Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1


was victorious in all four of the city cantons, whereas the forest cantons remained the strongholds of Roman Catholicism? The cities, with their centres of higher learning and their printing industries, were the perfect places for Reformation thought to be disseminated.


Likewise in Germany, the ma- jority of the ‘free imperial cities’ (self- governing cities, little independ- ent states in effect, with no higher allegiance save to the Holy Roman Emperor) turned Protestant. Nor was this some superficial political or cultural conversion, as the Emperor Charles V discovered to his cost, when he tried to reimpose Roman Catholicism on the cities by armed force in the late 1540s. The people of the German cities remained defiantly Protestant. The sword could conquer their territories but not their souls. Charles eventually had to admit de- feat and withdraw. He learned what so many other military powers have learned, that vanquishing a people’s land does not mean vanquishing a people’s mind and spirit.


Dissenting movements


Now let us look at some other fac- tors that helped pave the way for the Reformation. I mentioned earlier the evangelical dissenting movements of the later Middle Ages, the Waldensi- ans (located chiefly in northern Italy), the Lollards (England and Scotland), and the Hussites (Bohemia, the Slavic region of the Holy Roman Empire). These dissenting movements were very much alive and flourishing on the eve of the Reformation, al- though mostly underground. Despite


A woodcut from 1568 showing a ‘puller’ removing a printed sheet as the ‘beater’ on the right inks the text blocks. Compositors are setting type in the background. Up to 3,600 printed pages could be produced in a day.


contributing little to Luther and Zwingli’s reform, they did provide a rich and ready-made soil for Luther- an and Zwinglian ideals. The Waldensians gladly embraced the new reform movement of the 16th


century, and became part of the


wider Protestant world that was tak- ing shape. One interesting point of contact between Waldensianism and the Reformation was the Walden- sian merchant Étienne de la Forge, stationed in Paris. He used his home to give shelter and hospitality to Protestant refugees from the Nether- lands. More strikingly, it was in the Waldensian merchant’s Paris home


Seeds of the Reformation page 29


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