ABSTRACT
During the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had frequently been confronted by heresy and the threat of schism. Yet it had survived intact, only to be taken completely by surprise by the Reformation. Initially, reformers like Luther were regarded as no more serious a threat than the Waldensians and the Albigensians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries or the Hussites in the fifteenth. The papacy, which had reached its lowest ebb by the turn of the fifteenth century, largely because of the process of secularization explained in Chapter 2, was probably quite unaware that the Protestant Reformation was potentially more dangerous than a medieval heresy with minority appeal.
