In forty-one essays eminent historians of culture, religion, and social history redefine and redirect the debate regarding the scope and impact of European anticlericalism during the period 1300-1700. The meaning of reform and resentment is here clearly articulated.

Traditionally anticlericalism has been regarded as a significant historical factor, by some historians even as the unifying focal point for the host of movements known as the Reformation of the sixteenth century. In forty-one essays eminent historians of culture, religion, and society redefine and redirect the debate regarding the scope and impact of European anticlericalism during the period 1300-1700. The meaning of reform and resentment is here clearly articulated and the sentiments are analyzed which were directed first against all levels of the Roman hierarchy and later as well against the evangelical pastor. Using sources drawn from a wide variety of city and village archives, of literary genres and theological tracts, the articles presented here uncover the clusters of reform hope and bitter resentment directed toward parish priest, monk, bishop and pope, in addition to the early Protestant clergy. The volume highlights the continuity and discontinuity of anticlerical passion, language, goals and actions between the late medieval and Reformation periods.

Many of the leading figures of the Reformation and many of their most able opponents came from among the ranks of the Franciscan Order. This Order became the focus of attack in a pamphlet war waged against it in 1523 by converts to the Reformation. These criticisms were based on arguments 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 criticisms of the mendicant orders drawn from medieval polemical and satirical literature. The campaign of 1523 brought together both Reformation and pre-Reformation anticlerical themes. In this book Geoffrey Dipple looks at the perception of the Franciscan order in the 15th and 16th centuries, placing the attacks firmly in the context of late medieval inter-clerical rivalries. He looks particularly at the anticlerical polemics of one of the primary participants - Johann Eberlin von Günzburg - the most vocal of the Franciscan’s critics.

Here leading religious historians examine the ways anticlericalism manifested itself in Britain.

This contextualised study illuminates the oft-misunderstood aspects of Richard Baxter's ecclesiology: purity, unity, and liberty. In doing so, it sheds further light on the nature of seventeenth-century English Puritanism, and the quest for the true church and the corresponding conflicts between the Laudians and Puritans.