ABSTRACT
The most important figure in the Protestant Reformation after Luther*, Calvin was born in Noyon in 1509. His father was a notary and secretary of the episcopal court and planned a career in the Church for his son. Calvin had a thorough education and solid humanistic training. We know that he spent a year (1522-23 or 1523-24) at the Collège de la Marche in Paris and then four years at the Collège Montaigu, where he earned a master of arts. He should then have begun theological studies, but contrary to his original intention his father had him study law*. Calvin says that this was because law was more lucrative, but it was probably not by chance that at the same time his father was in conflict with the cathedral chapter (he died excommunicate a few years later). Calvin studied law for four years in Orléans and Bourges and during this time began to study Greek with Melchior Wolmar. He then began a career as a humanist, as evidenced by the publication in Paris in 1532 of his commentary on Seneca’s De clementia. It is not known whether Calvin was already consciously a Protestant at this time; the date of what
he was to call his sudden conversion* (subita conversio) remains unknown. But in 1533 his friend Nicolas Cop, rector of the University of Paris, delivered an inaugural lecture that owed a good deal to Luther. Cop had to leave Paris as a consequence, and Calvin did the same. There followed three years of wandering in and out of France, during which Calvin went as far as Ferrara. In 1534 he abandoned the church livings that had allowed him to finance his studies, and in 1535, in Basel, he finished the first edition of Christianae Religionis Institutio, adorned with a dedication to François I that was at the same time a passionate defense of the persecuted French Protestants. The work was published in Basel in early 1536. At around the same time, Calvin returned to France for the last time and left with the intention of making a literary or scholarly career in Strasbourg or Basel, both of which were centers of Protestant humanism*. But his journey took him to Geneva, and this was the decisive moment of his life.
