Braghi explores the critical period of the middle sixteenth century when the French Reformed Church was expanding. Many of these churches received pastors from Geneva, but there were Frenchmen who embraced Protestantism independent of Geneva. Not all ministers were formally trained, and many never visited Geneva. This was a dynamic period as the French Reformed Church attempted to establish a religious identity, institutions, and communities under the rule of a Catholic monarch.
Braghi examines how the leaders of the Reformed Church attempted to establish authority “from loose evangelicalism to the synodal-consistorial network of Reformed congregations scattered throughout the kingdom of France” (3). Braghi asserts that his “study uses the unique status, pre-eminence, and reputation of these individuals as its lens,” meaning he looks at selected individual pastors, their personal ambitions, and their rivalries (10). He uses both case studies and local examples. Braghi builds on the foundational work of such scholars as Philip Benedict and Raymond Mentzer who brought the French Reformed Churches out of the shadows of John Calvin and Geneva.
The book is organized into seven chapters mostly in chronological order. Chapter 1 examines the early reformed church of Poitier and the controversial pastor Jean Saint-Vertuniende La Vau; Chapter 2 covers the first National Synod held in May 1559; Chapter 3 explores the origins of a more formal French Reformed Church culminating with the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561; Chapter 4 addresses the attempts to institutionalize the Reformed Church in France and limit local pastoral authority; Chapter 5 explores censorship and controversial pastors in Lower Languedoc; Chapter 6 focuses on the scandal associated with the Pastor Jean Morély; and Chapter 7 examines the conversion of Reformed pastor Hugues Sureau du Rosier in the wake of increased persecution of the Protestant populations in France culminating in St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in August 1572.
The bulk of the book explores pastors and practices that ran afoul of Calvin and Geneva, and the efforts made by Geneva and its allies to reform or silence them. In Poitier, Pastor La Vau was connected to two of Calvin's adversaries, Michael Servetus and Sebastian Castellio. Braghi asserts that Castellio's writings “had an enormous influence on those literate groups” in France that were attracted to the ideas of the Reformation (15). Poitier was an important city to the French Reformed movement, and Geneva sent the city more pastors than any other city but Paris. Calvin and Geneva desired conformity within the Reformed movement in both belief and practice.
Efforts to enforce conformity included a meeting of pastors in May 1559. It was dominated by pastors of congregations in Northern France and most with close ties to Geneva. A Confession of Faith was drawn up but was deemed too dangerous to publish with the increased persecution of Protestants. A toned-down version was published in 1561. Braghi traces the rapid development of the French Reformed Church and the realities of needing a written confession of belief and institutions like the Synodal System to build a national church. Yet local conditions continued to shape approach and practice of the French Reformed church. Geneva tried to prevent local adaptations of the Discipline ecclésiastique (Discipline of the Church). National Synod records show that disagreement continued, and pastoral leadership made efforts to keep pastors whose beliefs were not in line with Geneva from spreading their influence.
Braghi's research reveals ongoing tensions between proscribed doctrine and practices from Geneva and local situations. Pastors condemned by Calvin were willing to use “moderation, negotiation, and compromise: yet, this was a model of church-building to which Calvin could in no way consent” (124). Synodal discipline, condemning popular election of pastors, and censoring were some of the ways Braghi notes that Reformed leadership tried to reign in local autonomy. Despite these efforts, “Challenges to the monopoly of pastoral authority and the preaching of the living word of God held by duly-elected minsters became one of the greatest obsessions of Reformed Synods of the 1560s” (125). Geneva's chief defender in writing, Antoine de Chandieu, was a champion of this position.
Chapter 6 is devoted to the controversy surrounding the publication of Jean Morély's Traité de la discipline et police chrestrienne (1562) where he called for lay participation in church government and an end to the “tyranny” of the clerical elite. Braghi examines the intellectual back story of the itinerant theologian and Morély's path to his contentious publication. He highlights Morély's chief criticisms of pastoral authority including the exclusion of most lay involvement in the Reformed institutions and the pastorate's focus on discipline of church members. Braghi notes there is evidence that not all French pastors agreed with the condemnation of Morély's writings, but he does not go into why there was support. Braghi examines Geneva's response to Morély led by Antoine de Chandieu.
Braghi's final chapter explores the “double conversion” of Reformed minister du Rosier, who converted to Catholicism in the wake of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre but returned to the Reformed faith when he was able to leave France. This type of conversion with accompanying publications was not uncommon in confessional contested places. This chapter would benefit from engaging with more scholarship on the topic of multiple conversions.
The footnotes and bibliography are expansive, but more direct engagement with the critical scholarship of the French Reformation would better contextualize Braghi's research within the existing historiography. The writing is clear, but transitions between chapters are at time abrupt. Going back and forth between chapters on institutional issues and individual pastors lessens the impact of the major themes of the book.
Braghi's scholarship is one of several recent contributions about those that questioned the power and authority of Calvin and Geneva over the Reformed movement. Michael Breuning's recent monograph Refusing to Kiss the Slipper: Opposition to Calvinism in the Francophone Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2021) examines reformers, including Castellio and Morély, who disagreed and clashed with Calvin. Braghi makes the important point that the French-speaking Reformed movement was never monolithic, despite the efforts of Geneva, and his research highlights the difficulties of maintaining consistency in a religious movement.
