Pastoral Care East of Eden: The Consistory of Geneva, 1568–82

Abstract

Reformed churches in early modern Europe gave special prominence to moral discipline and created institutions to oversee public behavior and promote personal sanctification. These moral tribunals—known variously as consistories, kirk sessions, presbyteries, or Kirchenrat—have been of particular interest to social historians, who have found in disciplinary records a rich deposit for understanding popular belief and daily life in the age of Reformations. Today a veritable “cottage industry” (to use Judith Pollman's apt phrase) of specialized studies exists exploring the form and function of reformed discipline throughout sixteenth-century Europe, from Emden to the French Midi, from the Scottish lowlands to Transylvania. Accordingly, perceptions of these disciplinary institutions have changed significantly. Whereas consistories were once often portrayed as repressive agents of social control concerned primarily with punishing misbehavior and promoting a kind of puritan moral austerity, recent scholarship has shown that these disciplinary institutions played an important role in defining confessional boundaries and preserving the sacral unity (and witness) of the eucharistic community. The importance of Calvinist social discipline in the process of confessionalization and state-formation in early modern Europe is now widely acknowledged. At the same time, specialists have gained new awareness of the penitential and pastoral dimensions of reformed discipline. Consistories concerned themselves not simply with supervising and controlling public behavior and belief, but also with educating the unlearned, defending the weak, and mediating interpersonal conflicts. As Robert Kingdon recently commented regarding John Calvin's consistory in Geneva, “Discipline to these early Genevans meant more than social control. It also meant social help.”