Contemporary ecumenism is a revival of a Reformation ideal. The Colloquy of Poissy was the last great expression expression of that ideal. At the colloquy, held in1561 on the eve of the French religious wars, revived Catholicism and emergent international Protestantism met in an attempt to establish peace, unity, and reconciliation of differing viewpoints. Ahistory of this great conference reveals how unfinished was the Reformation and how tragic a turnit had taken.

This work on the colloquy presents the dialecticalcomplexities of the sixteenth-century theology--atheology that had...