PEDERSEN, CHRISTIERN (c. 148o-1554), Danish writer, known as the "father of Danish literature," was a canon of the cathedral of Lund, and took his master's degree in Paris in 1515. In Paris he edited the proverbs of Peder Laale and (1514) the Historia danica of Saxo Grammaticus. He worked at a continuation of the history of Saxo Grammaticus, and became secretary to Christian II., whom he followed into exile in 1525. In Holland he translated the New Testament (1529) and the Psalms (1531) from the Vulgate, and, becoming a convert to the reformed opinion, he issued several Lutheran tracts. After his return to Denmark in 1532 he set up a printing press at Malmo. He published a Danish version (Kronike om Holger Danske) of the French romance of Ogier the Dane, and another of the Charlemagne legends, which is probably derived immediately from the Norwegian Karlamagnus saga. His greatest work, the Danish version of the Holy Scriptures, which is known generally as "Christian M.'s Bible," is an important landmark in Danish
crown doors, windows and especially niches. Where many such decorative pediments occur in a row, the Romans frequently made them alternately triangular and segmental in shape; in this they were copied by the High Renaissance in Italy. Following certain late Roman precedents, in which the line of the raking cornice is broken back in the centre, the designers of the Baroque period de veloped all sorts of fantastic broken, scrolled and reverse curved pediments; in some cases they even reversed the direction, so that the high part of the broken or sectional pediment was toward the outside of the composition rather than toward the centre, and in the Churrigueresque, or late Renaissance of Spain, little sections of pediment are used to intricate line patterning.