Lukas Holste

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lucas Holstenius, etching by Johann Jacob Haid (1740)

Lukas Holste , latinized Lucas Holstenius (born September 27, 1596 in Hamburg , † February 2, 1661 in Rome ) was a humanistic scholar, librarian and geographer.

Life

Holste, the sixth child of the Hamburg dyer Peter Holste, received his school education in Hamburg. He then enrolled - after short study visits at the University of Rostock and the Academic Gymnasium Hamburg - at the University of Leiden , where the humanists Gerhard Johannes Vossius , Daniel Heinsius , Johannes van Meurs , Petrus Scriverius and Joseph Justus Scaliger taught at the time.

His trip to Italy and Sicily in 1618, largely on foot for financial reasons and accompanied by Philipp Clüver , the founder of historical geography, encouraged him to study geography more intensively. After his return with short stays in Leiden and Hamburg, he went to England in 1622, where he continued his geographic studies. In 1624 he stayed in Paris, where he became the librarian of the French statesman Jean-Jacques de Mesmes . Through de Mesmes he came into contact with the scholar Fabri de Peiresc . Around this time he converted to Catholicism.

In 1627 he traveled to Rome, where he got a job at the court of Cardinal Nepot Francesco Barberini through Peiresc's mediation . In 1636 he was appointed librarian to the cardinal and soon afterwards Pope Urban VIII appointed him papal consistorial secretary and apostolic protonotary . In 1653, under Pope Innocent X , he became head of the Vatican Library .

The popes entrusted him with important diplomatic and internal church tasks. He supervised the conversion of the Swedish Queen Christine of Sweden , Landgrave Friedrich von Hessen-Darmstadt and Danish Count Christoph von Rantzau to Catholicism. He used his diplomatic travels to expand his extensive scientific correspondence and to continue his research. In addition to geography, his main subjects remained philosophy, above all Neoplatonism , Greek and Latin patristics and the history of the Pope. During his research in the monastery of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme , he discovered the Liber Diurnus in 1640 , which contains files from the papal chancellery from the seventh to the end of the ninth century. Holste prepared the papers for printing, but was not allowed to publish them by order of Alexander VII , as they evidently touched on delicate theological problems.

In the controversy over Galileo , Holste belonged to the party of his supporters. When Urban VIII issued the ban on erecting a monument to Galileo, Holste called Galilei a divine human being , whose splendor had outshone all the other natural philosophers.

Holste died on February 2, 1661 and was buried in the church of the German-speaking Catholic community in Rome, Santa Maria dell'Anima .

estate

He did not leave his private library of over 3,000 volumes to the Bibliotheca Vaticana , of which he had been director for so long, but to the Biblioteca Angelica , a library operated by the Augustinian order , which had been made publicly accessible since 1605 and as a center for science and Research applied.

He bequeathed part of his manuscripts to his native Hamburg. His album amicorum with entries from the years 1616 to 1623 came to the Austrian National Library through his nephew Peter Lambeck .

literature

  • Conrad BursianHolste, Lucas . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1880, p. 776 f.
  • Peter Fuchs:  Holste, Lukas. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , pp. 548-550 ( digitized version ).
  • Alfonso Mirto: Lucas Holstenius e la corte medicea. Carteggio (1629-1660). Leo S. Olschki, Firenze 1999.
  • Alfredo Serrai: La biblioteca di Lucas Holstenius , Forum, Udine 2000, ISBN 88-8420-013-X
  • Hans-Walter Stork (Ed.): Lucas Holstenius (1596-1661). A Hamburg humanist in Baroque Rome. Material on the history of his manuscript donation to the Hamburg City Library. Edited by Gernot Bühring, Eva Horváth, Marina Molin-Pradel, Burkhard Reis, Bianca-Jeanette Schröder, Hans-Walter Stork. (Association for Catholic Church History in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Articles and communications, Vol. 9), Husum 2008, ISBN 978-3-7868-5109-7 .
  • Burkhard Reis: friend of bees, master of books. He hated censorship and defended Galileo: the scholar and papal diplomat Lukas Holstenius, born 400 years ago as the son of a dyer in Hamburg . In: Die Zeit , September 27, 1996.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Claudia Sojer, Christian host: The family book of Lukas Holste (1616–1623). Report from the research project Peter Lambeck , in: biblos 62 (2013) ISSN  0006-2022 pp. 33–56 ( digitized version )