Bibliotheca selecta

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.

Part II is dedicated to king Sigismund III Vasa of Poland, one of the contemporary rulers under Possevino's Counter Reformation tutelage.

Possevino is creating an authorized bibliography of the traditional arts and sciences elaborating the humanistic educational precepts of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum.

The major thrust of Possevino's orthodox compendium is the creation of a bibliography of the humanist culture of the Late Renaissance that is both confidently encyclopedic and outspokenly anti-heretical.

In addition to two revised folio editions of the Bibliotheca selecta printed in Venice, 1603 and Cologne, 1607, several books were reprinted in separate editions, notably Book 16, as Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam,[4] a thorough bibliography of the ancient and contemporary literature of world history reworking, expurgating and updating Bodin's Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem(1566).