In Calvin's Geneva, the changes associated with the Reformation were particularly abrupt and far-reaching, in large part owing to John Calvin himself. "Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva" makes two major contributions to our understanding of this time. The first is to the history of divorce. The second is in illustrating the operations of the Consistory of Geneva--an institution designed to control in all its variety the behavior of the entire population--which was established at Calvin's insistence in 1541. This mandate came shortly after the city officially adopted Protestantism in 1536, a time when divorce became legally possible for the first time in centuries.

Robert Kingdon illustrates the changes that accompanied the earliest Calvinist divorces by examining in depth a few of the most dramatic cases and showing how divorce affected real individuals. He considers first, and in the most detail, divorce for adultery, the best-known grounds for divorce and the best documented. He also covers the only other generally accepted grounds for these early divorces--desertion.

The second contribution of the book, to show the work of the Consistory of Geneva, is a first step toward a fuller study of the institution. Kingdon has supervised the first accurate and complete transcription of the twenty-one volumes of registers of the Consistory and has made the first extended use of these materials, as well as other documents that have never before been so fully utilized.

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.

This critical edition of the Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the time of Calvin reveals what life was like during the Protestant Reformation in a city where ecclesiastical discipline affected many. These valuable primary source documents- the great bulk of which have remained unknown to most modern researchers- are of capital importance for study of this seminal period in church history. Volume 1 records the activity of the Consistory between 1542 and 1544. Arbitration of disputes, surveillance of morals, repression of the vestiges of the Catholic cult, promotion of the Reformed mode of living, resolution of matrimonial cases- this is a general sketch of the Consistory's work during its earliest days. Rich in details pertaining to daily life and piety in Geneva, these noteworthy historical documents testify to the immense role played by the church in society at the beginning of the Reformation.