PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Protestant cause. 735 As Alexandra Kess noted, ‘his work was commissioned by a
political authority to set forth the history of a religious group in a process of self-
definition and justification’. 736 The association of history with Christianity was also
promoted by humanists. For instance, Guillaume Budé’s De Transitu hellenismi ad
christianismum (1535) united ancient learning and Christian faith, examining how the
study of Ancient Greek history and philosophy could be used for the interpretation of
the history of Christianity. This particular work also revealed Budé’s defence of royal
policies of persecution. At a time of religious transformation, history was used by
Catholics and Protestants alike in support of their respective arguments. The notion of
a community of the elect who had suffered but eventually emerged victorious, found
its application in historical works through the integration of the history of the first
Church. Being an account of Christian persecutions and the spread of heresies, this
topic communicated evocative messages to sixteenth-century readers. The linear
scheme of persecuted Church – militant Church – triumphant Church served as
confirmation for Boaistuau’s Histoire de persecutions de l’Eglise chrestienne et
catholique which was structured around this same concept, following the long
tradition of ecclesiastical history.
Works of this kind narrated the history of the Church from the time of the Apostles.
The first example was deemed to be St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, which examined
the history of the Apostolic Age and the spread of Christianity. The first work which
set the model of an analytical framework of research to be followed by other writers
was Eusebius’s Εκκλησιαστική Ιστορία (Historia Ecclesiastica in Latin), which was
735 Pierre de la Place (c. 1520-1572) was a French Huguenot jurist and historian.
736 Kess, A., Johann Sleidan and the Protestant Vision of History, p. 161.
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