Possevino, Antonio

Antonio Possevino was a Jesuit, diplomat, scholar, college founder and administrator. A very active member of his order in the core phase of its worldwide diffusion, he travelled throughout the Northern and Eastern Europe as a diplomat, trying to prompt conversions and build alliances between Catholic and Orthodox countries against the Protestant Reformation and the Turks. While on the road, he established several Jesuit seminaries and colleges (Lukács, Archivum Historicum S.I. 24:33–94, 1955). Possevino is most renowned for his Bibliotheca Selecta (Possevino, 1593), a two-volume in-folio bibliographic project, listing and commenting on all the works he deemed as fundamental for a complete Christian humanistic culture. Very influential in his time was a pedagogical treatise drawn from the Bibliotheca and translated by him into vernacular Italian, the Coltura degl’Ingegni (“Cultivation of Man’s Wits”), based on a theory of natural talents governed by free will and emphasizing the educational value of real-life experiences.