Folk stories and songs shape culture. What would the United States be without Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, England without Robin Hood, Scotland without William Wallace, or France without Joan of Arc? They embody the national spirit and provide legends passed down from parents to children through the generations. During my ongoing study of the Waldensians, it’s easy to get bogged down in historical dates, names, and places, but miss the intricacies of daily life.

Every so often in history, it seems everything happened at once. A recent example future historians may evaluate is the rapid downfall of colonial empires from the end of World War II until the 1960’s. Further back was the period of national revolutions beginning with the American Revolutionary War and ending with the Napoleonic Wars. Build Up The most interesting to me, however, is the “explosion” of Bibles in the early modern period.

No … but I imagine that answer lacks sufficient explanation. This article is my opinion based on my education and recent research, yet it’s far from scholarly. I do, however, want to explain my conclusion as one who has thoroughly enjoyed studying about the Waldensians: a historic, dissenting branch of Christianity predating the Protestant Reformation by at least 400 years. They are also the subject of my novel, Heretics of Piedmont, the first part in a series I have titled Witnesses of the Light.

With a story set in the fifteenth century featuring oppressed Christians, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, they were the ones doing the oppressing. In a sense, it would be easy for me to paint the Catholic Church as pure evil—the persecutors of God’s people, the Mary-worshipers, the harlot of Babylon. But Heretics of Piedmont would be very edgy, boring, and frankly, a bad novel if I went down that road.