Des pasteurs sans pasteur Historiographie de la Réforme en Suisse romande, 1956–2008

Abstract

Eugenie Droz, the Genevan erudite publisher, published one after the other from 1956 to 1961, Robert M. Kingston's Columbia University dissertation, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France 1555―1563, Pierre Fraenkel's Lund University dissertation, Testimonia patrum. The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon, and the first volume of Theodor Beza's Correspondence. Droz had thus helped put into place the themes that would shape the history of the Reform in francophone Switzerland for the next fifty years: the edition of unpublished Genevan manuscripts, non-confessional political and social history of the Reform, and the importance of Patristics in sixteenth-century religious polemics. Other areas of interest were soon added, such as critical editions of unpublished texts, textual history rather than histoire des mentalites, and exegetical history and bibliography. These themes were advanced by the Institut d'Histoire de la Reforme, established at the end of the 1960s, which has strongly influenced Reformation historiography.