ABSTRACT
During the Reformation period, the issue of religious and confessional identity became of capital significance. The definition of a religious identity inevitably entailed defining what one was not, and this meant attaching new importance to the definition of heresy. This in turn meant that Catholic theologians after the end of the Council of Trent in 1563, as confessional positions hardened, felt impelled to refute as heresies all systems of beliefs other than their own. This strategy is evidenced by the French Jesuit Gabriel du Preau or Prateolus in his Alphabetical Catalogue of Lives, Sects, and Doctrines of all Heretics, first published in Cologne in 1569. Du Preau’s purpose was not to put together a real catalogue in any sense of the word or to give an accurate account of either the Cynics or the Waldensians. His entry is based on unreliable and hostile sources and constitutes a classic piece of Counter-Reformation polemics.
