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One of the most difficult elements of Wyclif’s thought is resolution of the tension between his deterministic understanding of the nature of the church and his call for ecclesiastical reform. Augustine theology has long been defined by the problem of predestination, and Bradwardine had famously attacked the “Pelagianism” of the Ockhamists in his strongly deterministic De Causa Dei. Wyclif’s thought is an attempt at balancing Bradwardine’s determinism by a carefully articulated modal account of necessity, allowing for a stronger degree of reciprocity between God’s necessary understanding of creation and human free will than Bradwardine had allowed. This opened Wyclif’s conception of the church as the unknowable body of the Elect to the possibility of reform. While his writings are filled with references to Antichrist, Wyclif followed Augustine in rejecting millennialism, arguing that Antichrist’s threat in the form of papalism and friars was ongoing, but ultimately able to be resolved.

This chapter examines the literature associated with the medieval antifraternal tradition, a corpus of texts supposedly inspired by the Parisian theologian William of St Amour (d. c.1273) and united in its call to eradicate the mendicant orders. By looking at both doctrinal and literary texts composed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it demonstrates that few authors actually adhered to William’s ecclesiology, rendering his magnum opus something of a false start. While theologians mostly shied away from rejecting the orthodoxy of religious mendicancy, authors of poetry and prose fiction appropriated themes and ideas from William’s works in ways far removed from his reactionary writings. Thus, insofar as there was a medieval literary antifraternal tradition, it is comprised predominantly of theological treatises that criticized but did not abhor the friars and works belonging to the polyvalent realm of estates satire.

Based on numerous sources both in and out of print, this chapter establishes the scale and scope of aggression against friars across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It documents a modest, if consistent, rate of physical aggression: a surprise for those (including medieval mendicants) who assumed or sought to establish major and continuous suffering. As for scope, a careful examination of more than 100 cases reveals a wide range of goals and motivations for targeting the brethren, be it as aliens, political scapegoats, landlords, abusers of privileges, or even innocent bystanders in military campaigns and factional struggles. The friars’ ubiquity, accessibility, and wealth thus often put them in the line of fire, and yet there were few signs of contemporaries’ desire to see the brethren disappear from the urban landscape.

This chapter tracks religious mendicants’ gross misbehavior as it emerges mostly from the orders’ internal documents. Rather than taking polemicists and other authors at their word, it carefully gauges the frequency and profile of deviance among the brethren, especially but not exclusively Dominicans. Given the brethren’s strong presence in urban centers and in episcopal and secular courts, their misconduct was hard to conceal and even harder to dismiss in light of the ideals they stood for: humility, obedience, and poverty. Deviance, in turn, exacerbated pressures created by the friars’ growing number of antagonists, both within and outside the church, who were able to manipulate potentially isolated events to their own benefit in the context of local and regional power struggles.

Medieval mendicants took a more conscious and active role than is commonly thought in forging an antifraternal tradition. Bringing together a variety of texts and images, this chapter documents the ways in which friars and their coeval and later advocates perceived of and represented their own victimhood as a form of Christological suffering. Jointly they helped to turn what appears to be (on the basis of previous chapters) a limited phenomenon into a major cornerstone of the mendicants’ social memory. And, although different orders made different contributions to this effort, in retrospect they fused somewhat disparate incidents into a misleadingly cohesive, lachrymose narrative, which enabled them to perpetuate yet another antifraternal tradition under the legitimizing guise of mendicant suffering and martyrdom.

In the speeches of Ami and especially of La Vielle and Faux Semblant, human beings are shown to be marked by a dangerous animality that they can mask with an artificiality, figured through images of clothing. La Vielle parodies Boethius’s Lady Philosophia to put forward a suspect ethics of desire, rethinking the idea of freedom in relation to the sexual drive. In Faux Semblant Jean de Meun draws on a tradition of antifraternalism to attack the alleged hypocrisy of friars and to suggest a broader understanding of hypocrisy as a characteristic of human social behaviour. Accordingly, Amant is shown to be a suspect figure whose word cannot be trusted and the Rose itself shares this suspicion. The text’s own strategies of mendacity are seen as both a trap for readers and an ethical test.

For some writers, Chaucer’s portrait of the Friar, along with that of Friar John in the ‘Summoner’s Tale’, meant that Chaucer should appear in the gallery of medieval antifraternal authors, alongside writers such as William of St Amour, Jean de Meun, Giovanni Boccaccio, and John Wyclif. Yet a closer look at the Friar’s fabrication raises doubts about Chaucer’s rejection of religious mendicancy and the extent to which his writings may parallel, or even reflect, Lollard-style anticlericalism and/or foreshadow Reformation abolitionism. While Friar Huberd is satirized in the ‘General Prologue’ for his many failings, his depiction can be seen as highlighting the ambiguity of Chaucer’s position and the dialogic nature of his work rather than placing him in one corner or the other of an ecclesiological debate.