Career
Around 1533, when Calvin had returned to Paris, tensions were rising between the humanistic and religious reformers of the Collège Royal and the conservative senior faculty members. The Collège Royal was later to become the Collège de France and eventually the University of Paris or Sorbonne. Nicolas Cop, one of the reformers, had been elected rector of the university although the institution generally condemned Martin Luther.
On All Saints Day, November 1, 1533, Nicolas Cop as rector delivered his inaugural address, in which he revealed himself as being in sympathy with Luther.
Calvin is thought to have been complicit because he had fled from Paris just before Cop"s delivery of the inaugural address. Cop traveled until reaching Basel in February 1534 and then went to Freiburg with Erasmus and Ludwig Baer.
He made contact with the reformers in Strassburg and Ludovicus Carinus or Ludwig Carinus, whom he had known well in Paris. Nicolas Cop"s inaugural address as rector of the University of Paris provoked a strong reaction from the faculty, many of whom denounced it as heretical.
Within just two days, on 3 November 1533, two Franciscans filed a complaint in the Parlement de Paris against Cop for heresy.
Cop appeared before the parlement and, upon failing to obtain the support of the king or the university, was forced to flee. He fled in secret, arriving in time at Basel. King Francis I during the furor created by Cop"s brief tenure as rector referred to "the cursed Lutherans." Calvin, implicated in Cop"s offense, was himself forced into hiding for the next year.
Nicolas Cop was befriended by the King"s sister Marguerite de Navarre.
He used his post to rehabilitate her work "Le miroir de l"âme pécheresse" (The mirror of the sinful soul)). In January 1535, Calvin joined Cop in Basel, a city that had come under the influence of the reformer Johannes Oecolampadius.
Cop traveled again to Paris where he earned his medical licence in May 1536. In the following year he was called to Scotland, where illness had struck the newly married Madeleine of France.
Nicolas Cop also taught medicine at the university of Paris, but died suddenly in the winter of 1539/1540.
