Meric Casaubon was born in Geneva in 1599, the son of the renowned classical philologist Isaac Casaubon, and moved to England as a child when his father took up royal patronage there. He followed his father into serious classical scholarship, was ordained in the Church of England, and eventually held a doctorate in divinity and a prebendary stall at Canterbury Cathedral, a career built on textual editing and theological writing that continued despite the disruption of the English Civil War, during which he was for a time deprived of his church living under the Commonwealth before its restoration.
Alongside his editorial and theological work, Casaubon developed a sustained scholarly interest in defending the reality of spirits, witchcraft and other supernatural phenomena against the skeptical natural philosophy that was gaining ground among some of his contemporaries, a concern that shaped both his most distinctive publications. He died in 1671, having spent much of his later career as one of English scholarship's most serious defenders of supernatural reality on textual and historical rather than purely theological grounds.
His father Isaac Casaubon had been renowned across Europe for demonstrating, on philological grounds, that the Hermetic writings long believed to record ancient Egyptian wisdom were in fact composed centuries later in the early centuries of the Christian era, a finding that reshaped Renaissance ideas about Hermes Trismegistus. Meric inherited both his father's rigorous philological method and, in noticeable contrast, a greater personal willingness to credit reports of genuine supernatural activity, a tension that runs through his own later writing on spirits and witchcraft.