As Beatus Rhenanus, undoubtedly one of the greatest promoters of patristic scholarship in the early modern period, wrote in the preface to his 1523 collection of church historians: ‘One could certainly wonder why the writers of ecclesiastical history [...] are being neglected as if they weren’t worthy of being taken in hand.’ Until recently, one could with equal astonishment ask why modern researchers have largely ignored the enthusiasm for the Church Fathers and early church historians that was instigated in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by such figures as Ambrogio Traversari, Beatus Rhenanus, Erasmus of Rotterdam and a great many similar-minded scholars. The age of Renaissance and Reformation, it is increasingly recognized, was marked not only by a new era in the reception of classical antiquity, but also the beginning of ‘nearly three centuries of unprecedented developments’ in the field of patristics. In this period, well-known Church Fathers were disseminated in new, ground-breaking editions, many hitherto lost Greek church authors were rediscovered and made available in the original language or in translation, and patristic texts were closely read by the many, often feuding, confessional groups who sought answers to the questions that had been raised by contemporary debates about the past and present of the church.