1536 – 1960 · A publishing history
It began as a six-chapter handbook for persecuted French Protestants. Calvin revised it through five Latin editions until it became a summa in four books, translated it into French himself, and it has since been put into English four times. These are twelve of its editions, each shown with its title page.
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Chapters in each Latin edition Calvin published, one mark per chapter.
Chapter counts understate it: by 1559 the text was about five times the length of 1536.
Six chapters following the shape of Luther’s catechism: the Law, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments, the five false sacraments, and Christian liberty. It is prefaced by an address to King Francis I in defence of the French evangelicals. Pocket-sized. Calvin was twenty-six.
Nearly tripled, to seventeen chapters. The new title says it “now at last truly answers to its name.” Its purpose shifts from catechism to a textbook for theology students, meant to prepare readers for Scripture and to accompany his commentaries, beginning with Romans in 1540.
Calvin’s own translation of the 1539 Latin, written for lay readers. It is counted a landmark of early modern French prose. Later French editions followed each Latin revision (1545, 1551, 1560).
Expanded to twenty-one chapters, with new material on the church, the ministry, vows and monasticism, reflecting Calvin’s pastoral years in Strasbourg. Reprinted 1545; French edition 1545. The title page keeps the 1539 wording but adds a testimonial from the Strasbourg schoolmaster Johann Sturm.
Still twenty-one chapters, but now divided into numbered sections for the first time, with additions on conscience and human traditions. French edition 1551; Latin reprints 1553 and 1554.
Completely restructured into four books and eighty chapters on the order of the Apostles’ Creed: God the Creator; God the Redeemer in Christ; the grace of Christ received by the Spirit; and the outward means of grace (church, sacraments, civil government). It runs to roughly five times the length of 1536.
In the preface Calvin says he was never satisfied with the arrangement until this edition. The French followed in 1560, and every later translation below renders this text.
The first complete English translation, published within two years of the final Latin. Norton’s version was reprinted repeatedly into the 1630s and formed the theology of Elizabethan and Puritan England.
The first new translation in 250 years. It was widely reprinted in America, notably by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, and served as the standard text for much of the nineteenth century.
Produced alongside the Society’s edition of Calvin’s commentaries. Beveridge’s became the most widely circulated English Institutes for more than a century, and it remains in print and freely available.
Read it on Commonplace →Baum, Cunitz and Reuss open the great Strasbourg edition of Calvin’s works with the Institutes. Volume 1 prints the 1536 text and collates the editions of 1539–1554, volume 2 the 1559 Latin, and volumes 3–4 the French of 1560. This laid the foundation for modern study of how the text developed.
Volume 1 (1926) gives the 1536 edition; volumes 3–5 (1928–36) give the 1559 Institutio with an apparatus marking which passages entered in 1536, 1539, 1543, 1550 or 1559. This is the Latin text Battles would translate.
Translated from the Opera Selecta text, with McNeill’s introduction and notes tracing Calvin’s sources and the growth of each passage across the editions. It is now the standard English Institutes for scholarship and the classroom.
The famous opening of Book I as it appears in Calvin’s French and Latin and in each English translation. Spelling follows the source; the 1541 and 1560 French are from the Calvini Opera.
Toute la somme de nostre saigesse, laquelle merite d’estre appellee vraie et certaine saigesse, est quasi comprinse en deux parties, a sçavoir la congnoissance de Dieu, et de nousmesmes.
Tota fere sapientiae nostrae summa, quae vera demum ac solida sapientia censeri debeat, duabus partibus constat, cognitione Dei et nostri.
Toute la somme presque de nostre sagesse, laquelle, à tout conter, merite d’estre reputee vraye et entiere sagesse, est situee en deux parties : c’est qu’en cognoissant Dieu, chacun de nous aussi se cognoisse.
The whole summe in a manner of all our wisedom, which only ought to be acompted true & perfecte wisedom, consisteth in two partes, that is to saye, the knowledge of God, and our selues.
True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves.
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
The 1845 Calvin Translation Society text is in the Commonplace library, searchable alongside more than a thousand other works of the Reformation and after.
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