SERRY, Jacques-Hyacinthe. - Dominican theologian and polemicist, b. at Toulon in 1658, d. at Padua on 12 March 1738.
He entered the Order at Marseilles (c. 1673), where an uncle of his, the Dominican Tommaso S., was living. He completed his studies in Paris and taught there. Called to Rome in 1690, he served as theologian to Cardinals de Bouillon and Altieri, and as consultant to the Holy Office. On 23 March 1697 he became a doctor of the Sorbonne, and in September of the same year he moved to the chair of theology at the University of Padua, which he held until his death, having declined the post of theologian at the Casanatense Library (1700–1702).
A prolific and combative writer, he is especially known for his *Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae* (Louvain 1700; definitive ed. Antwerp 1709), published under the pseudonym A. Le Blanc, and for the controversies that preceded and followed its publication, which seemed to revive disputes from a century earlier. Though a moderate Gallican (he had been a pupil of N. Alexandre), he was unjustly accused of Calvinism, and it was even claimed that his *Historia* had been condemned. Other works: *Esercitationes historicae, criticae, polemicae de Christo, eiusque Matre* (Venice 1719); *Praelectiones theologicae dogmaticae, polemicae scholasticae*... (5 vols., ibid. 1742). In 1770 a six-volume edition of his *Opera omnia* also appeared in Venice.