The Calvinist International
21 March marks the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and architect of the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, by being burned alive at the hands of Queen Mary I in 1556. The most famous account of his death is that found in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe writes: But when he came to the […]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously opens the first chapter of the first book of The Social Contract by saying, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” One almost–almost–hears an echo of a poem of his fellow Genevan Theodore Beza from nearly 200 years before. In emblem 16 of the Emblemata, Beza says something superficially similar, but […]
At the conclusion of his Icones, a series of tributes to the Reformers and their forerunners, Theodore Beza attaches a series of 44 emblemata, pictures with captions in verse to explain their meaning. The opening image/poem combination in the series is quite nice. The image, an empty circle, at first glance appears odd. What could it possibly […]
A nicely turned epigram on Zwingli by Theodore Beza from his Icones–all the more surprising because Protestants can’t write, and what is true in general should be true a fortiori in the particular case of writing about Zwingli! Beza’s imagination, it seems, did not get the memo that it did not exist. Zvinglius arderet gemino quum sanctus […]
As I’ve noted before, Beza includes tributes to some non-/proto-Protestants in his Icones. One of those is Girolamo Savonarola, a Florentine Dominican friar hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in 1498. After a brief section in prose, Beza appends a verse-eulogy by Marcantonio Flaminio (interestingly; since generally Beza uses his own poems): singularis tuae pietatis…quam […]