Dictionary of Heretics, Dissidents, and Inquisitors in the Mediterranean World
Edizioni CLORI | Firenze | ISBN 978-8894241600 | DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1309444
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John Calvin (Jean Calvin, Noyon, 10 July 1509 – Geneva, 27 May 1564) was a theologian and reformer. The body of his doctrines is known as Calvinism, which constituted a highly important strand of the Protestant Reformation. Its spread was particularly strong in France—provoking the Catholic reaction that led to the Wars of Religion—and not negligible across the Mediterranean world as a whole.

Biographical notes on John Calvin

The son of a notary, he studied in Paris, Orléans, and Bourges (where he was a pupil of Andrea Alciati).
In the 1530s in Paris he frequented evangelical circles and was forced to flee after the explosion of the affaire des placards (1535). He then took refuge in Basel, where in 1536 he published a first version of his Institutio. In this period he travelled extensively and was also briefly, between March and April 1536, in Ferrara at the court of Renata di Francia. In 1536 he was recruited by Guillaume Farel to Geneva, which had just rebelled against Savoyard rule, to assist him in introducing the Reformation in the city. To this first Genevan stay date the Articuli de regimine Ecclesiae (1536) and the Catéchisme (1537). Expelled together with Farel from Geneva in 1538 because of strong civic opposition to his “theocratic” programme, he took refuge in Strasbourg, where in 1539 he published a much expanded second edition of the Institutio. In 1541 he was able to return to Geneva and impose “his” Reformation—of civil and religious life—implemented through the strict enforcement of his Ordonnances ecclésiastiques. The new “mixed” body (composed of lay elders, doctors, pastors, deacons) that he introduced to carry out the Reformation, the Consistory, gradually took the lead in the political and religious life of Geneva.
In these years Calvin was strongly opposed by the faction of the “Libertines” led by the syndic Ami Perrin and his family. The death sentence of Servetus in 1553 was an important proof of his triumph. The strong migration religionis causa to Geneva, especially of French people, strengthened Calvin’s position; by the 1550s he had uncontested control over the government of the city. Calvin then devoted himself to vigorous propaganda, especially towards France, and in 1559 founded the Genevan Academy, where pastors were trained (many of whom would go on to propagate Calvinism in France and elsewhere).
He died on 27 May 1564.

Calvinian doctrine

In the following paragraphs we shall briefly consider John Calvin’s theology as presented by him in his major work, the Institutio christianae religionis. To distinguish his doctrine from later theological developments that took shape in the early decades of the seventeenth century, this account will use the adjective “Calvinian” rather than “Calvinist,” the latter being more suited to denote the wider theological debate and doctrinal attestations that have marked the Reformed movements since Calvin’s death.

Calvin the scholastic

At the age of 19 (1528), Calvin had already obtained the baccalaureate in arts; he moved to Orléans—whose law faculty was highly esteemed—to acquire a legal training that would serve him throughout his life. Theodore Beza writes: «[Calvin] progressa tellement en peu de temps qu’on ne le tenait pas pour étudiant mais pour l’un des enseignants réguliers. En réalité, il enseignait plus souvent qu’il n’apprenait. On lui offrit un poste de professeur mais il refusa»¹.
Calvin continued his legal studies in Bourges, which he had to leave on his father’s death (1531). On that occasion he decided to remain in Paris and attend courses at the prestigious Collège de France, where he learned Greek and Hebrew. His academic training, which was completed at twenty-four with a doctorate in law, did not include the study of theology. His first work—showing no trace of the evangelicalism of Lutheran stamp or of the Picard theologian Lefèvre d’Étaples²—was the commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, published in 1532. According to Beza’s sources, Calvin was influenced by a cousin and by two significant friendships. If Olivétan had placed in the future reformer’s hands a French translation of the Bible, printed at Neuchâtel, with which—as Beza writes—«il commençait a se distraire des superstitions papales», the friends Melchior Wolmar (a Lutheran) and Nicolas Cop (rector of the University of Paris) only strengthened Calvin’s bond with Reformed doctrines.

