Contra libellum Calvini
By: Sebastian Castellio ; a new critical edition supplemented by the text of the Basle manuscript-fragment by Uwe Plath ; Sebastian Castellio
Contributors: Plath, Uwe, editor
Series: Cahiers d'humanisme et Renaissance -- no 160; Cahiers d'humanisme et Renaissance -- v. 160.
Publisher: Droz
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Genève
Language: eng; lat
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9782600059763
Copyright date: 2019
Subjects: Early works to 1800; Calvinism; Controversial literature; Christian heresies; History; Reformed Church; Reformation; Toleration; Middle Ages
Other titles: Contra libellum Calvini in quo ostendere conatur haereticos jure gladii coercendos esse.
Description: Sebastian Castellio's Contra libellum Calvini belongs -- together with the De haereticis, an sint persequendi -- to his most important contribution to the toleration controversy that began after the Spaniard Michael Servetus was arrested and burnt at the stake in Geneva for heresy. Castellio wrote this work in the summer 1554 in Basle as an answer to Calvin's Defensio orthodoxae fidei. It was written as a dialogue between Calvin and "Vaticanus" (Castellio). In this work we get to know the Basle humanist as an angry, passionate debater who attacks Calvin's faults and weaknesses, his theology and activity in Geneva with arguments full of irony and biting scorn. Here we find the famous sentence "to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but is to kill a man". This work was first published in 1612 in the Netherlands by the humanist Reinier Telle. Uwe Plath's critical edition is not only a reproduction of the Telle text, it also includes the text of the Basle Autograph- fragment and attempts to give a readable, error-free text, as close as possible to Castellio's original.
Notes: On his: Contra libellum Calvini in quo ostendere conatur haereticos jure gladii coercendos esse, also known as: Dissertatio qua disputatur, quo iure, quove fructu haeretici sunt coercendi gladio vel igne.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-235).

Text in Latin; critical matter in English.