The use of the term anti-clericalism for a variety of structurally unrelated phenomena has, for the most part, been rejected by German medievalscholarship, while many English-speaking historians and literary scholars use it in order to denote continuities from the Late Middle Ages to the Reformation period. This article seeks to utilize the term anticlericalism, which is admittedly inadequate for the internal differentiation of movements and phenomena, to contextualize texts and groups criticizing the clergy, pointing to similarities between anticlerical and orthodox ideologies, specifically anti-Judaism and antifeminism. This allows for both the points of rupture between the Catholic andanti-clerical movements and the importance of anti-clericalism as an indicator of the epochal break between the Middle Ages and the early modern period to be put into perspective.