John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait - Hardcover

Professor Bouwsma studies the theologian John Calvin as a way to bring into focus the cultural, psychological, and intellectual problems of the sixteenth century. He argues that Calvin represents an historical moment of transition from traditional modes of philosophical and religious thought to modern ones. Beginning with a description of the traditional culture of Calvin's time, and of the moralism which exerted such a powerful hold over medieval thought, he goes on to indentify the crucial issue in this transition as the ability of a culture to manage the anxiety of existence. Medieval society, by creating simplified polarities such as Good and Evil, he argues, was conspicuously successful in performing this task. Finally Bouwsma provides a critical analysis of this medieval philosophy, and explains the significance of Calvin's concept of a "New Order" in providing an ethical system which no longer relied upon these established views of the world. Scholars and students of religion and theology; religious historians

About the author: William J. Bouwsma is Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the foremost American scholars of the Renaissance and Reformation, he is also the author of Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation, acclaimed by The Historian as "marvelously rich" and by Renaissance Quarterly as "among the handful of the most significant studies of the history of ideas produced in the 1960s."