Gábor Hevenesi was born in 1656 and entered the Jesuit order in 1671 in Sopron. He taught rhetoric and theology in Nagyszombat and later became rector of the Pazmaneum in Vienna.
Hevenesi was a colleague and advisor of the archbishop of Esztergom, Lipót Kollonich, and in 1686 he began collecting sources of Hungarian history on the archbishop’s behalf. He collected ninety-one volumes from copies of documents and certificates in archives and in private ownership. Most of the original documents have since been destroyed, so the value of the manuscript collection is inestimable. In the course of his literary activity, he published more than thirty books, one of the most significant of which is a collection of biographies written about Hungarian saints. In addition to his ecclesiastical works, he also contributed to the first atlas of Hungary. His manuscript collection is preserved in our library.