DEMPSTER, THOMAS (157o-1625), Scottish scholar and historian, was born at Cliftbog, Aberdeenshire, and sent, at ten years old, to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. He then studied at Louvain, graduated at the English College at Douai, and in canon law in Paris. He was in turn regent of the college of Navarre in Paris, professor of the humanities at Toulouse, of rhetoric at Nimes, tutor in Spain, and then, after a short visit to Scotland, professor in various colleges in Paris. His quarrelsome tempera ment led to difficulties in all these places, and in 1615 he came to London at the invitation of James I. His Roman Catholicism stood in the way of preferment in England and he returned to the Continent. He became professor of the Pandects at Pisa, and then professor of the humanities at Bologna, then the most famous of European universities. He died there on Sept. 6, 1625.
Dempster had a great reputation in his day. His principal works are : An edition of Rosinus's Antiquitatum romanarum corpus absolutissimum (Paris, 1613) ; De Etruria regali, posthu mously published (Florence, 1723-24) ; editio princeps of Corip pius (Paris, 161o) ; an annotated edition of Benedetto Accolti's De bello a Christianis contra barbaros gesto. (Florence, 1623); and the famous Historia ecclesiastics gentis Scotorum (Bologna, 1627), in which Scottish patriotism made him claim as Scots Bernard (Sapiens), Alcuin, Boniface and Johannes Scotus Erigena. Some of his Latin verse was published in vol. i. of Delitiae poetarum Scotorum (Amsterdam,