JACOBSEN, JENS PETER (1847-1885), Danish imaginative writer, was born at Thisted in Jutland, on the 7th of April 1847; he was the eldest of the five children of a prosperous merchant. He became a student at the university of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy he showed a remarkable turn for science, particularly for botany. In 1870, although he was secretly writing verses already, Jacobsen definitely adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt and Læsö. About this time the discoveries of Darwin began to exercise a fascination over him, and finding them little understood in Denmark, he translated into Danish The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. In the autumn of 1872, while collecting plants in a morass near Ordrup, he contracted pulmonary disease. His illness, which cut him off from scientific investigation, drove him to literature. He met the famous critic, Dr Georg Brandes, who was struck by his powers of expression, and under his influence, in the spring of 1873, Jacobsen began his great historical romance of Marie Grubbe. His method of composition was painful and elaborate, and his work was not ready for publication until the close of 1876. In 1879 he was too ill to write at all; but in 1880 an improvement came, and he finished his second novel, Niels Lyhne. In 1882 he published a volume of six short stories, most of them written a few years earlier, called, from the first of them, Mogens. After this he wrote no more, but lingered on in his mother’s house at Thisted until the 30th of April 1885. In 1886 his posthumous fragments were collected. It was early recognized that Jacobsen was the greatest artist in prose that Denmark has produced. He has been compared with Flaubert, with De Quincey, with Pater; but these parallelisms merely express a sense of the intense individuality of his style, and of his untiring pursuit of beauty in colour, form and melody. Although he wrote so little, and crossed the living stage so hurriedly, his influence in the North has been far-reaching. It may be said that no one in Denmark or Norway has tried to write prose carefully since 1880 whose efforts have not been in some degree modified by the example of Jacobsen’s laborious art.
His Samlede Skrifter appeared in two volumes in 1888; in 1899 his letters (Breve) were edited by Edvard Brandes. In 1896 an English translation of part of the former was published under the title of Siren Voices: Niels Lyhne, by Miss E. F. L. Robertson.
(E. G.)
JACOB’S WELL, the scene of the conversation between Jesus and the “woman of Samaria” narrated in the Fourth Gospel, is described as being in the neighbourhood of an otherwise unmentioned “city called Sychar.” From the time of Eusebius this city has been identified with Sychem or Shechem (modern Nablus), and the well is still in existence 1½ m. E. of the town, at the foot of Mt Gerizim. It is beneath one of the ruined arches of a church mentioned by Jerome, and is reached by a few rough steps. When Robinson visited it in 1838 it was 105 ft. deep, but it is now much shallower and often dry.
For a discussion of Sychar as distinct from Shechem see T. K. Cheyne, art. “Sychar,” in Ency. Bibl., col. 4830. It is possible that Sychar should be placed at Tulūl Balātā, a mound about ½ m. W. of the well (Palestine Exploration Fund Statement, 1907, p. 92 seq.); when that village fell into ruin the name may have migrated to ’Askar, a village on the lower slopes of Mt Ebal about 1¾ m. E.N.E. from Nablus and ½ m. N. from Jacob’s Well. It may be noted that the difficulty is not with the location of the well, but with the identification of Sychar.
JACOBUS DE VORAGINE (c. 1230-c. 1298), Italian chronicler, archbishop of Genoa, was born at the little village of Varazze, near Genoa, about the year 1230. He entered the order of the friars preachers of St Dominic in 1244, and besides preaching with success in many parts of Italy, taught in the schools of his own fraternity. He was provincial of Lombardy from 1267 till 1286, when he was removed at the meeting of the order in Paris. He also represented his own province at the councils of Lucca (1288) and Ferrara (1290). On the last occasion he was one of the four delegates charged with signifying Nicholas IV.’s desire for the deposition of Munio de Zamora, who had been master of the order from 1285, and was deprived of his office by a papal bull dated the 12th of April 1291. In 1288 Nicholas empowered him to absolve the people of Genoa for their offence in aiding the Sicilians against Charles II. Early in 1292 the same pope, himself a Franciscan, summoned Jacobus to Rome, intending to consecrate him archbishop of Genoa with his own hands. He reached Rome on Palm Sunday (March 30), only to find his patron ill of a deadly sickness, from which he died on Good Friday (April 4). The cardinals, however, “propter honorem Communis Januae,” determined to carry out this consecration on the Sunday after Easter. He was a good bishop, and especially distinguished himself by his’ efforts to appease the civil discords of Genoa. He died in 1298 or 1299, and was buried in the Dominican church at Genoa. A story, mentioned by the chronicler Echard as unworthy of credit, makes Boniface VIII., on the first day of Lent, cast the ashes in the archbishop’s eyes instead of on his head, with the words, “Remember that thou art a Ghibelline, and with thy fellow Ghibellines wilt return to naught.”
Jacobus de Voragine left a list of his own works. Speaking of himself in his Chronicon januense, he says, “While he was in his order, and after he had been made archbishop, he wrote many works. For he compiled the legends of the saints (Legendae sanctorum) in one volume, adding many things from the Historia tripartita et scholastica, and from the chronicles of many writers.” The other writings he claims are two anonymous volumes of “Sermons concerning all the Saints” whose yearly feasts the church celebrates. Of these volumes, he adds, one is very diffuse, but the other short and concise. Then follow Sermones de omnibus evangeliis dominicalibus for every Sunday in the year; Sermones de omnibus evangeliis, i.e. a book of discourses on all the Gospels, from Ash Wednesday to the Tuesday after Easter; and a treatise called “Marialis, qui totus est de B. Maria compositus,” consisting of about 160 discourses on the attributes, titles, &c., of the Virgin Mary. In the same work the archbishop claims to have written his Chronicon januense in the second year of his pontificate (1293), but it extends to 1296 or 1297. To this list Echard adds several other works, such as a defence of the Dominicans, printed at Venice in 1504, and a Summa virtutum et vitiorum Guillelmi Peraldi, a Dominican who died about 1250. Jacobus is also said by Sixtus of Siena (Biblioth. Sacra, lib. ix.) to have translated the Old and New Testaments into his own tongue. “But,” adds Echard, “if he did so, the version lies so closely hid that there is no recollection of it,” and it may be added that it is highly improbable that the man who compiled the Golden Legend ever conceived the necessity of having the Scriptures in the vernacular.
His two chief works are the Chronicon januense and the Golden Legend or Lombardica hystoria. The former is partly printed in Muratori (Scriptores Rer. Ital. ix. 6). It is divided into twelve parts. The first four deal with the mythical history of Genoa from the time of its founder, Janus, the first king of Italy, and its enlarger, a second Janus “citizen of Troy”, till its conversion to Christianity “about twenty-five years after the passion of Christ.” Part v. professes to treat of the beginning, the growth and the perfection of the city; but of the first period the writer candidly confesses he knows nothing except by hearsay. The second period includes the Genoese crusading exploits in the East, and extends to their victory over the Pisans (c. 1130), while the third reaches down to the days of the author’s archbishopric. The sixth part deals with the constitution of the city, the seventh and eighth with the duties of rulers and citizens, the ninth with those of domestic life. The tenth gives the ecclesiastical history of Genoa from the time of its first known bishop, St Valentine, “whom we believe to have lived about 530 A.D.,” till 1133, when the city was raised to archiepiscopal rank. The eleventh contains the lives of all the bishops in order, and includes the chief events during their pontificates; the twelfth deals in the same way with the archbishops, not forgetting the writer himself.