Monumento di Chanforan in Val d’Angrogna. (Photograph: Gabriella Peyrot)
was encouraged to study Luther’s works by his landlord, a Waldensian cloth
merchant.
The ideas of Luther and his follower Melancthon quickly spread south of
the Alps from 1519 and two students at Turin University became Waldensian
‘barbas’ [uncles] or preachers. Luther himself wrote to Duke Charles III of Savoy
in 1523 to promote the preaching of the Gospel. In 1526, two barbas, Giorgio
from Calabria and Martin Gonin from the Angrogna Valley, were sent north
by Synod to discover more and met William Farel of Geneva, who provided
them with a large quantity of Reformation literature to take back. This studied,
the Synod of Merindol of 1530 sought clarification on questions of doctrine
especially predestination, morality, liturgy, discipline and church organisation,
and they returned to be welcomed by the Reformer John Oecolampadius of
Basle, who sent them on to Martin Bucer (later Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity at Cambridge) at Strasbourg. William Farel of Geneva accompanied
them back to the 1532 Synod of Chanforan, in Val Angrogna, which voted
after long and contentious debate to join Farel’s Genevan Reformation—and
also to pay for a new French translation of the Bible to be made in the Col-
lege of Barbi, the little theological faculty high up in the natural hole in the
wall of Pra del Torno. ‘Make your own Reformation but have much regard
to your own heritage as to that of others’, had been the considered advice of
the Czech Christian Brothers in a letter to the 1533 Synod in Praly, but now
the die had been cast. Now, too, the itinerant ministry, confession and vows
of poverty and chastity were also abolished.
The Waldensian resistance in their mountain fastnesses was so deter-
mined that in 1561 the Duke of Savoy, with the Treaty of Cavour, granted
(alone at that time in Europe) toleration of a different confession from that of
the ruler; however, only within strict bounds, outside the plains and valley
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