Calvin, the last and the most profound of the great Reformers, was born July 10, 1509, at Noyon in Picardy, northern France. His father served there as an ecclesiastical attorney and manager. His mother, a pious woman, died when he was still a child.

When only twelve, his father obtained for the young Jean Cauvin an endowment from the Roman Catholic church for study. He entered the Col-lege de la Marche in Paris. One of his teachers, the famous Latinist Mathurin Cor-dier, would be the one to whom Calvin would dedicate his com-mentary on 1 Thessalonians (1550). The following year he went to the College de Montaigu, where he was taught Romanist theology from the anti--Lutheran Beda.

But a change in his father's wishes led him to switch to the study of law in 1528 at the Universities of Orleans and Bourges. It was here that he met the German scholar Melchior Wol-mar, whose tutelege in Greek would be foundational to Calvin's study of the New Testament. In 1531, after his father died, Calvin returned to Paris where he pur-sued humanist studies and published in 1532 his first work on Seneca's De Clementia.