The forty-eight essays in this excellent book provide an important resource for studying John Calvin. Their focus is on “the contextual issues that made up the world in which Calvin lived” (2). This contextualization is needed to provide the background against which Calvin's life and thought must be seen. There are studies that concentrate directly on Calvin's theological views. The current volume illuminates these treatments of Calvin by putting “a variety of other studies into their proper historical, political, and theological contexts” (3).
Editor Holder has assembled a top list of scholars who provide short essays that succinctly focus on their topics so key elements are presented and a wide range of important issues are discussed. Both scholars and students will appreciate the vision and expertise of Holder and the writers, which will make this an essential volume for Calvin studies in the future.
The essays are divided into six parts which show the breadth of the treatments here. The parts are: “France and Its Influence,” “Switzerland, Southern Germany, and Geneva,” “Empire and Society,” “The Religious Question,” “Calvin's Influences,” and “Calvin's Reception: Our Context.” An extensive bibliography and index complete the volume. The skillful writing and consistent clarity of the essays enhance this book's value as a reference work as well as a volume that can be read as a narrative to gain an essential and well-rounded understanding of the contextual elements which shaped Calvin and in which his life and work were set. Holder concludes by indicating that this book is intended to broaden the normal canvases on which we see Calvin and show “a variety of portraits that are responses to a variety of impulses” (436). In this, the book succeeds admirably.
Calvin was born in France and educated at the University of Paris where he imbibed French humanism. He lived in the midst of a period of upheaval in French religious politics and was “the absent cause of the French Wars of Religion, given that these events unfolded mainly after his death in 1564,” writes Diane C. Margolf (51). Each of these topics receive essays in part 1 of the book. The influence of humanism was enduring for Calvin, though after “a conversion to radical evangelicalism,” Calvin “prioritized the criterion of faithfulness to Reformation doctrine and subordinated humanist studies to religious goals,” notes Olivier Millet (40).
Rich essays on Switzerland, southern Germany, and Geneva mark part 2 of the book. These include pieces by Bruce Gordon, Jill Fehleison, William G. Naphy, Karin Maag, and Elsie Anne McKee. They discuss Calvin's regional context, focusing on the Swiss Confederation and Strasbourg, as well as looking at Geneva—its daily life, government, consistories and discipline, education, and worship, pastorate, and diaconate. Consistories played a large part in influencing the behavior of Genevan residents. According to Jeffrey R. Watt, like those in other places, the Genevan consistory sought “persuasion over persecution in effecting social change” and “in the long run the Reformation was a success, thanks in part to the discipline of the consistories” (110).
Part 3, “Empire and Society,” features pieces on the politics of the emperors, Judaism, refugees, and Calvin and women. Upheavals in the early modern period affected Europe, with refugee crises creating significant impacts. This was especially true of Geneva in Calvin's time and, as Jesse Spohnholz argues, Calvin himself “may be the most famous Reformation-era refugee” (147).
Calvin's drive for religious reform is central in part 4, “The Religious Question.” Here pieces are devoted to Luther and the Council of Trent but also to changes in biblical scholarship, the printed word (and the importance of the print media), as well as to polemics, where doctrinal matters were discussed widely in many forms. These matters—such as baptism, the Eucharist, and predestination—are essay topics, as are the challenges associated with heresy, idolatry, Trinitarian controversies, and Nicodemism and Libertinism. Calvin's participation in these religious questions marked his involvement in larger European discussions which, with their own histories and trajectories, helped shape discussions and actions in Calvin's Geneva.
Calvin's influences (the subject of part 5) were wide and deep. Essays here are devoted to Calvin and a host of others: Luther, Melanchthon, and his friends and critics among the Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and Anabaptists. A function of these pieces is to show Calvin in the context of other theological voices—those who were supporters and those who warned of dangers in Calvin's theological viewpoints. The ongoing influences of Calvin into the seventeenth-century and beyond are pointed toward here, too.
“Calvin's Reception: Our Context” (part 6) concludes the book. It looks at ways Calvin's influences spread into an “international Calvinism,” inciting (as Jennifer Powell McNutt explores) “hagiography and demonology” in its wake. The spread of Calvinism in England, Scotland, Ireland, The Netherlands, and the Dutch Atlantic world is complemented by pieces on Calvin in Asia, his theological legacy in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, and his reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the end, writes Bruce Gordon, Calvin's work “continues to be read and be cited in theological and ecclesiastical debates” today. While “consensus on his life and thought remains elusive,” Gordon writes that “without doubt he remains the most controversial reformer of the sixteenth century” (435).
Beyond the wealth of information and informed judgments of this book, the project of seeing Calvin in context is vastly important—not only historically but also for scholarship today. Holder concludes that “our own readings of Calvin come through our understanding of the mediated traditions in which we stand.” For “when we take seriously the contexts in which Calvin lived and thought, as well as our own, we place ourselves in the best position to understand him not as a caricature, but as the early modern man who lived in a rich and complex world, a world without which his thought is rendered almost meaningless” (437). We are grateful for this splendid volume which deepens—and enlarges—our understandings of John Calvin in the midst of his many contexts.
