While both modern and ancient societies have held decidedly secular views of time and being on time, Swiss scholar Max Engammare focuses upon a radical episode in our world history, where religious fervor and revolutionary new interpretations of the scriptures led to an altogether new conception of time, contributing to the invention of punctuality as an ethical virtue.

In his fascinating and thorough study, Engammare recounts that in the 16th century, reformed Protestants, particularly those of Geneva, but equally those from Huguenot France, London and Berne took and adopted for the first time as an integral part of their attitudes and beliefs an original conception of time, applying this very particular ethic to the unfolding of their days.

Constraints of a spiritual order strictly determined their relationship with time, which was first and foremost conceived of as a relationship to God. They believed that God kept watch over his followers, and at the end of time that each would render an account of their every minute, as John Calvin preached continuously in his “fire and brimstone” sermons. Punctuality, Engammare writes, did not issue forth, as some believe, from technical innovations; rather, it was first and foremost a spiritual, social and disciplinary virtue, to which John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, Isaac Casaubon and Mathurin Cordier ascribed. It was in Geneva, Frenchman John Calvin’s adopted city, that community structures of incitement and control were first instituted; that a new calendar was developed; that a new economy of time and its division was created; and that applications of punctuality were conceived to which the Protestants, and in particular those of Calvinist faith, are still today indebted.