The Christian church has not been monolithic or unified at any time. We are all aware of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has been in competition with the Western, or Catholic, Church. Perhaps it is less well known that through the ages there have been many minor sects. Most of these have faded away and reconstructing their history is very difficult. The dominant church usually controlled the writing and publication of history, and they made every effort to describe the minor sects in the most unfriendly terms, if at all. On the other hand, if the minor sects succeeded to the point where they did leave some writing, they often were guilty of biased reporting of their own history. [We have plenty of this in genealogy where the almost universal tendency is to make one's ancestors look good.]
Peter Waldo, in the twelfth century, was the founder of one of these minor sects which has survived through the centuries. The writings about him and his followers have been biased, and it is difficult to reconstruct an accurate history. Persecuted and on the move, perhaps their biggest impact was on other movements and bodies of thought that came after them. Thus, Wycliffe, and Huss, and the general Protestant Reformation, owe something to Waldo. Waldo was not the first, though, to rise up against the established thought and practice. Waldo sponsored a translation of the New Testament into Provencal, the language of his district around Lyon, France.
The Waldenses, under the more modern name of Vaudois (after Valdez, an alternate form of Waldo), have survived and are regarded as one of the oldest and most evangelical of the medieval sects. Their original tenets are difficult to ascertain as they wrote very little. Furthermore, their strongest adherents were often unlettered peasants who hid away in the cracks of civilization. They often held that oaths were to be avoided and that the civil authorities could not use capital punishment. These were thoughts that came to the fore centuries later among the Friends and the Anabaptists. They generally held that every person, male and female of all ages, was a priest and that there should be no separate category of priests, certainly not a closed rank of priests.
By 1487, Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull for their extermination. A bloody period followed which drove the adherents into further isolation, intellectually and physically. They were generally sympathetic to the Hussites, the Brethren, and the Lutherans, and many Waldenses joined these movements while influencing them also.
In 1650, strong measures were taken against the Waldenses in the area of Turin, with French and English elements opposing them. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to a determination to exterminate them. In the time of Queen Anne, she lent support to them. The colony at Gochsheim in the Kraichtal (1698 to 1724), which was mentioned in the last note, was probably a group seeking refugee from the persecutions.
(19 Aug 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.