Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone
Michael Servetus was a Spanish polymath: a theologian and physician. He was burned for heresy in 1553. His anti-trinitarian writings had set both the Catholic Church and John Calvin against him, and it was Calvin who was responsible for his execution. His writings were burned; only three copies of his book “Christianismi Restitutio” (Christianity Restored) survive and the Goldstones tell their story as well as their author’s.
The story of his life as told in this book is a kind of core sample of the renaissance. The Goldstones are not historians and some of their judgments are suspect (for example, they repeat the fallacy that the Catholic Church outlawed vernacular Bibles and prohibited laymen from reading the Bible), but the book is an interesting random walk through Servetus’ times.