Walter de Stapledon
- Born: February 1, 1261, Annery, Monkleigh.
- Walter de Stapledon was Bishop of Exeter 1308–1326 and twice Lord High Treasurer of England, in 1320 and 1322. He founded Exeter College, Oxford and contributed liberally to the rebuilding of Exeter Cathedral. His tomb and monument, of great architectural importance, survives in Exeter Cathedral.
- Stapledon became professor of canon law at Oxford and chaplain to Pope Clement V. On 13 March 1307 he was appointed Bishop of Exeter, and was consecrated on 13 October 1308.
- He went on embassies to France for both Kings Edward I and Edward II, and attended the councils and parliaments of his time. He was twice appointed Lord High Treasurer of England, in 1320 and 1322.
- Died: October 15, 1326, London, United Kingdom.
Conrad Celtes
- Born: February 1, 1459, Wipfeld, Germany.
- Conrad Celtes was a German Renaissance humanist scholar and poet of the German Renaissance born in Franconia. He led the theatrical performances at the Viennese court and reformed the syllabi. Celtis is considered by many to be the greatest of German humanists and thus dubbed “the Archhumanist”.
- Education: Heidelberg University, University of Cologne, Jagiellonian University.
- He was the foremost cartographic writer in German lands. He worked on the large-scale cosmographic and cartographic project Germania Illustrata, of which the core — among them the treatise Germania generalis, four books of love elegies, and De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Norimbergae libellus (“On the origins, site, habits and institutions of Nuremberg”) — was published under the title Quatuor libri amorum secundum quatuor latera germanie in Nuremberg (1502).
- Died: February 4, 1508, Vienna, Austria.
Johannes Trithemius
- Born: February 1, 1462, Trittenheim, Germany.
- Johannes Trithemius, born Johann Heidenberg, was a German Benedictine abbot and a polymath who was active in the German Renaissance as a lexicographer, chronicler, cryptographer, and occultist.
- Education: Heidelberg University.
- Travelling from the university to his home town in 1482, he was surprised by a snowstorm and took refuge in the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim near Bad Kreuznach. He decided to stay and was elected abbot in 1483, at the age of twenty-one. He often served as featured speaker and chapter secretary at the Bursfelde Congregation’s annual chapter from 1492 to 1503, the annual meeting of reform-minded abbots. Trithemius also supervised the visits of the Congregation’s abbeys.
Trithemius wrote extensively as a historian, starting with a chronicle of Sponheim and culminating in a two-volume work on the history of Hirsau Abbey. His work was distinguished by mastery of the Latin language and eloquent phrasing, yet it was soon discovered that he inserted several fictional passages into his works. Even during Trithemius’s lifetime, several critics pointed out the invented sources he used.
Known for: Steganographia, Polygraphiae, Trithemius cipher.
Died: December 13, 1516, Würzburg, Germany.
John Napier
- Born: February 1, 1550, Merchiston Tower, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
- John Napier of Merchiston, nicknamed Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchiston. His Latinized name was Ioannes Neper. John Napier is best known as the discoverer of logarithms.
- His work, Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (1614) contained fifty-seven pages of explanatory matter and ninety pages of tables listing the natural logarithms of trigonometric functions.Ch. III The book also has an excellent discussion of theorems in spherical trigonometry, usually known as Napier’s Rules of Circular Parts.
- List of works
(1593) A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John
(1614) Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio
(1617) Rabdologiæ seu Numerationis per Virgulas libri
(1619) Mirifici logarithmorum canonis constructio –written before the Descriptio, but published posthumously by his son Robert.
(1839) De arte logistica - Died: April 4, 1617, Merchiston Tower, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Edward Coke
- Born: February 1, 1552, Mileham, United Kingdom.
- Sir Edward Coke SL was an English barrister, judge, and politician who is considered the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Born into an upper-class family, Coke was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, before leaving to study at the Inner Temple, where he was called to the Bar on 20 April 1578.
- Education: Trinity College.
- Coke had earned the favour of the Dukes of Norfolk. When he secured the Lordship of Aldeburgh for them in 1588, he also obtained the Aldeburgh parliamentary constituency, which elected two Members of Parliament (MPs). With their support, Coke was returned for Aldeburgh as an MP in February 1589.
- Coke’s first judicial postings came under Elizabeth; in 1585, he was made Recorder of Coventry, in 1587 Norwich, and in 1592 Recorder of London, a position he resigned upon his appointment as Solicitor General.
- Coke is best known for his written work – thirteen volumes of law reports, and the four-volume Institutes of the Lawes of England. John Marshall Gest, writing in the Yale Law Journal at the start of the twentieth century, noted that “There are few principles of the common law that can be studied without an examination of Coke’s Institutes and Reports which summed up the legal learning of his time”, although “the student is deterred by the too common abuse of Coke’s character and the general criticism of his writings as dry, crabbed, verbose and pedantic”. John Campbell, in The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, had said that “His reasoning… is narrow minded; [he had] utter contempt for method and style in his compositions”, and says that Coke’s Reports were “tinctured with quaintness and pedantry”.
- Died: September 3, 1634, Godwick, United Kingdom.
