PONCELET, ALBERT. — Jesuit, hagiographer, born in Liège on 30 August 1861, died in Montpellier on 19 January 1912.
He entered the Order in 1878 and was definitively admitted in 1895 to the College of the Bollandists, with whom he had already completed his training. A methodical writer and impeccable editor, possessing rigorous and open intelligence and indefatigable industriousness, he contributed to vol. II of Novembre of the Acta SS. (Brussels 1894) with a small number of brief commentaries; in vol. III (ibid. 1910), however, his contribution is considerably more substantial. Worthy of note are: De s. Willibrordo, episcopo Trajectensi et Frisonum apostolo (pp. 414–500); De s. Leonardo confessore nobiliacensi (pp. 139–200); De s. Engelberto, archiep. Coloniesi et martyre (pp. 623–84). He contributed extensively to vols. VI–XXI (1887–1912) of the Anal. Boll., where each year he also published several monographs devoted to descriptions of the Latin hagiographical holdings of the public and private libraries of Austria, France, Germany, and Italy; in separate volumes he produced the catalogues of the libraries of Rome (Brussels 1909) and the Vatican Library (ibid. 1910); he revised, completed, and reworked the Biblioteca Pagiographica Latina, left to him in draft form by Fr. C. De Smedt, who had conceived the project, adding a first supplement (2 vols., ibid. 1901); and subsequently republished it in a revised and reworked 2nd edition (ibid. 1911). He had begun his journey through Italy in order to catalogue the hagiographical manuscripts of the chapter libraries when death overtook him at Montpellier.