In 1555 John Calvin was optimistic about the progress of the cause of reform in the kingdom of Poland and grand duchy of Lithuania. In a letter to Mikołaj Radziwiłł, Calvin suggested that even the Jagiellonian king and grand duke, Sigismund ii Augustus, was on the side of reform. While Calvin's confidence in the king was misplaced, a first synod of Reformed churches in Lesser Poland took place in 1556. A few months later the Polish Church wrote to the Genevan council asking that Calvin be allowed to visit Poland for a period to assist them. While he refused this invitation, Calvin continued to write to clergy and nobles in Poland and Lithuania with advice and encouragement. News also reached Geneva about the spread of Calvin's brand of reform to other parts of the Continent. In 1559 Reformed clergy held their first general synod in France. Jeanne d'Albret enforced Reformed religion in her kingdom of Navarre. Synods held in Antwerp began to organise an underground Reformed Church in the Habsburg Netherlands. The Wittelsbach ruler of the Palatinate moved towards the Reformed camp. In the remote Atlantic isles, a Tudor queen restored the Reformed Church of her half-brother, while a Stuart queen could not prevent the development of a Reformed Church in Scotland. Was there a central figure lurking behind the walls of Geneva who was responsible for these profound changes across Europe's religious landscape? During Calvin's lifetime and from the first biography printed in the year of his death, supporters and opponents have attempted to estimate the impact of Calvin's published works and the influence of his network of correspondents and supporters. This collection of essays, edited by R. Ward Holder, provides a contextualised assessment of Calvin's career, thought and legacy. However, the focus is mostly not directed towards analysis of Calvin's books, sermons and letters. Holder argues that if ‘we truly wish to understand Calvin, we must grasp the many contexts that influenced him’ (p. 437). In short essays, forty-eight contributors to this volume cover a variety of contexts for understanding Calvin and Calvinism.

Essential orientation is provided by G. Sujin Pak about Calvin's career and by Andrew Pettegree on Calvin's remarkable output of published works in Latin and French. One group of essays explores contexts for Calvin's intellectual and spiritual development in France (Raymond A. Mentzer writes about the state of religious life and Olivier Millet discusses French humanism). Other essays establish contexts for Calvin's life in Geneva (including Karin Maag who writes on education, and Jeffrey R. Watt who addresses practices of moral and social discipline). By the mid-1560s there were Reformed Churches from the Pyrenees to the borders of Muscovy and from the Highlands of Scotland to the Carpathians. Essays assess contexts for the reception of Calvin's ideas in France and Navarre (Jonathan A. Reid, Diane C. Margolf and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt), in the Swiss confederation and the Empire (Bruce Gordon, Steven W. Tyra and Ute Lotz-Heumann), in the Netherlands (Christine Kooi) and in the Anglophone world (Crawford Gribben). Christine Kooi's chapter includes coverage of the Dutch Atlantic world, while Yudha Thianto complements this work with a fascinating assessment of the development of Reformed Churches in Asia. Some authors advance concerns about over-estimating both Calvin's importance and the extent of support for Calvinism. Christine Kooi alerts readers to Johan Huizinga's judgement that the ‘foreigner who wishes to understand our history begins with the assumption that the Republic was indisputably a Calvinist state and a Calvinist land’. However, Huizinga added, ‘we Dutch know better’ (p. 401). Calvin's reputation and the importance of Calvinism as a set of ideas also changed over time in different contexts (as discussed by Jennifer Powell McNutt, Keith D. Stanglin and Bruce Gordon). Crawford Gribben writes of Calvinism that although ‘no system of thought had done more to shape the imagination and experience of individuals and institutions in early modern England, Scotland, Ireland and their colonies’, by the end of the seventeenth century ‘the theology of John Calvin had had its day’ (p. 400). Other warnings are offered by contributors against errors in thinking about Calvin's career without appropriate contextualisation. William G. Naphy explains the vital significance of the politics of the Genevan state (it was never Calvin's Geneva). Jesse Spohnholz offers an important corrective to thinking about Calvin as an exile or about Calvinism as a religion of refugees. Many Catholics and Lutherans were refugees too, and there were common elements about how the experience of exile was understood across confessional lines.

Two sections of the volume are devoted to religious ideas and practices. Brad S. Gregory discusses ideals of reform and other essays assess different reform movements and the leading reformers of the sixteenth century. Essays by Esther Chung-Kim, Ralph Keen and Kirk Essary discuss critiques of Calvin's thought. Arnold Huijgen and Rebecca Giselbrecht discuss anti-Trinitarian challenges to Calvin's exegesis of the Bible. Calvin often emphasised points of difference between his views and those he claimed were held by Anabaptists. However, Mirjam van Veen argues that at least in part the explanation for the many heated clashes between ‘Anabaptists and Reformed is that they simply resembled each other too closely’ (p. 366). Internal relations within the Reformed camp were often fractious, and Calvin's place among Reformed theologians is discussed by Peter Opitz and Michael W. Bruening. Calvin's approach to the Bible, style of writing and attachment to eloquence are discussed by Jon Balserak, Amanda Eurich and Randall C. Zachman. Context is also provided on key aspects of Calvin's thinking about necessary reforms to rituals, services and church buildings. Karen E. Spierling and Amy Nelson Burnett write on the sacraments, Charles Raith ii reviews ideas about salvation, while Carlos M. N. Eire discusses ideas about idolatry. The expert guidance provided by authors on such a wide range of topics in this admirable collection also highlights possibilities for further research. All contributions to this volume are supported by short reading lists to assist in that endeavour.