that brought him to Venice. During the 1590s while he was busy as a bibliographer he was also active in pastoral work in his native Mantua and at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga. Two missions on the status of the Jesuits in France brought him into renewed contact with recently converted Calvinist, King Henri IV. Venice and Ferrara: Jesuit polemicist During the production and publication of his enormous Apparatus Sacer (1603-06) in Venice, Possevino became the Jesuit leader of the traditionalist vecchi in opposing the anti-papal giovani who were being more successfully led by Servite historian Paolo Sarpi. There he fought the confessional "battle of the books" in a familiar diplomatic milieu that included the ambassador of James I, Sir Henry Wotton and the Venetian ambassador of his old acquaintance Henry IV of France. Following the Interdict of 1606 of Pope Paul V against Venice, Possevino was banished with the Society of Jesus from the Republic of Venice. He was sent to relative obscurity in nearby Ferrara where he wrote several polemical tracts under various pseudonyms concerning the pro-Catholic False Dmitriy I, the Venetian Interdict and other controversial issues. Having outlived his role during the Counter Reformation as the political Jesuit intellectual, par excellence, he died in 1611. Selected works Apparatus sacer ad scriptores Veteris et Novi Testamenti, also simply called Apparatus sacer, is one of the most celebrated works of Antonio Possevino (the other being Bibliotheca selecta). It is an overview of the different interpretations of the Old and New Testament by ecclesiastical authors from the Church fathers up to his contemporaries. It was printed in three volumes in Venice during the first decade of the 17th century. It references no less than six thousand authors.Del sacrificio dell'altare (Lyons, 1563) [English trans. Louvain, 1570]Risposta a Pietro Vireto, Nicolo Balbiani. e a due altri heretici (Avignon, 1566)Il soldato cristiano (Rome, 1569)Notæ verbi Dei et Apostolicæ Ecclesiæ (Posen, 1586)Muscovia (Vilna, 1586)()Iudicium de Nuae, Iohannis Bodini, Philippe-Mornaei et Machiavelli scriptis (Rome, 1592); (Lyons, 1593) ()Bibliotheca selecta (Rome, 1593)()Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (Venice, 1597)()Nuova risposta di Giovanni Filoteo d'Asti (Bologna, 1607)Risposta del Sig. Paolo Anafesto (Bologna, 1607) Bibliography Alberto Castaldini (ed): Antonio Possevino; i gesuiti e la loro eredita culturale in Transilvania, Roma, IHSI, 2009, 188pp.Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), sub voce''. In literature Possevino appears in the early chapters of Alison Macleod's historical novel "Prisoner of the Queen", in