Bibliotheca selecta

Bibliotheca selecta (full title Bibliotheca selecta de ratione studiorum in Historia, In Disciplinis, in salute omnium procuranda) is a bibliographical encyclopedia by the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, printed in two folio volumes at the Typographia Apostolica Vaticana by Domenico Basa in 1593. It represents an authoritative and up-to-date Jesuit compendium of Counter-Reformation knowledge.

Part I (Books 1-11) is dedicated to pope Clement VIII with the imprimatur of Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva. It begins with an introduction that traces the Idea et causae operis to the 1560s in France when as a Jesuit superior Possevino started fighting the anti-heretical battle of the books. From Lyons and Avignon he had seen the challenge to the orthodoxy of Rome and the Council of Trent represented by Konrad Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis, the ground-breaking encyclopedia expressing the Erasmian culture of Swiss and German Reformers, a work immediately banned by church censors. To begin, Possevino discourses on the principles of Jesuit humanist pedagogy enunciated in the Ratio studiorum in a preliminary section, Cultura ingeniorum. This part, as several others, went through several separate editions and an Italian translation by Possevino. Among these was an edition dedicated to the Russian False Dmitriy I. The theological presentation of the several books outlines a comprehensive bibliography on theology, scholastic, catechetical and controversial, and incorporates works by such contemporary Jesuit missionaries as Alessandro Valignano and Edmund Campion.

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