János Sylvester (Szinyérváralja, 1504 ?- Vienna, 1552)

Humanist writer and Bible translator. He studied in Krakow and Witttenberg. He was first a follower of Erasmus and later of Melanchton. From 1543 he was the schoolmaster in Tamás Nádasdy's court, who subsidised the issuing of Sylvester's version of translation of the New Testament (which included the firs Hungarian metrical verse) and his book the Grammatica Hungarolatina which contained Czech diacritical signs and remarks on the peculiarities of the Hungarian language. Upon Nádasdy's recommendation he worked as a professor at the Viennese University where his Latin poems first appeared.

UG