It was under such conditions of strife and disturbance, of contests political and religious, of wars civil and foreign, of revolts against the Church, and of fresh assumptions on the part of the Church against any liberty of action for the community or for the individual, that the life-work of Robert Estienne was begun. He was born in 1503, and appears to have imbibed his scholarly interests and to have secured his early scholarly training principally from the learned men who had served as correctors of the press for his father, Henry. Henry died in 1520, and his widow married, in 1522, Simon de Colines, whose work as a typographer has already been referred to. Robert speedily became the assistant of his step-father, and the first important undertaking entrusted to him was the supervision through the press of an edition of the _Novum Testamentum_.[7] The text followed the version of the Vulgate, but the youthful editor found occasion for certain corrections. The textual changes ventured upon in the volume at once called forth criticism from the divines of the Sorbonne, who were already raising objections to any general dissemination of the Scriptures, and Robert found himself classed with the group of heretical persons who required watching. This reputation clung to him through all his career, and the hostility of the divines, thus early aroused, was never withdrawn. According to Robert’s correspondence, he held himself always ready to justify on critical grounds and by theological arguments the corrections in the Vulgate text upon which he had ventured. The divines, however, while continuing their invectives from their instructors’ Chairs and even from the pulpit, took pains to avoid any direct controversy on the points at issue.[8]