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Preachers by Night: The Waldensian Barbes 15th-16th Centuries
This work traces the history of the barbes, the Waldensian preachers whose itinerant mision maintained the fervent but clandestine faith of a dissent which from Lyons extended across much of Europe, enduring despite the Inquisition, from the 12th-16th century.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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June 28, 2018
I have several complaints with this book. Most of my problems revolve around the fact that Audisio perpetuates demonstrable myths about the Waldenses.
The first myth is that their name: “Waldenses” was given to them because they were founded by Peter Waldo. Antoine Monastier, a Vaudois himself, in his ‘A History of the Vaudois Church: From Its Origin and of the Vaudois of Piedmont to the Present Day’ (1848), explodes this myth in two ways. First, he traces Vaudois history back to the 10th century, older already than Waldo, and Alexis Muston, whose two-volume history was compiled with the help of countless Vaudois primary sources, many of which were unpublished in his day, demonstrates that much of the Ambrosian ritual was preserved in the Waldenses worship, which argues that they historically had been influenced by Ambrose. The diocese of Milan originally included Liguria, Emelia, Flaminia, Venetia, the Cottian Alps (where the Vaudois valleys are), the Grajan Alps, and Rhetia. Down to the time of the Crusade against the Albigenses, the Bible had been read in the vulgar tongue of the Piedmont region. And the diocese of Milan still maintained independence. Secondly, both Monastier and Muston trace the origin of the name “Waldenses” as a corruption of the word “Vaudois” (which they were also called) from the words “vallis” and “vaux” – words that refer to the valleys were they lived. The association with Waldo was a popish slander in order to tar them with the charge of heresy by associating them with a declared heretic.
The second demonstrable false idea Audisio perpetuates is the notion that the Vaudois entertained the idea of rejecting infant baptism. Again, this is clearly proved to be a myth. Monastier and Muston, as well as Wylie and other historians of the Waldenses. The simplest way to refute this charge is to point to the fact that at the time of the Reformation, Waldenses sent leaders to meet with the Reformers. The Waldenses had confessions of faith, i.e., creedal statements dating back to the 10th century – which had not changed. These statements maintained the propriety of infant baptism, and as such, they met with the full approval of the Reformers. It is no secret that the Reformers wrote sharply against the Anabaptists. Had the Vaudois been Anabaptists they would not have been so warmly received by the Reformers, nor would the Reformers have appealed to them as examples of the Christian doctrine kept pure from Romish accretions. The Reformers always spoke highly of the Waldenses and always spoke harshly of the Anabaptists.
These are commonly repeated theories – false all the same – but familiar. But the real issue is when Audisio attributes to the Waldenses things no one has ever attributed to them before – and not from reliable primary sources, but by imagining things based on the imaginary connection with Waldo. An example would be that there was no established clergy among the Vaudois. This, against is proven false by the interactions between the Vaudois and the Reformers.
Even more egregious is his claim that there were women ministers among them. This, of course, is false on the face of it. How could they have women ministers if they didn’t have established minsters to begin with. This is nothing more than the wishful thinking of a 21st century adherent of liberal theological and sociological ideas reading his pet theories into a past where such notions never existed. When Waldensian documents detail the structure of their church society as collegial, not hierarchical, rather than accept the obvious fact that the Vaudois did in fact have a doctrine of the church which included church officers, Audisio opts to imagine that there must’ve been some evolution over the years and that there original church structure (which had no structure and had women preachers) had passed away without notice. When he does explain the process of becoming a church officer, he has to rely on Vaudois documents which detail how a man, between 25 and 30 would have to embark on a 3 or 4 year course of study under the tutelage of an ordained minister in order to become a “barbe,” i.e., a Vaudois preacher. There are no records of women preachers, nor are their records of self-ordaining. Men had to be qualified by men already in the ministry. In detailing the process of ordination, a document is cited which states, “The said disciples, after the Eucharist and laying on of hands, are admitted to the ministry of presbyter and preaching and, thus prepared and trained, they are sent out to evangelise, two by two.” Furthermore, this ceremony of ordination is documented to occur at the annual synod – an oddity indeed for a society with no ordained ministry peopled by co-equal men and women preachers! By their own documents, they have a synod, they have presbyters, and new candidates to the ministry are 25 to 30 year-old men who must first undergo a 3-4 year-long course of training and study before being commissioned to preach. This sounds suspiciously like a modern-day Presbytery to me.
