The Institutes of the Christian Religion is Calvin's single most important work. Yet anyone who has bought an English translation of the final Latin edition of 1559 knows the difficulty: the sheer size of the thing, and the proliferation of technical detail and polemical argument, do not make for easy reading. Many readers have wished for an edition that left those aside while keeping the heart and soul of Calvin's teaching.

Such an edition exists, and it is not the work of an editor or an abridger but of Calvin himself. This translation is newly made from the French of 1541, and it has been designed and annotated with a wide readership in mind. For a reader who has been meaning to read Calvin and has been defeated by the 1559 edition, this is where to begin.