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A famous seventeenth-century Dutch engraving, known as The Candlestick, pictures the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and certain others, gathered around a table on which shines a candle. Among the divines represented is the German Martin Luther, the French John Calvin, the Swiss Uldrich Zwingli, the Czech John Hus, the Scotsman John Knox, the Slav Matthias Flaius Illyricus, and the Englishman William Perkins. Because these various leaders often represented conflicting theological viewpoints, it takes some imagination to envision them meeting together so peacefully.

However, though the picture is incomplete, it does furnish a fair graphic representation of the character of the European Protestant Reformation. Born in Germany, it was not confined to the world of the small German states. Already in the 1530s Lutheranism penetrated and sank roots in the Scandinavian countries.

In the Swiss cantons of Zurich, Bern, and Basel of the Helvetic Confederation, and in the free republic of Geneva, a vigorous reform of the Church took place. This movement, which was parallel to, but not identical with Lutheranism, we call reformed Protestantism. From this base reform spread out all over Europe—from France to the Netherlands, to East Central Europe—and later to the New World.

The Reformation in England was certainly more than an act of Parliament. To the building up of the Anglican Church (ecclesia anglicana) contributed numerous and able theologians, such as Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer. In Scotland, between 1557 and 1560, the preaching of John Knox had great and decisive influence upon the small landed aristocracy (the Lairds), who, against the will of the staunchly Catholic Queen Mary (“Bloody Mary”), imposed Calvinism as the state religion of Scotland.

Also in the engraving are two Italian theologians: the Florentine Peter Martyr Vermigli and the Bergamo-born Jerome Zanchi. Their presence demonstrates that Italy was not cut off from the circulation of ideas and proposals of Church renewal in the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe. Indeed, numerous recent studies have shown convincingly that the Protestant Reformation, in all its forms (from Lutheranism to Calvinism to Anabaptism), penetrated and sank roots in Italy. It made converts at every level of society and witnessed the formation of underground circles, not only in the most northerly regions adjacent to Protestant countries, but also in the remote southern areas of Calabria and Sicily.

The conditions for free and open debate did not exist, however, in the Italian Christianity of the sixteenth century. The political powers would not allow it, for they used religious uniformity as a means of ensuring their control (a means of rule—instrumentum regni); nor could the Church of Rome tolerate disagreement without its authority being put radically in question.

A quarter of a century or so after the protest of Martin Luther—once it had become clear that it was impossible to stem the penetration of the new “protestant” faith—the Roman hierarchy moulded a plan to block the spread of the heresy and reconquer the lost ground. Rome reconstituted its establishment for rooting out and punishing heresy, the Inquisition (1542), and at the council of Trent (1545) fixed its doctrines in opposition to the Protestant theology, and promoted a number of reforms of religious life of its own, which would not undermine its institutional power. This is usually known as the Catholic, or Counter-Reformation

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