Rare books 20: Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, Carmelite and Calvinist

  

Here is Bolsec’s “scurrilous but highly entertaining” life of John Calvin of 1577. That is Alister McGrath’s judgement in the Times Literary Supplement, 14 June 2002. Bolsec is reprinted here with information about one of Calvin’s successors in Geneva, Jean de Labadie (Lyons, 1664). Notes: Bolsec was a Carmelite who, according to his wiki, preached a sermon in Paris that “aroused misgivings in Catholic circles”. He became favourably disposed towards Protestants, we are told, settling in Geneva about 1550. There he got into a raging row with John Calvin “whose doctrine of predestination he deemed an absurdity” and was soon banished from that city. Wherever he goes he is found not to be orthodox enough, whether in the Reformed Church or the Catholic Church. He eventually recants, returns to Rome, though the wiki doesn’t say what happens to Bolsec’s wife. He died circa 1584. His book is a character assassination of Calvin rather than a biography. McGrath reports, “[Calvin], according to Bolsec, was irredeemably tedious and malicious, bloodthirsty and frustrated. He treated his own words as if they were the word of God, and allowed himself to be worshipped by his followers. In addition to frequently engaging in homosexual activity, he had an undiscriminating habit of indulging himself sexually with any female within walking distance.” It is for these reasons, according to Bolsec, that Calvin resigned his benefices at Noyon. McGrath observes drily that his biography “makes much more interesting reading than the more deferential biographies” of Calvin by other contemporaries like Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon. The record at the Bibliothèque nationale de France discloses that one François Mauduict has some authorial influence, which is useful as his name appears nowhere in the book in hand. Perhaps he wrote on Labadie (1610-1674), a Jesuit who became the founder of a Protestant religious community named after him, the Labadists. Labadie exited Geneva for the Netherlands two years after publication of this book, leaving the cataloguer with the strange feeling he is holding a piece of dynamite. Research continues on Antoine Offray, as sometimes it is the publisher and who he represents that offers the ultimate clue as to why the book was ever printed in the first place.