Bruce Gordon’s biography of John Calvin » Mark Horne.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Calvin would name his political enemies (and there really isn’t any other kind of enemy available in Geneva) from the pulpit. While they were present, I think.
The sheer extent to which the Reformation in a particular area was simply a church vandalism campaign was disconcerting. Calvin was better than this, but not Farel. (Here my reading of Calvin’s Geneva may be bleeding over into my memories of this biography.)
Jim Jordan has said in some lecture I heard once that his father, a French literature professor, claimed that Calvin more or less transformed and invented the French language. I’ve never felt confident asserting this in lectures of my own because it was so second hand by the time I speak of it. But Gordon spends a couple of pages making basically the same claim (which I haven’t articulated very well here).*
*There seems to be a bitter irony here. One step in the evolution of secular nation states was unified languages for a geographical area. Calvin probably never envisioned such things, or would have desired them, but he assisted in the creation of one. (He probably also assisted in giving France a scapegoat of unity. To what extent can French identity and culture be distinguished from hatred of Protestantism? Well, that can change gradually, just like language does.) Calvin was originally Picardian, though since he had come by way of Paris, that distinction was probably lost on the Genevans, just as it has been lost in the absorption that took place in history. He invented a French that he himself had to learn to speak fluently, since Picardian was not quite the same.