Christendom Destroyed by Mark Greengrass

Author:Mark Greengrass
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-11-06T08:00:00+00:00

BEFORE THE PLACARDS . . . AND AFTER

There are parallels between the reception of the Protestant Reformation in Italy and France. If Italy’s was the Reformation that never was, France’s was the Reformation that might have been. As in Italy, Luther’s ideas circulated quickly in France after 1519, thanks to books, students and preachers. In August 1524, Guillaume Farel published the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in French, a disguised translation of Luther’s Little Book of Prayers (1522). Published under the nose of the Sorbonne it was the most daring Protestant book to appear in France before 1534. Fewer than eighty Lutheran editions across the whole of France in the 1520s was a drop in the ocean when set alongside the 2,500 other works known to have been published in Paris alone during that decade. In a letter of 1524, Guillaume Farel wrote: ‘Good God how I rejoice when I see how the knowledge of the pure grace of God has spread abroad the greater part of Europe! I hope that Christ will eventually visit France with his benediction . . .’ That hope was expressed, however, while hostile reactions to Luther gathered, orchestrated by Noël Béda, a professor of theology, director of one of the colleges in Paris and rector of the Sorbonne. In what became a leitmotif of the French Reformation, the anxieties about religious change were accompanied by fears of a cataclysmic event – in this case, the fears of a second Flood in 1524. One magistrate in Toulouse was so convinced that he built himself an ark against the eventuality.

In the diocese of Meaux reforming aspirations confronted the forces of reaction. Its bishop was Guillaume Briçonnet, whose ideas for his diocese mirrored those of Matteo Giberti at Verona. Visitations and synods were followed by something more unusual. Determined to reorganize its rural preaching, he established mission stations, manned by a group (the Meaux Circle) holding known reforming convictions. Foremost among them was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, a biblical scholar and friend of Erasmus. The others were mostly his friends and disciples. Briçonnet was confessor to the king’s sister Marguerite of Navarre and he counted on her protection. It was not enough. After Francis I’s capture at Pavia, the Queen Mother Louise de Savoie became regent in the king’s absence (1525–6). Meaux, a cloth town suffering hard times, began to take the Reformation into its own hands. Catholic posters were torn down and anticlerical chants echoed in the marketplace. Lefèvre fled to Strasbourg, while Briçonnet’s diocese was investigated for heresy by a commission of judges from Paris. In the aftermath of the ‘Affair’ of Meaux, the network of Marguerite of Navarre was all that protected Briçonnet and like-minded humanist reformers.

Although there were patronesses of reform in Italy their influence was nowhere that of Marguerite’s. She was a royal princess, had a huge patrimony, and used this to create niches of safety for those who were reformers who refused to be stereotyped as ‘Lutheran’ or ‘Protestant’. Her first book was

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