This book lays out the theological and political conflicts between Venice and Rome in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century in impressive detail. Bouwsma shows that a historicist understanding of reality on the part of Venetians led to repeated misunderstandings with Rome's authority, predicated on a sense of authority grounded in an unchanging cosmic hierarchy. An extremely important contribution to political and religious history.

It is William Bouwsma's thesis that the Renaissance was not the budding spring of the modern age, but an organic era with a beginning and an end. Curiously, the forces given birth at the beginning of the era proved to be so frightening that the Renaissance players rushed to euthanize them. The Renaissance did not wane so much as it was dismantled, like an errant atomic bomb, by scientists overawed by their invention.

Bouwsma examines sixteenth century European thought in piecemeal-philosophy, theology, politics, science, literature, the theater-and with Newtonian precision describes how the adventuresome Renaissance spirit smashed molds of dated thinking and psychological ordering. Then, in reaction to its own recklessness, the Renaissance mind either retreated to old certainties rehabilitated or domesticated its inventions into a more tranquil conventionality.

Historical essays of this sort can make for delightful reading. Boorstin's "The Discoverers," for example, captures both the specificity and the poetry of scientific history. Bouwsma, unfortunately, errs on the side of specificity. The flow of the work reminds one of a lengthy receiving line where every great thinker gets a handshake and a bon mot, but soon it is time to move on to the next guest. This is not to say that some of the guests don't mingle excessively. The author has a warm spot in his heart for Shakespeare, Sarpi, Jonson, Hobbes, Hooker, Galileo, and in particular Bacon and Montaigne, who pop up dozens of times in the narrative. Regrettably, "pop up" is exactly what they do, to provide proof texts and anecdotal spicing. The reader who is not intimately familiar with Bacon, for example, will not get a significant taste of his thought.

This is most unfortunate, because I believe Bouwsma has at least scratched the surface of an interesting concept: the Renaissance as psychological event. From our vantage point the Renaissance looms as an unmitigated liberation. Bouwsma, on the other hand, implies that for every man who felt liberated, another felt terrified. The great irony is that frequently these were one and the same man, that few intellectuals were so dense as not to feel some fear at the rending of the medieval synthesis. There is no shortage of great Renaissance men in this work, but only a glimmer of their ambiguity.

Historians have viewed Western cultural achievement as a singular progression; William Bouwsma's Waning Of The Renaissance rethinks the view, arguing that the period from 1550-1640 was a phase of complex ambivalence which stimulated cultural change. Chapters consider the yearning for order, social and political discontents of the times, and the process of change.

I read the first several chapters of this book and found the author didn't have a grasp of the Calvin's basic theological teachings which plainly contradicted some of Bouwsma thoughts. I do not question his historical expertise, but i doubt very serriously that he knew John Calvin In his book he called Calvin a pagan and anybody who knows Calvin knows he was a man of God. He also took a passage from the Institutes that Calvin was addressing the Catholic church and applied it to Calvin to support his claim that Calvin was anxious. I tried three times to get something out of this book and failed all three times. I appreciate Calvin too much to keep this book in my library.Also I crossed referenced some of his notes he claimed he quoted Calvin from and found discrepricancies. If you want a secular oppion of who Calvin was not based on his Theological mindset, then read this book. Otherwise disreguard it.

Bouwsma's work on John Calvin is exciting and entertaining. He opens the mind of Calvin and conveys an image of his thought that is incomparable when contrasted with the immense and lengthy volumes you find in other works. I found this book to be clear, concise,and authoritative. Bouwsma places his focus on Calvin's thought rather than his life, and gives a more in-depth understanding of the man whose doctrines and aspirations changed the modern world.

This is one of the finest academic historical biographies to have appeared in the past couple of decades, and will provide nearly anyone with an insightful and in depth introduction to one of the most important figures of the early modern age. It must be stressed, however, that Bouwsma will not please everyone. He is a professional historian, and not a theologian nor an apologist. Many hardcore Calvinists might not enjoy the style with which he deals with his subject matter or his theologically neutral stance in discussing Calvin's work and thought. But most students of theology and all students of history will discover in this a study of Calvin that not only discusses his thought, but relates it to the particular period of history in which it was produced. Too many Calvinist treatments of Calvin discuss him in almost ahistorical fashion, as if his thought were developed in a vacuum. As Bouwsma demonstrates, however, the was very much the product of the Late Renaissance as much as he was the Reformation.

One review below states that Bouwsma claims Calvin was a pagan. This is an important misunderstanding, the correction of which will take us to the heart of Bouwsma's central argument. Absolutely nowhere does Bouwsma assert that Calvin was a pagan, but his central argument in the book is that Calvin was deeply entrenched in renaissance humanism. The humanists went back to the pagan writers of Greece and Rome as literary models as well as alternative sources of inspiration to medieval Catholicism. As Bouwsma quite correctly points out, humanism was in no way antithetical to Protestantism. Calvin was absolutely not a pagan, nor does Bouwsma make that claim, but he did study the pagans such as Cicero and Quintillian, and modeled his writing style on them.

Many biographers delight in the smashing of myths of their subjects. While Bouwsma might not please hardcore Calvinists, in that he isn't deferential or assuming that Calvin articulated truths nearly as authoritative as those of the New Testament, he also does not try in any sense to defame or criticize Calvin. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to debunk many of the negative myths concerning Calvin. What he does try to do is provide the most accurate portrait he can of a major figure of the 16th century, both his positive and negative traits, and situation him in his time and place. In this he succeeds marvelously. This volume could stand for some time as the premiere biography of one of the two most important figures in the history of Protestantism.