A reformer tried to build religious community by preaching the word of God and subjecting the town and territory to the pastoral oversight of evangelical clergy. To preach and reorganize, the reformer needed a bible that recounted events and narratives written down for an explicit purpose: the regeneration of individual and society. The reformer was sensitive to threats to the bible’s purpose. Any time textual fact and regenerative purpose seemed to drift apart, its purpose could seem to be compromised. Fact and purpose could drift apart in two ways. Historicizing the text, taking the book as the artifact of a distinctive, remote culture or as ancient fiction, could seem to nullify the text’s power as divine speech in the present. Equally problematic was the suggestion that spiritual readings of the text were divorced from historical facts. These two challenges to the bible, one historicizing and another spiritualizing, first appeared as an intellectual dilemma in the Reformation. This chapter illustrates that first appearance by examining two controversies in the life of the Reformation’s most celebrated literalist, John Calvin. The first example is Calvin’s conflict with his friend Sebastian Castellio. The second is Calvin’s conflict with the so-called “libertines.”

This chapter surveys how Decadent writers engaged with contemporary politics. It defines the Decadents as anti-modernists drawn to modernity in literary form but deeply resistant to modernity in social and political life. Like other anti-modernists they channelled their frustrations into dreams of idealized pasts or utopian futures and like them they fulminated loudly against the prevailing order. The chapter considers Decadent engagements with politics in terms of three key examples: the use by writers in the movement of tropes from the tradition of republican political theory; their enthusiasm for elite, underground and countercultural communities like the eighteenth-century libertines that provide historical alternatives to contemporary politics; and recurrent images of crowds, political protest and political forms of writing (like the manifesto) in their works, which comment more directly on the age. The chapter argues that Decadent writing arose from and responded to the politics of its historical moment, one rife with real and imagined political disorder and one that demanded the imagination of alternative possibilities for expression and association.

When Nicodemus approached Jesus under cover of night (John 3), he did so to keep from being seen with someone accused of taking liberties with Jewish tradition and morality. Both Nicodemus’s strategy and the associations he sought to avoid took on new forms in early modern Europe. Nicodemism was the practice of hiding one’s beliefs, usually to evade persecution. Libertinism included various forms of ethical indifference. Nicodemism and libertinism in the Reformation era are best understood in relation to the period’s profound cultural changes. A proliferation of new religious confessions in early modern Europe put many believers at odds with their communities. The resulting fluidity of religious identity meant that what one practiced did not always correspond with what one believed. More urgently, landing on the wrong side of belief could have disastrous, even deadly, consequences. The stakes were high at a time when religious pluralism was widely viewed as impurity that put a society under threat of divine judgment. Borders dividing mainstream from deviant religion could change quickly, so that a person found herself having to either prove she belonged or hide that she did not. Widespread persecution forced migration and exile upon those who could no longer worship according to their beliefs. Yet not everyone had the luxury of leaving for friendlier environs. Traditions of martyrdom and accusations of crypto-religion emerged within Catholic, Protestant, and radically reformed communities alike.