The High Medieval Era · c. 1173 onward · Lyon, Alpine valleys
The Waldensians
Not yet available
There's no built conversation for this tradition here yet.
About This Movement
Around 1173 a rich merchant of Lyon named Valdes gave away his property, had parts of Scripture translated into the language people actually spoke, and began preaching in the streets. His confession of faith was entirely orthodox. What he would not do was stop preaching without a licence, and in 1184 the bull Ad abolendam condemned him and his followers for exactly that. Driven out of the cities, the movement survived in the Alpine valleys between France and Italy for three and a half centuries of intermittent persecution, with its own travelling ministers and its own books. In 1532 its representatives met the Reformers at Chanforan and threw in with the Reformed tradition. Which is why a single line of protest can be followed from twelfth-century Lyon into the Reformation without a break.
In Its Own Record
Formed or Influenced
- The Waldensian-Reformed Union — The Waldensians adhered to the Reformation in 1532; how much earlier “proto-Protestant” continuity is real versus retrospective is a live scholarly argument.
Sources
- Valdes's Profession of Faith (1180) and the early Waldensian dossier, trans. in Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (Columbia, 1969; repr. 1991) (primary) — The founder's own orthodox confession - evidence the charge was discipline, unauthorized preaching, not doctrine.
- Durand of Osca, Liber Antiheresis (c. 1190s; ed. Selge, 1967) (primary) — The earliest inside theological text, from the first generation; its author later reconciled with Rome, so how representative it is remains debated. Available only in Latin; no English translation exists.
- Bernard Gui, Inquisitor's Guide, Waldensian section (trans. Janet Shirley, 2006), plus 13th-c. inquisition registers (primary) — Written by the persecutors: how they described Waldensian practice. The depositions preserve ordinary believers' voices that no inside text records.
- Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Blackwell, 2000) (secondary) — Source-critical standard; warns against reading later Waldensian identity back into the 1170s.
- Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170-c.1570 (CUP, 1999) (secondary) — Covers the survival arc down to the 1532 union with the Reformed tradition.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 12 'Christians and heretics' (Biller); cf. ch. 3 (Kienzle) (reference) — Biller is the leading Waldensian specialist.