Colin Kidd writes:

Trevor-Roper’s real task in his purported biography of Mayerne is the recovery – through the lens of one particular case-study – of a ‘lost moment’ in intellectual history, the diaspora of independent-minded and creative so-called Calvinists from some of the most advanced parts of Europe in the wake of the Counter-Reformation: from Italy in the 1550s, from France after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres of 1572, from Flanders after the fall of Antwerp in 1585. Calvinism, it transpires, was a flag of convenience for this undoctrinaire and cosmopolitan elite, many of whose members displayed scant interest in predestinarian ideas or in theocratic blueprints for a godly society. Indeed, as Trevor-Roper points out, many of them were ‘intellectual reformers, “liberals”, even “libertines”, in the tradition of Erasmus, who were driven to protect themselves by assuming a “Calvinist” armour’.

(LRB 22 May 2008)

Yale University Press | Hardback 464 pp. |ISBN: 9780300112634