John Thompson describes how Martin Luther and John Calvin treated conscience. For Luther, natural conscience is beset by knowing that a person can never meet the rigorous requirements of the law. Faith can relieve a person’s downtrodden conscience, which would otherwise condemn him. Once a person accepts the favor of God that flows solely from trusting him, his conscience is liberated. He knows he can do nothing himself to merit that favor. His conscience is freed “to trust God’s promise of mercy and forgiveness.” The highest functioning conscience for Luther, then, is the one that does not depend on its own goodness or perfection. Calvin teaches that, though a person’s conscience is a natural faculty, it is marred and affected by the fall. Once a person is saved, however, his conscience is transformed so that he desires to obey the will of God found in the law. This is true even though adherence to the law will not add in the least to his salvation. For this reason, Calvin created a catechism to train and chasten Genevan Christians’ consciences. Calvin also helped to establish the Geneva consistory, which was less a disciplinary body, and rather “a school for consciences.”

Whenever Geneva is mentioned one thinks of Calvin, Beza and the establishment of Reformed structures and theology. The great names that stand out are other ministers (Des Gallars), famous printers (Estienne) and Calvin’s great opponents: Castellio, Servetus and Bolsec.1 Thus, Geneva becomes more the place where Calvin lived and wrote and less a locale with its own history and idiosyncratic historical context.2 In particular, one forgets that Geneva was a city-state Republic squeezed by an expansionist Berne, a revanchist Savoy and a turbulent France. By focusing on Calvin and the Reformation one forgets that Geneva’s adoption of Protestantism was the direct result of the city’s Revolution from Savoy. By discussing the city’s government, the spotlight returns to this political upheaval that created the city-state in which Calvin found refuge. Geneva’s political structures were critical in facilitating (and complicating) Calvin’s work and must be understood in their own right.

The question of how the transformations of the early modern era changed – or did not change – the lives of women has become a familiar question for historians. Joan Kelly’s pathbreaking “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” challenged scholars to interrogate the impact of watershed moments, like the Renaissance, and to resist assuming that women necessarily benefited from them.1