Isaac Casaubon - Literary Appearances

Literary Appearances

The scholars in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and Middlemarch by George Eliot are named Casaubon. Mary Gentle named a character in her novels Rats and Gargoyles and the Architecture of Desire Casaubon, as an homage to Isaac Casaubon. Ross King makes mention of Casaubon in his novel Ex-Libris where he is said to have debunked the Corpus Hermeticum as a forgery (which he probably took from Frances Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition ).

In their book Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg show that Casaubon was a Hebrew scholar too, taking serious interest in Jewish studies. The Jewish bibliographer Isaac ben Jacob in his Bibliography Otsar Hasefarim 1880, mentions notations on Michlol, the Hebrew book by David Kimhi on Hebrew grammar, which he attributes to one "Rabbi Isaac Casaubon".

  • “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

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