Tipo di documento:
Articolo
Autore/curatore:
Samuel L. Young
 
Standard: Young, Samuel L. [Samuel L. Young]
Titolo:
Waldensianism Before Waldo: The Myth of Apostolic Proto-Protestantism in Antebellum American Anti-Catholicism

Standard:

Rivista:
Church History
Tipo di documento:
91
Fascicolo:
nr. 3
Data di pubblicazione:
September 2022
Pagine:
513-534
Soggetti:
Origine apostolica dei valdesi - Controversie - Stati Uniti d'America - 1800-1900
Protestantesimo - Polemica anticattolica - 1800-1900
Valdesi [nella] letteratura americana - 1750-1900 - Bibliografia
Valdesi nella letteratura - Stati Uniti d'America - 1800-1900

Riassunto/commento:

 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.