Peter Martyr Vermigli

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Peter Martyr Vermigli — Pietro Martire Vermigli in his native Italian — was a learned Augustinian canon, raised to the front rank of his order, who concluded by middle age that the church he served was wrong about the things that mattered most, and left it. Born in Florence in 1499, he was prior of an abbey at Naples and then at Lucca, reading Bucer and the early Reformers in private, until in 1542 he crossed the Alps rather than answer to the Roman Inquisition. He never returned to Italy.

The exile that followed made him an international scholar of the Reformed cause. He taught at Strasbourg under Bucer’s protection, then accepted Thomas Cranmer’s invitation to England, where he held the Regius chair of divinity at Oxford through the brief Protestant spring of Edward VI’s reign and helped shape the revision of English liturgy. When Mary Tudor restored Catholicism he withdrew again — back to Strasbourg, and finally to Zurich, where he taught alongside Heinrich Bullinger until his death in 1562. His career traces, almost exactly, the geography of the Reformed movement at mid-century.

What gave Vermigli lasting weight was the Eucharist. The question of what happens in the bread and wine had split the Reformation against itself, and it was here that he argued most carefully. He rejected the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and equally the Lutheran insistence on a bodily presence; he held instead that Christ is truly received in the sacrament, but spiritually, by the faith of the believer, the body itself remaining in heaven. This was the broadly Reformed position he shared with Calvin and Bullinger, and his 1549 Oxford disputation on the subject became one of its more rigorous statements. His learning in the Church Fathers — which he marshaled to show the early church on his side — was part of what made the argument tell.

For the traditions that received him, Vermigli was less a system-builder than an authority: a name cited, a locus consulted. His scattered theological essays were gathered after his death into the Loci Communes, a topical compendium that served generations of Reformed students as a working reference. Historians have long noted how thoroughly he absorbed the scholastic method he had been trained in and carried it into Protestant theology — so that the Reformation he joined kept, in him, some of the intellectual machinery of the church he fled. He is remembered now mainly by specialists. In his own century he was read across Protestant Europe, and his account of the sacrament outlived the controversies that produced it.

→ Related: Martin Chemnitz