Bibliotheca selecta

"Bibliotheca selecta" is a bibliographic almanac by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, published in two folio volumes by the Vatican printer Domenico Basa in 1593. The full title was "Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum in Historia, In Disciplinis, in salute omnium procuranda". It represents an authoritative and up-to-date Jesuit compendium of Counter Reformation knowledge. Part I, {Books 1-11} outlines a comprehensive bibliography on theology, scholastic, catechetical and controversial, and incorporates works by such contemporary Jesuit missionaries as Alessandro Valegnano and Edmund Campion.

Part II summarizes the literature and bibliography for law {12}, philosophy {13} and medicine {14). Possevino is creating an authorized bibliography of the traditional arts and sciences elaborating the humanistic educational precepts of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. The liberal arts are dealt with in the final books on architecture and geography {15}, history {16} poetry & painting {17} and rhetoric {18}. The major thrust of Possevino's orthodox compendium is the creation of a bibliography of the humanist culture of the Late Renaissance that is both confidently encyclopedic and outspokenly anti-heretical. The criterion of orthodoxy is underscored in his previous "Iudicium de Nuae, Iohannis Bodini, Philippe-Mornaei et Machiavelli scripta", 1592, which placed the works of leading writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Bodin on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In addition to two revised folio editions of the "Bibliotheca selecta" printed in Venice, 1603 and Cologne, 1607, several books were reprinted in separate editions, notably Book 16, as "Apparatus ad historiam omnium gentium" (1596), a thorough bibliography of the ancient and contemporary literature of world history reworking and updating Bodin's "Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem"(1566).