This book grew out of a 2007 Colloquium Conference jointly sponsored by the Calvin Studies Society and was held at the University of Notre Dame on April 12-14, 2007. The list of contributors, and editor Randall C. Zachman who is associate professor of Reformation studies at the University of Notre Dame, have a great deal to offer readers with regard Calvin studies during the Reformation era in this collection of essays.

These informative essays offer a new approach to the study of John Calvin. The authors move beyond traditional approaches to consider the influential reformer within the broader context of the Roman Catholic Church and his complicated relationship to it. Several themes emerge in these studies one being that Calvin saw himself as intending not to form a new tradition but to reform the Catholic Church to its true form. Another theme is Calvin’s engagement with contemporaries who remained within the Roman Catholic Church, some of whom were evangelical in their theology. Finally, this volume attempts to illustrate that some of the best contemporary research on Calvin is being done by Roman Catholics and that the Catholic and Protestant traditions have much to learn from each other.

This in turn provides a new appreciation of Calvin's catholicity and a better understanding of the Catholic culture in which the reformer lived and worked despite the distinct differences between Calvin and his Roman Catholic contemporaries. After all Calvin was born a Roman Catholic, and engagement with Roman Catholicism is fundamental to his theology and understanding the Reformation era. ( )