The fundamental works: the Institutio and the Ordonnances

The Institutio christianae religionis (1536)

After the Toussaint address of 1533—which common opinion read as Cop’s declaration of solidarity with Luther’s thought—Calvin’s theological production began: forced to leave the kingdom of France after the “affaire des placards,” Calvin found refuge in Basel, which became the first stage in the doctrinal systematisation of his thought. In 1536 the Insitututio christianae religionis was published, inspired by the catechetical literary model already used by Luther in the Der Kleine Katechismus (1529). The first Latin edition was far from being «seulement un petit livret contenant sommairement les principales matières»—as Calvin would write in 1558—consisting rather of eight chapters across 519 pages. The first edition was soon translated into many languages, but the French version, prepared by Calvin himself and published in Strasbourg in 1541, was a genuine second edition, expanded by the author. What distinguished this second edition—which would form the basis for the subsequent ones—was the rendering of the specific lexicon, which, in the authoritative view of Daniel-Rops, «[est celle] que les artisans, les femmes de ménage, les colporteurs et les paysans pouvaient comprendre. Les formules frappées, riches de sens, abondent, amenées habilement. Sobre, discret, ce style plaçait à la portée du peuple – et là était bien le danger pour le catholicisme – une pensé personnelle, d’une logique persuasive»³.
The Institutio Christiane Religionis, later Institution de la religion chrétienne (hereafter ICR), spread rapidly in Reformed Europe (much appreciated by Guillaume Farel, who co-opted Calvin into the project of reforming the Church of Geneva, first as a simple preacher and then as pastor), with a publishing history that accompanied the author to his death: after the first two Latin versions (Basel, 1536; Strasbourg, 1539), from which the French translation was made (Strasbourg, 1541), a third Latin edition followed (Strasbourg, 1543); it reached twenty-one chapters and had a French translation (Geneva, 1545). After seeking to give the material a more organic structure in the fourth edition (Geneva, 1550), Calvin published the definitive edition in 1559 and the French translation in 1560, in four books comprising eighty chapters in all⁴: 1) the knowledge of God; 2) the knowledge of Christ; 3) the Holy Spirit; 4) the Church. The four books have a structure that could be summarised as a phenomenology of salvation, and which recalls Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences, fundamental for academic theological training and which undoubtedly influenced Calvin’s systematisation: the Magister Sententiarum had divided Christian science into speculation on the Trinity and unity of God safeguarding the universal faith (liber primus); the salvation of creation through the grace that proceeds from Christ (liber secundus); the mystery of the Incarnation, redemption, the virtues and the commandments under the seal of the Holy Spirit (liber tertius); the Sacraments and the novissimi as signs and loci entrusted to the Church, heir to Christ’s mission (liber quartus).
Even if the structure of Calvin’s Institutio strictly follows a descending pattern (God – Christ – Holy Spirit – Church), the reading one may make begins from the reality most influenced by the reform of civil society and ecclesiastical organisation: the Church. Despite the existence of two Churches—Calvin affirms—an invisible one of the elect and a visible one in which “saints” and “hypocrites” coexist (with reference to the Gospel passage Sinite [granum et zizania] simul crescere usque ad messem, Mt 13:30), there can be no salvation outside it, because it was instituted by Christ. The Church, in Reformed doctrine, is the assembly of believers in which God’s action is made manifest through the sacraments (the fourth book). However, it is the Church as a whole that assigns the true meaning to the visible holy signs (the sacraments of baptism and the supper, signs of washing from sins and of deliverance from death), and it is rightly constituted only with the aid of the Holy Spirit (the subject of the third book). The Spirit proceeds from Christ (the second book), who is the visible image of God (the first book).

