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In the final decades of the 16th century the Late Renaissance ars historica propagated the primacy of history as the intellectual and literary focus of contemporary humanist culture among the European res publica litterarum. The famous Italian Jesuit, Antonio Possevino (Mantua, 1533-Ferrara, 1611) was a principal spokesman for the ars historica among the Catholics. His works on historiography champion the humanist tradition of classical and Renaissance historical culture as central to the influential pedagogical program of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. They also depend heavily on an earlier collection of ars historica literature, the Perna Methodus historica (Basel, 1576). By identifying Possevino's sources in the Perna edition my dissertation seeks to study the character and the extent of Possevino's borrowings from this Erasmian collection in his Jesuit editions.
In plagiarizing the Perna collection it was Possevino's Counter-Reformation mission to subvert the heterodox character of the existing ars historica and transform it into a vehicle for papal hegemony and for Catholic orthodoxy. The Perna collection of 1576 features Jean Bodin's controversial 1566 masterpiece, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, along with another twelve works in the genre by both Catholic and Protestant writers. Possevino's 1592 censure of Bodin's work refers explicitly to the text of the Basel edition. Tacitly building on Bodin and the other sources in Perna he articulates the framework and constructs the erudite historical bibliography of his great encyclopedia, Bibliotheca selecta in historia of 1593.
The Bibliotheca selecta in historia is a comprehensive program for humanist learning rooted in the historical culture of the Late Renaissance. It depends heavily on the work of Bodin found in the Basel Methodus historica. Possevino's Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (1597) expands his original De humana historia (Book XVI) of 1593 into a full-scale Jesuit ars historica. In the Apparatus, in addition to the borrowings from Bodin, Possevino also copies the Erasmian translations into Latin of key texts by Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Lucian of Samosata from the Perna edition and uses them for his own Italian translations in his Apparato all'historia di tutte le nationi (1598). The ars historica work of Possevino is rather enhanced than diminished by the disclosure of his Erasmian sources in Perna. They bolster the classical and humanist credentials of his Jesuit editions. Through such humanist recyclings Possevino preserved the culture of the ars historica within the encyclopedia of his Bibliotheca selecta and laid solid Renaissance foundations for the siecle classique of the Jesuits and for the historical encyclopedias of the Enlightenment.