CORPUS REFORMATORUM. — Since the nineteenth century, this title has designated a grand collection of the works of the writers of the Reformation. Still in the course of publication, it also gathers confessions of faith and points of doctrine possessing a certain authority. These religious writings, imposed in the authors’ intention as rules of faith and teaching, “so that the faithful might have a correct conception of God and invoke him worthily, for the concord of the Church and to restrain the audacity of continually inventing dogmas,” were so numerous that, as early as 1560, it became necessary to gather them into particular collections, about a dozen in number, which generally took their names from the Protestant region where they were compiled.
The first collection in chronological order was prepared by Filippo Melantone, the technical theologian of Luther, in 1560, and was therefore called Corpus Philippicum; it was initially presented as a private collection and then imposed, by order of certain heads of state, upon all the Protestant regions. Almost all the other collections that followed until 1580, namely the C. Hamburgicum (1560), the C. doctrinae urbis Brunswicki (1563), the C. Pomeranicum (1566), the C. Pratenicum (1567), the C. Turingicum (1570), the C. Brandenburgicum (1572), the C. Norinbergense (1573), the C. Wilhelminum (1575), and the C. Iulianum (1576), were compiled precisely to oppose the imposition of the Melanchthonian texts. These collections, however, lost their importance when, on 25 June 1580, solemnly proclaimed at Dresden in a prefatory letter signed by 49 princes and 35 cities, the Liber Concordiae, or simply Concordia, appeared, with the aim of reviving doctrinal agreement and consequently union among the various dissident regions, but which instead became the cause and origin of new and more bitter controversies. A few years later, in 1626, a final collection, the C. Hassiacum, was compiled in Hesse; it, however, was not included in the C. R.