RIVADENEIRA (RIBADENEIRA), PEDRO de. - Jesuit, writer, b. at Toledo on 1 Nov. 1526, d. at Madrid on 22 Sept. 1611.

At the age of 13 he followed Cardinal Alessandro Farnese to Rome as a page and there met St. Ignatius of Loyola, who protected him and then received him among his sons on 18 Sept. 1540. He studied at the Universities of Paris, Louvain and Padua; a priest in 1553, he spent the period 1555-60 in the Netherlands to secure there the official recognition of the Society of Jesus; from 1560 to 1572 he was in Italy, where he discharged various offices: provincial, commissary, visitor, assistant; on the death of St. Francis Borgia he was removed from Rome as a Spaniard and moved to Toledo, where he devoted himself to the composition of his works, for the most part in classical Castilian.

R. is the first biographer of St. Ignatius. He began with Vita Ignatii Loisiae (Naples 1572), on whose vicissitudes cf. P. Tacchi Venturi, Della prima edizione della vita di s. Ignazio (Naples 1901), which, enlarged and corrected, he himself translated into Castilian (Madrid 1583) and which was then reproduced and translated into various languages down to our own day. R. is also the first biographer of the Society with Illustrium scriptorum religionis S. I. (Madrid 1602; 3rd posthumous ed., ibid. 1613). Other principal historical works: Vida del p. Diego Lainez (ibid. 1594) and of p. Francisco de Borja, added to the Ignatian life in the ed. of 1594; he completed these writings on the Society with the Tratado con lo qual se da razón del instituto de la Compañía de Jesús (ibid. 1605); Tratado del modo de gobierno que nuestro p. Ignacio ha tenido (ibid. 1878). Historia eclesiástica del Scisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (ibid. 1588); new ed. edited by E. Rey. Historia de la Controviforma por el p. R. (ibid. 1945). Of the ascetic and moral works, worthy of mention are: Tratado de la tribulación (ibid. 1589); Tratado de la Religión y virtudes que deve tener el Príncipe christiano para gobernar... Contra lo que Nicolas Machiavelo y los políticos deste tiempo enseñan (ibid. 1595); Flos Sanctorum o libro de las vidas de los Santos (2 vols., ibid. 1599-1601).

Bibliography6 works

BIBL.: cdd.: Obras escogidas. Madrid 1868; Confesiones, epistolae aliaque scripta inedita, 2 vols., ibid. 1920-23 (Monum. Hist. S. I.); Sommervogel, VII, 1724-48. Stud.: J. M. Prat. Hist. du p. R., disciple de st Ignace, Paris 1862; A. Astrain, Hist. de la Comp. de J. en la asistencia de España, I-IV, Madrid 1908-13, see indexes; P. Taechi Venturi, Storia della Comp. di Gesù in Italia, II, 2nd ed., Rome 1950, pp. 316-23; T. Gonzalez Garcia, Ideas politicas del p. R., in Rev. nacional de educación, 1944, Sept., pp. 34-59.

Celestino Testore

@incollection{ec10_rivadeneira_ribadeneira_pedro, author = {Testore, Celestino}, title = {Rivadeneira (Ribadeneira), pedro de}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {X}, pages = {1016--1017}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/rivadeneira-ribadeneira-pedro-de} }

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Rivadeneira (Ribadeneira), Pedro de

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