John Calvin was born as Jehan Cauvin…
January 1535 CE
John Calvin was born as Jehan Cauvin on July 10, 1509, in the town of Noyon in the Picardy region of France.
He is the first of four sons who survives infancy.
His mother, Jeanne le Franc, was the daughter of an innkeeper from Cambrai.
She died in Calvin's childhood, from an unknown cause, after bearing four more children.
Calvin's father, Gérard Cauvin, had a prosperous career as the cathedral notary and registrar to the ecclesiastical court.
Gérard Cauvin died in 1531, after suffering two years with testicular cancer.
Gérard intended his three sons—Charles, Jean, and Antoine—for the priesthood.
Jean was particularly precocious; by age twelve, he was employed by the bishop as a clerk and received the tonsure, cutting his hair to symbolize his dedication to the Church.
He also won the patronage of an influential family, the Montmors.
Through their assistance, Calvin was able to attend the Collège de la Marche, in Paris, where he learned Latin from one of its greatest teachers, Mathurin Cordier.
Once he completed the course, he entered the Collège de Montaigu as a philosophy student.
In 1525 or 1526, Gérard had withdrawn his son from the Collège de Montaigu and enrolled him in the University of Orléans to study law.
According to contemporary biographers Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon, Gérard believed his son would earn more money as a lawyer than as a priest.
After a few years of quiet study, Calvin entered the University of Bourges in 1529.
He was intrigued by Andreas Alciati, a humanist lawyer.
Humanism was a European intellectual movement which stressed classical studies.
During his eighteen-month stay in Bourges, Calvin learned Koine Greek, a necessity for studying the New Testament.
At the death of his father in 1531, Calvin turned immediately to his first love—study of the classics and theology.
During the autumn of 1533 Calvin had experienced a religious conversion.
In later life, John Calvin wrote two accounts of his conversion that differ in significant ways.
In the first account he portrays his conversion as a sudden change of mind, brought about by God.
In his second account he speaks of a long process of inner turmoil, followed by spiritual and psychological anguish.
By 1532, Calvin had received his licentiate in law and published his first book, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia.
“De Clementia,” which he follows with a profusion of influential commentaries on books of the Bible.
After uneventful trips to Orléans and his hometown of Noyon, Calvin had returned to Paris in October 1533.
During this time, tensions rose at the Collège Royal (later to become the Collège de France) between the humanists/reformers and the conservative senior faculty members.
One of the reformers, Nicolas Cop, was rector of the university.
On November 1, 1533 he devoted his inaugural address to the need for reform and renewal in the Catholic Church.
The address had provoked a strong reaction from the faculty, who denounced it as heretical, forcing Cop to flee to Basel.
Calvin, a close friend of Cop, is implicated in the offense, and for the next year he had been forced into hiding.
He has remained on the move, sheltering with his friend Louis du Tillet in Angoulême and taking refuge in Noyon and Orléans.
He is finally forced to flee France for Basel during the Affair of the Placards in mid-October 1534.
In that incident, unknown reformers had posted placards in various cities attacking the Catholic mass, which provoked a violent backlash against Protestants.
In January 1535, Calvin joins Cop in Basel, a city under the influence of the reformer Johannes Oecolampadius.
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