.
A popular example of this was Thomas Bradwardine's "The Cause of God Against the Pelagians". In this essay, Bradwardine uses the Scholastic Method to reconcile his beliefs of predestination versus free will. Bradwardine guards the Augustinian teaching of predestination and argues in the essay against the Pelagian belief of free will.
As one can imagine, this can be a very heavy weight to carry throughout life. Among all of the anxiety of afterlife and doing good works, the Church was conducting much corruption and problems that would later be attacked by reformers.
When joining a monastery, a monk takes certain Benedictine Vows that include the vows of obedience, poverty, and conversion of ways. Along with their vows, they had requirements to pray for the community, live religiously all day and night long, have high levels of devotion, aim to imitate Christ, and find paths for salvation. The monks, however, began to stray from this way of life. So, when Thomas a Kempis wrote his "The Imitation of Christ", it came as no surprise. Kempis wrote this essay to use as a manual to teach monks and get broader participation in laity. He accused the monks of being too social, too vain, no longer feeling contrition, and not prepared for their deaths and salvation.
Women, on the other hand, had the option of joining beguines, which was not necessarily a nun, but they lived in convent-like communities without actually taking the formal vow and had minimal connections to the local church hierarchy. The beguines became suspect, however, because clerics, believed they rejected the traditional moral leadership of the male clergy. They were forced to shut down for a few reasons. One, while the women were in these communities, they were unable to procreate and two, there was a huge profit to the city when these convents dissolved and the city would receive money for selling the land.
If an individual was accused of heresy, there were certain processes that would be followed.
