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Agostino Steuco


Agostino Steuco (in Latin Agostinus Steuchus) (1497–1548), Italian humanist, Old Testament scholar, Counter Reformation polemicist and antiquarian, was born at Gubbio in Umbria.

In 1513 he entered the congregation of the Order of the Augustinian Canons of San Salvatore of Bologna, taking up residence in the monastery of San Secundo, one of the order's houses in Gubbio. In 1524 he went to the mother cloister in Bologna, from where he briefly attended courses in Hebrew and rhetoric at the University of Bologna. In 1529 he was sent by his congregation to the Monastery of Sant' Antonio di Castello in Venice, where, due to his expertise in biblical languages and humanist textual criticism, he was placed in charge of the monastery's library, donated to the canons by Cardinal Domenico Grimani. Many of the collection's biblical, Hebrew, and philosophical works had once been owned by Pico della Mirandola.

Over the next several years (1529–33) Steuco wrote a series of polemical works against Luther and Erasmus, the latter of whom he accused of helping to foment the Protestant Revolt against the Church. These works show Steuco's staunch support of the traditions and practices of the Church, including a strident defense of papal authority. Part of his output during this period included a major set of annotations on the Pentateuch, titled Veteris testamenti ad Hebraicam veritatem recognitio, in which he used Hebrew and Greek manuscripts from the Grimani Library to correct Jerome's Vulgate translation of the Old Testament text. When explaining the text, he never strayed from the literal and historical meaning. An interesting juxtaposition to this work of humanist biblical exegesis was a syncretic philosophical work that he wrote in this period, to which he gave the title Cosmopoeia.


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