Isaac Casaubon, Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes, John Prideaux, and Tarnished Reputations: A (not Entirely) Scholarly Controversy

Abstract

Isaac Casaubon’s open letter to Fronton du Duc (1611) was the most eagerly anticipated contribution to James I’s controversy with the Jesuits. It provoked a vitriolic response from Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes, who insinuated that Casaubon’s father had been hanged. As this paper demonstrates, it is due to Casaubon’s successful rhetoric that he is often believed to have been outraged only by Eudaemon-Joannes’ slanderous treatment of his father, but not by the Jesuit’s attacks on Casaubon’s scholarly competence and moral integrity. Even as he protested that these ridiculous accusations do not merit a reply, Casaubon did in fact publish three slanderous responses, and further undermined Eudaemon-Joannes and the Jesuits in his private correspondence. This paper contributes to the revision of Mark Pattison’s depiction of Casaubon’s ‘English’ years, and his turn to theology, as a failure. By tracing the genesis of a short passage in Casaubon’s Exercitationes, it reassesses treatises by Eudaemon-Joannes, Prideaux and Casaubon in the light of Casaubon’s recently published correspondence. A comparison of the rhetorical strategies of these authors demonstrates that they shared a culture of polemic that did not shy away from slanderous and vulgar imagery.