I SEE nothing in this tract to give us any certainty as to its authorship. It is simply an enumeration of the faults charged against the religious orders, thrown into the form of a wish that they may be avoided.
The special points for notice are the mention of astronomy among the subjects taught in the religious schools (No. 39), and the complaint that the friars were "too homely with gentlewomen by colour of physic" (No. 38), (cf. Prof. Brewer's preface to Monumenta Franciscana, pp. xliii-xlvi). The same charge is made in the tract Of the Leaven of Pharisees. The abuse of bishoprics in partibus infidelium conferred on men who only desire episcopal orders for the profit to be made of them at home (No. 40) is, I think, mentioned nowhere else in this volume. It is attacked in the Great Sentence of Curse (S.E.W. III. 300).
We may see from No. 42 the kind of retort made by the friars on the poor preachers.
The only indication of date is in No. 26, where we learn that one of the points of the poor preachers was the application of the prophecies of Antichrist to the Pope. The preachers are not likely to have begun with arguments of this kind. Still we cannot lay much stress on this argument; such use of prophecy had long been familiar to the Fraticelli.
Copied from the Corpus MS. X. and collated with the Dublin MS. AA.
I have omitted the usual summary as useless with a mere list like this.
