Religion and violence

The name Sébastien Castellion does not figure amongst the most well known of the humanists of the sixteenth century nor the intellectuals of the Protestant reformation. Originally a disciple and even a friend of John Calvin^[1] in Strasbourg and Geneva, Castellion was suspected of being an advocate of reform and took refuge in Basel, where he managed to make a living (teaching Greek at the Academy and as an editor and print-worker). We are indebted to him for a number of translations, notably of the Bible (into Latin and French), as well as a number of texts which were immediately condemned as subversive such as Conseil à la France désolée, 1562, (Advice to France in her distress) which remained unpublished in his lifetime; Libelle contre Calvin (Against Calvin's Book) wasn't published until the seventeenth century, and De haereticus non puniendis (literally, ‘heretics should not be punished'), to give another example, had to await publication until the twentieth century.