Calvinism's First Battleground Conflict and Reform in the Pays de Vaud, 1528-1559

"Most scholarly work on the early Reformation in French-speaking areas has focused on Calvin and Geneva. Michael Bruening has had the genial idea of placing his focus instead on the Pays de Vaud, the largest single political entity in French Switzerland. [...] Bruening's analysis is backed throughout by archival research in several parts of Switzerland. [...] It makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the history of the early Reformation in French-speaking parts of Europe."

Robert M. Kingdon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, in

Renaissance Quarterly



"[...] Bruening deploys disparate bits of information to construct a plausible and basically persuasive argument about the political and theological significance of the early Reformation in this area. Better still, he sets his topic convincingly into wider contexts by integrating it with works by such major experts as his mentor (Heiko Oberman†, EA) and Robert Kingdon. [...] I have seldom seen such an untidy package wrapped up so neatly."

William Monter, Northwestern University, in
The English Historical Review
CXXIII 501 (April 2008)