In his wildly popular children's trilogy, His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman uses a well-worn fantasy device: parallel worlds. The young protagonist lives at Oxford, and it is an Oxford—and a world—that we would all recognize, for the most part. There are some minor changes: no jet planes, talking bears (okay, maybe not so minor), and, oh yes, John Calvin became pope in the sixteenth century. Not only did he become pope and move the institutional mechanisms of the Catholic Church to Geneva, he also developed the consistory such that it oversaw every aspect of human life. Moreover, he instituted the office, essentially, of Church assassin (titles in the series include The Golden Compass [New York: Knopf, 1995]; The Subtle Knife [New York: Knopf, 1997]; and The Amber Spyglass, [New York: Knopf, 1999]).

As funny as this may (or may not) be, it speaks volumes about the historical reception of John Calvin. Starting during his lifetime, the assessment of Calvin ran the gamut. Many greatly admired the man and became disciples of his vision of Christianity; others found him to be despicable—and dangerous. There were already, in the sixteenth century, complaints among some Protestants that Geneva had become the new Rome, and the image of Calvin as the Genevan pope has been a standard trope for centuries. The consistory has been pilloried as institutionalized snooping at best, as a sort of inquisition at worst, and the Servetus Affair has stamped Calvin's reputation with the seal (and zeal) of a religious fanatic, ready to slay all in the name of his despotic god. These negative images have always had a great deal of leverage, from Calvin's own time until today (Marilynne Robinson has suggested that one daren't speak Calvin's name in polite company; see her The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Though Calvin has had his hagiographers, it is mostly been a losing battle for them.

The year 2009 marked the quincentenary of Calvin's birth. Among the many admirable books published to mark the occasion, Bruce Gordon's Calvin stands out. As a biography, it works admirably, providing at times an almost palpable sense of Calvin's life as it was lived. And because it helps the reader become immersed in Calvin's life, the book is able to clear a path through the dueling historical images of saint and demon so that Calvin the man may be met. This is no small feat.

Drawing on a wide and substantial secondary literature on Calvin's life, thought, and times, Gordon's book is well grounded in the most recent scholarly assessments of the numerous topics related to Calvin, Geneva, and sixteenth-century Europe in general. Though many of Calvin's works have been consulted, Gordon's touchstone throughout is the corpus of Calvin's letters. He uses these in an extremely effective manner, sensitive to the ways they reveal a man caught up in his times. It was a volatile age where the soothing overtures of Christian humanism, yearnings for religious reform, fanaticism, and the absolutes of battle lines—whether metaphorical in terms of intellectual contests and religious identities or literal in terms of various intra- or international conflicts—jostled each other as Europe lurched toward early modernity. With a light touch that almost removes the sense of intermediacy, Gordon invites us to journey with and learn of Calvin.

What do we learn of the Genevan reformer? First and foremost, we learn of Calvin what most of us would want people to know of ourselves—that we are complicated in our loves, passions, and desires; that we often do our best yet fail to meet our own standards of comportment and accomplishment; that while being well intentioned we can hurt those around us; and that we are, in fact, willing to give up a great deal on behalf of something we truly believe in. I have always liked Raymond Aron's notion that, in the end, good historical study leads to a better understanding of the self. In this work of historical reconstruction, Gordon displays the glory, tragedy, rarity, and mundaneness of a human life, Calvin's life; through a study of this life, light can be shed on our lives, if we choose.

This biography is straightforward in terms of its approach—it is, in a standard way, structured by the chronology of Calvin's life (though, oddly, I did not see the date of his birth or the exact date of his death mentioned in the book). I was, momentarily, a little lost in the 1550s, but not for long. Gordon hits the important moments, the various controversies, and the significant developments along the way as the story is told, but he always grounds these things in a real sense of Calvin's present; in other words, the big-stage events are not allowed to wipe out the sense of the everyday life Calvin lived, hence his humanity is preserved.

In many ways, the best decision that Gordon made in writing this biography involves his treatment of Calvin's commentary on Romans. Though a number of Calvin's writings, including the Institutes, are duly noted, this is not a history of Calvin's thought, so they only come into play as they shed light on Calvin's life. Yet Gordon essentially spends an entire chapter on the Romans commentary with some explanation of what is therein contained. It is the only work of Calvin so treated. And it is a terrific biographical move. By spending significant time on this one work, Gordon is able to accomplish any number of things: examine Calvin's exegetical method and how he worked; give readers a sense of the importance of the Pauline perspective for Calvin; and explore Calvin's sense of self, calling, and vocation. This chapter very much serves as the lens through which the rest of Calvin's story in the biography is read. In Romans, Calvin sets forth his exegetical goal: to reveal the mind of the author, doing so through the tools available to the scholar: languages, history, geography, rhetoric, and so on. Whether intentional or not, Gordon seems to have done the same thing: through the tools available to him, he has revealed—insofar as biography can—the life of Calvin.

Every biographer, of course, has to make choices because there are only so many pages. I wished for expanded treatment of a few items: a fuller contextual discussion of predestination, simply because it loomed so large in many of Calvin's conflicts. The general reader, without further information, may be left a bit clueless as to why Calvin held to this doctrine. I would have liked to have had a bit more from Calvin's sermons—not just the parts where he lambasts various and sundry Genevans (when not lumping them all together), but also those parts where he speaks so tenderly of God (when he speaks of God as a nursemaid in the Deuteronomy sermons, for example); such tenderness, I think, would be eye opening for some readers. I would also have liked to have seen some concrete excerpts from the consistory records, especially those that tend to counter the commonly held perceptions of the consistory as the worst of big brotherhood; for example, specific cases where the body sought to correct problems of domestic abuse.

These are minor quibbles; it is simply a case of a reader wanting more (which is saying something after about four hundred pages). The bottom line is this: Gordon's Calvin will deservedly stand as the standard introduction to Calvin's life for a very long time.