PETER JAN RIETBERGEN Lucas Holstenius

PETER J. A. N. RIETBERGEN Lucas Holstenius (1596-1661), seventeenth-century scholar, librarian and book-collector. A preliminary note 'La cupidigia d'haver molti libri è una infermità che si porte seco sino all'ultimo periodo' This, to many of the readers of this journal eminent, not to say self-evident truth, was uttered by Lucas Holste, according to one of his many learned and bibliophile correspondents, Luca Torreggiani, archbishop of Ravenna, who sought his friend's advice when he planned to create a library of his own.' I The seventeenth century produced many learned men who, through the sheer bulk of their correspondence, the vast extent of their erudite contact, the weightiness of the many tomes they have left-published or still in manuscript-remain essentially unstudied and thus actually escape from the grip of our knowledge of the Respublica Litteraria, of the world of the Vir- tuosi, though, of course, the mere mention of their names elicits an 'oh, yes' from the listener and reader. Men like Gisbert Cuper (1644-1716), the Dutch antiquary, polymath, university professor and burgomaster, the cor- respondent of so many European scholars and literati; men like Leone Allacci (1586-1669), the Greek-born Byzantinist, physician, theologian and librarian; men like Nicholas Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), the Pro- vencal lawyer, numismatist, botanist and `collectioneur' . In short, men like Lucas Holste, often referred to as Holstenius, whose importance for the intellectual life of seventeenth-century papal Rome is generally acknowledged and constantly underlined; a man of whose political activities, paradoxically, we are quite well informed, though we know far less about the actual extent of his cultural significance. The fact that Holstenius's letters remain largely unpublished2 has been rightly lamented-until quite recently3-but little has been done to remedy it. 206 It is the aim of this article to show the richness of this source, to give a new impulse to Holstenian studies, and to examine at least one detail of Holste's activities-as the librarian of the two most important seventeenth- century Roman collections, the Barberini and Vatican Libraries, and as a collector of books and manuscripts in his own right. The data are furnished by the enormous collection of letters and other unpublished manuscripts which, on his death in 1661, Holste left to his patron, cardinal Francesco Barberini, and which thus became part of that family's great library; in 1902 the Biblioteca Barberiniana was transferred to and incorporated in the 4 Vatican Library, where its rich contents can now be studied.4 Lucas Holste5 was born in Hamburg in 1596, the son of Peter Holste, owner of a cloth-dyeing business. His father must have done reasonably well, for in 1616 he could afford to send his son to the recently founded university of Leyden, in the Dutch Republic-chosen, perhaps, as much for the commercial contacts between the merchant metropolis on the Elbe and the new mercantile republic as for religious reason. In Leyden, the young Holste's keen intelligence and his growing erudition earned him the friend- ship of such scholars as Cluverius, Heinsius and Meursius. With the first, he travelled to Italy, traversing the peninsula afoot and even journeying as far as Sicily'-not normally one of the stops on a Grand Tour or Peregrinatio Academica. Back in Leyden, Holste felt for the first time attracted to the ideas and ideals of St. Augustine, and contemplated conversion to Roman Catholicism.8 He did not then take this step; not yet. He did, however, cross the North Sea to England, to study in the libraries of London and Oxford.9 His interest there was in classical geography, as he planned an edi- tion of the lesser Greek geographers-a plan which was to become a lifelong .

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