ABSTRACT
The Council of Trent created a new Church very different from the one out of which it had arisen, a Church that can with some justice be called the 'Tridentine Church' in order to distinguish it from a preceding 'Renaissance Church'. The Italian mystics of the Age of the Renaissance came from all classes of society; and mysticism cannot therefore be described as the expression of any one class. Some of the mystics were even married, a revolution in the history of mysticism at least since the time of that gamophobe, St Jerome. Refugees from the abortive Tyrolean revolution of 1525 used the leisure provided them by subsidies from the Venetian government to inform some of their hosts' humbler subjects of their own special brand of Moravian Anabaptism: that political action is immoral, that the sacraments are worthless, that 'there is no Trinity but a single God who dwelt in Christ'.
