North and East Germany.
[4] As a Calvinist, he refused to subscribe to the formula concordiae, the authoritative Lutheran statement of faith, and lost his position as a result in 1592.