Calvin And Social Welfare: Deacons and the Bourse Francaise

The hospitality offered by John Calvin and his supporters in Geneva to Protestant refugees from Catholic areas was institutionalized in the 1540s into a welfare fund known as the Bourse francaise. This history of the institution and its influence is set within the larger social and cultural context of sixteenth-century Reformation Europe and of welfare and the diaconate in the early and medieval church.