Les Ordonnances ecclésiastiques (1540)

It cannot have been easy for Calvin to leave Strasbourg in 1540 to return to Geneva. His bond with Bucer and Melanchthon’s esteem seemed obstacles to the request from the Swiss city’s populace for him to come back, but, as Theodore Beza recalls, «[sur] l’exemple de Jonas»⁵, he accepted to serve the Kingdom of God rather than follow his own sentiments. Calvin made Geneva the laboratory for the realisation of his doctrine: historiography has repeatedly used the term “theocracy” (some even pushed to define the Genevan experience as a “theocratic dictatorship”⁶) to indicate the institution of a permanent consistory composed of pastors and members of the city guilds. But, as will be seen, this is not only a reductionist position; according to Turchetti’s interpretation⁷, one can discern in it ideas that inspired modern democracies. This “constituent body,” desired by Calvin, would preside over the promulgation of the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, complementing the Articles ecclésiastiques begun in 1537.
Calvin’s focus in drafting the Ordonnances was above all the realisation of a “societas perfecta,” whose fundamental principle did not differ from what would be defended, on the politico-theological plane, by the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine⁸: the moral superiority of the ecclesiastical institution (Catholic) over the institutions of the nation-states consecrates its authority and autonomy. Geneva too, then, in its reality, would answer to the pastoral project that, in its general lines, had been indicated by the apostle Paul in the Letter to Titus⁹. For precisely this reason, one can understand that Geneva was never a theocracy (understood as total subordination of the State to the Church) and that Calvin himself was never in favour of it. Rather, he had to defend himself against the inverse excess: the control of the State over the Church. He very clearly distinguished ecclesiastical power and the city’s power, not according to a principle of “separation” (ante litteram!), but of complementarity.

The life of faith according to Calvin

Sola fide, sola gratia

Justification by faith alone is, for Calvin, as important as it is for Luther; the difference—underlined by the Jesuit Charles Boyer—is that whereas for the reformer of Wittenberg justification by faith is the conditio sine qua non of Christian doctrine, from which all benefits for the believer consequently derive, for Calvin justification by faith is “one” of the most important aspects that cooperate in salvation.
The reference to sola fide in Calvin’s work is found in Book Three of the Institutio, ch. 11 (ed. 1560): the development of Reformed theological argument follows a scrupulous reading of the scriptural sources, with particular attention to the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: «Puisque Dieu nous justifie par le moyen de Jésus-Christ, il ne nous absout point en tant que nous serions innocents: mais c’est en nous tenant gratuitement pour justes, nous réputant justes en Christ, bien que nous ne le soyons pas en nous-mêmes» (ICR, III, 11:2). Still on the basis of Scripture, Calvin thus opposes the Catholic tradition, which supported the justification of the believer on the basis of faith and good works (ICR, III, 13). In support of his thesis, Calvin cites a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: «sed quae mihi fuerunt lucra haec arbitratus sum propter Christum detrimenta […] et inveniar in illo non habens meam iustitiam quae ex lege est sed illam quae ex fide est Christi quae ex Deo est iustitia in fide» (Phil. 3:7, 9).
For Calvin, as for Luther, whatever the necessity for the Christian to perform the “works of the law” (or, better, to satisfy the law), these cannot be “in themselves” a meritorious value that contributes to salvation because, just as justification, sanctification too is the fruit of divine grace: «la sainteté réelle de vie, comme on dit, n’est point séparée de cette imputation gratuite de justice: c’est-a-dire que cela s’accorde bien, que nous ne soyons pas sans bonnes œuvres, et toutefois que nous soyons réputés justes sans bonnes œuvres» (ICR, III, 3:1). The value of good works, as interpreted in the light of Calvin’s doctrine of grace, is functional to obedience to God’s command (a theme very dear to the reformer was le renoncement à soi-même, ICR, III, 8:5). The Christian is therefore called to dispense what God has given to each, for nothing belongs to man: «itaque nemo glorietur in hominibus omnia enim vestra sunt, sive Paulus sive Apollo sive Cephas sive mundus sive vita sive mors sive praesentia sive futura omnia enim vestra sunt, vos autem Christi Christus autem Dei» (1 Cor. 3:21–23).
What then remains of the law? In the Geneva Catechism (1542) Calvin explains that the principal role of the law, after the event of Christ, is no longer to reveal sin to man in order to lead him to ask for grace (Rom. 8:1–3), but to provide the framework of the one who believes and is saved by grace. Salvation by grace does not, therefore, shield man from sin: Luther’s dichotomy of simul iustus ac peccator assumes in Calvin a far more dynamic sense, whereby justification and sanctification constitute God’s gratuitous and progressive work “towards” and “within” the believer’s heart. Conversion too is understood as the assumption by man of Christ’s nature (gifts and characteristics) through the action of the Holy Spirit. Thus the third person of the Trinity regains its place in Calvinian doctrine, whereas in some historiography its function in the Reformation experience had been minimised to a mere “light” of scriptural wisdom, depriving the reformer’s thought of a highly significant mystical component¹⁰.