There is no firmly established connection between Waldo and the Vaudois. There are only accusations of association thrown around by the Papal courts in order to crush them by the sword. The same tactic was used against Luther by associating him with Huss. There is, in fact, little in common between them, but the connection was drawn in order to justify suppression and persecution. There is, by the author’s own admission, precious little information about Waldo in the first place. For centuries, there isn’t even record of a first name. It seems like quite a leap, in the teeth of such paucity of data, to hitch one’s wagon to the notion that the Vaudois societies and churches were founded by Waldo, and that all the alleged quirks of Waldo are, in fact, true, and that Rome’s associating of the Vaudois with Waldo can be trusted. Medieval Rome was known to accuse its opponents of all sorts of wilds things simply so temporal rulers could be put on the warpath and opponents of Rome’s monopoly could be quelled.
The whole work, while copiously noted, seems like it was made up out of thin air. I know that the author is a “specialist” on the Vaudois, and he provides a great deal of documentation, but he seems to focus on all the wrong places. Where unfounded claims have been made, ridiculous allegations leveled, he tracks these down as if they have merit, but the long-established traditional view of the Vaudois is evidently too boring to merit attention. It’s like a builder obsessing over far-flung theories about the architects choice of pencil color on the blueprint for the house rather than the measurements of the walls, floors, doors, and windows.
I have already mentioned Monastier, Muston, and Wylie. But there are also several other important histories of the Waldenses. Monastier is important because he was a Vaudois. Muston is important because he had access to Vaudois documents that even Monastier didn’t. But Audisio hardly mentions any of these authors, and he never so much as cites a single authoritative history of the Waldenses. This is like writing a history of Western Christianity and never even acknowledging the existence of Augustine, or writing a history of the Peloponnesian Wars and relegating Thucydides to a couple of footnotes. Monastier gets three footnotes, one of which contains a passage that undermines the connection to Waldo by citing a Vaudois book that mentions Pope Sylvester (died 335) in a way that ties Vaudois knowledge of the outside world to his era. The early Reformation-era historians of the Waldenses, Audisio labels “apologists,” in a way that implies they had ulterior motives in telling Vaudois history and were more interested in painting them as heroes than in presenting the truth. Physician heal thyself.
The Waldenses are interesting on their own merit. They don’t need to be turned into 21st century egalitarians in order to be of interest. The greatest travesty is that the horrific suffering on the Waldenses is so little known. Monastier spent much time researching and studying medieval manuscripts. He plows through countless works and letter of various figures in Church history from the 4th through the 16th century following the plight of this remnant of God's faithful church amid the mass of false teaching which pervaded Christendom. And like Wylie, he details the horrific persecution these poor saints endured at the hands of the papacy. This is the one feature of the Vaudois, coupled with their purity of doctrine (which was not because the rejected each newly-invented tenet of Rome, but because their isolation kept them from even encountering these Romish novelties), which makes them particularly fascinating. They are a remnant that God protected in order to maintain a pure testimony to Himself during the darkest, most corrupted days of the Papacy. And this is precisely what Audisio completely overlooks. I am at a loss to understand why he even found them interesting enough to research and write about.
It is quite odd, since Audisio is considered something of a specialist on the Vaudois, yet he accepts without question some of the basic myths about them. And he seems to enjoy entertaining ideas about them, which were they true, the Vaudois would never have been persecuted, never have been admired by the Reformers, and would never have been remembered.
