This book is the published proceedings of a conference held in Holland in the autumn of 2009, a year of many such conferences, it being the five-hundredth anniversary of the year of Calvin's birth. It is one thing to propose a theme and organise a conference, and to issue invitations to researchers in a field, another for them all to offer material on that very theme. It has to be said that Herman Seldenhuis's invitation met with mixed success, only a few of the papers being avowedly on the theme of the Reformer's character. The convenor may propose, but those invited dispose. A few of the remainder hit the target per accidens or tangentially, the rest miss it entirely. Among the saints (so to speak) are Irena Backus, ‘The Beza/Colladon Lives of Calvin and the Calvinist concept of sainthood’; Max Engammare, ‘John Calvin's seven capital sins’; Isabelle Graesslé, ‘Geneva against Calvin: the myth of the non-saint’ and Olivier Millet, ‘Calvin als Leidensmann: Berufung, Arbeit, Krankheiten’. These all defend a qualified sainthood thesis. Engammare has interesting speculations on why Calvin's signature became somewhat more grandiose over the years. There are plates illustrating this. Other papers such as Jon Balserak's ‘“There will always be prophets”, Deuteronomy 18 14–22 and Calvin's prophetic awareness’; Karin Maag, ‘Calvin as the ideal teacher’; Scott Manetsch, ‘Holy terror or pastoral care? Church discipline in Calvin's Geneva, 1542–1596’; and Elsie Anne McKee, ‘John Calvin as reformer of “spirituality”’, each have things to say which impinge directly abut the theme; they provide material towards it, even if they do not directly address it. No one could be found to argue directly for Calvin's sinnerhood (though I guess that he himself would have found no difficulty in doing so). The remainder (off-target) papers included a number of interest. I single out that of Arnold Huijen, ‘Divine accommodation and the reality of human knowledge of God: the example of Calvin's commentary on Moses’ theophany’. This paper made me wonder why those who write on this theme seem to assume that Calvin thought that all the language of the Scripture which refers to God is accommodated, when he gave us plain evidence that he doubted this. Others are Anthony N. S. Lane, ‘Anthropology: Calvin between Luther and Erasmus’, and Kees van der Kooi, ‘Calvin's Christology from a contemporary systematic perspective: a few remarks’. These, together with a number of the other papers that I haven't mentioned, add up to a volume that will be of interest to the Calvin specialist, and to others besides. As Calvin himself might have said, in his inscrutable wisdom God can bring good out of our sins of omission.