Sola Scriptura

Calvin’s doctrine of Holy Scripture is more elaborated than Luther’s. Revelation began with creation and reached its fullness in Christ. God opened his mouth and spoke to the prophets and apostles: owing to human frailty, what God said (and did not “dictate”) was written so that not a single word would be lost. The Scriptures are the words that God himself destines and continues to destine to his people, insofar as the believer holds it «pour arrêté et conclu qu’elles sont venues du ciel, comme s’ils entendaient là Dieu parler de sa propre bouche» (ICR, I, 7:1).
The authority of those words does not, therefore, need to be proved by the Church; they are intrinsically holy. Indeed, the Church is creatura Verbi¹¹, brought forth by the word of God (Yves Congar). Holy Scripture, Calvin continues, «bien qu’elle porte avec soi sa crédibilité pour être reçue sans contredit et n’être soumise à preuves ou arguments, toutefois c’est par le témoignage de l’Esprit qu’elle obtient la certitude qu’elle mérite» (ICR, I, 7:5).
Holding, then, that all Scripture is inspired by God, in the fullness of its authority («omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata et utilis ad docendum ad arguendum ad corrigendum ad erudiendum in iustitia ut perfectus sit homo Dei ad omne opus bonum instructus», 2 Tim. 3:16), Calvin urges that the Bible be read and become the regula fidei of every believer, for it is God himself who speaks to the human heart through it. As for Luther, so for Calvin the Scriptural canon is reduced to 66 books, as declared in the Confession of La Rochelle (1571)¹². Calvin states that «l’inspiration de l’Ecriture ne fut pas réalisée aux dépens de la personnalité des auteurs humains», thereby reaffirming that the style, the form of argument, and the vocabulary are the distinctive hallmark of the writer—or rather, writers—of the sacred text. If, therefore, verbal inspiration is upheld by the reformer, literal interpretation is cut down to size; indeed, in the Commentaire de la Genèse, he clearly writes that «n’est ici [Gn 1:6] traité de la forme visible du monde. Que celui qui voudra apprendre l’astronomie et autres arts excellents et cachés les chaches ailleurs, car l’Esprit de Dieu a voulu ici enseigner toutes sortes de gens ensemble sans exceptions»¹³.
Calvin’s clarity and sobriety when commenting on Scripture aim wholly at considering the two Testaments (the première et la deuxième Alliance) in their unity—with a sensibility different from Luther’s—in a Christocentric perspective: the fullness of revelation.

The Church and civil society

Belonging to the second generation of the Reformation, Calvin was far from the idea that one should attempt to change the Catholic Church from within, still less that the conventicles which, in differing ways, had broken with Roman papism should be gathered together. His first thought is to distinguish between the two Churches, the invisible—«la communion des saints, un assemblée d’aimes saintes» (ICR, IV, 1:2)—and the visible, «l’Eglise-communauté des croyants», made such by the Word of God. The Church has the task of recognising “its own,” with a judgment of charity, while knowing that «il y a beaucoup de brebis hors de l’Eglise, et beacoup des loups dedans» (ICR, IV, 1:8). The life of the Church is not left to chance or to charismatic improvisation, but is likewise founded on the preaching of the Apostle Paul. This emerges from the drafting of the Ordonnances, devised by Calvin for the community of Geneva.
The Ordonnances recognise four ministries in the Church. Pastors preach the word of God and administer the sacraments. However, they exercise no civil jurisdiction and must take an oath pledging to ensure that the people respect the city authorities; doctors teach holy doctrine; elders watch over the conduct of the faithful—laymen chosen by the city councils; finally, deacons, according to ancient tradition, care for the needs of the poor and the sick. The Ordonnances also establish two assemblies: the Company of Pastors (Compagnie des pasteurs) and the Consistory.
The Company, which meets weekly, ensures the doctrinal coherence of the pastors and examines the nomination of candidates for the ministry. The Consistory brings together elders and pastors of the Church of Geneva (laymen form the majority of the assembly), who are tasked with rooting out Catholic “superstitions” and denouncing the immoral conduct of the faithful. There is no substantial distinction between “citizens” and “faithful,” since those who enjoyed Genevan citizenship were, de facto, subject to the authority of both governing bodies.
The crucial issue in the relationship between the magistrate (the civil authority) and the Company of Pastors concerned excommunication (the prohibition from participating in the Lord’s Supper): was it a religious act or a civil one? Recast otherwise: excluding a member from the religious life in which the whole community recognised itself, and in which its identity (people-Church) resided—what implications could that have for the management of power? Calvin defended the interpretation of excommunication as religious. However, the city councils wished to retain the prerogative, in a failed attempt to remove it from the Company. A second point of conflict with the civil authority was the appointment of pastors, in which the magistrates intervened to depose unworthy ministers, on the Company’s recommendation.