One example should suffice: Audisio entertains the notion that the Waldenses were hypocrites that routinely dissimulated in order to avoid persecution. It is suggested that they routinely attended Romish masses and, when threatened with persecution, engaged in acts of pretended Romish worship in order to survive. They were supposed quite deft at this, yet not proud of it. They may even have been, it is suggested, the Nicodemites Calvin castigated for compromising with Rome to avoid persecution. Plain horse sense refutes this. For starters, the Vaudois were persecuted and mercilessly slaughtered countless times throughout the centuries – even long after the beginning of the Reformation. If they were so good at pretending to be Catholic, why would they have been attacked so many times? Secondly, if they dissimulated to avoid persecution, why does even Rome acknowledge that she killed thousands of them multiple times over the course of several centuries? Why would they have sided with the Reformers when Rome was persecuting and killing them till well into the 17th century? Why would the Reformers have so openly admired them had they been prone to lapse into Popery to avoid persecution? The Papacy has a long history of brutality and viciousness toward its enemies, but persecution always stopped once the enemy capitulated and worshipped according to Romish decrees. If the Vaudois were guilty of such, whence the need to quash them repeatedly over 600 years? None of this adds up. It is a long rabbit trail occasioned by wild “scholarly” speculation. The very suggestion that the Vaudois (a people with a longer and more sustained history of attacks, persecutions, and slaughters) had ever compromised to avoid persecution would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. A people who had thousands of its fathers, mothers, and children literally butchered to death – over and over and over again – and that well documented – accused of compromise with Rome to avoid persecution. It’s hard to trust the author’s scholarship after this goose chase.
One encounters phrases like, “it seems likely,” and “it is possible that” far too often in a work that purports to be history. History deals in documented facts, not conjectures of the historian loosely connected to those facts. I have probably not read as many documents as he has, but the dozen or more that I have read are long-established reliable histories, chock full of citations of primary sources, many of which had to be accessed by going to the Vaudois villages in Piedmont and elsewhere. Nothing I have read by historians, who did not always agree among themselves, would lead me to believe a fraction of the claims Audisio makes in this book.
Make no mistake, this is a very well documented book, but the citations do not serve the author's obvious intent. He makes unfounded assertions, provides citations which cannot be tortured into saying what he wants, then he sweeps the citation aside with a casual, "It seems safe to assume that..." I think it’s safe to assume that the author would like the Vaudois better had they been 21st century Anabaptists, complete with women preachers and a non-existent ecclesiology. Finding that to not be the case, he proceeds as if it were anyway.
The first myth is that their name: “Waldenses” was given to them because they were founded by Peter Waldo. Antoine Monastier, a Vaudois himself, in his ‘A History of the Vaudois Church: From Its Origin and of the Vaudois of Piedmont to the Present Day’ (1848), explodes this myth in two ways. First, he traces Vaudois history back to the 10th century, older already than Waldo, and Alexis Muston, whose two-volume history was compiled with the help of countless Vaudois primary sources, many of which were unpublished in his day, demonstrates that much of the Ambrosian ritual was preserved in the Waldenses worship, which argues that they historically had been influenced by Ambrose. The diocese of Milan originally included Liguria, Emelia, Flaminia, Venetia, the Cottian Alps (where the Vaudois valleys are), the Grajan Alps, and Rhetia. Down to the time of the Crusade against the Albigenses, the Bible had been read in the vulgar tongue of the Piedmont region. And the diocese of Milan still maintained independence. Secondly, both Monastier and Muston trace the origin of the name “Waldenses” as a corruption of the word “Vaudois” (which they were also called) from the words “vallis” and “vaux” – words that refer to the valleys were they lived. The association with Waldo was a popish slander in order to tar them with the charge of heresy by associating them with a declared heretic.
The second demonstrable false idea Audisio perpetuates is the notion that the Vaudois entertained the idea of rejecting infant baptism. Again, this is clearly proved to be a myth. Monastier and Muston, as well as Wylie and other historians of the Waldenses. The simplest way to refute this charge is to point to the fact that at the time of the Reformation, Waldenses sent leaders to meet with the Reformers. The Waldenses had confessions of faith, i.e., creedal statements dating back to the 10th century – which had not changed. These statements maintained the propriety of infant baptism, and as such, they met with the full approval of the Reformers. It is no secret that the Reformers wrote sharply against the Anabaptists. Had the Vaudois been Anabaptists they would not have been so warmly received by the Reformers, nor would the Reformers have appealed to them as examples of the Christian doctrine kept pure from Romish accretions. The Reformers always spoke highly of the Waldenses and always spoke harshly of the Anabaptists.
