On Time, Punctuality, and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism

by Max Engammare, Karin Maag

Overview

In On Time, Punctuality, and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism, Max Engammare explores how the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers of Geneva, France, London, and Bern internalized a new concept of time. Applying a moral and spiritual code to the course of the day, they regulated their relationship with time, which was, in essence, a new relationship with God. As Calvin constantly reminded his followers, God watches his faithful every minute. Come Judgment Day, the faithful in turn will have to account for each minute. Engammare argues that the inhabitants of Calvin’s Geneva invented the new habit of being on time, a practice unknown in Antiquity. It was also fundamentally different from notions of time in the monastic world of the medieval period and unknown to contemporaries such as Erasmus, Vives, the early Jesuits, Rabelais, Ronsard, or Montaigne. Engammare shows that punctuality did not proceed from technical innovation. Rather, punctuality was above all a spiritual, social, and disciplinary virtue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521769976
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/23/2009
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Max Engammare is a scholar of the Reformation and General Director of Editions Droz in Geneva. He is the author and editor of ten books, including an edition of the sermons of John Calvin and, with Nicole Gueunier, Sebastien Castellion, Les livres de Salomon.

Table of Contents

1. John Calvin's personal time-management; 2. Church time and its civic setting; 3. Saving time and learning to be punctual; 4. The growth and decline of Huguenot calendars (mid-sixteenth to late-seventeenth centuries); 5. Ronsard and Tyard versus Viret regarding time; 6. The daily pattern; Conclusion.