ABSTRACT
Any analysis of antifraternal polemics in the Reformation necessarily must begin with Paul Nyhus’s question of what happened to the vitality of the mendicant orders between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The obvious explanation for the apparent eclipse of the friars as the intellectual and spiritual leaders of Christendom rests on the assumption that the mendicant orders of the later Middle Ages were unable to maintain the high standards established by their founders and early adherents. Such an explanation assumes that religious orders follow an organic life cycle: as they age the strength of adherence to their original ideals is sapped until replaced by a new vitality in the form of a reform movement. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then, the friars gradually fell away from the ideals of Francis and Dominic. As a result, discipline within the orders was relaxed, the friars became more worldly, the contrast between their lives and their ideals became more obvious, and the early enthusiasm of the laity for the friars and their vision of the apostolic ideal was eroded. When the Christian Renais sance of the humanists and the Reformation arrived on the stage, the mendicant orders were only a shadow of their former greatness, and they amounted to little more than houses of cards which were easily toppled by the telling and accurate criticisms of the humanists and Reformers.
