ABSTRACT
In 1523, as the Genevan struggle for independence from the Duke of Savoy was beginning to heat up, an innkeeper and furrier named Jean Lullin refused to lodge the Duke’s horses, protesting that his stables were already full of the horses of his German guests. This insolent act earned him several days in prison.1 As the decade wore on, Lullin established himself ever more explicitly as an opponent of the House of Savoy, which had been claiming increasing control over Geneva since 1265, and of the city’s bishop, Pierre de la Baume, who was also a member of the Savoyard court. Later, as one of the leaders of the first anti-Calvin faction, the Articulants, Lullin would “‘prepare entire slates of offices as though they were his to be given’ after a series of public banquets and private deals at his tavern.”2 Lullin’s role as an innkeeper put him in a unique position: across early modern Germany and Switzerland, inns and taverns were sites of potential resistance to both political and religious authority, evading official efforts to regulate them or shut them down. Offering one of the main non-church venues for socializing, Genevan auberges such as Jean Lullin’s defied the efforts of the reformers to transform them in accordance with Reformed Christian priorities.3 At the same time,
however, Jean Lullin became deeply involved in the official business of governing the newly-Reformed city in the 1530s.
