E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics and Director of the Collegiate Scholars Program at Hillsdale College, and is the translator of the new Christian’s Library Press publication, Niels Hemmingsen’s On the Law of Nature, now available in the Acton Institute book store.
Recent Articles by E. J. Hutchinson
The learned Dane and the harmony of natural law
There are a decent number of well-known Danish writers: Saxo Grammaticus, Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jens Peter Jacobsen, to name a few. Niels Hemmingsen (1513-1600), the author of On the Law of Nature: A Demonstrative Method, is not one of them.
It has not always been so. During his life and in the years that followed his death, Hemmingsen was an intellectual of international standing. The fact that some of his works were translated into English during his own lifetime testifies to his reputation. A pupil of Philip Melanchthon, Hemmingsen wrote voluminously on a number of topics in the fields of theology and philosophy: works of doctrine, exegesis, and homiletics, as well as Europe’s first treatise devoted to the topic of method as such. His work on preaching was required reading in the diocese of Durham in England in the 1570s and 1580s. In his 17th-century Decades Duae, Melchior Adam records his honorary epitaph, which praises Hemmingsen as an object of admiration not only to Danes, but also to “all the learned men of Europe.”
Now, however, he is known to few outside his native Denmark and a handful of specialists in early modern intellectual...
