In the middle of the sixteenth century, Calvin and Viret established the outlines of an anti-relic polemic which formed a part of the larger controversy with Rome. In its insistence on the primacy of Word and Spirit, the prohibition of idolatrous images, and a new view on death and the dead, their criticism drew on Erasmus, on the Zwinglian ‘evangelicals’, and in particular on Bullinger. After the Council of Trent, relics became one of the confessional markers which bound the Protestant world together and set it apart from the Catholics.