I cannot recall ever having seen faith affiliations declared in a volume's list of authors. This information is at the front of the book and gives the immediate impression that participation in the 2007 conference at Notre Dame, the papers from which constitute this anthology, was predicated upon religious commitment along with scholarship. Indeed, Randall Zachman declares in his introduction that the aim of the conference was “ecumenical understanding” within “the Christian tradition we all share” (10).

In nearly every essay, this principle proves to be at least outwardly irrelevant. Several authors dispassionately put forward theses of originality here, each of them based in careful research. Irena Backus, fresh from completing Life Writing in Reformation Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), treats us to lesser-known Catholic lives of Calvin, such as Jean-Papire Masson's brief Latin Vita Calvini. In contrast to Jerome Bolsec and Richelieu, Masson carefully examines slanderous and otherwise clearly spurious allegations, and he distinguishes between the genres of elogium (praise) and vita (which can be critical and in this case is). George H. Tavard looks closely at the mutually recriminating correspondence between Calvin and Louis du Tillet, who returned to the Catholic Church whence he had come to the Reformed faith. Karen E. Spierling assesses the quandary in which Genevan clergy and magistrates found themselves over relations between residents and the Catholic world that surrounded the city. Although economics lurks in the background, she does not explicitly draw a connection between it and the necessity of citizens' transactions with Catholics. Ultimately, the boundaries have to be porous and flexible. Geneva was at a crossroads and was a mercantile center, and thus Jill Fehleisen shows why authorities in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might find even Jesuits and Capuchins, with eyes focused on conversion, in their midst.

Charles H. Parker shifts us to the Dutch Republic. He asserts that, in an unwitting dialectic of reciprocal definition, the Reformed Church assisted in the establishment of Catholic institutions there. “The Calvinist reformation … sparked the formation of innovative ecclesiastical structures and lurked behind the organizational improvisations of local Catholic communities across the Netherlands” (125). Carlos M. N. Eire expresses initial incredulity over his assignment to identify ways in which Calvin might be regarded as a Catholic theologian, for Calvin regarded Catholicism as condemnable and continually drew a line between his own “true” faith and the “false” Church out of which he had come. Eire ultimately finds a homology between the Genevan divine's binary view with Catholic missionaries' relegation of Native Americans' religions beyond the proverbial pale of the “one true faith.”

Zachman himself renders a service in scrutinizing Calvin's sacramental convictions as they change from edition to edition of the Institutes as well as in other writings. In the end, Calvin approaches a more Catholic position in gradually espousing an indefinable manner in which God, in the sacraments, not only signals his intent but conveys it to Christians in the liturgical acts. Having early dismissed the laying on of hands, for example, by 1543 he accords this rite a certain “extraordinary” sacramental status in the initiation of ministers. Dennis E. Tamburello briefly surveys some modern theologians' perspectives on sacramentality. Calvin shared the view with Catholics that God reveals himself in nature, but he differed from them in his persuasion that human sin prevented people from receiving God's messages via the creation. We are, Tamburello quotes, stone-blind because we are “alienated in mind” (204).

These are essays of generally admirable quality. Colleagues will wish to select among them for their individual purposes. All demonstrate that Calvinism could not simply dismiss the ancestral Church but had, in numerous contexts, to come to terms with it.