ABSTRACT
At the height of heretical accusation by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Brethren of the Free Spirit emerged as perhaps the most antinomian group of the High Middle Ages. They are, in the course of history, one of the most obvious, yet unnoticed millennial groups of the past two thousand years. Their followers did not fit any schema; there were the rich and the poor, men, women, and children. They believed in their equality with Christ, yet in a desire to achieve eternal salvation, followed the vita apostolica (apostolic life). While the papacy did not call a crusade against them, as they did against the wellknown Cathars in the early thirteenth century, and while they were not as popular as the aforementioned group, the Free Spirit were a blatant threat to the papacy and to Western Latin theology.
