The Italian Church of London

Sixteenth-century London played host to the formation of a small but lively Italian Protestant community, which worshiped at Mercers’ Chapel in Cheapside. By 1598, as the major influx of religious exiles progressively ended, the Italian Reformed Church ceased to exist. After some ten years, the church reopened in 1609. This chapter reconstructs the seventeenth-century vicissitudes of the Italian Church of London and its links with the Church of England. The Italian Protestant church in London dissolved probably around 1663, never adopted Anglican worship, and both from the institutional and the liturgical points of view had always been a Calvinist church.