 Bruno’s several clashes with ecclesiastical authorities testify to his impatience with Christianity of whatever shade. The sectarian violence that plagued the sixteenth century plainly showed that it had done the very opposite of what religion should do, “bind” men and women together, an allusion to an etymological derivation of the Latin word religio from religo, “I bind”, commonly invoked by Latin authors of all periods (BOL II.2, 181). There are, however, many indications that Bruno found Protestantism the more irksome variant. Above all Protestants’ denial of the efficacy of “good works” and free will and, conversely, their emphasis on the inner spirit, predestination and justification through “faith alone”, were unconducive to civil order, political stability and material prosperity. At several points Bruno’s turn of phrase suggests that his attack on Protestant theology was directed in the first instance against Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will (1525) and that, in formulating his riposte, he drew on Erasmus’s On Free Will (1524), the work that had prompted Luther to write his treatise in the first place.