The sacraments of the Church

Calvin defines a sacrament as “an outward sign” by which the Lord seals consciences in order to sustain the weakness of human faith (ICR, IV, 14:1). The reformer cites Augustine’s definition, calling the sacrament «signum […] gratiae Dei, et invisibilis gratiae forma, ut ipsius imaginem gerat et causa existat (De Civitate Dei, X, 55). The only sacraments that fulfilled God’s promise concerning the living presence of the Holy Spirit, according to Calvin—in accord with Scripture—were Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Church could therefore celebrate only these with the assurance of God’s blessing.
It is clear that sacraments are not valid or effective outside the Church (or, better, outside of ecclesiality). Sacraments are nothing in and of themselves, but subsist only in relation to the life of the Church. Calvin insists that the sacraments must be celebrated with the “consent” of the word of God in Scripture: it is therefore important that the Sacred Text be proclaimed in connection with the sacrament.
The sacraments, however, according to Calvin, are more than mere seals of the conscience. They are also true visible representations of the invisible spiritual realities to which Scripture directs the believer. Scripture is able to discern in the form of the action and in the use of the elements the promises proper to the Word presented clearly and visibly. «The testimony of the Gospel is engraved on the sacraments» (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19). The sacraments are also signs of man’s acceptance of God’s grace. In the very act of accepting the signs of God’s grace given in the sacrament and of observing the rites connected with these signs, man bears witness that on his part he lives daily the grace figured in the sacraments and will be a follower of Jesus Christ.
As regards the Holy Supper (see in particular his Petit traité de la Sainte Cène, 1541), Calvin denies that Christ’s body is present in the elements of bread and wine; still more, he polemicises against the celebration of the Eucharist according to Catholic doctrine because he considers its sacrificial premise erroneous. That doctrine implies that Christ’s body could exist without defined dimensions and without being limited to a particular place—indeed, with the possibility of being in several places at once. For Christ’s flesh to assume such properties would mean that it had truly ceased to be flesh and highlights the folly of expecting such an absurd miracle.
This is why Baptism assumes not only an initiatory role but constitutes the beginning of union with Christ, which endures in the Supper. Calvin, therefore, contrary to Anabaptism, favours “paedobaptism”: it is not required that the child know Christ and accept the gospel by virtue of prolonged study or adherence to a conscious confession; rather, the child must be known by Christ and be united to him by sharing in redeeming grace.

A controversial issue in Calvinian doctrine: divine election (predestination)

As noted at the outset, these paragraphs have considered Calvinian theology prior to its later systematisation after the reformer’s death. In particular, both the more moderate and the more extreme positions took shape as complex theological offshoots based precisely on the doctrine of grace in relation to predestination. By way of example one may cite the position of the Arminians (from the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, 1560–1609), who above all marked the evolution of confessional Calvinism. We are also distant from the definitions of the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619), which marks the first stage of theological confrontation among the Reformed a generation after Calvin.
Here we attempt to summarise one of the cornerstones of Calvinian doctrine as it can be derived from the reformer’s early writings, in particular the 1539 edition of the Institutio, and from the querelle with Jérôme Bolsec in 1551–1552, culminating in the publication of De la prédestination éternelle de Dieu, a text of similar scope to Luther’s De servo arbitrio.
Election is, in other words, predestination to salvation—the act by which God chooses certain individuals to save. These elect enjoy mercy while others suffer condemnation. Unconditional election depends on the supreme conviction of God’s sovereignty: it is God’s choice to save human beings regardless of their sins or any other condition. This means that God’s act of saving man does not depend on what man can do or choose to do; rather, it shows that man is loved by God unconditionally and independently of his own actions. God’s act of saving the elect is based solely on grace (sine condicione, not sub condicione): sin so inhibits the individual’s will that no one desires or is able to follow God except through an initial regeneration of the soul by God, which gives him the capacity to love him. Therefore God’s choice of “whom” to elect is and can only be based on God’s independent and sovereign will, not on human actions.

