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Johann Gesner’s early life was characterized by constant poverty and the kindness of those who recognized his intellectual powers. His father died when Gesner was very young, leaving the family in very straitened circumstances until his mother remarried, to a prosperous businessman, Johann Zuckermandel, who made it possible for his stepson to have the finest education in the area. In Weimar he was supported by the Hofmarschall Friedrich Gotthilf von Marschall (1675-1740). At the Ansbach Gymnasium, Gesner lived in dormitory space reserved for poor students, but the rector, Georg Nikolaus Köhler (1673-1743), encouraged his study of Greek. Gesner moved on to Jena where he was a scholarship student and befriended by the theologian and philosopher Johann Franz Buddeus (1667-1729), who gave Gesner a room in his house. His teachers’ confidence was confirmed when, as a 23-year-old student, Gesner produced not only an edition of Lucan’s Philopatris but also a treatise on the value of education, Institutiones rei scholasticae. These twin interests, philology and educational reform would characterize his later career. 

The first twenty years of Gesner’s career were spent in secondary education where he implemented revolutionary standards and methods. His publications were largely aimed at guiding students to proper sources for both linguistic and interpretive edification. As a young scholar he showed particular expertise with philology and text criticism, but his vision of humanistic, that is to say, classical education meant more than just Wortphilologie. His courses addressed a range of fields beyond literature, including history and philosophy. While at Leipzig he produced his Chrestomathia Graeca (1731), an argument for the teaching of great works of Greek literature in the schools. Gesner attempted to re-focus teaching away from rote memorization and imitation by composition and towards the appreciation of the standards of the greatest literature of antiquity as models for the literature that followed, up to his own day.  In this regard he opposed the old Humanism of the Renaissance and became either a harbinger or a founder of the New Humanism of Winckelmann, Lessing and Goethe. At Weimar he was in addition to teaching responsible for the coin collection and library. In Leipzig his agenda was supported by the theologian and philologist Johann August Ernesti (1707-81) and the school’s cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) (BWV 1075 is dedicated to Gesner). 

A professorship at Leipzig was not possible for him because of faculty politics. When Göttingen was founded in 1734 Gesner was offered the professorship of poetry and directed of the first philological seminary in Germany. In addition, he was inspector of schools for Braunschweig-Holstein and librarian of the university. The new school was an ideal laboratory for the introduction of his fresh methods of Latin instruction and the revival of Greek instruction. Thanks to his students who absorbed his principles and based their own teaching upon them, Gesner was a principal role in reforming the teaching of Greek and Latin in Germany. 

Thanks to his professorship, Gesner was able to return to philology with a Latin translation and commentary to Hesterhuys & Reitz’s edition of Lucian.  His edition of the Roman agricultural writers maintained the old style and his editions of Livy and Horace to the editions of LeClerc (1710) and Baxter (1725) was often broken out into separate editions of the various authors after Gesner’s death. His texts of Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, Horace, and Claudian show his emphasis on teaching the best of the ancients as a means of acquiring good literary taste. 

He is best remembered for his four-volume Novus linguae et eruditiones Romanae thesaurus (Leipzig 1749). Gesner had produced revised editions of the Thesaurus eruditionis scholasticae (1571) of Basilius Faber (ca. 1520-75), but relied on English translation (1734) of Robert Estienne’s (1503-59) Latinae linguae Thesaurus (1531). The chronological arrangement of examples, all coming from ancient sources are among the lexicographical principles Gesner laid down which are still employed in the major authoritative dictionaries and thesauri of modern times.