TESEO, AMBROGIO. - Orientalist, born at Albonese in Lomellina in 1469, died at Pavia in 1540. After attending the school of law at Pavia, he entered the Congregation of the Lateran Canons Regular. He soon showed himself to be a passionate seeker of Oriental texts.
During the Fifth Lateran Council T. was in contact with the envoys of Patriarch Simone of Monte Libano. He already knew some Hebrew and Syriac and was charged with verifying the orthodoxy of their liturgical texts. Among the various scholars with whom he had contact, it will suffice to recall Widmanstetter, whom he met in 1529 at Reggio Emilia. To him T. gave a Syriac manuscript of the Gospels, extensively used by Widmanstetter for the edition of the Novum Testamentum Syriacum (Vienna 1655). In 1539 T. published at Pavia an Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam atque Armenicam et decem alias linguas. Characterum differentia alphabeta circiter quadraginta et eorundem invicem conformatio. Mystica et cabalistica quam plurima scitu digna. Et descriptio ac simulacrum Phagoti Afranii. The lengthy title suggests the heterogeneous character of the work, in which autobiographical and historical information is interwoven with sound linguistic observations or cabbalistic digressions. It was a pioneering grammatical attempt, at least for Syriac and Armenian.