John Edward Fletcher

John Edward Fletcher (18 January 1940 – 1 June 1992) was a British-Australian scholar best known for his research and publications on Athanasius Kircher as well as several other Germans who had lived in and/or influenced Australia.

John Edward Fletcher was born in the industrial city of Bradford in Yorkshire to a printer/soldier father and a millworker mother. There he attended Thornton Grammar School of which in his final year he became Dux and School Captain.

He went on as a scholarship holder to read for his BA degree at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he studied under such famous scholars of German as the Medievalist A.T. Hatto and the Renaissance and Baroque specialist Leonard Wilson Forster, later Schroeder Professor of German at Cambridge.

On graduating he moved on to the University of Durham to obtain Diploma of Education and then back to the Queen Mary College on a postgraduate scholarship intending to do his PhD under Dr Claus Viktor Bock on the 17th-century German polymath and polyglot Father Athanasius Kircher. His first task was to come to grip with Kircher's vast body of writings on most branches of learning of his age, for example: mathematics, astronomy, music, oriental languages - including Egyptian hieroglyphics, which Kircher was certain he had deciphered, but of course hadn't. The second task he and Dr. Bock set was to edit the immense correspondence from and to Kircher. Fletcher succeeded by 1966 in producing an extremely erudite thesis of over 900 pages - somewhere around the size of many of Kircher's own publications.

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