Between 1550 and his death in 1564, John Calvin’s output of published words was never less than a 100,000 per year.
And supreme among all of these published words were those of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which led the German Lutheran Philip Melanchthon to dub Calvin ‘the theologian’.
Editions of Calvin’s Institutes
The first edition of the Institutes had been published in Basle in 1536. Three years later Calvin brought out a second edition, printed in Strasbourg, that was three times as large as the first. Further editions appeared in 1543 and 1550 and then, finally, the even larger fifth edition was issued in 1559 in Geneva.
