F. Bruce Gordon

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/calvin-by-f-bruce-gordon/

A pretty dry and detailed biography of the major figure of Geneva's history, what he was trying to do and what he did. As usual (I keep saying this about theology books, but it's true) the ideological points mostly soared over my head, but I found a lot of interesting stuff. Calvin lived from 1509 to 1564, and from 1541 became the most important person in Geneva – he never held public office, but politics in the city became completely polarised between his supporters and his opponents, and usually his supporters won. (But not always.)

There's a lot here about the politics of Geneva as a city-state and Calvin as an individual with regard to France (where he was born and brought up), vs the Holy Roman Empire, vs Berne and the nascent Swiss Confederation (which Geneva did not fully align with until 1584, twenty years after Calvin's death). I'd have liked a bit more reflection on how Geneva became a theocracy in the first place – it had been an ideologically Protestant republic since 1536, before Calvin arrived – and also how it managed to survive as such, when other such experiments failed (for instance in Münster shortly before). But the books is about Calvin, not Geneva.

Calvin's wife died in 1649 after only nine years of marriage; he is not reported to have had other partners, but his brother Antoine was a major supporter throughout his career, and he had many other close friendships, some of which went sour when ideological differences emerged. He is remembered for his writing – and his output at the peak of his career was phenomenal – but his preaching was clearly an important factor as well; none of that survives, apart from a few second-hand notes taken by people in the congregation. Gordon is clearly a fan of his subject (most biographers are) and does his best to find in his favour, performing particularly intense gymnastics when it comes to the execution of Michael Servetus.

The most interesting part for me was the relationship between Calvin and England. He actually had something resembling a personal relationship with Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and regent of England in the first couple of years of the reign of Edward VI (1547-1549). But Somerset was overthrown, and when Edward died in 1553 his Catholic sister Mary took over. Calvin had hopes of winning England back when Elizabeth, a Protestant, came to the throne in 1558. However, in what Gordon calls "perhaps the worst mistiming of the European Reformation", that same year saw the publication in Geneva of Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women and Goodman's How superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects, both of which opposed the legitimacy of women as rulers. Knox and Goodman had been thinking of Mary I of England and Mary of Guise in France, but Elizabeth took huge offence and returned Calvin's correspondence unopened, and although he still had some powerful sympathisers in England, he never again had the access to the top in London that he'd had ten years before. He was much more successful in Scotland, but there is surprisingly and disappointingly little about that here; he was of course less directly involved, Knox being the main figure.

Anyway, really a book for specialists only, but I got a bit more out of it than I had expected.… (altro)

An extraordinary history of an extraordinary event in European history, the Reformation in Switzerland as it occurred in the mid-16th century, with some consideration of the Swiss Reformation's influence on Reformation events elsewhere in Europe. I found particularly interesting the discussion of Calvin's and Geneva's unpopularity in some other Reformed cantons (especially in Basel, the home of Switzerland's only degree-granting university in that era).

There are a lot – and I mean a lot – of characters appearing in this history, but the author (unlike many other historians) has the good sense to include a short biographical glossary at the front of the book. Still, you might want to keep an Internet connection alive to google phrases like "double predestination" or groups like the "Utraquists."

That's the one reason I give this book 4**** and not somewhat higher, that it does require some knowledge of Reformed theology and Reformed as well as paleo-Protestant history that the author skims over or assumes knowledge of. The biographical glossary is a big help, but it's limited to persons – not including sects/groups and theological concepts – which makes the book a bit hard to follow for the casual reader.

Still, given the relative paucity of current-day histories of figures like Zwingli and Bullinger in particular, this is a very welcome addition to Reformed Church history and will stimulate further reading in this area.… (altro)

For more than half a century from the 1520s to the 1570s, the rural backwater that was the Swiss Confederation found itself, rather unexpectedly, at the heart of the European Reformation. This was primarily down to the influence of one dominating figure, the Toggenburg preacher Huldrych Zwingli. Zwingli arrived in Zurich in 1519 and proceeded to combine radical sermonising with canny political networking, a combination that would prove decisive. He set the terms of the theological debate for the Swiss states and beyond, but he was holding too much together by sheer force of personality: after he was killed on the battlefield in 1531, things slowly but inevitably fell apart. By the mid 1570s, Zwinglianism had been subsumed in a wider Protestant culture that was dominated instead by the ideas of Calvin.

(We don't count Calvinism as Swiss, by the way. Calvin himself was French, and Geneva was essentially an independent republic – though it did become allied with the Confederation during this period.)

The basic narrative of the Swiss Reformation can be found in many other, general books, where it is usually treated (quite rightly) as part of a much broader European movement. What I wanted from this study was to get some idea of how ‘Swiss’ the ideas of Zwingli and Bullinger were – to what extent they arose from and reflected the socio-politico-geographical circumstances of the Swiss Confederation. Gordon has a go at addressing this question, and although his answer involves a lot of shrugging he does at least try to describe the main points of contemporary Swiss society in order that readers can reach their own conclusions. These sections are the most interesting, especially for non-specialists: the first chapter, which outlines the history of the Confederation and discusses some of the main intellectual and religious currents in sixteenth-century society; and the final two chapters, which reflect on ‘the culture of the Swiss Reformation’ in a much wider sense.

Some random observations, mostly for my own benefit:

Though Zurich was at the centre of the Swiss Reformation, it was Basel that was the main cultural and intellectual hotspot – actually, pretty much the only cultural and intellectual hotspot. Basel had the only Swiss university of any importance, and it was also a major printing centre. This is what attracted Erasmus, who lived there on and off from 1514 to 1525 and swore that the Froben printing house had the most beautiful Greek type in the world. Although he did his best to distance himself from the evangelical movement, Erasmus was clearly the godfather of the Swiss Reformation (bad metaphor, they hated godfathers); Zwingli approached theology as an identifiably Erasmian humanist, and his mastery of the ancient Biblical languages, his close reading of the original texts, his cultivation of a sodality of fellow-scholars – all these things Zwingli learned directly from Erasmus.

The Radical Reformation again emerges as the most interesting trend. The early Anabaptists followed Zwingli eagerly, and took him at his word: yes, we must live only by the word of the Bible – Zwingli himself just didn't go nearly far enough for them. Almost immediately there was a separate sensibility which leads directly to the Mennonites of Ontario, the Amish of Pennsylvania. It's one of the striking ironies of the Swiss Reformers that they came to prominence by standing against the bureaucratic structure of the Catholic Church, but almost immediately became incredibly clerical themselves, because of the need to define themselves against the radicals. (There is a novel set in this world that I really want to write – people meeting in secret by moonlight in obscure mountain pastures, dodging Catholics and Reformed authorities alike, heretics burnt on the shores of Lake Zurich, the primacy of newly-printed texts, the importance of the vernacular….)

On the evidence of this book and others like it, the Reformation was a TOTAL SAUSAGE FEST – I don't think a single woman is referred to by name. And yet there are clearly lots of stories to tell – many nuns abandoned their vows when they heard the Reformers' message and went off to get married, while others, their convents forcibly shut down, found themselves with no financial help and no social purpose. Priests' mistresses, who had before been tolerated, could now legally marry their partners and gain some legal protection. There are lots of things like that, where you get only a tantalising glimpse of what must have been going on in individual households and communities.

Gordon's style is pretty dry and academic, it must be said, but he's also synthesised a huge amount of research that is otherwise available only in German and/or in obscure minor journals. I'm grateful for it, and especially grateful for the many suggestions he gives for further reading, both among modern historians and among the contemporary scholars, chroniclers and dramatists of the sixteenth-century Swiss Confederation.… (altro)