Mediterranean Calvinism

The question of a Mediterranean Calvinism was first raised by Giorgio Spini in an essay published in “Rinascimento” in 1951¹⁴. Salvatore Caponetto then re-proposed it significantly within his major synthesis on the Protestant Reformation in Italy (1992 and 1997), some chapters of which flowed in 2006 into a volume with a telling title: Il calvinismo nel Mediterraneo¹⁵.
Calvinism spread throughout the Mediterranean world along the routes of trade, commerce, and finance. An important driving centre—as a hub of economic exchange, a meeting-place for merchants and intellectuals, and a “capital” of European printing (together with Venice)—was the city of Lyon, through which many protagonists of the sixteenth-century religious debate passed.
Calvin’s works circulated very early in the Mediterranean world, and particularly in Italy. The Institutio christianae religionis circulated in its Latin versions of 1536 and 1539 and in its French version of 1541. Some success was also enjoyed by the 1557 Italian translation by the Messinese poet and humanist in exile at Geneva, Giulio Cesare Pascale; and even earlier success attended the Italian translation of Calvin’s Catechism, edited by Giulio Domenico Gallo (1545 and 1551). In Florence in 1548 the Piacenza man of letters Lodovico Domenichi published, under the title Nicodemiana, a translation of the Excuse à messieurs les Nicodemites, bearing witness to the interest in the transalpine reformer within the Florentine cultural milieu.
The Institutio was read and discussed by members of the heterodox conventicles active in Grosseto and Siena at the beginning of the 1540s, whose leading figures were the physician Achille Benvoglienti, the notary Fabio Cioni, and the barber—also a diplomatic agent—Basilio Guerrieri.
Religious dissent in the Republic of Lucca increasingly took on a distinctly Calvinist hue; its patriciate swelled the ranks of the exiles religionis causa in Geneva.
In sixteenth-century Genoa the Protestant Reformation penetrated widely, as evidenced by the wave of repression from 1540 to 1543. Genoese merchants played a key role in circulating the new religious ideas: significant is the case of Giorgio Costa, a Genoese merchant condemned to death by the Sicilian Inquisition in 1549 (although labelled generically “Lutheran,” he was probably a Calvinist). In October 1567 the Genoese authorities arrested Bartolomeo Bartocci, a merchant from Città di Castello who had emigrated religionis causa to Geneva but was passing through the Peninsula for business reasons. After much delay, Bartocci was extradited to Rome, where he was executed on 25 May 1568. At that juncture, the Genoese situation alarmed the Roman Holy Office, to the point that Cardinal Gian Battista Cicala complained of the Republic’s leniency towards the “Calvinists who have held the Supper in the heretical manner.” Following Bartocci’s arrest, an inquisitorial investigation uncovered a small group of Genoese Calvinists and ended with sentences to the galleys, abjurations, and the abitello. At the beginning of the 1580s Calvinism was still present in the Republic, as some prominent trials attest.
Calvinism was also widely diffused in the Republic of Venice. A sensational case was that of the patrician Andrea Da Ponte, who emigrated to Geneva in 1560. Particularly significant is the story of Marcantonio Varotta, a Venetian weaver who had in the 1540s been a member of the Grosseto heterodox circle gravitating around Achille Benvoglienti. Varotta resided in Lyon and Geneva, where he moved in the circles of Andrea Da Ponte and other members of the Italian Reformed community in Calvin’s city, and then returned to Italy to win converts. Disappointed, he took refuge in Moravia, only to decide to return to Italy, frustrated by divisions among radical heretics. Captured in Vienna, he was transferred to Udine and then to Venice and finally to Rome, where he was executed on 6 December 1568.
Many leading figures of the Valdesian diaspora from Naples also embraced Calvinism: the most striking case was undoubtedly that of the marquis of Vico, Galeazzo Caracciolo, who in 1551 arrived in Geneva.
Calvinism also left its mark on sixteenth-century Sicily, where it was predominant among heterodox groups in the 1560s (in Syracuse, Messina, Catania and Palermo), thanks in part to the influence of foreign travellers staying on the island for business.
Calvinian ideas did not fail to penetrate Sardinia: the island’s most significant heterodox figures, Nicola and Giovanni Gallo, Sigismondo and Antonio Arquer, Francesco and Gervaso Vidini, were decidedly oriented towards Calvinism and all emigrated to Geneva, where they integrated and remained until their deaths, with the exception of Sigismondo Arquer, who ended his days at the stake in Toledo in 1571.
In general, in the Italian Peninsula, Calvinism was harshly repressed in the 1560s. Between 1567 and 1569 the Calvinist community of Faenza, which gathered around Camillo Regnoli, was struck. It is no accident that that decade opened with the severe repression of the Waldensians in Calabria and Apulia. The Waldensians had organised their churches on the Calvinist model and received assistance, missionaries, and preachers from Geneva. Thus, despite Calvin’s very complicated relationship with the “Italian heretics” in the Cantimorian sense, his theology and the Genevan model attracted many other Italian heterodox in search of an alternative to the Roman Church in which to channel their aspiration to profess their religious faith freely.

