John of Genoa or Johannes Balbus (died c. 1298) was an Italian

grammarian Grammarian may refer to: * Alexandrine grammarians, philologists and textual scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE * Biblical grammarians, scholars who study the Bible and the Hebrew language * Grammarian (Greco-Roman ...

and Dominican priest. At an advanced age, John gave away his wealth to the poor of

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

and entered the

Order of St Dominic The Order of Preachers (, abbreviated OP), commonly known as the Dominican Order, is a Catholic mendicant order of pontifical right that was founded in France by a Castilian priest named Dominic de Guzmán. It was approved by Pope Honorius III ...

. He is best known for his

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

grammar, ''Summa Grammaticalis'', better known as the '' Catholicon'', apparently the first Latin lexicographical work "to achieve complete alphabetization (from the first to the last letter of each word)."Hans Sauer in A.P. Cowie (ed.), ''The Oxford History of English Lexicography'' (Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 30-31. This work is made up of treatises on

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

etymology Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...

, grammar, prosody, rhetoric, and an etymological dictionary of the Latin language (''primae, mediae et infimae Latinitatis''). It was highly respected as a textbook for over a century after its publication, and received both excessive criticism and excessive praise.

Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus ( ; ; 28 October c. 1466 – 12 July 1536), commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic priest and Catholic theology, theologian, educationalist ...

was particularly critical of the work, criticizing it in his works ''De Ratione Studiorum'' and ''Colloquia''.

Leandro Alberti Leandro Alberti (12 December 14799 April 1552) was an Italian Dominican friar, historian, and Renaissance humanist. Life Alberti was born and died at Bologna. In his early youth he attracted the attention of the Bolognese rhetorician, Giovanni ...

wrote a defense of the ''Catholicon'' in response to these attacks.

Peter Schöffer Peter Schöffer or Petrus Schoeffer () was an early German printer, who studied in Paris and worked as a manuscript copyist in 1451 before apprenticing with Johannes Gutenberg and joining Johann Fust, a goldsmith, lawyer, and money lender. Amon ...

and

Johann Fust Johann Fust or Faust ( 1400 – October 30, 1466) was an early German printer. Family background Fust was born to a burgher family of Mainz, traceable back to the early thirteenth century. Members of the family held many civil and religio ...

published the ''Catholicon'' in 1450, and it was several times republished. Besides the ''Catholicon'', John also wrote ''Liber Theologiae qui vocatur Dialogus de Quaestionibus Animae ad Spiritum'' and ''Quoddam opus ad inveniendum festa mobilia''. A ''Postilla super Joannem'' and a ''Tractatus de Omnipotentia Dei'' have also been attributed to him.

References

* Alessandro Pratesi,
BALBI, Giovanni (Iohannes Balbus, de Balbis, de Ianua)
�. In: ''

Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani The ''Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani'' () is a biographical dictionary published in 100 volumes by the Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, started in 1960 and completed in 2020. It includes about 40,000 biographies of distinguished Italia ...

'', Volume 5, Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1963 {{Authority control 1298 deaths 13th-century Genoese people 13th-century writers in Latin 13th-century Italian writers 13th-century Italian Roman Catholic priests 13th-century linguists Italian Dominicans Grammarians of Latin Grammarians from Italy Italian lexicographers Year of birth unknown