Conseil à la France Désolée

Sébastian Castellion (1515–63), or Chateillon, Professor of Greek at the University of Basel, was best known, prior to the twentieth century, for his scholarly manuals: The Dialogi Sacri (1543/45) and his Bible en français (1555). Subsequently, due to his unflinching confrontation with Calvin and Calvinist orthodoxy after the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553, Castellion has emerged as a central figure in the bid for religious toleration. His De Haereticis, an sint persequendi (1554) is a key text in this debate and his manuscript De arti dubitandi (written in 1563) an important contribution to French scepticism. However, the survival of Castellion’s texts has historically often been more a matter of luck than planning: his Contra libellum Calvini, for example, would only be published after his death, when it was re-purposed by the Dutch Remonstrants (1612). The manuscript of Castellion’s response to Calvin’s successor Théodore de Bèze’s attack on his work, the De haereticis a civili magistratu non puniendis (1554–5), was only discovered by Bruno Becker in 1938.

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