William Tyndale c. 1494–1536
The Underground Translator In the early 1530s, an English merchant named Stephen Vaughan was commissioned to find William Tyndale and inform him that King Henry VIII desired him to return from hiding on the...
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Thomas Becon c. 1512–1567
The Monday Morning Protestant Though almost entirely overlooked in church history, Thomas Becon was a prolific pamphleteer, popular bestseller, and godly cleric in sixteenth-century England during the Reformation. Living through the turbulent reigns of...
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Peter Martyr Vermigli 1499–1562
The Phoenix of Florence From childhood, Peter Martyr Vermigli desired to teach God’s word. At age fifteen, he entered the Augustinian order in the Italian town of Fiesole, near his native Florence. After eight years...
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Menno Simons 1496–1561
The Fearless Pacifist If you are familiar with the contemporary Mennonites, you may be surprised to learn that the group’s founder started as a Catholic priest who had never read the Bible. A Priest...
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Wolfgang Capito c. 1478–1541
The Protestant Peacemaker “What is God like? Whom should we follow?” Many people must have been asking these questions during the turbulent times that we now celebrate as the Reformation. Reformers, counter-Reformers, humanists, and...
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Wibrandis Rosenblatt 1504–1564
The Bride of the Reformation In 1504, Wibrandis Rosenblatt was born in Säckingen, Germany. Over the next sixty years, she would marry and be widowed four times, inspiring one writer to describe her as the Reformationfrau —...
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Philip Melanchthon 1497–1560
The Gentle Lutheran He was not the kind who started revolutions, but the kind who brought order to the ensuing chaos. His mentor, Martin Luther, was brash, impulsive, and forceful. But Philip Melanchthon was...
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Girolamo Savonarola 1452–1498
The Florentine Forerunner Surrounding the base of the Luther monument in Worms, Germany, sit the four forerunners of the Protestant Reformation — Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, Peter Waldo, and Girolamo Savonarola. They could not...
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Jan Hus c. 1369–1415
The Goosefather On December 17, 1999, the pope issued the ceremonial equivalent of a modern apology: “Our bad.” John Paul II addressed a crowd in the Czech Republic, expressing “deep regret for the cruel...
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The First Tremor
Peter Waldo – Died by 1218 More than three hundred years before Martin Luther was born, an unlikely reformer suddenly appeared in the city of Lyon in southeast France. His protests against doctrines and...
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