Caspar Schoppe

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Caspar Schoppe (May 27, 1576 – November 19, 1649) was a German controversialist and scholar.

He was born at Neumarkt in the upper Palatinate and studied at several German universities. Having converted to Roman Catholicism in about 1599, he obtained the favour of Pope Clement VIII, and distinguished himself by the virulence of his writings against the Protestants. He became involved in a controversy with Joseph Justus Scaliger, formerly his intimate friend, and others; wrote Ecclesiasticus auctoritati Jacobi regis oppositus (1611), an attack upon James I of England; and in Classicum belli scan (1619) urged the Catholic princes to wage war upon the Protestants. In about 1607, Schoppe entered the service of Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, afterwards Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, who found him very useful in rebutting the arguments of the Protestants, and who sent him on several diplomatic errands. According to Pierre Bayle, he was almost killed by some Englishmen at Madrid in 1614, and again fearing for his life he left Germany for Italy in 1617, afterwards taking part in an attack upon the Jesuits.

Schoppe, as the long list of his writings shows, knew also something of grammar and philosophy, and had an excellent acquaintance with Latin. His chief work is, perhaps, his Grammatica philosophica (Milan, 1628). Schoppe died at Padua on November 19, 1649. In his Life of Sir Henry Wotton Izaak Walton, calling him Jasper Scioppius, refers to Schoppe as "a man of a restless spirit and a malicious pen." More recent material appears in Wotton And His Worlds by Gerald Curzon (2004): see [1].

Besides the works already noticed, he wrote:

De arte critica (1597)
De Antichristo (1605)
Pro auctoritate ecclesiae in decidendis fidei controversiis libellus
Scaliger hypololymaeus (1607), a virulent attack on Scaliger

Anti-jesuitical Works:

Flagellum Jesuiticum (1632)
Mysteria patrum jesuitorum (1633)
Arcana societatis Jesu (1635).

For a fuller list of his writings see J. P. Nicéron Mémoires, (1727–1745). See also C Nisard, Les Gladiateurs de la république des lettres (Paris. 1860).