Lasco, JOHANNES A, or JAN LASKI

Lasco, JOHANNES A, or JAN LASKI, Polish reformer, was a man of high family and was born at Lask, in the modern government of Piotrkow, about 1499. He was educated at Cracow by his uncle, chancellor and primate of Poland, and chose to enter the church. He studied further in Rome and Bologna, was ordained in 1521, and two years later at Basel came in contact with Erasmus and Farel; the former by his will left his library to A Lasco. From this journey the young Pole returned in 1526, his mind greatly exercised with the question of church reform. At length he was caught in the current of the Reformation, and, quitting his native land in 1538, he settled at Louvain in the Netherlands. But a year or two later he moved to Emden in East Friesland. The countess of that little province appointed him superintendent of church affairs, and he used his influence to establish a presbyterian form of church government. The Emden Catchism, defining the religious doctrines of the East Friesland Church, was in great part his work. But in 1550 he accepted an invitation by Cranmer to visit England—he had already passed the winter of 1548-49 there—and became head of an influential congregation of Protestant refugees in Austin Friars, London. Mary's accession in 1553 drove him back to Emden and scattered his flock. After staying a while in Frankfort-on-Main, he finally returned to Poland in 1556. There the Reformation was making rapid headway, and was assisted in no inconsiderable degree by the labours of A Lasco as superintendent of the churches in Little Poland. He died at Pirezow, on 8th January 1560. See Dalton's John a Lasco (Eng. trans. from the German, 1886), which only brings the narrative down to A Lasco's second arrival in England; G. Pascal, Jean de Lasco (1894).