‘Il faut éviter le scandale’: Debating Community Standards in Reformation Geneva

ABSTRACT Historical scholarship on consistories has overlooked the context of the theological and polemical debates regarding scandal in the sixteenth century, leaving us without a full understanding of the negotiations and debates in which Genevan inhabitants and consistory members engaged regarding the articulation of moral values and the supervision of their community. To address this lacuna, this article considers the failure of scholars to apply a useful, multivalent definition of scandal to practical questions of Reformed discipline. It then sets a deeper local context for Genevan connotations of scandal by examining examples from the Genevan city council, ducal, and other records before 1536 (the establishment of the Reformation there). Finally, it analyzes appearances of the word scandale in the consistory records of the 1540s and 1550s that reveal the variety of meanings of scandal and the ways in which laypeople used the word to negotiate the proper shape and limits of the Christian community of Geneva.