1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Schoppe, Caspar

CASPAR SCHOPPE (1576–1649), German controversialist and scholar, was born at Neumarkt in the upper Palatinate on the 27th of May 1576 and studied at several German universities. Having become a convert to Roman Catholicism about 1599, he obtained the favour of Pope Clement VIII., and, even in an age of violent polemics, 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 scarf (1619) urged the Catholic princes to wage war upon the Protestants. About 1607 Schoppe entered the service of Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, afterwards the emperor Ferdinand II., 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 the 19th of November 1649. In his Life of Sir Henry Wotton Izaac Walton, calling him Jasper Scioppius, refers to Schoppe as “a man of a restless spirit and a malicious pen.”

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; and latterly the anti-jesuitical works, Flagellum Jesuiticum (1632); Mysteria patrum jesuitorum (1633); and Arcana societatis Jesu (1635). For a fuller list of his writings see J. P. Nicéron Memoires, (1727–1745). See also C. Nisard, Les Gladiateurs de la republique des lettres (Paris, 1860).