Qualche considerazione sulla personalità ed il poliglottismo del cardinale Giuseppe Mezzofanti

Abstract

Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774-1849) is unanimously considered one of the greatest polyglots in history. In addition to this, he was also a highly regarded librarian – he also became “primo custode” of the Vatican Apostolic Library – and an outstanding classicist and orientalist. Mezzofanti held the chair of Greek and Oriental Languages at the University of Bologna for many years, and was an eminent figure of great erudition with whom numerous scholars sought consultations. In addition to this, being a clergyman, he also carried out his mission as a pastor of souls. Despite his alacrity and his tireless study, Mezzofanti did not publish any scientific publications and this fact makes it difficult to evaluate both his activity as a scholar and the actual competence he had in the dozens of languages he was said to know. In order to better understand his activity as a scholar and to clarify which languages he actually knew (and at what level of competence), therefore, all that remains is to rely on the extensive handwritten documentation he left and on the information contained in the numerous biographies that have been written about him, among which the best is still the one compiled by C. W. Russel.