Genre de document:
Article
Auteur/éditeur:
Samuel L. Young
 
Standard: Young, Samuel L. [Samuel L. Young]
Titre:
Waldensianism Before Waldo: The Myth of Apostolic Proto-Protestantism in Antebellum American Anti-Catholicism

Standard:

Revue:
Church History
Genre de document:
91
Fascicule:
nr. 3
Année de parution:
September 2022
Pages:
513-534
Sujets:
Origine apostolique des vaudois - Controverses - États-Unies d'Amérique - 1800-1900
Protestantisme - Polémique contre les Catholiques - 1800-1900
Vaudois dans la littérature - États-Unis d'Amérique - 1800-1900
Vaudois dans la litterature américaine - 1750-1900 - Bibliographie

Résumé/commentaire:

 Between 1820 and 1850, American presses generated an enormous amount of literature devoted to the myth of apostolic Waldensianism. Though the Waldenses began as a lay reform movement in the twelfth century, speculations about their apostolic origin were popularized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This historical construction gave American Protestants a versatile rhetorical weapon against an increasingly encroaching Roman Catholicism. The apostolicity of Waldensianism allowed Protestants to trace their teachings not only to scripture but through the middle ages and the early church, providing a ready answer to Catholic accusations of Protestant novelty. Additionally, renarrating the history of Waldensian persecution at the hand of Catholics reinforced nativist conceptions of Catholicism as a violently tyrannical religion, and became a call to action for Protestants to resist Rome’s attempt to gain power in the United States. Though the myth of apostolic Waldensianism was widely held by American Protestants, by 1850 it became largely untenable. Historians on both side of the Atlantic contextualized the group as a medieval phenomenon, rather than the remnant of apostolic Protestantism.