Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, a dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent. Thus speak John Cowland. God's guard dog, a Frenchman exiled to Geneva, who became a towering figure of the 16th century reformation.

He achieved this not through charismatic or attribute through the relentless rigor of his analysis of the Bible. Insisting on a strict code of personal discipline, Calvin galvanizes followers to root out sin wherever they found it. The explosion of printing helped spread his doctrine across Europe and onto the new world.

English Puritans went into battle with the Calvinist Geneva Bible in their pockets, but it's also been credited with driving capitalism forward and inspiring an array of political movements.

When we discuss the nature and impact of Calvin's ideas are just in champion, professor of the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway University of London, Susan Hardman Scott, senior lecturer in divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and German McCulloch, professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford.

Can you introduce us to John Calvin, what kind of man was he and what was his background? Well Melvin, you said the most two important things, but already he's French and he's an exile for most of his adult life.

This is a very brilliant Frenchman who would have had a career, I think, in a university teaching law, but then the reformation happened. The reformation event seized him and he had to flee from France.

He was wandering for a long while and by a peculiar chain of circumstances ended up in the city of Geneva, which was stranded between France and Switzerland in the 16th century, and that's where most of the career was.

I don't think you actually liked Geneva very much, but he felt that God had put him there and you can't argue with God.

He started by training as a priest and then he turned to law. Can you tell us a little bit about what he did in those two disciplines when he was trained in the Universities in France?

Well, I guess it's actually exaggerating to say he trained as a priest. When he was a 12-year-old boy, he was given revenues from a little bit of the cathedral in his native town, just like a sort of university bursary or a school bursary.

So in no way was he a priest of the old church and he was never ordained in any church at all, and that's what I think something you've got to remember about him.

I mean, his self-image is of teacher and all through his life he is teaching, he's writing, he's preaching incessantly in a pulpit, so he looks very like a clergyman, but in fact he's not.

And that law is very important to him because his sort of Christianity is very based on the idea of structure, law. It's a very systematized form of the Christian faith.

Can you give us a little sketch of his character?

Well, I guess he's not the sort of person you'd want to go down the pub with, unlike say Martin Luther, I think you'd have a nice night out with Luther.

Calvin was intensely serious, very focused, and very emotional when he was crossed. You would not want to do the wrong thing with Calvin, and a lot of his career is spent in a rage.

And yet he could be very self-contained, very organized, very directed, so he's a sort of person who you'd want on your side in a crisis, and you'd certainly not want on the other side in a crisis.

He was very influenced by pre-reformation or initials humanism as exemplified by arasmas. Again, can you touch on that?

I mean, he's one of the people who have really benefited from the rediscovery of Greek and Latin. He's a beautiful stylist in Latin.

He speaks beautiful French and beautiful Latin. And you'd think therefore that he would have that sort of lightness of touch than toleration that arasmas, the great humanist was so fond of.

No, that's not the sort of man he was because there's another big man in his life from the remote past, Augustine of Hippo, 4th Century, 5th Century Latin speaking Bishop from Africa.

...