During the sixteenth century the Church in the West ceased to be a single body of the faithful. The Protestant reformers brought about a division in which lay many further divisions. Thomas Stapleton (1535–98), the English Catholic polemicist, sneers at the multiplicity and confusion of protestant beliefs:

In the web of politics, social and economic change and religious and theological developments which brought about this fragmentation one continuous thread is visible from at least the beginning of the fourteenth century. Those scholars and preachers and demagogues (Marsilius of Padua, Wyclif and the Lollards, the Hussites, for example) who challenged the authority of the Church as it was then institutionally constituted, held up the authority of the Bible in its place and argued that the interpretation of Scripture was no matter for the Church to regulate if by the Church was meant the Pope and his cardinals. Instead, the individual must read for himself under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The study of the Bible had always formed the basis of Christian theological endeavour; so much so that it was not until the twelfth or thirteenth century that the word ‘theology’ came into use in the schools of the West alongside ‘the study of the Sacred Page’.