Book reviews: John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography

Displaying the rhetorical skills of the humanist tradition in which he was trained, Calvin sought to expose the order of scripture both through argument and literary beauty - in the elegant forms of Holbein, Gordon says, rather than the glorious chaos of Bruegel. Interestingly this elegance continued to move readers, from John Cotton who read the Institutes to 'sweeten' his mouth before sleeping, to women in early modern England who learned from the Institutes that 'faith is inseparable from devout affection', to Gordon's own students who found Calvin 'orderly and playful' in this book. The last chapter brings the influence of Calvin and his book up to the present, where popular culture and the media have portrayed a dour Calvin as the poster child for austerity and humourless religion.