ABSTRACT
Jacques Desmay explains John Calvin's chopping and changing of benefices by his restless spirit's forever seeking change and novelty. Desmay further adverts to Calvin's purported theft of a silver cup belonging to the Picard Nation at the university in order to finance his travels. Desmay's Calvin is very fragmentary. However, he does show certain distinctive traits that do not feature in any of the other biographies. He emerges as a restless youth, forever seeking change and novelty. Le Vasseur's account is far more comprehensive than Desmay's digest of the Cathedral Registers and of the local, oral tradition surrounding the reformer. Le Vasseur had read Desmay's petit liure on the reformer's life, and refers to it several times in the text of the Annales. Nowadays, the value of the Annales thus consists in their listing of all the documentary evidence about John and his family, which was available in the Noyon Registers before they burnt down later in the seventeenth century.
