These two volumes each contribute important revisionist scholarship on the role of the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages. The making of medieval antifraternalism comprehensively reframes the traditional understanding of the clerical and popular response to the Dominicans and Franciscans beginning with William of St Amour, while Creating Augustine reexamines the strategies of self-legitimation employed by the Order of Hermits of St Augustine (OESA) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Both are essential works for specialists in their respective fields, and each helps to re-envision the role of the friars in our understanding of medieval spirituality, politics and culture.

Geltner comes to Medieval antifraternalism with a monograph on medieval prisons, an edited collection reassessing Fleming's landmark study on Franciscan literature, and an edition of De periculus novissimorum temporum in the bag. These provide an apt backdrop for the driving thesis of the current book: that ‘antifraternalism’, traditionally understood to be a byproduct of the friars' failure to live up to their own rigorous standards (along with their involvement in the implementation and administration of the inquisition), was in fact a discourse of victimisation consciously promoted by the friars, even as that discourse reveals the rewriting of the grammar of symbolic power relations in medieval society. Geltner effortlessly segues from analysis of texts and textual reception to social and quantitative methodologies, offering a reading of the Roman de la rose and Chaucer while also casting a sceptical eye over documentary evidence of aggression against the friars throughout Europe. The overarching contribution of the book is to place antifraternalism into the same contexts of rhetoric and social dynamic that have redefined the study of heresiology: antifraternalism, while unquestionably a real, physical phenomenon in many cases, should none the less be understood as a rhetorical, polemical production that the friars themselves contributed to as part of a Christoform ‘lachrymose history’ that had the effect of ‘bolstering their social memory and identity, on the one hand, and enhancing their political status, on the other’ (p. 132).

The overall structure of the book falls into two parts. First, Geltner analyses the context of anticlerical polemic and violence, building on his study of William of St Amour to isolate William's radical ecclesiology as far more isolated and idiosyncratic than is traditionally understood, and circumscribing the scope of its impact on literary antifraternalism. His analysis of incidents of violence against friars demonstrates that such acts reveal more about the symbolic shifts in urban society, and intraclerical tensions, than a coherent, theologically-driven reaction. In part ii Geltner turns to the records of the Dominicans and Franciscans to identify the internal actions of the orders to curb deviance, before highlighting the construction of a lachrymose narrative of persecution (the term comes from Jewish historiography, about which Geltner expresses appropriate reservations in drawing comparisons) that placed the mendicants' self-perception in an ideological history dating back to Perpetua and Cyprian. His conclusion takes aim at several tropes of traditional antifraternal scholarship: Geltner broadens the field of representative texts; complicates the social and ecclesiastical spheres in which, and reasons for which, resentment against the friars accumulated; and undermines the idea that antifraternalism functions as semaphore for the anticlerical reforms of modernity, beginning with the Reformation. In sum, the text reframes antifraternalism as ideological production on the part of both the friars and their critics, while highlighting the social dynamics of urbanisation and ‘symbolic violence’ that antifraternalism reveals.

Saak's Creating Augustine builds on a record of scholarship in Augustinianism and the OESA, notably his High way to heaven (Leiden–Boston 2002), a massive study of the Augustinian order, and Saak's involvement in the forthcoming Oxford guide to the historical reception of Augustine. A detour from Saak's announced trilogy on late medieval Augustinianism, this monograph is a focused attempt to develop a ‘historical Augustinianism’, an identifier owing less to the prescriptive theological or political agendas of historians and more to ‘the historical understanding, the historical intellectus’ (p. 19) in which a particular social group – the OESA – constructed itself on the myth of the religio Augustini. This hermeneutical question of an Augustinian Wirkungsgechichte preoccupies Saak, but to this reader more illuminating is his reexamination of Oberman's ‘Augustinian Renaissance’ in the fourteenth century, and his argument that this renaissance owes its existence less to Rimini and Bradwardine's campaign ‘contra Pelagianos modernos’ and more to the need of the OESA to locate the origin of its rule in Augustine himself in order to circumvent Lateran IV's restrictions on new religious orders, and in the context of rivalry with Franciscan presumption to prestige among the mendicants (notably, with the representation of Augustine as alter christus). Saak does some fine work in identifying how library holdings in Augustine's writings figure in the renaissance, shows the social function and fluidity of the Sermones ad fratres in eremo, and tracks the iconography of Augustine (via a slightly over-complicated calculus of representation and interpretation of images as mythic cultural artifacts) in image and text through the turn of the sixteenth century.

The upshot of Saak's work is that Augustine, a ‘created saint’ (p. 222), as a function of memory, representation and social legitimation, enabled the OESA to self-present as the true religio Augustini, as the ‘body’ of Augustine in late medieval society. The implications of this thesis are not only in reassessing teleological arguments that link the ‘Augustinian renaissance’ with the Reformation, but also in assisting contemporary scholarship to get a firmer fix on the immensely complicated reception history of Augustine in the Middle Ages, the ways that reception history is tied up in the social and political rivalries of the mendicant orders, and providing clarification on the discipline of intellectual history itself.

Taken together, the books of Geltner and Saak provide compelling histories that revise, reframe and reinvigorate the study of the mendicant orders in the Middle Ages. Both are well aware that they are wading into deep traditions of scholarship, are deeply versed in the literature yet nimbly interdisciplinary, and yet are appropriately realistic in their ambitions. They will be most useful to fellow specialists or upper graduate level students.