Joseph Justus Scaliger

Joseph Justus Scaliger (b. 1540–d. 1609) is regarded as one of the most important scholars of Europe around 1600. His scholarship is primarily devoted to the philology of texts ranging from preclassical Rome to the Byzantine period, including the Bible. Building on the work of Italian and French humanists, Scaliger increased the empirical character of textual criticism by assessing the materiality of the documentary evidence and by sharpening the principles to establish the interdependence of manuscripts in the chain of transmission of ancient Greek and Roman authors, on the one hand, and of the Bible, on the other hand. Moreover, he is often billed as the founding father of comparative chronology on account of his two editions of Manilius (1579, 1599), his De emendatione temporum (1583, 1598) on calendar reform, and the Thesaurus temporum (1606). Scaliger was also famed as a pioneer among Europeans in the study of eastern languages such as Arabic, Chaldaic (Aramaic), Aethiopic, and Persian. As an accomplished Christian Hebraist, he took an interest in Rabbinic scholarship and studied the Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, and the Septuagint as well as versions in other languages. Scaliger himself never published a coherent study of his biblical observations and his polyhistorical antiquarian knowledge, which remained scattered across his published works, letters, and Table Talk. He exercised a lasting influence on the Leiden School of classical, biblical, and oriental historico-critical philology and antiquarianism through such scholars as Janus Gruter, Hugo Grotius, Daniel Heinsius, Gerardus Vossius, Thomas Erpenius, Jacob Golius, Constantine l’Empereur, Louis de Dieu, Claude Saumaise, and Isaac Vossius. Together with his friend and closest correspondent, Isaac Casaubon, he informed a variety of debates regarding ancient philosophy and modern religion in 17th-century England. Scaliger, the son of the philosopher, medical scholar, and poetical theorist Julius Caesar Scaliger, was born in Agen, France, and studied in Paris. After his conversion to Calvinism (1563), he entered a wandering life in the services of a French nobleman who fought on the side of the Catholic king. In 1593, he moved to Leiden University, where he lived until his death, at times embroiled in polemics with Catholic scholars who mocked his vain claim to a noble pedigree. He corresponded widely with German, French, Flemish, and Dutch scholars. Part of his private oriental collection was posthumously integrated into the collections of the university library, and, in the twenty-first century, the university named a research institute after him.