Bibliography

• Albert Autin, L'Institution chrétienne de Calvin, Edgar Malfere, Paris 1929.
• Roland H. Bainton, La riforma protestante, Einaudi, Torino 1958.
• Irena Backus, Philip Benedict (éd.,), John Calvin and his Influence, 1509-2009, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York 2011.
• Jean Bauberot, Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, Histoire des Protestants. Une minorité en France (XVI^e-XXI^e siécle), Paris, Ellipses, 2016.
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• Salvatore Caponetto, Il calvinismo del Mediterraneo, Claudiana, Torino 1996.
• Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525- vers 1610), Champ Vallon, Paris 1990.
• Denis Crouzet, Jean Calvin. Vies parallèles, Fayard, Paris 2000.
• Lucien Febvre, Au coeur religieux du XVIe siècle, École Pratique des Hautes études, Paris 1958.
• Lucia Felici, Giovanni Calvino e l'Italia, Claudiana, Torino 2010.
• Jonathan Monnier, La doctrine de l’union avec Christ est-elle la doctrine centrale de la théologie de Calvin?, in «La Revue Réformé», IV, 271, 2014 (on line).
• Achille Olivieri, Pietro Bolognesi (edited by), Calvino ieri e oggi in Italia, Aracne, Roma 2010.
• [Henri Petiot dit] Daniel-Rops, L’Eglise de la Renaissance et de la Réforme, Fayard, Paris 1955.
• Giorgio Spini, Di Nicola Gallo e di alcune infiltrazioni in Sardegna della Riforma protestante, in "Rinascimento", 2, 1951, pp. 145-178.
• Mario Turchetti, Il contributo di Calvino e del calvinismo alla nascita della democrazia moderna, in “Protestantesimo”, 69, 2014, pp. 107-149.
• Michaela Valente, Calvino e gli italiani: un rapporto difficile (da Valentino Gentile a Benedetto Croce), in "Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica", 2/2010, pp. 99-110.

Nota bene

The chapters “Biographical notes on John Calvin” and “Calvinian doctrine” were written by Daniele Santarelli; the chapter “Calvinian doctrine” was written by Vincenzo Vozza.

Article written by Vincenzo Vozza & Daniele Santarelli | Ereticopedia.org © 2017-2021 | English version 2025

et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos
invidia inter dum contemptim in Tartara taetra
invidia quoniam ceu fulmine summa vaporant
plerumque et quae sunt aliis magis edita cumque
[Lucretius, "De rerum natura", lib. V]