Lay Militancy in Christian Humanist and Early Reformation Discourse

Beginning in the fifteenth century, Christian humanists set forward a reform program that focused on the purification of the clergy and a renewed emphasis on the spirituality of the laity. On the eve of the Reformation, the concept of the clerical miles Christi was well-established, as was the popular mythology of chivalry. These ideas were so culturally embedded in the late medieval world that it became second nature to use these motifs in devotional literature. This chapter homes in on Erasmus of Rotterdam’s manifesto, the Enchiridion militis christiani (1504), and the precedents for his lay activism in other humanists, like Lorenzo Valla. Erasmus’s ideas rippled out into the reform movements in Germany and Switzerland. We can see in some of the pastoral works of Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and their contemporaries’ reflections of Erasmus’s persona of the miles Christi . This chapter closes by addressing Lutheran and Swiss Reformed uses of the metaphor, tracing threads that all had varying degrees of influence on the colorful tapestry of early Anabaptism.