Calvin’s Geneva

Since Calvin’s lifetime, Reformation-era Geneva has taken on a life of its own as the model—and even the myth—of what truly dedicated Christian reformers can achieve: a community dedicated unswervingly to Christian piety and living out ‘true’ Christian doctrine in daily life. Despite the tenacity of this myth of Calvin’s Geneva, scholarship of recent decades has begun to forge a more precise and complicated picture of the Reformation as it happened in Geneva: a reform with seemingly absolute goals but without absolutely rigid or complete effects. As this chapter demonstrates, in order to contextualize the work of Calvin fully, we must continue to deepen our understanding of Geneva as the perpetual work-in-progress that Calvin himself would have recognized rather than only as the ‘most perfect school of Christ’ trumpeted by John Knox.