ABSTRACT
The Waldensian myth of the apostolic origins of their Church has long nurtured the Protestant imagination. One of the most powerful reasons for the continuous British support to the Waldensian cause from Oliver Cromwell until the end of the 1800s, was the idea that they had kept alight the torch of the Gospel during the long night of apostasy. Their alleged passage to Calvinism in 1532, with the so-called Synod of Chanforan, was celebrated as a manifestation of the direct continuity between the medieval Waldensians and the Protestant Reformation. All these components came together to construct an imaginary Waldensianism, which contributed in a decisive way to feed a growing interest toward the Waldenses in nineteenth-century Britain. Thomas Sims, William Stephen Gilly, John Charles Beckwith and Robert Walter Stewart, who unfolded their action in the Waldensian valleys of Piedmont before the Unification of Italy in 1861, were among those who, moved by this mythical past, contributed greatly in pushing the Waldenses to become a National Italian Protestant Church.
