Contributing similarly to Knox's reputation are his moral austerity and his powers of "prophecy." His sermons against "vanities" such as dancing and extravagant dress are always convenient targets for satirists of religious excess in any century, and his influence in creating a community in Edinburgh during the 1560s where moral transgressions were punishable by law under an austere code gives to him, no less than to John Calvin in Geneva, a certain notoriety in moral engineering. That he could also foresee or predict how his enemies would die--as many apocryphal anecdotes claim--adds a bizarre twist to his contemporary status as a messenger of God.
In physical person he was short, broad-shouldered, and vigorous; his hair was black, and he appears in his portraits with a long beard. Three portraits share a claim to his likeness, but the one appearing in Theodore Beza's Icones (1580)--sketches of the lives of the most influential Reformers--offers the greatest likelihood of verisimilitude; Beza's text offers as well some pertinent data for reconstructing the Scottish Reformer's life. To this as a source may be added Knox's letters (more than a hundred survive; twenty-nine are to Mrs.
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