Gotthard Friedrich Stender

Gotthard Friedrich Stender, also called Old Stender, was a Baltic German Lutheran pastor who played an outstanding role in Latvia's history of culture. He was the first Latvian grammarian and lexicographer, founder of the Latvian secular literature in the 18th century. In the spirit of Enlightenment, he wrote the first Latvian-German and German-Latvian dictionaries, wrote the first encyclopedia “A Book of High Wisdom on the World and Nature” (1774), and wrote the first illustrated Latvian alphabet book (1787).