Piero Mariano Vermigli

Born in Florence on 8 September 1499, Vermigli was the oldest of three children (Felicita Antonio, b. 1501; Antonio Lorenzo Romulo, b. 1504) and christened as 'Piero Mariano', the son of Stefano di Antonio Vermigli, a wealthy shoemaker, and Maria Fumantina (d. 1511). According to Simler’s Oratio, Martyr’s mother had taught him Latin when he was a child, and the family were clearly oriented towards the Church (his sister soon followed him into the religious life).

In 1514, Piero Mariano entered the Augustinian novitiate in Fiesole at the age of 15. He demonstrated advanced academic ability. On completing his novitiate, he took his religious name from the Dominican St Peter of Verona, and so the name Pietro Martire (Peter Martyr) after the thirteenth-century Dominican Saint Peter of Verona. He was then sent north to the monastery of San Giovanni di Verdara, which had a splendid library, to begin studies at the University of Padua, where Aristotelian scholarship was still in the ascendant. Vermigli received a solid Renaissance humanist education under Pietro Bembo and others. He studied Greek in order to read Aristotle and the classics in the original.

He was ordained in 1526, and granted a doctorate in divinity. His order appointed him as public preacher, and (commencing in Brescia) he traveled through northern Italy lecturing on Scripture and philosophy. In Bologna, taught himself Hebrew with the help of a Jewish doctor - his Augustinian order described him as predicatorem eximium (an exceptional preacher). This pushed him to increasingly systematic exegesis, the Fathers, and the original texts of the Bible. His fame spread, and he could count among his friends other reformers as Gasparo Contarini, Pietro Carnesecchi, Marcantonio Flaminio and Reginald Pole. Unfortunately, none of his sermons from his Italian period survive.

In 1530, as his notoriety grew, he was appointed vicar of the Augustinian house in Bologna, San Giovanni in Monte. In 1533 he was made abbot of his order’s two notorious monasteries in Spoleto, and reformed the monastery's life. This gave him a reputation as a reformer of religious life, and some authors suggest he may have been involved in the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia in Rome. In 1537 he was made abbot of San Pietro ad Aram in Naples. He fell into a serious illness (thought to be malaria) and came to adopt the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone which he encountered among the Valdesian circles in Naples. In return, there are indications that Juan de Valdez may have adopted the doctrine of predestination from Vermigli.

In 1541, the year that Calvin returned to Geneva, Vermigli moved north as the prior of San Frediano in Lucca (the Lateran Congregation of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine), where he tried to reform the ecclesiastical life of the city. He set up a humanist College modelled on the newly founded St John's College, Cambridge, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He came to be called the “Italian Calvin” because of the two men’s later friendship and theological similarity. Numbers of the former canons who taught at San Frediano during Vermigli's priory, all humanist scholars, later converted to Protestantism, including Girolamo Zanchi, Paolo Lacizi, Celio Secondo Curione, and Count Massimiliano Celso Martinenghi. Some 18 of the fellows (including Immanuel Tremellius) also left the Catholic Church, many to become Protestants (Austin 2002). Paul III however instituted the Roman Inquisition, and the city of Lucca was commencing to crack down on its reputation as a haven of Protestantism, causing Vermigli to renounce his vows and flee his homeland for the Protestant enclave of Strasbourg. Vermigli fled Lucca for Pisa on 12 August 1542 by horse with three of his canons. Stopping at Badia Fiesolana he spoke to the popular preacher Bernardino Ochino, and convinced him to flee Italy as well. In Strasbourg, Martin Bucer provided him with refuge in the College of St Thomas, where he taught Old Testament from the original text, and he was joined by Lacizi and Tremellius. He married a former nun from Metz named Catherine Dammartin (d. 1553), “a lover of true religion,” especially admired for her charity. At the core of the continental reformed teaching, his intellectual leadership was now recognized across Europe.

