Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin
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A01=Stefan Zweig
Author_Stefan Zweig
authoritarianism
biography
Category=DNBH
Category=DNBX
Category=NHD
Category=NHDL
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Geneva
heresy
history-writing
john calvin
rediscovered classics
resistance
sebastian castellio
sixteenth-century
stefan zweig
tyranny
violence
Product details
- ISBN 9781805331902
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 10 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Pushkin Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'Because he had the courage to make his passionate protest against a worldwide terror, Castellio's feud with Calvin must remain everlastingly memorable'
Stefan Zweig saw sixteenth-century Geneva as a place gripped by heresy-hunting fanaticism and raging ideologies of violence. A world in which free-thinking humanists too often foresaw, and failed to protest, the disasters that draconian leaders would bring upon Europe. Theologian and writer Sebastian Castellio, however, did condemn the burning of 'heretics' as murder and advocated for religious tolerance, at great personal cost.
Written in 1936 when Zweig himself had just fled the rise of Nazism, The Right to Heresy is the story of Castellio's feud with Calvinist doctrine, and an urgent polemic on individual sacrifices made, throughout history, in resistance to authoritarianism.
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York - a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
Eden Paul (1865-1944) and Cedar Paul (1880-1972) together translated dozens of books from French, German, Italian and Russian during their thirty years of marriage. Among them were writings on psychoanalysis and socialist thought, as well as many of the works of Stefan Zweig.
