The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and the Age of Consent -- (Chap. V, Pt. 8)

What really made Reformation Geneva different, though, was that it had begun to punish men and women equally for sexual transgressions.

As the charge of incest against Cossonex shows, Protestant Geneva also cracked down on sex crimes against children.

Calvin opposed arranged marriages and believed that the marrying age for individuals should be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on their maturity.

When this proved impractical, the Genevan authorities set the age of consent at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls.

Adults who crossed this boundary were sentenced to death.

Although the defendants would often try to bribe and threaten their victims, one researcher into Deviance in Geneva (1535-1650) has noted that kids living under Calvin's laws apparently didn't feel intimidated in telling their parents that they'd been abused—or in testifying face-to-face against their abusers.

At their core, all of Calvin's laws stemmed from his harsh (and thoroughly depressing) conviction that if God was all powerful, He must have decided everyone's fate before the world was created: in other words, a Chosen Few were predestined to be saved, while most were born to die in the eternal fires of hell.

The catch was that you could never know in this life whether you were one of the Elect, so the best you could do was examine your soul constantly, confess your sins regularly—not to intermediaries but directly to God and your peers—and hope that you found yourself in Jehovah's Good Book on Judgement Day.

Until then, you could look forward to a lifetime of Protestant guilt (arguably worse than Catholic guilt because there's no penance).

Alternatively, if you felt instinctively that you weren't one of the Elect, you were effectively damned if you did and damned if you didn't—so you might as well do everything (and everyone) you could in this life.

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