Epistle to Marguerite de Navarre and Preface to a Sermon by John Calvin


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Born to a noble family in Tournai, Marie Dentière (1495-1561) left her convent in the 1520s to work for religious reform. She married a former priest and with her husband went to Switzerland, where she was active in the Reformation's takeover of Geneva. Dentière's Very Useful Epistle (1539) is the first explicit statement of reformed theology by a woman to appear in French. Addressed to Queen Marguerite of Navarre, sister of the French king Francis I, the Epistle asks the queen to help those persecuted for their religious beliefs. Dentière offers a stirring defense of women and asserts their right to teach the word of God in public. She defends John Calvin against his enemies and attacks the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Her Preface (1561) to one of Calvin's sermons criticizes immodesty and extravagance in clothing and warns the faithful to be vigilant. Undaunted in the face of suppression and ridicule, this outspoken woman persisted as an active voice in the Reformation.










The Company of the Preachers


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Walton's Lives


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This book argues that Walton's practice, in his Lives, was crucial in shaping modern expectations of biography: how it should be organised, how it should treat evidence, how seriously it should regard narrative coherence, and most particularly in the modern expectation of an intimaterelationship between author, reader, and subject. Dr Martin considers Walton's biographical ethics in relation to the tributary genres influencing him as they emerged from post-Reformation commendatory practice after 1546, most particularly classical funeral oratory and the emergent Protestantfuneral sermon, the Plutarchan parallel, the didactic Character, martyrological narrative, and finally Walton's direct model, the exemplary biographical commemoration of the conformist minister.Dr Martin considers how Walton develops his literary inheritance, arguing that his lay status required him to initiate a different kind of mediation between reader and subject from the straightforwardly imitative. Walton presents himself as a channel for the words and acts of an authoritativesubject, a preference implicitly followed both in his stress on personal connections with his subjects (which spectacularly particularizes his portraits) and in his very extensive use of their own writings. His Lives attempt posthumous autobiography. They are also considered as prominent andaccomplished examples of the many politically intended narratives which exploit a consensual interpretation of private virtue to support, without having to argue for, a sectarian interpretation of public rectitude.




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