Herbest, Benedykt

Herbest, Benedykt, b ca 1531 in Nove Misto near Dobromyl, Galicia, d 4 March 1598 in Jarosław, Galicia. Polish Jesuit theologian and scholar. A graduate of the Cracow Academy, he was the rector of schools in Lviv (1555–8), Cracow, and Poznań, and the Jesuit college in Jarosław. An advocate of the Counter-Reformation in Western Ukraine, he actively promoted the conversion of the Ukrainian Orthodox elite to Catholicism and initiated a written polemic (see Polemical literature) with Herasym Smotrytsky on this topic with his brochure Wiary kościoła rzymskiego wywody y greckiego niewolstwa historya ... dla Rusi nawrócenia pisaney (Elucidations of the Faith of the Roman Church and the History of Greek Enslavement ... Written for the Conversion of Rus’, 1586).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]