ABSTRACT
The Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe divided territories, cities, and families. Many townspeople and peasants remained loyal to the traditional church and its teachings, suspicious of doctrinal innovation and horrified by the popular violence that racked the Holy Roman Empire and France beginning in the 1520s. In the letter preface to his popular Confession of the Christian Faith, the Geneva minister Theodore Beza relates the intense struggle and personal cost that was involved in leaving the religion of his childhood and becoming an openly Protestant believer. Theodore Beza’s decision to embrace Protestantism and flee Catholic France in the fall of 1548 occurred after years of personal turmoil. In 1528, when Beza was 9 years old, he was sent to Orleans to study with the famous pedagogue Melchior Wolmar, who instructed him in the liberal arts and imparted to him a love of classical literature. In 1535, Beza was introduced to the writings of the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger.
