*Protestantism does best in the liminal spaces of the Holy Roman Empire. The biggest of them is the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, which Günther turns into Prussia in a way that winds up aborting the unification of Germany. But it's not the only liminal space of the HRE; another is the intersection of the Alps where Germany, Italy, and France run into each other. At the time, it was variously Lyons, Provence, Savoy, and the Eidgenossenschaft. We call it "Switzerland."
IRL, the other (and much more dominant) Protestantism was started there by Huldrych Zwingli. (Two of them, actually, because Zwingli also personally spun off the Anabaptists.) Herein, it begins in what I suspect is now part of France. And the guy who begins it is at once legendary, historic, and mythical.
His name is Oliver Farrell.
So who the hell is Oliver Farrell?
Andalusada has steampunk social science: it's designed to be deliberately anachronistic in some ways, and the line between "medieval" and "modern" is deliberately blurred. In the case of Oliver Farrell, it's blurred into meaninglessness.Zwingli, you see, was a Catholic before he was a Zwinglian. IRL, the Protestant leaders all thought of themselves as Catholic.
Oliver Farrell breaks from that in a big way: he's a Waldensian. The Waldensian, in fact: pretty much all of Waldensian history starts over when he comes into the picture. "Reforming the Church" is stuff that other people do; by the time his career is underway, the faith he was born into had been heretical and on the fringe of Rome for 300 years, a persecuted and marginal underground.
Oliver Farrell makes it respectable. He also makes it, for one moment in time, much larger - in addition to everything else he is, Farrell is a hell of an evangelist for the Waldensian cause. A fair number of people convert personally because of him - and when they start converting people of their own, who don't acculturate into Waldensian society, it gives rise to the southern heresy of the *Reformation: the Farrellites.
Oliver Farrell in outline
- Olivier Farel ("Oliver Farrell" in English, German, and Romand) is born sometime in the early 1480s, about the same time as Johan Georg Gunther.
- He's raised in a Waldensian family, and is educated for a secular profession. (What profession is as yet undetermined, but given how important his written works are to his career, I'm thinking that he may be a printer.)
- At some point in his adolescence, he has a religious calling, and against his parents' wishes gets involved with something akin to the Brethren of the Common Life, where he additionally gets a fair humanist education as well. (I'm going to need the names of the Brethren; they probably radicalize collectively, and Farrell is simply the most notable among them.)
- At no point in his life does Farrell ever take formal vows or earn an academic degree. His authority is entirely charismatic.
- Farrell's career as a Waldensian reformer begins with a printing of a vernacular Bible, in this case one written in Romand. By itself it's nothing particularly remarkable (being based on the Vulgate rather than the Opus Transtulit), aside from editing a few typographical errors; but its availability makes it a surprising success in a region from Geneva to Lyons. More importantly, the conflicts that ensue over the translation philosophy lead the Brethren to discuss a more radical Bible translation.
- Stuff happens...
- Oliver Farrell finally dies in battle against the Duke of Savoy.
Oliver Farrell's legacy
- Linguistically, Farrell's biggest work is in establishing Romand as a written language, and Romandy as a linguistic area.
- Oliver Farrell is remarkable in establishing not one but two Bible translations in his lifetime: the Lyonnaise Vulgate and the later Farrell Bible. Remarkably, both remain in use; the latter is by far the more widespread, but Waldensian Catholics (and occasionally, in moments where it needs to be ecumenical towards Catholics, the Skete of Orsa) favor the Vulgate, which was also just as legitimately his.
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