Anna Funk, Petter Bohms... Karin Johansdotter Oljeqvist Kristina Johansdotter Oljeqvist Elisabeth Johansdotter Oljeqvist Maria Johansdotter Oljeqvist Petrus Johansdotter Oljeqvist Carl Johansson Oljeqvist Maria Johansdotter Katarina Johansdotter Oljeqvist Career Early life and education Gothus' special position among the clergy is explained by his unique life course. He grew up in a milieu that was shaped by Duke Charles's struggle against Sigismund, the high nobility, the clergy and the practical-religious problem associated with immigration of foreign labor in the mining industry. His father, who was a church pastor in Söderköping, had, as one of the delegates of the clergy, signed the Söderköping Arvsförening in 1590, his 20-year-old brother was a pastor of Duke Charles in 1597, and since 1599 the church pastor in Norrköping, where the Confederate Confederate's through a wide-eyed congregational care assimilated the reformed population. Like Duke Charles, later Charles IX of Sweden, Gothus' came to work for an evangelical-humanist Church reform and to meet the opposition from the orthodox clergy. During a ten-year study period, beginning in 1599 in Linköping, Gothus experienced Linköping Bloodbath and Norrköping's Arvsförening. Once the stormy decade of the 1590s had come to an end, he enrolled at Uppsala university. Upon enrolling, he immediately joined the pious religious controversy of the compatriot, the educated Johannes Messenius of Braunsberg Jesuit College, Collegium Hosianum, who was in conflict with the intrusive scholastic confessional representative Johannes Rudbeckius. During his stay in Uppsala, he received further impulses that would guide him in his independent spiritual direction. He enjoyed financial support from the East Gothic court circles and the burghers, from John, Duke of Östergötland and his wife, king Gustav II Adolf's sister Princess Maria Elizabeth of Sweden, and High Councillor Johan Skytte. His humanistic religious orientation is reflected in his studies of poetry under Messenius, whose dramas he performed on stage, in his dissertations in ethics, and in his position as informant of his relatives, the sons of Lutheran-Melanchthonic Archbishop Petrus Kenicius. After studying in Uppsala, Gothus' came, in no less than seven years, between 1618 and 1625, to have Europe as his university. He made his first foreign study trip in 1618 to 1620, mainly to the Hessian university in Giessen. He deepened his piety focus during studies for the major ethical-religious-oriented theologian, university, church and school reformer Balthasar Mentzer the Elder. Gothus made only a brief visit to Sweden between his two long foreign trips during, which,