CRESPIN, Jean

(c. 1520-1572)

Jean Crespin was a lawyer and a publisher who achieved fame as a Protestant martyrologist. He was born into a noble family in Arras. He received a humanist education and studied law at Louvain and Paris. He returned to Arras and mar­ried in 1544, but was banished from that town in the following year under suspicion of heresy. He fled to Strasbourg and subsequently made the acquain­tance of Theodore Beza.*

Crespin moved to Geneva in 1548 and set up a publishing house there. Both John Calvin* and Beza published some of their works through Crespin. Crespin quickly became one of the major publishers in Geneva. He had fonts to accom­modate a variety of languages and published grammars in Greek, Hebrew, Ital­ian, and Latin and works in French and German. He also published the Geneva Bible for the Marian exiles from England. While Crespin did print the classics, the majority of his output consisted of Bibles, biblical commentaries, and litur­gical works. He published the only two editions of the church fathers in Geneva before 1570. Although Crespin printed Lutheran works, his own theological adherence was primarily Calvinist. He published attacks on the Lutherans in the Lutheran-Reformed debates over the Last Supper.

Crespin also wrote the famous History of the Martyrs, a collection of stories in French about Protestant martyrs. It was first published in 1554 and saw six­teen editions in forty years. It soon became a classic of the Reformed tradition and was read and imitated in all the major Protestant communities of Europe. Crespin died of the plague in 1572.

Crespin's martyrology created a genre of literary works about Protestant mar­tyrs. It especially helped provide the French Protestants with a common sense of identity. As late as the eighteenth century, it continued to be read aloud to recount the lives of those who suffered persecution and death at the hands of the Catholics.

Bibliography

A. G. Dickens and J. M. Tonkin, The Reformation in Historical Thought, 1985.

J.-F. Gilmont, Jean Crespin, un éditeur reforme du XVI siècle, 1981.

Andrew G. Traver