Ordering daily life: the Zurich marriage court and the Genevan Consistory

Zurich: the Ehegericht and the moral mandates

Zurich’s instrument of moral discipline was a court of the state. In 1525 the council created the Ehegericht, composed of six judges: two of the city’s people’s priests and two members each of the Great and Small Councils. The court heard marital disputes and cases of adultery and, over time, a widening range of moral offences. In the villages, local supervisors known as Ehegaumer reported misconduct.¹ From 1530 onwards the synod assembled the clergy and representatives of the parishes in Zurich every spring and autumn under the presidency of the Antistes, the head of the Zurich church, with members of the council in attendance.²

The substantive rules were laid down in the Sittenmandate, the moral mandates issued by the council. The great mandate of 1530, Christenlich ansehung des gemeinen Kilchganngs, which enforced church attendance and prohibited dancing, gambling and visits to taverns on Sundays, was repeated and revised many times over the following century and a half. The modern critical edition of the Zurich church ordinances, published by Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli in 2011, describes the mandate as a red thread running through the whole period from 1520 to 1675 and includes the marriage-court ordinance of 1525 and the synodal ordinance of 1532 among its fundamental texts.³ The Sittenmandate also addressed matters of direct economic relevance: luxury in dress and at weddings, gambling, drinking and, in later versions, the conduct of trade. Their general tone was paternal: the council acted as the father of the household of the republic, with its mandates as the house rules.

Geneva: the Consistory

The Genevan Consistory was constituted differently. Under the ordinances of 1541 it consisted of the pastors of the city and twelve lay elders, chosen by the magistrate: two from the Small Council, four from the Council of Sixty and six from the Council of Two Hundred. It met every week, heard matrimonial cases and a vast range of matters of morals and belief, and could impose ecclesiastical sanctions up to exclusion from communion. For secular penalties such as whipping or banishment it referred cases to the Small Council.⁴ The records of the Consistory, which survive almost complete, are being published in the series Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin, begun under the direction of Robert M. Kingdon with Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt in 1996 and continued by Jeffrey and Isabella Watt, who published the volumes for 1559–1560 in 2021.⁵

The decisive question was excommunication. Calvin held that the power to exclude an unrepentant sinner from the Lord’s Supper belonged to the church, exercised through the Consistory, whereas the councils claimed it for themselves, as the Zurich magistrate did. The conflict dominated Genevan politics for more than a decade. Jordan Ballor and Bradford Littlejohn, in their survey of Reformed church discipline, describe the Zurich model as one in which the civil magistrate had primary concern for the externals of religion and social life. The Genevan model they call “disciplinarist”, dating Calvin’s victory on excommunication in Geneva to 1555.⁶ The victory came with the defeat of Ami Perrin and his party, whom Calvin’s supporters called the Libertines. After an armed rising of Perrin’s followers was suppressed in May 1555, Perrin was condemned to death and escaped to Bern.⁷ One of the grievances of the Perrinists had been the admission of French refugees to burgess rights, which altered the electorate in Calvin’s favour. The conflict over discipline was therefore also a conflict over immigration, a point to which section VI returns.⁸

Discipline and economic behaviour

Both systems of discipline reached into economic life, where they were concerned with the same vices: idleness, gambling, drunkenness, luxury, fraud and oppressive lending. The range of offences dealt with by the Genevan Consistory included gambling, usury, drunkenness, marital strife and inheritance disputes.⁹ The Zurich Ehegericht and the Sittenmandate pursued the same aims through the ordinary machinery of the state. The difference lay in the institution. Geneva relied on a semi-autonomous church body, dominated numerically by lay elders drawn from the councils and inspired by pastors who were for the most part French immigrants. In Zurich the task fell to a court of the republic, staffed by councillors and clergy who were almost all natives of the city and its territory.

A small but telling example of the Genevan approach is the discipline of time. The University of Geneva, in a series on Geneva’s contributions to modern life, noted that the ordinances of 1541 imposed a fine of three sous on those who missed a sermon, arrived late or left before the end. It also recorded that clocks were installed at strategic points in the city by 1561 and that the length of sermons was measured by hourglasses. The same article argues that the rhythm of prayer days was adjusted so as not to compete with markets.¹⁰ Such punctuality expresses a way of ordering public life by rule, measurement and supervision that the later watchmaking and banking city would recognise as its own. Zurich shared the concern with order but expressed it in the paternal mandate of a council, while Geneva expressed it in the weekly deliberation of a consistory. The interpretation offered here is that the Genevan model placed greater weight on the individual’s internalised discipline, while the Zurich model relied more heavily on the external authority of the magistrate. Both produced disciplined commercial societies.

Notes

1. Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (as above), section on the Reformation, which gives the composition of the court and describes the Ehegaumer. The State Archives hold the records of the court from 1525 onwards under the signatures A 6 – A 9 (“Ehegericht, 1515–1798”), see https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/detail.aspx?ID=3728765. ↩
2. Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (as above), for the synod meeting from 1530 in spring and autumn. ↩
3. Wolfgang Dobras, review of Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli (eds), Zürcher Kirchenordnungen 1520–1675, 2 vols (Zurich: TVZ, 2011), sehepunkte 12 (2012), no. 7/8, https://www.sehepunkte.de/2012/07/druckfassung/20353.html; the content of the Sunday prohibitions is summarised in Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte (as above). ↩
4. Wikipédia (French), “Consistoire de Genève”, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistoire_de_Gen%C3%A8ve, which gives the composition 2–4–6 and the weekly sittings, citing Jeffrey R. Watt, The Consistory and Social Discipline in Calvin’s Geneva (University of Rochester Press). The Musée protestant (as above) confirms that lay members were in the majority. ↩
5. Persée, review of Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin, t. 1 (1542–1544), ed. Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt under the direction of Robert M. Kingdon (Geneva: Droz, 1996), https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhpr_0035-2403_1997_num_77_3_5466_t1_0361_0000_3 (bibliographical entry); Carolyn Corretti, review of vols 15 and 16 (1559–1560), ed. Jeffrey Watt and Isabella Watt (Geneva: Droz, 2021), The Sixteenth Century Journal 54 (2023), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/729753. ↩
6. Jordan Ballor and W. Bradford Littlejohn, “European Calvinism: Church Discipline”, European History Online (EGO), republished at https://brewminate.com/european-calvinism-church-discipline/. ↩
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ami Perrin”, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ami-Perrin. ↩
8. Wikipedia (English), “John Calvin”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin: before the elections of February 1555 “many of the French refugees had been granted citizenship, and with their support, Calvin’s partisans elected the majority of the syndics and the councillors”; on 16 May 1555 the Libertines attempted to burn down a house “supposedly full of Frenchmen”. See also Wikipedia (English), “Ami Perrin”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ami_Perrin, on the resentment the Libertines stirred up against the growing number of refugees from France. ↩
9. Ballor and Littlejohn, “European Calvinism: Church Discipline” (as above), https://brewminate.com/european-calvinism-church-discipline/: “The range of offences dealt with by the Consistory is staggering, including such matters as gambling, usury, marital strife, drunkenness, and inheritance disputes.” On the French origin of the Genevan ministers, Wikipedia (English), “John Calvin” (as above), which refers to the “opposition to Calvin and other French refugee ministers”. ↩
10. Vincent Monnet, “1541, Calvin …”, Idées de génie series, Tribune de Genève, 27 February 2009, reproduced by the Université de Genève, https://www.unige.ch/presse/static/ideesgenie/PDF4CALVIN.pdf. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.