John Calvin transformed the Western theology and law of sex,
marriage, and family life. Building on a generation of Protestant
reforms, Calvin constructed a comprehensive new theology and law
that made marital formation and dissolution, childrenbs nurture and
welfare, family cohesion and support, and sexual sin and crime
essential concerns for both church and state. Working with other
jurists and theologians, Calvin drew the Consistory and Council of
Geneva into a creative new alliance to govern domestic and sexual
subjects. Together, these authorities outlawed monasticism and
mandatory clerical celibacy, and encouraged marriage for all fit
adults. They set clear guidelines for courtship and engagement and
mandated parental consent, peer witness, church consecration, and
state registration for valid marriage. They radically reconfigured
weddings and wedding feasts and reformed marital property and
inheritance, marital consent and impediments. They created new
rights and duties for wives within the bedroom and for children
within the household. They streamlined the grounds and procedures
for annulment and introduced fault-based divorce for both husbands
and wives on grounds of adultery and desertion. They encouraged the
remarriage of divorcees and widow(er)s. They punished rape,
fornication, prostitution, sodomy, and other sexual felonies with
startling new severity and put firm new restrictions on dancing,
sumptuousness, ribaldry, and obscenity. They put new stock in
catechesis and education, created new schools, curricula, and
teaching aids, and provided new sanctuary to illegitimate,
abandoned, and abused children. They created new protections for
abused wives and impoverishedwidows. Many of these reforms of
sixteenth-century Geneva were echoed and elaborated in numerous
Calvinist communities, ultimately on both sides of the Atlantic,
and a good number of these reforms found their way into our modern
civil law and common law traditions. This volume and its sequels
analyzes and documents this transformation of sex, marriage and
family life in Geneva using many newly-discovered theological and
legal materials.
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