Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Jean Crespin edition, 1560 (and remakes)

You’re not supposed to use swash capitals in a row, or throw them in whenever you feel like it. You’re not supposed to use terminal forms at the end of every word, or use an ‘ß’ to print French. You’re not supposed to change font size before you’ve even finished the first word of your title. And if you must do these things, the title page of an edition of Calvin is certainly not the obvious choice as a site to deploy such excesses.

Good job nobody told printer Jean Crespin, who does all of those things together on one page on his edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion and … well, I’m not sure I’m going to say he gets away with it, but presumably he didn’t get hauled off to prison, so we’re counting that as a success, right? Crespin clearly was keen to show off the increasingly intricate italics of his time in his typography to celebrate his friend’s magnum opus.

So what font is this? It looks a lot like Robert Granjon’s Paragon Italic (c. 20 pt), shown in Professor Hendrik Vervliet’s monumental Palaeotypography of the French Renaissance — it is the only font in the book that seems to include all the ligatures, terminal forms and swash capitals Crespin uses. (With two exceptions: it doesn’t include the ligature for ‘es’ and the second swash cap ‘M’ with a centre loop. Vervliet mentions but does not describe an alternate swash ‘M’ that was in circulation from the 1560s. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see a reprint of the specimen in which he mentions this appears.) Supporting this, he lists that the font reached Geneva and the printing of Jean Crespin in 1558, two years before this edition. The 'a’ in the largest line of roman type also looks a lot like it might be font C in this picture, a 48pt, which Vervliet also mentions Crespin using. (One development in this period of printing Vervliet mentions is use of increasingly larged-size mixed case on title pages rather than exclusive use of titling capitals, although in this case the largest sizes are caps-only. And in practice, many of the example uses Vervliet shows do use letterspaced swash capitals, although this is one of the most ostentatious I’ve seen, and particularly in a font that — unlike many other italics of the period — included non-swash capitals as an option.)

Can modern typographers replicate this? Very closely, actually. Shown above is a remake in Hoefler Text (and Cormorant for the largest type), which has almost everything you need, including both swash Ms, terminal forms, the ampersands and long s — pretty much the only things missing are the italic ‘at’ and ‘th’ ligatures. Two and a half decades on, it’s startling how comprehensive the feature set of Hoefler Text is in replicating the Renaissance style — in an interview Hoefler has mentioned as an early influence ATF’s legendary 1923 specimen which shows ATF Garamond’s many italic alternates — although the general build of Hoefler’s italic is darker and higher-contrast than this. Adobe’s Garamond Premier (below) is even closer in build but doesn’t include the ligatures for ‘es’ and (terminal) ‘nt’, nor the centre-loop swash ‘M’. More stylised digital fonts in this vein with a lot of loopy alternates are Garalda and (more condensed) Thesaurus, although I haven’t used either.

Crespin seems to have liked letterspaced swash capitals when he could get them — I add below an additional image of a different book printed by him the year before using what looks like the same italic. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any articles discussing his aesthetic choices and how they fitted (or didn’t fit) usual tastes in Calvinist printing of the period. I’ll add anything I find at a future date in the comments section.

A slightly earlier edition of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (in Latin) was that printed by Robert Estienne, a leading printer of the period and another defector from Paris to Calvin’s Geneva, who had died the year before Crespin’s edition was published. Its use of roman only on the title page, like most early Calvin editions, seems more in line with what modern audiences might expect the printing of a Christian text to look like.