Conference
Possevino’s Multiple Legacies: A Controversial Travel from Mind to Soul, from Heart to World
- Saturday, March 22, 2025
- 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
- Boston Westin Copley Place - St. George Room B - 3rd Floor
Table of Contents
Organizers
Emanuele Colombo
Boston College (IAJS)
Cristiano Casalini
Boston College (IAJS)
Presentations
Chair:
Cristiano Casalini
Michał Edmund Nowakowski
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
Scholars have long recognized the intellectual, political, and religious contributions of Antonio Possevino, S.J. Among these, his activities in Northern and Eastern Europe hold significant importance. As a legate of Pope Gregory XIII, Possevino shaped papal policy in Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Poland–Lithuania, and Moscow. Understanding his work in these areas is essential for grasping the multifaceted legacy of Possevino, as well as his writings, such as his 1586 treatise Moscovia. However, Possevino’s diplomatic missions were not without controversy. In Vilnius, Lithuania, during the 1570s and 1580s, Calvinist writer Andreas Volanus engaged in fierce public polemics with local Jesuits. Possevino joined this conflict, publishing a treatise against Volanus (1583), condemning him as a dangerous blasphemer, and urging King Stephen Báthory to punish the “heretics.” This sparked strong opposition from Volanus and other Calvinist writers in Poland–Lithuania. They depicted Possevino as the cruel and savage “Italian Catiline” and an instigator of religious violence, responsible for Jesuit schemes to exterminate non-Catholics and establish an ultra-Catholic monarchy in Poland–Lithuania. My paper analyzes these writings and Possevino’s negative portrayal to provide a nuanced understanding of his legacy in Poland–Lithuania, which has often been presented apologetically, overlooking significant aspects.
Alessandro Corsi
Boston College (IAJS)
Explicitly conceived by the author to provide a comprehensive reading of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, Antonio Possevino’s Bibliotheca Selecta is a seminal work for understanding the cultural legacy imparted by Jesuits to the future elites of the seventeenth century. The development of the two editions, drafted in conjunction with the final version of the Ratio (1599), marks a crucial moment in defining the essential elements of the Jesuit pedagogical system. The paper highlights the selection criteria that Possevino used to create a canon for academic devices. This canon inherited and adapted themes from the Neoplatonic-Renaissance academic model and contributed to forming the Baroque model by meeting Tridentine dictamina’s requirements. Building on Melion’s observations (2023), the paper contextualizes and explores the reasons why Possevino added a chapter on devices (§38) to book 17 of Bibliotheca Selecta’s second edition (Venice, 1603). The analysis of Possevino’s selection of exempla will consider several factors, including the interplay of Possevino’s biography, publications by Jesuit academies active during the drafting of the two editions of the Bibliotheca (Roman, Neapolitan, and Milanese Parthenias), and internal and external tensions within the Society of Jesus regarding the definition of a set of rules for literary academies.
David Salomoni
Università per Stranieri di Siena
Antonio Possevino’s Biblioteca Selecta is often described as a resource, particularly from the viewpoint of geographical disciplines, designed mainly to help understand biblical passages. At most, some have observed that, for Possevino, geography could serve philosophy in understanding the character of nations based on the nature of places. In short, Possevino’s geographical conception, as it would emerge from his great work, seems to reflect a thought anchored to ancient uses connected with this discipline, primarily religious or moral. But what if this were not all? Possevino lived and worked precisely when geography was established as an autonomous scientific discipline within the Catholic and Jesuit world. This paper aims to challenge the widespread interpretation of Possevino’s geographical views through a comparison with the views of contemporary fellow Jesuits, such as Christopher Clavius and Matteo Ricci, to highlight his contribution to the birth of geography as a modern scientific and scholastic discipline.