The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism

‘Antifraternalism’ has become a term commonly used in medieval studies to refer to the criticism of friars; that is, members of the uncloistered religious orders that developed in Europe from the early thirteenth century. In this long essay, Guy Geltner makes the argument that what has hitherto been seen largely as a literary discourse and as a precondition of the Protestant reformation can, in fact, only be understood if social history is brought into dialogue with literary history, and if teleological interpretations are cast aside. Geltner has recently produced a new edition and translation of the polemical text that is usually seen as the representative and original work of medieval antifraternal rhetoric: William of St Amour’s On the Dangers of the Last Times (1256) is a vitriolic and compellingly forceful piece of writing, urging the abolition of the mendicant orders, and it was influential in some learned circles in succeeding centuries. But it was not, as Geltner carefully demonstrates, the defining antifraternal text: most enemies of the Franciscans, Dominicans and other friars aimed at their reform or curtailment, not their abolition, making William’s text seem more like a freak high-water mark than a turning of the tide. Geltner argues, moreover, that literary antifraternalism was not a linear tradition deriving from William but a complex cultural development conditioned by the particular political and religious intentions of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean de Meun. Chaucer’s friar in The Summoner’s Tale was a vehicle for moral criticism of an ambiguous sort in which the tale-teller himself is compromised and culpable; and, rather than the friars alone, de Meun had hypocrisy more generally in his sights, using the friar figure as shorthand for a ‘false seeming’ which he diagnosed as a widespread social vice

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