Martinus Smiglecius

Martinus Smiglecius (1564 to 1618), known in Polish as Marcin śmiglecki, was a Polish Jesuit philosopher and logician known for his learned scholastic Logica. He was born in Lwów in the Kingdom of Poland, now Lviv, attended the Jesuit school in Pułtusk, studied in Rome until 1586, where he joined the Jesuit order in 1581 with his education paid for by the statesman Jan Zamojski, and took a master's degree in philosophy and a doctorate in theology at the Academy of Vilnius, where he taught. In 1599 he took part in a public disputation with the Protestants Marcin Janicki and Daniel Mikołajewski, and he spent his last twenty years teaching in Jesuit colleges in Pułtusk, Poznań, Kraków and Kalisz, where he died. His Logica, published at Ingolstadt in 1618, harked back to Gregory of Rimini and was reprinted at Oxford in 1634, 1638 and 1658 for use as a textbook, so that it was still remembered in English satire a century later.