CORPUS REFORMATORUM. - Since the 19th 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 having a certain authority. These religious writings, imposed in the intention of their authors as rules of faith and of teaching "so that the faithful might have a right concept of God and worthily invoke him, for the concord of the Church and to curb the audacity of always inventing new dogmas," were very numerous, so much so that as early as 1560 the need arose to gather them into particular collections, about a dozen in number, which generally took their name from the Protestant region where they were compiled.
The first collection in order of time was drawn up by Philip Melanchthon, the technician of Luther's theology, in 1560, and was therefore called the Corpus Philippicum; it was presented at first 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 one another 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 with a letter of preface signed by 49 princes and 35 cities, there appeared the Liber Concordiae or simply the Concordia, with the aim of reviving doctrinal agreement and thus union among the various dissident regions, and which instead was the cause and origin of new and more bitter polemics. A few years later, in 1626, a final collection was drawn up in Hesse, the C. Hassiacum, which however has not been included in the C. R.
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Sebastiano Ferri