Sixteenth-century Switzerland was not overburdened with monasteries, which, politically and socially, posed less of a problem there than elsewhere. Some of the greater houses, Engelberg, Dissentis, Reichenau, for example, were outside the Federation, while no city state of the Federation was seriously troubled by the existence of a great monastery within its walls. Schaffhausen had indeed the Benedictine house of All Saints with which to contend, and Zurich itself had at one time been almost an appanage to or dependent upon the Fraumünster, but by the fifteenth century, the governments almost everywhere had reduced the Regulars to a state of semi-dependence.

There was not a single monastery in Uri or Unterwalden and effectively none in Schwyz; therefore there was no local feeling against them, whereas Zurich had wealthy foundations within its territory, whence they received considerable revenues. Roughly speaking, where monasteries were numerous reform was welcomed; where they were few the opposite was the case. The difference between the ‘possessionate’ monks and nuns, professedly removed from the world, devoting their whole lives to the ordered services and internal routine of their houses, and the ‘non-possessionate’ friars, preaching and begging among the people, had ceased to be a reality in the sixteenth century. They were all ‘Regulars’, with rule and a habit; some, like the Premonstratensians and Augustinians, were endowed canons with extra-mural duties; others, like the members of the order of St John of Jerusalem, had few obligations.