John Calvin
John Calvin (1509-64), French Protestant theologian and religious reformer. Having broken with the Catholic Church, he travelled to Basel in Switzerland. There in 1536 he completed his major work, The Institutes of Christian Religion, in which he argued for re-forms based on the practice and teaching of the early Church. His theological ideas, known as Calvinism, were widely influential; his theory of Church government is the basis of Presbyterianism. His name is especially associated with Geneva, where, in 1541, he established a church state that was one of the most important citadels of the Reformation.
