Wessel Gansfort

Wessel Harmensz Gansfort
Born	1419 Groningen, Netherlands
Died	October 4, 1489 Groningen, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Other names	Johan Wessel
Occupation	theologian humanist

Wessel Harmensz Gansfort (1419 – October 4, 1489) was a theologian and early humanist of the northern Low Countries. Many variations of his last name are seen and he is sometimes incorrectly called Johan Wessel.

Gansfort has been called one of the reformers before the Reformation. He protested against a perceived paganizing of the papacy, superstitious and magical uses of the sacraments, the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and the tendency in later scholastic theology to lay greater stress, in a doctrine of justification, upon the instrumentality of the human will than on the work of Christ for man's salvation.

Gansfort was born at Groningen. After initial schooling at the local Latin school of St Martin's, he was educated at the municipal school of Zwolle, which was closely connected to the Brethren of the Common Life in whose house the young student lived. He developed close ties with the monastery of Mount St. Agnes not far from Zwolle, where Thomas a Kempis was then living.

His sixteenth-century biographer Albertus Hardenberg, who knew Gansfort's one-time famulus Goswinus van Halen, writes that Gansfort left Zwolle directly for Cologne, perhaps as late as 1449. At Cologne he stayed in the Bursa Laurentiana, where he soon became a teacher. He was granted the degree magister artium in 1452, and remembers with great gratitude that it was here that he first studied Plato. He learned Greek from monks who had been driven out of Greece, and Hebrew from some Jews. He was particularly interested in the spiritual theology of Rupert von Deutz, and he scoured local Benedictine libraries for works related to this devotion.

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