In 1547, then, both Peter Martyr and Ochino were invited by Thomas Cranmer to help the newly independent Church of England with Reformed theology as Regius Chair of Divinity at Oxford. There he lectured on Romans, produced various theological treatises, debated Catholics, and assisted Cranmer in reforming the Church of England by revising the Prayer Book, in the formulation of the Forty-Two Articles (later condensed to the authoritative Thirty-Nine Articles), participated in a commission to rewrite the canon law of England (the Reformation of Ecclesiastical Laws) from 1551–1553. In 1549, his attacks on Catholic doctrine sparked the Disputation on the Eucharist: during which he debated three Catholic apologists, William Tresham, William Chedsey and Morgan Phillips. Anti-protestant riots shortly thereafter caused him to flee to Canterbury to dwell with Cranmer. Though he was able to return to Oxford, and was made first canon of Christ Church in January 1551, opponents to this first married priest bringing his wife into his chambers saw his windows smashed, forcing him to build and work in a fortified stone study.

In 1553, with the death of Edward VI, Vermigli (under house arrest) was forced to flee back to Strasbourg with the enthronement of Mary, again teaching at the Senior School. His pious, caring wife Catherine, had died in the February before Vermigli left -- when he did, his old friend Reginald Pole had her body disinterred and thrown on a dungheap. Under Elizabeth's rule, she was re-interred with the relics of Saint Frithuswith in Christ Church Cathedral. Vermigli's theological justification for Elizabeth's Royal Supremacy become one of the bases for the 1559 Elizabethan Settlement establishing Prayer Book Anglicanism as the state religion. In Strasbourg, Vermigli taught and wrote theology, gathered with Marian exiles in his home to study and pray. He also taught moral philosophy on the basis of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and disputed with Lutherans in support of the doctrine of predestination.

Finally, in 1556, Vermigli accepted Heinrich Bullinger’s offer to succeed Konrad Pellikan at the Academy of Zurich. He received many invitations to lecture throughout Europe, including invitations from Calvin to teach in Geneva and pastor the Italian congregation, but he remained in Zurich. In 1561 he participated in the Colloquy of Poissy with Theodore Beza, where he debated Catholic leaders before the French court, and to Catherine de’ Medici in her native Italian. In 1559, he married for a second time in Zurich to Caterina Merenda.

Vermigli died in Zurich on 12 November 1562. Simler and Bullinger were among those by his side. In his lifetime, he had only published three commentaries (Corinthians, Romans, Judges). Another four were edited posthumously. His moral philosophy lectures were also published posthumously by his former personal secretary and assistant, Giulio Santerenziano, making him one of the few Reformation theologians who also published philosophy. The fact that 'there is a strong scholastic substratum in his theology that depends upon [Thomas Aquinas and Gregory of Rimini] more than upon any other medieval theologian', has led authors such as Donnelly to refer to his 'Calvinist Thomism'. Caterina survived him, marrying a merchant of Locarno. His only child to live past infancy was a daughter, Maria, who was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1563, and who went on to marry Paul Zanin, a Swiss citizen.

Vermigli's influence continued to spread after his death. In 1576, his scholia or topoi (treatments of various “topics” in the Aristotelian style), in his biblical commentaries were gathered by Robert Le Maçon and published in London as the Loci Communes (“Common Places”) The Loci Communes were 'one of the most significant theological works of the later sixteenth century' (Castaldo). There were over a dozen editions following its initial publication in 1576 and it was a central vehicle for spreading Reformed theology throughout Europe. It was widely used in the New World as well. This as much as anything made Peter Martyr a significant contributor to the codification of Reformed theology. His Defence of the orthodox doctrine of the Eucharist against Stephen Gardiner became a definitive text for reformed believers. Baschera (2011) notes that he was no mere disciple of Calvin, but an original thinker, whose philosophical precision had a profound impact on Beza, Ursinus, Zanchi, and the Canons of Dordt.

Sources:

• Austin, Kenneth. (2002), From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (1510-1580), PhD thesis, University of St Andrew's.
• Baschera, Luca, 'Independent Yet Harmonious: Some Remarks on the Relationship between the Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499—1562) and John Calvin', Church History and Religious Culture 91.1/2 The Reception of John Calvin and His Theology in Reformed Orthodoxy (2011), pp. 43-57
• Castaldo, Chris, 'Peter Martyr Vermigli: The Forgotten Reformer', in K. Summers and C. Castaldo, On Original Sin: Vol. I of a New Translation of the Loci Communes (1576), Davenant Press, 2019.
• McLelland, Joseph C. (ed). Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform, Waterloo, ONT: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.
• Sytsma, David S., 'Vermigli Replicating Aquinas: An Overlooked Continuity in the Doctrine of Predestination', Reformation & Renaissance Review 20.2 (2018), pp. 155–167.