Casaubon’s Ephemerides as a Companion of Calvinist Ascesis through Labour

Abstract

The Hellenist Isaac Casaubon taught at Geneva’s Academy from 1582 to 1596. Invited to Montpellier’s University as the future restorer of Greek studies, after the tormented years of the French civil wars, he moved to the Midi of France. A few weeks later, Casaubon started to keep a diary. The psychological reasons of this decision and the nature of his journal are examined. Started as a sort of log-book, it is argued that its deep roots are to be sought in the difficulty to adapt himself to an environment so utterly contrasting with reformed Geneva, lacking sound and comfortable “religious safeguards”, and in the sudden solitude in which he fell, deprived as he was of the contact with his coreligionist colleagues and friends. Casaubon, Rousseau, Amiel, three authors deeply stamped by Reformation: it cannot be due to sheer coincidence if they all started very personal autobiographical writings, eventually worded as journal intime. The root of Capitalism and of Punctuality has been shown to be the Genevan Reformation, the author argues that the genre of the journal intime too developed under the new psychological relationship of persons to themselves which grew out of the unprecedented religious and moral context.