Book Review: Calvin's Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609

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Calvin's Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609 . By Scott M. Manetsch . Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 428 pp. $74.00 cloth.

Book Reviews and Notes

What was the life of a reformed pastor like in sixteenth-century Geneva? This deceptively simple question is, as Scott Manetsch demonstrates, a crucial element in understanding the trajectory of the Genevan Reformation. While the ideas of John Calvin and his colleagues have received immense scholarly scrutiny over the centuries, the contours of their lives as pastors have not. Manetsch address this lacuna with a thoroughly researched, lucid account of the lives and work of the reformed Genevan pastors from 1536 to 1609, with the particular goal of comparing the work of the pastorate during Calvin's lifetime with its experiences after Calvin's death in 1564. His book is based on extensive work with the records of the Genevan Consistory and Company of Pastors, as well as the personal correspondence, published writings, personal devotionals, catechisms, and sermons of the reformed Genevan clergy. Using this wealth of sources, Manetsch reconstructs the daily lives of Geneva's pastors during the first seven decades of the Reformation, thus forwarding ongoing efforts to examine how the ideals of Reformation were put into practice.

This book is, in a way, a group biography of the Reformed pastorate in Geneva. One of Manetsch's main goals is to elucidate the ideas and assumptions that shaped the "ministers' identity and self-awareness," (2) in order...