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.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Casaubon
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or appearances:
“It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)