Vermigli, Peter Martyr

▪ Italian religious reformer

Italian  Pietro Martire Vermigli  

born Sept. 8, 1500, Florence

died Nov. 12, 1562, Zürich, Switz.

 leading Italian religious Reformer whose chief concern was eucharistic doctrine.

      The son of a prosperous shoemaker, Vermigli had by 1518 entered the Lateran Congregation of the Augustinian Canons Regular at Fiesole. After eight years of study at Padova he served variously as preacher, vicar, and abbot, finally becoming abbot at St. Peter ad Aram, a city monastery in Naples, in 1537. There he joined the select group around Juan de Valdés and read the pseudonymous works of the Reformers. Vermigli became suspect, and the Theatines procured his suspension from preaching, but sympathetic cardinals at Rome had the ban lifted. In 1541 he became prior of San Frediano at Lucca, where he gathered a teaching staff and introduced both monastery and congregation to Reformed doctrine and worship. Summoned to appear before his order at Genoa, he fled in August 1542 to Zürich. Martin Bucer then called him to Strasbourg (now in France), where he was professor of theology (1542–47, 1553–56). Vermigli in 1547 accepted Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's invitation to England and became regius professor of divinity at the University of Oxford. The major event of his stay was a disputation (1549) on the Eucharist, at which three matters of belief were debated: (1) transubstantiation, (2) carnal or corporeal presence, and (3) whether “the body and blood of Christ is sacramentally joined to the bread and the wine.” His influence on the 1552 prayer book and the Forty-two Articles (1553) is problematic. His eucharistic doctrine, in the Oxford Disputation and Treatise and in Defensio adversum Gardinerum (published in 1559), was close to that of John Calvin, Bucer, and Philipp Melanchthon. After Queen Mary's accession, Cranmer named him the archbishop's assistant, but Vermigli went into exile, followed by disciples such as John Jewel, during later persecutions by the crown. He returned to Strasbourg in 1553 but in 1556, after the Lutheran–Reformed dispute over the ubiquity of Christ's body intensified, went to Zürich as professor of Hebrew.

Additional Reading

Joseph C. McLelland, The Visible Words of God: An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli, A.D. 1500–1562 (1957), is a study of his life and thought.

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