Colleagues in the Taylor Institution Library have set up trials to some online Droz French resources. Two of these will be of interest to early modern history, history of the book, intellectual history, religious history, and European history. You will need SSO for remote access. Please send feedback to isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.
The Droz Humanisme et Renaissance collection offers a collection of sources and studies on Humanism (Politien, Ficin, Erasmus, Budé…), the French Reformation (Lefèvre d’Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Beza…) and the Renaissance (literary and artistic, Hieronymus Bosch or Rabelais, Ronsard or Primaticcio), as well as the medicine, science, philosophy, book history, and all forms of knowledge and human activity from the long sixteenth century, roughly from 1450 to the death of Henry IV in 1610, the threshold of the classical age.
This portal presents all the texts by or about John Calvin which have been published by the Librairie Droz from 1960 to 2012, with an initial focus on Geneva, Calvin, and the beginnings of the French evangelical movement with Lefèvre d’Etaples and Marguerite de Navarre.
Related resources already available in Oxford:
This database comprises the writings of French Catholics against the doctrines of John Calvin (1509-1564) and other protestant leaders. France was a major centre in the clash between Catholics and Protestants during the sixteenth century. Much of the Protestant literature was in French in the hopes of converting the French people. In response, the Catholic Church preserved its position in France with these documents. This archive includes both sixteenth-century attacks on Calvinism and Protestantism as well as defences of the Catholic doctrine.
This collection offers a comprehensive survey of the original writings of the French Huguenot authors, from the first stirrings of radical dissent in the 1530s through to the end of the century. The selection privileges first and foremost original writings of authors writing within France and for an exclusively French audience. Thus whereas Calvin’s Genevan writings are not included, the tracts penned by Theodore de Bèze as part of the polemic exchange during the Colloquy of Poissy (1561) do appear here.
All told the writings collected here reveal an intellectually vibrant movement, meeting unprecedented challenges and later hardship with that mixture of confidence, aggression, and resolution in the face of adversity that characterises Calvinist churches of this era throughout Europe.
