Many of the leading figures in the Reformation and many of their most able opponents came from the ranks of the mendicant friars. In 1523 converts to the Reformation waged a pamphlet war against the Franciscan Order. Criticisms of the Franciscans, also applied to other mendicants, were based on arguments raised by Luther in his 'Judgement on Monastic Vows', and the pamphlets provided an important channel for these views.

Luther's arguments were also reinforced by criticism of the mendicant orders drawn from medieval polemical and satirical literature. The campaign of 1523 brought together both Reformation and pre-Reformation anticlerical themes.

1. This book looks at the perception of the mendicant orders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, placing the attacks on them firmly in the context of late medieval inter-clerical rivalries, and examining, in particular, the anticlerical polemics of Johann Eberlin von Gunzburg - one of the primary participants, and the most vocal of the Franciscans' critics.