‘The Most Perfect School of Christ’: Intellectual Relations between Geneva and Scotland in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Inaugurated in 1917 for the four-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, the ‘Reformation Wall’ is a monument to the international Calvinist Reformation. It features four main statues for each of the great Calvinist reformers: Guillaume Farel, Jean Calvin, Théodore de Bèze and John Knox. Knox thought that Geneva was ‘the most perfect school of Christ’. The agreeable connections between Geneva and Scotland are well known but they have rarely been studied in a comparative and comprehensive way. The aim of the conference was to look at the intellectual relations between Geneva and Scotland before and after the Reformation, from the combined perspectives of intellectual history, history of theology and history of philosophy.