floors and with the order to keep their settlements and churches above 600
metres.
Yet in the same year of 1561 in Philip II of Spain’s Italian Province of
Calabria, the Waldensian community in Guardia Piemontese were massacred
at what is still called the Bloody Gate. The characteristic traditional Walden-
sian dress still remains, but no Waldensians. Again in 1561 their Waldensian
brothers and sisters in Dauphiné, just over the Alps from the Italian/Savoyard
Waldensian Valleys, who had also voted as congregations for non-resistance,
were summarily exterminated by Jesuits.
Farel had been impressed by the Bible study of the Waldensians in tiny
matchbook-sized Gospels. However, these books, easily concealable about the
clandestine Barba’s person, were in the ‘old French’ dialect (by the 1530s barely
comprehensible) and so these versions of the Good News needed modernising
as well. The Cambridge University Library has a collection of these ‘jewels of
great price’ rescued from the flames by Samuel Morland, Cromwell’s Com-
missioner Extraordinary to Turin, from the week-long burning of religious
books that followed the fall of Pra del Torno in 1655.
The Reformation was the triumph of the Word over the image; indeed,
it was often iconoclastic towards ‘distractions’ such as painted walls and
sculptures. The pulpit for preaching the Word in the vernacular replaced the
rood screen separating the congregation from the miracle of the Mass as the
centre of attention. The resurrected, therefore risen, Christ was represented
by an empty Cross, for He was risen. This replaced the crucified dead Christ
suspended over the rood screen half hiding the priest as he performed the
miracle of the elements becoming the body and blood of Christ.
For Luther, the miracle was that, as in Romans 1 17, ‘The just shall live by
faith’. No human action can save sinful man, but only what God does through
the believers when they believe in the power of his Son’s death on the Cross
and Resurrection, which alone can bring forgiveness and salvation. There was
no church and no priest with a bank account of Masses to mediate between the
individual man or woman and God. For Luther there was ‘a priesthood of all
believers’. Luther was locked up disguised as a knight in the Wartburg Castle,
but printing—the new Internet—meant that his books were everywhere, and
above all Luther’s translation of the Bible, which created a unified German
language, but divided Christendom. The Internet, too, brings unanticipated
conflicts.
It was Calvin’s cousin Pierre Robert Olivetan, a Hebrew scholar who,
hidden in the Coulege di Barbi in Pra del Torno at the end of Val Angrogna,
had newly translated the Old Testament from Hebrew and revised Lefèvre
d’Étaples’ New Testament from the Greek and signed off the final page: Des
Alpes, Février 1535.
In his foreword Olivetan wrote: ‘The poor people [Waldensian shepherds]
who make you this gift have been banished and separated from you for more
than 300 years. Ever since, they have been regarded as the most wicked,
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