John Calvin developed arresting new teachings on rights and liberties, church and state, and religion and politics that shaped the law of Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings were periodically challenged by major crises - the French Wars of Religion, Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, American colonization, and American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, a major Calvinist figure emerged - Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, John Winthrop, John Adams, and others - who modernized Calvin's teachings and translated them into dramatic new legal and political reforms. This rendered early modern Calvinism one of the driving engines of Western constitutionalism. A number of basic Western laws on religious and political rights, social and confessional pluralism, federalism and constitutionalism, and more owe a great deal to this religious movement. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of history, law, religion, politics, ethics, human rights, and the Protestant Reformation.

• Contains detailed analysis of the connections between Calvinist political and legal theories and the French wars of religion, Dutch Revolt and English Civil War

• Features close case studies of several titans in the Calvinist tradition including Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius and John Milton

• Argues that there was a 1500 year tradition of rights talk before the Western Enlightenment and that Calvinism deserves greater recognition within it

Author  John Witte Jr. is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia.

Endorsements  "John Witte has written a magistral survey of ideas about law, religion and human rights as developed by John Calvin in sixteenth-century Geneva and then developed and adapted by selected intellectual descendants of his in France, the Netherlands, England, and colonial America. These ideas are analyzed with all the clarity and bite one expects of a great historian of thought. They should make a useful and thought-provoking contribution to modern attempts to cope with concepts that are still of fundamental importance." - Robert M. Kingdon, University of Wisconsin, Madison