Remembering Jerusalem

This article analyzes John Calvin’s 1562–1563 lectures on Lamentations as a case study for exploring the role of biblical exegesis in creating and shaping what scholars such as Judith Pollmann have demonstrated to be early modern memory practices. Lamentations is not one of the better-known books of the Christian canon, and although it was central to Catholic Holy Week liturgies, it appears to have played little to no role in Reformation-era doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies. In content, Calvin’s eighteen lectures on these five poems of lament are typical of Calvin’s historicizing approach to the Bible. Calvin shows deep appreciation for the events underlying the biblical text (in this case, he argues, the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians as a recent calamity) and seeks to relate the biblical past to the conditions of the present. But they can also be considered as a form of memory culture: an effort to engage with a past disaster that not only provides a negative object lesson for the present but, in addition, invites participation in a process of collective memory-making among Calvin’s sixteenth-century Genevan auditors and wider readership.