What was the life of a reformed pastor like in sixteenth-century Geneva? This deceptively simple question is, as Scott Manetsch demonstrates, a crucial element in understanding the trajectory of the Genevan Reformation. While the ideas of John Calvin and his colleagues have received immense scholarly scrutiny over the centuries, the contours of their lives as pastors have not. Manetsch address this lacuna with a thoroughly researched, lucid account of the lives and work of the reformed Genevan pastors from 1536 to 1609, with the particular goal of comparing the work of the pastorate during Calvin's lifetime with its experiences after Calvin's death in 1564. His book is based on extensive work with the records of the Genevan Consistory and Company of Pastors, as well as the personal correspondence, published writings, personal devotionals, catechisms, and sermons of the reformed Genevan clergy. Using this wealth of sources, Manetsch reconstructs the daily lives of Geneva's pastors during the first seven decades of the Reformation, thus forwarding ongoing efforts to examine how the ideals of Reformation were put into practice.

This book is, in a way, a group biography of the Reformed pastorate in Geneva. One of Manetsch's main goals is to elucidate the ideas and assumptions that shaped the “ministers' identity and self-awareness,” (2) in order to better understand their interactions with the Genevan laity and city authorities. He begins this exploration with an eloquent recounting of the Genevan Reformation, followed by an analysis of the Venerable Company of Pastors, including profiles of individual ministers, an overview of their recruitment and training, and discussion of the structure and functioning of the company. Particularly crucial to Manetsch's undertaking is chapter 3, “The Pastoral Vocation,” which explicates the reformers' understanding of the pastoral office and examines how that concept undergirded their preaching, process of ordination, and struggles with city magistrates. He then constructs a detailed picture of the pastors' domestic lives, providing a vital link between theology and practice. The following chapter explores pastoral duties, illustrating Manetsch's assertion that “pastoral ministry in sixteenth-century Geneva was inseparable from the rigorous study and regular proclamation of the Christian Scripture” (124).

Having laid out the broader patterns of the pastors' activities, chapter 6 focuses on the practice of preaching, including the pastors' theological principles, preaching styles, and the reception of their teachings. Here Manetsch examines the ways that preaching did and did not change after Calvin's death, ultimately asserting that “the pulpit stood at the epicenter of controversy and change in reformed Geneva” (146). Chapter 7, “The Ministry of Moral Oversight,” provides an impressive compilation of statistics on the consistory's activities both before and after Calvin's death—a goldmine of information for future studies of the Genevan Reformation and consistories more generally. Manetsch's primary goal here is to demonstrate, rightly, that the work of the consistory was a core element in the Genevan ministers' work of pastoral care. His discussion in this chapter confirms earlier studies (including those of William Monter, Christian Grosse, and Manetsch's own) that have observed a shift during the 1560s and 1570s in the number of consistory cases, the most common types of offenses, and the number of suspensions from the Lord's Supper, which peaked at 681 in 1568 and then dropped sharply to fewer than 300 by 1572 (199). While this general trend has been observed before, here Manetsch works effectively to set those changes, based on more complete data, into the context of pastoral concerns.

Chapter 8 confronts the stereotype of Theodore Beza and his pastoral colleagues as producers of “arid” or “stagnant” theology (254) who calcified Calvin's teachings. Looking at the personal libraries, scholarly publications, and personal devotional writings of the pastors, Manetsch finds, instead, a “vibrant, creative, and eclectic” intellectual culture “committed to Calvin's religious vision while at the same time in conversation with the broader Christian tradition” (222). In other words, similar to Calvin, his successors were deeply learned theologians who continued to work out theological issues in the context of the pastoral and political crises of their own time. Following on this idea, chapter 9 considers the reformed Genevan practices of the sacraments, religious instruction, pastoral visitations, and spiritual counsel, concluding that in all of their pastoral endeavors, “Geneva's ministers believed that they were not only religious workers, constructing a city church, they were spiritual shepherds caring for the Master's flock, serving God's larger purposes for this world and the next” (298). Finally, in his epilogue, Manetsch draws from sixteenth-century Geneva three lessons for contemporary Protestant clergy: the necessity of “pastoral virtues” such as “courage, a clear sense of vocation, a thick skin, a generous dose of humility, and solid Christian faith”; “the importance of accountability and collegiality in pastoral work”; and “the central importance of God's Word for Christian renewal in our own day” (304–305).

Throughout this study, Manetsch works to ground our understanding of early modern clergy in an acknowledgement of their commitment to their religious vocation. In this, he contributes to recent scholarly discussions seeking a rebalance between the highly confessionalized histories of the Reformation from a century ago, and the scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s that delved into archival sources to shed light on the broader economic, social, political, and familial factors involved in Reformation developments but tended sometimes to underplay the role of religious faith. In his effort to re-center attention onto the pastors' religious commitment, however, Manetsch may be overstating the case when he suggests that the confessionalization thesis of Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard necessarily reduced clergy to “mere ‘agents of the state’” (7) and, most importantly, that this view is largely unchallenged in current scholarship. Nonetheless, this book contributes significantly to current efforts to better incorporate all the relevant factors into our understanding of the Reformation. Manetsch's impressive utilization of such a wide range of sources allows the reader access to a complex and more complete picture of the interplay between theological ideas and pastoral practices in Reformation-era Geneva.