1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blondel, David

BLONDEL, DAVID (1591–1655), French Protestant clergyman, was born at Châlons-sur-Marne in 1591, and died on the 6th of April 1655. In 1650 he succeeded G. J. Vossius in the professorship of history at Amsterdam. His works were very numerous; in some of them he showed a remarkable critical faculty, as in his dissertation on Pope Joan (1647, 1657), in which he came to the conclusion, now universally accepted, that the whole story is a mere myth. Considerable Protestant indignation was excited against him on account of this book.