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CALVIN. Defensio Orthodoxae... [Geneva:] 1554. fir

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[Geneva:] Oliua Roberti Stephani, 1554. 8vo (186 x 125 mm). Collation: a-q4,r8,[1]. Contemporary limp vellum, spine lettered in manuscript, housed in a half-morocco clamshell case. Condition: very faint dampstain to lower margin of preliminaries; upper cover lightly soiled. Provenance: The Folger Shakespeare Library (neat release stamp to verso of final blank). first edition of one of the most significant works of the protestant reformation. In this work, Calvin attacks the religious beliefs of Servetus as heretical and defends the latter's execution despite the absence of laws providing for capital punishment in Geneva. The resulting public outrage against the execution of a great scholar over doctrinal issues contributed to the formation of the Unitarian Church and the dissolution of the Unity of the Reformation. The polymath Servetus was a renowned Doctor of Medicine, a cartographer, an expert in geometry, an astrologist, a student of Hebrew, and expert in biblical texts, and finally a philosopher and theologian. Calvin, who feared the intellectual strength of Servetus, famously wrote Farel in 1546, "Servetus wrote to me a short time ago, I was to find among them wonderful things, and such as I had never before seen; and if I wished, he would himself come. But I am by no means inclined to be responsible for him; and if he come, I will never allow him, supposing my influence worth anything, to depart alive."

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