"John Calvin developed arresting new teachings on rights and liberties, church and state, and religion and politics that shaped the law of Protestant lands. Calvin's original teachings, which spread rapidly throughout the West, were periodically challenged by major crises - the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, American colonization, and the American Revolution. In each such crisis moment, a major Calvinist figure emerged - Theodore Beza, Johannes Althusius, John Milton, John Winthrop, John Adams, and others - who modernized Calvin's teachings and translated them into dramatic new legal and political reforms. This rendered early modern Calvinism one of the driving engines of Western constitutionalism. A number of basic Western legal ideas of religious and political rights, social and confessional pluralism, federalism and social contract, and more owe a great deal to this religious movement."--BOOK JACKET.