BECCARI, ANTONIO:
V. FERRARA, ANTONIO da BECCARI, CAMILLO
Jesuit, historian of missions, b. in Rome on 14 July 1849. He entered the novitiate in 1863 and taught for twenty years in various colleges; in 1897 he became vice-postulator, and from 1902 to 1923 general postulator of the causes of beatification and canonization of the Society of Jesus; d. in Rome on 4 Aug. 1929.His name is associated with one of the principal modern editions of sources for the history of missions. In 1903 he published a volume of Notizie e saggi di opere e documenti inediti regarding the history of Ethiopia during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries; with the support of the Italian Ministry of Colonies, the essay became vol. I of a collection: Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti a saec. XVI ad XIX (vol. 15 in 4°, Rome 1903–1917; I, op. cit., 1903; II–III, Petr. Pacz, Historia Aethiopiae, 1905–1906; IV, Emm. Barradas, Tractatus tres historico-geographici, 1906; V–VII, Emm. d’Almeida, Historia Aethiopiae, 1907–1908; VIII–X, Patr. Alph. Mendez, Expeditio Aethiopica, 1908–1910; XI–XIV, Relationes et epistolae variorum, 1911–14; XV, Index analyticus, 1917). He republished separately, in Italian translation, one of the Portuguese treatises from vol. IV: Il Tigré descritto da un missionario gesuita del secc. XVIII (Rome 1909). Despite certain deficiencies, due to the editor’s insufficient technical preparation, Beccari’s collection is of fundamental importance, not only for the history of the Jesuit mission in Abyssinia, but for the entire civil and ecclesiastical history of Ethiopia in the modern period.