The Problem of Execution in Reformation Geneva Historiography

The shadow of the free-thinking humanist Michael Servetus and, more specifically, of his execution at the hands of Genevan magistrates in 1553 looms large in the historiography of Reformation Geneva.  The Protestant reformer John Calvin had an important hand in the decision to execute Servetus for his beliefs, and was criticized by some of his fellow Protestants, including most notably, Sebastian Castellio.

Liberal intellectuals in the nineteenth century embraced Castellio’s opposition to Servetus’s death as an ecumenical and forward-looking form of religious toleration.  The flipside of this veneration of Castellio was the condemnation of Calvin.  Nineteenth-century French Catholic and American Protestant historians in particular used the Servetus controversy as a primary lens through which to understand Calvin as intolerant, rigid and controlling.  Anglophone historiography of Calvin and of the Genevan reformation has been reeling ever since.  An apologetic historiographical tradition arose in reaction to these nineteenth-century attacks, and persists today in the defensive framing of scholarly biographies of Calvin (he was a nicer guy than you thought) and in histories of the consistory (religious regulation in Geneva was not very effective or vindictive).

Concern with rehabilitating Calvin’s reputation colors much Anglophone scholarship, and distracts historians from the still pressing question of whether the Calvinist version of Protestantism was more violent in its control of religious deviance than other reform movements.  Ample sources exist in the Geneva criminal archives to investigate this question.  Yet apart from two recent microhistorical analyzes of tried heretics by Genevans Christian Grosse and Bernard Lescaze, the wider question of the violence of Reformed godly justice remains neglected.