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.

Max Engammare (Author), Karin Maag (Translated by)

9780521769976, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 November 2009

288 pages, 15 b/w illus.
22.4 x 15 x 1.8 cm, 0.59 kg

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 Judgement 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.

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.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Church history [HRCC2], Christianity [HRC], Religion: general [HRA], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH]