For more than half a century, Robert Kingdon shaped scholarship on the French Reformation through his monographs, critical editions, and articles. A team of scholars continues work on his most recent project, editing and publishing the registers of the Genevan Consistory, which will generate new scholarship for many years. Up to his death in 2010, Kingdon mentored and offered generous encouragement to several generations of scholars; many participated in the eleven sessions of the 2011 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference organized in his memory, from which the ten essays in this volume were chosen. (All the panels and paper titles are provided in an appendix.) Most of the authors explicitly mention the significance of Kingdon’s work to their own. Most of the essays draw upon the kinds of archival sources that were also central to his research. The three themes that organize this volume also informed Kingdon’s scholarship: the impact of Calvinism, relations between church and state in the early modern period, and gender, marriage, and family. The significance of theology for lived experience was central to Kingdon’s work, and this theme runs through all ten of the essays.

Reformed Protestant leaders’ use of history and sacred writing to make sense of contemporary circumstances is the subject of the three essays in part 1, “Calvinism and Its Impact.” Barbara Pitkin’s essay analyzes how Calvin’s sermons on Second Samuel and Francis Hotman’s Consolation Drawn from Holy Scripture used sacred history to make sense of the French Wars of Religion and to shape their contemporaries’ responses to it. Extensive scholarship on the early church fathers led Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, a Huguenot leader and councilor to Henri IV, to assert that Catholic, not Reformed, theology introduced innovation to the doctrine of the Eucharist. Martin Klauber argues that while Mornay’s theological writing led to his political downfall, it had a lasting impact on Reformed theology as every major French Protestant theologian in the seventeenth century relied upon the writings of the church fathers for support. While many Protestants saw the Turkish threat as evidence of God’s punishment for the sins of Christians, James Tracy’s examination of Swiss Reformers’ correspondence about a specific episode, the Habsburg-Ottoman conflict and dynastic instability in Central Europe in the 1570s, reveals more complex perspectives and even disagreements among the Reformers in their advice to co-religionists in Eastern Europe.

The essays in part 2 examine church-and-state relations in the context of local circumstances and conditions. Kathleen Comerford investigates how Cosimo de Medici and the Jesuits in sixteenth-century Tuscany cooperated to achieve their respective goals. Sean Perrone uses GIS mapping to shed new light on the collection of the ecclesiastical subsidy and the nature of power in sixteenth-century Castile. David Mayes’s essay illustrates the differences among Reformed consistories in the Holy Roman Empire, which he argues resulted from the local political and social circumstances in which they were founded and from the settlement of 1648. From his analysis of interactions between Calvinists and Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Emden, Timothy Fehler offers a more complex understanding of religious diversity than simple submission or resistance to the dominant confession.

The regulation of marriage and morality, the subject of Kingdon’s most recent work, is the topic of the final three essays; each focuses on women’s experience before the courts and considers the participation of civil authorities in moral matters. Marjorie Plummer shows that former nuns in early modern Germany who married exchanged dependence on an abbess for dependence on civil authorities who dictated the terms under which they could claim property; their adherence to a Lutheran standard of the perfect wife figured in those decisions. William Bradford Smith analyzes the court testimony of early modern German women who hoped to convince civil authorities to enforce marriage promises. He argues that the women fashioned narratives based on the popular genre of literary romance, portraying themselves as honorable victims of love gone wrong; in so doing, they also gave meaning to their own unfortunate experiences. Dishonor characterized the unmarried Genevan women who attempted to conceal their pregnancies, whose cases William Naphy examines. They were not perceived as victims of seducers by Geneva’s civil authorities but as “wanton and licentious,” and when their children died, infanticide was immediately suspected.

This posthumous Festschrift and the eleven sessions of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference illustrate Robert Kingdon’s influence on early modern social, political, and cultural history, which extends well beyond France and Geneva and Reformed Protestantism through his encouragement of scholars with interests in a variety of regions and topics.