These are commonly repeated theories – false all the same – but familiar. But the real issue is when Audisio attributes to the Waldenses things no one has ever attributed to them before – and not from reliable primary sources, but by imagining things based on the imaginary connection with Waldo. An example would be that there was no established clergy among the Vaudois. This, against is proven false by the interactions between the Vaudois and the Reformers.
Even more egregious is his claim that there were women ministers among them. This, of course, is false on the face of it. How could they have women ministers if they didn’t have established minsters to begin with. This is nothing more than the wishful thinking of a 21st century adherent of liberal theological and sociological ideas reading his pet theories into a past where such notions never existed. When Waldensian documents detail the structure of their church society as collegial, not hierarchical, rather than accept the obvious fact that the Vaudois did in fact have a doctrine of the church which included church officers, Audisio opts to imagine that there must’ve been some evolution over the years and that there original church structure (which had no structure and had women preachers) had passed away without notice. When he does explain the process of becoming a church officer, he has to rely on Vaudois documents which detail how a man, between 25 and 30 would have to embark on a 3 or 4 year course of study under the tutelage of an ordained minister in order to become a “barbe,” i.e., a Vaudois preacher. There are no records of women preachers, nor are their records of self-ordaining. Men had to be qualified by men already in the ministry. In detailing the process of ordination, a document is cited which states, “The said disciples, after the Eucharist and laying on of hands, are admitted to the ministry of presbyter and preaching and, thus prepared and trained, they are sent out to evangelise, two by two.” Furthermore, this ceremony of ordination is documented to occur at the annual synod – an oddity indeed for a society with no ordained ministry peopled by co-equal men and women preachers! By their own documents, they have a synod, they have presbyters, and new candidates to the ministry are 25 to 30 year-old men who must first undergo a 3-4 year-long course of training and study before being commissioned to preach. This sounds suspiciously like a modern-day Presbytery to me.
There is no firmly established connection between Waldo and the Vaudois. There are only accusations of association thrown around by the Papal courts in order to crush them by the sword. The same tactic was used against Luther by associating him with Huss. There is, in fact, little in common between them, but the connection was drawn in order to justify suppression and persecution. There is, by the author’s own admission, precious little information about Waldo in the first place. For centuries, there isn’t even record of a first name. It seems like quite a leap, in the teeth of such paucity of data, to hitch one’s wagon to the notion that the Vaudois societies and churches were founded by Waldo, and that all the alleged quirks of Waldo are, in fact, true, and that Rome’s associating of the Vaudois with Waldo can be trusted. Medieval Rome was known to accuse its opponents of all sorts of wilds things simply so temporal rulers could be put on the warpath and opponents of Rome’s monopoly could be quelled.
The whole work, while copiously noted, seems like it was made up out of thin air. I know that the author is a “specialist” on the Vaudois, and he provides a great deal of documentation, but he seems to focus on all the wrong places. Where unfounded claims have been made, ridiculous allegations leveled, he tracks these down as if they have merit, but the long-established traditional view of the Vaudois is evidently too boring to merit attention. It’s like a builder obsessing over far-flung theories about the architects choice of pencil color on the blueprint for the house rather than the measurements of the walls, floors, doors, and windows.
I have already mentioned Monastier, Muston, and Wylie. But there are also several other important histories of the Waldenses. Monastier is important because he was a Vaudois. Muston is important because he had access to Vaudois documents that even Monastier didn’t. But Audisio hardly mentions any of these authors, and he never so much as cites a single authoritative history of the Waldenses. This is like writing a history of Western Christianity and never even acknowledging the existence of Augustine, or writing a history of the Peloponnesian Wars and relegating Thucydides to a couple of footnotes. Monastier gets three footnotes, one of which contains a passage that undermines the connection to Waldo by citing a Vaudois book that mentions Pope Sylvester (died 335) in a way that ties Vaudois knowledge of the outside world to his era. The early Reformation-era historians of the Waldenses, Audisio labels “apologists,” in a way that implies they had ulterior motives in telling Vaudois history and were more interested in painting them as heroes than in presenting the truth. Physician heal thyself.
