Things have changed since 2009, the ‘year of Calvin’. Before 2009 only the experts knew that the image of Calvin as being a ruthless leader and a staunch dogmatic by no means fitted the sources. The general sense of him therefore remained negative. In 2009 something happened that scholars always hope for but so seldom see realised: their research reaches and influences a wider audience. Calvin has – almost overnight – become a popular icon; he had switched for many from being sinner to saint. The books under review document as well as further encourage this changing interpretation. Effectively we have here three biographies, since the Pleiade edition with its major selection of Calvin's works not only starts with more than sixty pages of biographical information, but the texts themselves, with their impressive and abundant footnotes, present an image of the reformer.

A combination of Calvin texts and biography is the only way to gain an adequate picture of the man and his work. There is no real distance between him and his texts, not only because he wrote constantly, daily, and at almost every hour of the day, but also because he himself is tied up in his texts whether it is his Institutes, his sermons, his commentaries or his letters.

The books by Jean-Luc Mouton and Bruce Gordon on Calvin demonstrate this truth since to trace his life is also to track his bibliography. It is one of the great strengths of Bruce Gordon's book that he quotes Calvin constantly, allowing the reformer to speak for himself. Gordon not only writes in an accessible style, but provides a balanced account, maintaining a critical distance between himself and his subject, attempting to understand Calvin and to allow his readers to form their own impression of him. For that task a profound knowledge of Calvin, of the sources and of the sixteenth-century European world was essential. Gordon not only has all of this, but also knows how to organise that knowledge into a convincing description of Calvin's life and work. Here is a work in which Calvin is neither entirely hero nor entirely villain, but simply an influential sixteenth-century intellectual, trying to understand his times and the God he believes in, and attempting to deal with the many problems that Europeans had to face in those days, as well as with his own.

Jean-Luc Mouton's work differs in style, but not in content. Mouton engages his readers in a dialogue, asking them whether their image of Calvin complies with the facts; and in most cases expecting the answer to be ‘no’. Mouton's biography is more apologetic, but apologetic in a very pleasant and above all convincing way. Mouton makes connections with the present, convinced as he is that although Calvin was a child of his time, today's Church and society would do well to listen to him.

How necessary the approaches of Gordon and Mouton are, is demonstrated by the fact that it took more than seventy years for a selection of Calvin's works to be published in the distinguished Bibliothèque de Pléiade series. There was a long-standing ideological belief that Calvin was as un-French as he was un-Catholic. Since being published in this series is considered a major sign of recognition for an author in France, it is astonishing that an author as French as Calvin, whose writings were in themselves literature and who has been so influential had to wait until 2009 to be included in a series in which 500 works had already been published. But it was worth the wait for what we have here is an impressive selection of his work, with a solid biographical and theological introduction as well as a stimulating and rich apparatus demonstrating the well-known scholarly skills of the editors Francis Higman and Bernard Roussel. Letters, tracts and sermons – in French translation or in modern French – all thematically organised form the body of this fine piece of work. The choice not to edit texts from the Institutes is a fine one, since now the diversity of Calvin's theology and style come to the fore

Together these three works provide a sound and rounded view of Calvin, insofar as it is possible to form a correct view of this problematic and fascinating phenomenon.