This biography sheds new light on the life and personality of the great Reformer - and the milieu in which he lived and worked. Cottret's Cal vin is not the static theologian of earlier biographies, but a man of enormous vigour, constantly on the move in his thinking as well as in his life. Professor Cottret introduces the reader to the world into which Calvin was born, and follows him from childhood to humanistic and literary and finally back to Geneva. The vital issues of the day are encountered as it were through Calvin's eyes, as the author leads the reader through the dramatic upheavals of 16th-century Europe.