The Waldenses are interesting on their own merit. They don’t need to be turned into 21st century egalitarians in order to be of interest. The greatest travesty is that the horrific suffering on the Waldenses is so little known. Monastier spent much time researching and studying medieval manuscripts. He plows through countless works and letter of various figures in Church history from the 4th through the 16th century following the plight of this remnant of God's faithful church amid the mass of false teaching which pervaded Christendom. And like Wylie, he details the horrific persecution these poor saints endured at the hands of the papacy. This is the one feature of the Vaudois, coupled with their purity of doctrine (which was not because the rejected each newly-invented tenet of Rome, but because their isolation kept them from even encountering these Romish novelties), which makes them particularly fascinating. They are a remnant that God protected in order to maintain a pure testimony to Himself during the darkest, most corrupted days of the Papacy. And this is precisely what Audisio completely overlooks. I am at a loss to understand why he even found them interesting enough to research and write about.
It is quite odd, since Audisio is considered something of a specialist on the Vaudois, yet he accepts without question some of the basic myths about them. And he seems to enjoy entertaining ideas about them, which were they true, the Vaudois would never have been persecuted, never have been admired by the Reformers, and would never have been remembered.
One example should suffice: Audisio entertains the notion that the Waldenses were hypocrites that routinely dissimulated in order to avoid persecution. It is suggested that they routinely attended Romish masses and, when threatened with persecution, engaged in acts of pretended Romish worship in order to survive. They were supposed quite deft at this, yet not proud of it. They may even have been, it is suggested, the Nicodemites Calvin castigated for compromising with Rome to avoid persecution. Plain horse sense refutes this. For starters, the Vaudois were persecuted and mercilessly slaughtered countless times throughout the centuries – even long after the beginning of the Reformation. If they were so good at pretending to be Catholic, why would they have been attacked so many times? Secondly, if they dissimulated to avoid persecution, why does even Rome acknowledge that she killed thousands of them multiple times over the course of several centuries? Why would they have sided with the Reformers when Rome was persecuting and killing them till well into the 17th century? Why would the Reformers have so openly admired them had they been prone to lapse into Popery to avoid persecution? The Papacy has a long history of brutality and viciousness toward its enemies, but persecution always stopped once the enemy capitulated and worshipped according to Romish decrees. If the Vaudois were guilty of such, whence the need to quash them repeatedly over 600 years? None of this adds up. It is a long rabbit trail occasioned by wild “scholarly” speculation. The very suggestion that the Vaudois (a people with a longer and more sustained history of attacks, persecutions, and slaughters) had ever compromised to avoid persecution would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. A people who had thousands of its fathers, mothers, and children literally butchered to death – over and over and over again – and that well documented – accused of compromise with Rome to avoid persecution. It’s hard to trust the author’s scholarship after this goose chase.
One encounters phrases like, “it seems likely,” and “it is possible that” far too often in a work that purports to be history. History deals in documented facts, not conjectures of the historian loosely connected to those facts. I have probably not read as many documents as he has, but the dozen or more that I have read are long-established reliable histories, chock full of citations of primary sources, many of which had to be accessed by going to the Vaudois villages in Piedmont and elsewhere. Nothing I have read by historians, who did not always agree among themselves, would lead me to believe a fraction of the claims Audisio makes in this book.
Make no mistake, this is a very well documented book, but the citations do not serve the author's obvious intent. He makes unfounded assertions, provides citations which cannot be tortured into saying what he wants, then he sweeps the citation aside with a casual, "It seems safe to assume that..." I think it’s safe to assume that the author would like the Vaudois better had they been 21st century Anabaptists, complete with women preachers and a non-existent ecclesiology. Finding that to not be the case, he proceeds as if it were anyway.
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