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 […]
In a set of Icones contained in his youthful collection of poems (the Poemata or Iuvenilia, or Poemata Iuvenilia), first published in 1548 before his embracing of the Reformation the following year and reissued in expurgated form several times afterwards, Beza includes the following distich about Vergil, a couplet that remains in later editions of the poems. I post […]
Thedore Beza, in addition to being a theologian, pedagogue, and controversialist, was a delightfully ingenious neo-Latin poet. Below is an elegy (in elegiac couplets, natch) in praise of the Horatian aurea mediocritas (though he doesn’t say anything explicitly about Horace), the golden mean–that old standby of ancient philosophical wisdom. It is thoroughly classical and classicizing; all […]