Georg Fabricius (; 23 April 1516– 17 July 1571) was a Protestant German poet, historian and archaeologist who wrote in Latin during the German Renaissance.
Life
Fabricius was born as Georg Goldschmidt in Chemnitz in Saxony on 23 April 1516. He was educated at the University of Leipzig. In 1546 he was appointed rector of Saint Afra in Meissen.
Travelling in Italy with one of his pupils, he made an exhaustive study of the antiquities of Rome. In 1549 Fabricius edited the first short selection of Roman inscriptions focusing specifically on legal texts. This was a key moment in the history of classical epigraphy: for the first time in print a humanist explicitly demonstrated the value of such archaeological remains for the discipline of law, and implicitly accorded texts inscribed in stone as authoritative a status as those recorded in manuscripts.
Fabricius died at Meissen on 17 July 1571.
Legacy
A life of Georg Fabricius was published in 1839 by D. K. W. Baumgarten-Crusius, who in 1845 also issued an edition of Fabricius's Epistolae ad W Meurerum et alios aequales with a short sketch De Vita Ge. Fabricius de gente Fabriciorum. See also F. Wachter in Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie.