Every founder on this site can be read for free, in English, in editions old enough to be in the public domain. These are the editions this site quotes.
Start here
If you read one thing, read the opening chapter of Calvin’s Institutes: it’s 3 short sections on knowing God and knowing ourselves. Book 1, chapter 1, at CCEL.
By founder
Huldrych Zwingli
- Selected Works of Huldreich Zwingli, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson (1901). Letters, the 1523 Zurich disputation, and the 67 Articles in English. Internet Archive
Martin Bucer
- Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, second portion, edited by Hastings Robinson (Parker Society, 1847). Includes Bucer’s letters from Cambridge. Internet Archive
Heinrich Bullinger
- The Decades of Henry Bullinger, translated by “H. I.” and edited by Thomas Harding (Parker Society, 1849-1852). Fifty sermons on faith, godliness, and the church. The fifth decade at the Internet Archive
- The Second Helvetic Confession in English, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3. CCEL
John Calvin
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Henry Beveridge (1845). CCEL
- Tracts Relating to the Reformation, vol. 1 (Calvin Translation Society, 1844). Opens with Beza’s Life of John Calvin. Internet Archive
- Calvin’s commentaries on most of the Bible. CCEL
John Knox
- The History of the Reformation of Religion in Scotland, revised and edited by Cuthbert Lennox (1905), with modernized spelling. Project Gutenberg
Theodore Beza
- Life of John Calvin, translated by Henry Beveridge, in Calvin’s Tracts, vol. 1 (1844). Internet Archive
- Icones (Geneva, 1580), in Latin. e-rara
The confessions
Philip Schaff’s The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, collects the founding Reformed confessions. Schaff prints them in their original languages; the Second Helvetic Confession also has an English version in the appendix. All free at CCEL:
- The Sixty-seven Articles of Ulrich Zwingli (1523)
- The First Helvetic Confession (1536)
- The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), and in English
- The Heidelberg Catechism (1563)
- The French Confession of Faith (1559)
- The Belgic Confession (1561)
- The Scots Confession (1560)
- The Canons of the Synod of Dort (1619)
The portraits
- Beza’s Icones (1580), the Latin original with its woodcut portraits. e-rara
- Beza’s Icones: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers (1906), a facsimile of the portraits with English notes by C. G. McCrie. Internet Archive
- Theodore Beza, engraved by Hendrick Hondius in 1599. Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons
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A note on old translations
Most free English translations of the founders were made in the 1800s and early 1900s by groups like the Parker Society and the Calvin Translation Society. Their English is older than ours, and a few scanned copies have print errors, but they’re in the public domain, so anyone can read and quote them. When this site quotes one, it copies the printed wording exactly and names the edition and page.
Reference works this site uses
For dates and facts, this site relies on Encyclopaedia Britannica and, for the Swiss reformers, the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland). Wikipedia helps find sources, but it’s never cited as one.