The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance by Guy Geltner (review)

Antifraternalism, criticism of the mendicant friars, is probably most familiar through characters such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Friar John or False Seeming from the Romance of the Rose. Although scholars have long argued about how accurately these literary types reflect the lives (and vices) of medieval friars, that debate has rested largely on evidence drawn from literary sources and theological polemics of the friars’ opponents within the Church. With this book, Guy Geltner offers us a new definition of antifraternalism based on a much broader range of source material.

Geltner divides his study into two parts composed of two chapters each. Part 1 concentrates on criticisms leveled at the friars by their opponents. Chapter 1 revisits the traditional antifraternal corpus, the theological and literary sources critical of the friars. By most accounts, at the root of these are polemics arising from conflicts between secular and mendicant masters at the University of Paris in the 1250s, especially criticisms of the friars contained in William of St. Amour’s On the Dangers of the Last Times (1256). Geltner argues that although later antifraternal authors did build on St. Amour’s exegesis and repeat many of his charges against the friars, his challenge to the very legitimacy of their existence was atypical of most subsequent criticism of the friars that aimed at their reform rather than their eradication. Chapter 2 identifies other sources of antifraternal activity through an investigation of accounts of violence directed against the friars (gleaned from court records between the early-thirteenth century and the end of the fourteenth). These reveal a modest yet consistent rate of aggression against the friars, but no common motivation rooted in antimendicant sentiment derived from the rhetoric of St. Amour.

In part 2 Geltner investigates how the friars themselves contributed to the development of antifraternalism. Chapter 3 concludes, on the basis of evidence drawn from the mendicant orders’ records, that there was some substance behind the polemics of their opponents. The friars did often behave badly, and given the public nature of their mission, this was cause for scandal. Chapter 4 then surveys how the friars’ chroniclers portrayed the conflicts and violent episodes in which the orders were involved. Geltner characterizes this record as a lachrymose history, which sought to portray the friars as vanguards of the Church by emphasizing the Christological dimension and eschatological significance of their suffering, but, in the process, highlighted their contentiousness and misconduct. This led the chroniclers to focus on the conflicts at the University of Paris, which are thereby returned to a central position in the history of medieval antifraternalism.

This is a short book, and at times the reader is left wishing for more detail about the intricate interplay of polemic, violence, deviance, and remembrance in the development of medieval antifraternalism. In addition, elements of the first three chapters have already appeared in print elsewhere, and a number of Geltner’s criticisms of the reigning model of antifraternalism elaborate on the work of other scholars. But this also is an important book. It provides us with a significant corrective to an over-reliance on evidence from literary and theological works in understanding criticisms of the friars in the Middle Ages, and Geltner’s argument for the contribution of the friars’ own historiography to the development of the antifraternal tradition offers a whole new perspective on that process. Most important, however, Geltner brings this material together in a call for a comprehensive revision of how we think about antifraternalism.