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the sixteenth century or, in other words, too few bishops prepared to pursue God’s interests.32 Once Protestant ideas began to filter into France from the 1520s, the reformers saw the need to remedy the episcopate’s ills as especially pressing. Part of their response to the anti-episcopal stance of French Protestants was to emphasise the necessity for bishops within the institutional church and for successful reform with even greater urgency. Their plan of campaign was uncompromising: they agreed that episcopal residence was vital, and believed that the major
abandonment of the institutional Church and resignation to a non-interventionist God, the question of the level of forms of non-elite dissent from the Church in the early modern period cannot be irrelevant. It is surprising – with the partial exception of England – that such a question is so infrequently addressed in Enlightenment studies. Elite opinion is usually portrayed as developing without influence from the lower echelons and, in so far as elite ideas were passed down the social scale, without any intellectual reciprocity. Yet how many historians are prepared to