Mansi, John Dominique

, a very learned Italian prelate, and voluminous editor, was born at Lucca, Feb. 16, 1692. At school and college he made rapid progress in every branch of study, but became particularly attached to ecclesiastical history and biography. He was for some | years professor of theology at Naples; but the greater part of his life was spent in reading, and carefully exploring the contents of the Italian libraries, particularly the manuscripts, from all which he amassed a fund of information on subjects connected with ecclesiastical history, of vast extent and importance. His first station in the church was that of a clerk-regular in the congregation of the Mother of God; and from this, in 1765, at the age of seventy-two, he was promoted to the archbishopric of Lucca, by pope Clement XIII. who had a high esteem for him. He died Sept. 27, 1769. His life, in our authority, is little more than an account of his works, which indeed must have occupied the whole of his time. His first publication was entitled “Tractatus de casibus, et excommunicationibus episcopis reservatis, confectusad normam label lae Lucanse,” Lucca, 1724. He then published a translation into Latin of Calmet’s “Dictionary of the Bible,*' with additions; an, edition of Thomasini” De veteri et nova ecclesise disciplina,“3 vols. folio; a Latin translation of Calmet’s” Commentaries on the Bible,“1731, &c. 7 vols. an edition of Baronius’s annals, with great additions, in 30 vols. folio a new edition of the Councils, including Labbe, Cossart, &c. 1759, &c. 30 vols. folio; anew edition of yneas Sylvius (pope Pius II.) orations, with many hitherto unpublished, 1755, 2 vols. 4to. He was the editor of some other ecclesiastical collections and theological pieces of inferior note; but we must not omit the work by which he is perhaps best known in this country, his excellent edition of Fabricius’s” Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis," 6 vols. 4to, generally bound in three, printed at Padua, in 1754. This alone is sufficient to place him in the first rank of literary antiquaries. ¹