ABSTRACT
The religious upheavals of the sixteenth century were accompanied by the creation of new traditions, myths and narratives that provided the nascent reformed church with a plausible and polemically useful past. Antiquity and consensus ceased to be the foundation of authority, as religious identities came to be shaped, not by the membership of a visible and historical church, but by a sense of belonging to an invisible spiritual community. In the hands of evangelical polemicists, the universal history of the medieval church became a palimpsest, wiped clean and rewritten until cleansed of the accumulated errors of centuries of monastic history, hagiography and chronicles. The reinvention of the past, and the invention of traditions that might bind the present to the past, reflected the changing priorities of evangelical polemicists and the depth of the fracture in the universal history of the church that had been opened by the Reformation.
