Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/156

138 author in Denmark who was Danish both in spirit and language. Born in 1480, of parents probably belonging to the middle class, he became a canon in Lund and afterward studied in Paris, where he took the master's degree. In Paris he edited Peder Laale's collection of proverbs, and in 1514 Saxo's Danish chronicle, through which edition the latter was probably rescued from oblivion, for it cost him much trouble to secure a single manuscript copy. His labors for the cause of his country's history were not confined to the editing of this invaluable work, but he was also engaged on a translation or Danish adaptation of it, and even on a continuation of Saxo's chronicle. A few fragments of the latter have been preserved, and it would seem to have been carried down to the death of Christian I. Before the Reformation he produced in the Danish language a few religious works, chiefly intended for the use of laymen, prominent among which is his "Jertegns postille," a collection of sermons—probably based on Latin models—on the gospels and epistles of all the Sundays and sacred days, and each sermon contained meditations on some miracle (Jertegn) or other. When he afterward became a Protestant, he took it much to heart that he possibly had done much harm by this very postil and the papal errors which it helped to spread, for, as he says himself, "the fables and miracles, which it tells of, are things which men have themselves invented and imagined." In order to make such amends as he was able for this transgression, he now translated a Lutheran homily.

On his return to Denmark he became secretary to King Christian II. In this position he ever remained faithfully devoted to his prince, and when the latter, in 1523, was compelled to leave his country, Christian Pedersen accompanied him into exile. He lived in Holland several years, and the works he published in this country show that already at this time he had renounced Catholicism and become a convert to the new doctrine. He remained until his death one of the most ardent and valiant champions of the Reforma-