NICOLA di SALICETO (Wydenbosch or Weidenbusch). - Cistercian theologian, also called Nicolaus de Berno, because he was born in Berne, in what year is unknown. He studied the liberal arts and medicine in Paris, was a bachelor in 1456, licentiate in 1459, later “magister” and also “doctor medicinae.” In 1461 he was procurator of the German nation in Paris.
Having entered the Cistercian abbey of Frienisberg (canton of Berne) without having understood monastic life, in 1475 he had himself appointed physician of Berne, without the consent of his Order, by the magistracy of that city, which obtained for him from the Holy See authorization to practise medicine and to receive a benefice from the collegiate church of S. Vincenzo in Berne. In 1481 he was appointed master of the school of that city, but teaching was forbidden him by the abbot general Jean de Cirey, who assigned him the following year to various affairs of the Order in Lorraine and Burgundy and finally appointed him abbot of Pomeria (Baumgarten) in Alsace. N. is renowned for having procured the first printing of the liturgical books of the Cistercian Order: the Breviary (Basilea 1484), the Missal (Strasburgo 1487), and the Diarium or Diurnale. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries he was highly esteemed as an ascetical author for his book of meditations and prayers: Liber meditationum ac orationum devotarum qui anthidotarius anime dicitur (Strasburgo 1489, 14 editions up to 1500).
J. Schmidlin, Papstgeschichte der neuesten Zeit, I, Monaco 1933, pp. 627-39; French version, II, Lione 1940, pp. 333-347; R. Lefevre, S. Sede e Russia e i colloqui dello Czar Nicola I nei documenti vaticani, in Gregorio XVI, Misc. commemorativa, II, Roma 1948, pp. 159-392; J. Leflon, La crise révolutionnaire, Parigi 1949, p. 456 et seq. Wolf Giusti