Heribert Rosweyde

Heribert Rosweyde (20 January 1569, Utrecht – 5 October 1629, Antwerp) was a Jesuit hagiographer. His work, quite unfinished, was taken up by Jean Bolland who systematized it, while broadening its perspective. This is the beginning of the association of the Bollandists.

Life

Most archival evidence indicates that Heibert Rosweyde was born in Utrecht on 20 January 1569. His family was part of the Catholic minority. Rosweyde attended the university of Douai,

Plan Rosweyde thought it would be a useful work to publish the texts in their original form. His superiors, to whom he submitted his plan in 1603, gave it their approval, and allowed him to prepare the projected edition, without, however, relieving him of other occupations. At that time Rosweyde was serving as prefect of studies in Antwerp, but was soon sent to St Omer to replace a professor of apologetics who had fallen ill. He did not return to Antwerp until 1606.

There were about 1300 manuscripts regarding lives of the saints in the libraries of Belgium. Rosweyde obtained copies of most of them. He pursued his project, which he announced publicly in 1607, as well as the plan he proposed to follow. Under the title: Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliothecis manuscriptiae, he gave in a little volume in 16mo., published by the Plantin press at Antwerp, an alphabetical list of the names of the saints whose acts had been either found by him or called to his attention in old manuscript collections. This list filled fifty pages; the prefatory notice in which he indicates the character and arrangement of his work, as he had conceived it, takes up fourteen. Finally, the work contains an appendix of twenty-six pages containing the unpublished acts of the passion of the Cilician martyrs, Tharsacus, Probus, and Andronicus, which Rosweyde regarded—wrongly—as the authentic official report from the pen of a clerk of the court of the Roman tribunal.

Rosweyde was not disconcerted by this. He received encouragement, enthusiastic praise, and valuable assistance from various other sources. The new enterprise found an especial protector in Antoine de Wynghe, abbot of the Liessies Abbey in the now Nord department of France. The large sympathy of this patron manifested itself in every way; in letters of recommendation to the heads of the various houses of the great Benedictine Order which opened to Rosweyde and his associates monastic libraries; in loans and gifts of books, of manuscripts, and of copies of manuscripts; and in pecuniary assistance. The first volume of the Acta Sanctorum came out of the press in 1643.

The writings which would have been available are: the edition of the Little Roman Martyrology, in which Rosweyde believed he recognized the collection mentioned by Gregory the Great in his letter to Eulogius of Alexandria; the edition of the martyrology of Ado of Vienne (1613).

Rosweyde apparently commissioned and dedicated to de Wynghe an emblematic work of fifty plates of hermits, engraved by Boetius à Bolswert to designs by Abraham Bloemaert (Sylva Anachoretica Ægypti Et Palæstinæ. Figuris Æneis Et Brevibus Vitarum Elogiis Expressa. (Hendrick Aertssens, Antwerp 1619).

The rest, however, as for instance the Dutch edition of Ribadeneira's Flowers of the Saints (1619, two folio volumes), the General History of the Church (1623), to which he added as an appendix the detailed history of the Church in the Netherlands, both in Dutch; the Flemish lives of St. Ignatius and St. Philip Neri; the Flemish translation of the first part of the Treatise on Perfection, drew his attention completely from what he should have regarded as his principal task.

Works Vitae patrum: the ten books of the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, which he first published in Latin (1615 in fol.), dedicating the work to the Abbot of Liessies, and later in Dutch (1617) in fol., with an inscription to Jeanne de Bailliencourt, Abbess of Messines.