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The image of Great Britain as presented in the correspondence of the Genevan theologian Jean-Alphonse Turrettini

The correspondence of the pastor and theologian Jean-Alphonse Turrettini amounts to some 5000 letters and is one of the most important collections – perhaps the most important collection – for the study of reformed Protestantism during the period of transition from the later seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. These were the years in which reformed Protestantism hastened the decline of orthodoxy and promoted the need to rethink a Calvinist heritage which had found itself faced with changing intellectual and anthropological sensibilities. The letters span from 1681 to 1737, beginning when Turrettini was only 10 years old and ending in the year of his death. During this time, he became one of the best-known and most admired theologians of his era. The letters do not merely delineate the phases of a brilliant career in the service of religion; they also mirror the personal life of a man, his close relationships, his illnesses, his financial interests, as well as his disappointments and enmities. The correspondence also sheds light upon the era in which he lived (the Frühaufklärung), as well as a defined geographical and spiritual space – Protestant Europe. These thousands of letters, for the most part handwritten, expose questions, demands, needs and struggles that originate with various personalities and social groups whose destinies weave in and out of each other. At the centre of this network, made, deconstructed and remade over the years through vicissitudes both personal and collective, was Turrettini himself. Born into a family originally from Lucca, which had emigrated from Italy (driven by religious persecution) and settled in Geneva in the final decades of the sixteenth century, Jean-Alphonse was son of the celebrated François Turrettini, Professor of Theology and intransigent guardian of reformed orthodoxy during a period in which Geneva was riven by repeated theological conflict. In his education and career Jean-Alphonse followed in the footsteps of his family. He studied philosophy and theology at the Genevan Academy from 1686 to 1691 and spent three years making a Grand Tour of France, Holland and Britain. He then underwent pastoral consecration in 1694, became a minister in the Italian Church in Geneva and started an academic career beginning with the foundation of a new chair for the History of the Church in 1697 to which he added the chair of Theology in 1705. In sum, a faultless record, crowned by international recognition testifying to the esteem in which he was held. But his pastoral activity also involved the provision of concrete aid to those in need: Huguenots exiled following the revocation of the edict of Nantes, persecuted Piedmont Waldensians subjected to material conditions of great poverty, or the struggling reformed churches of Central Europe. The correspondence provides insights that neither studies nor institutional texts achieve. The reader is informed about the process by which