The interrogations carried out in the case of the Świdnica beguines in 1332 represented the implementation of the decisions of the Council of Vienne (1311–12), which accused the beguines of organizing informal religious communities and having links with heresy. The Cum de quibusdam and Ad nostrum constitutions worked out during the course of the Council challenged the raison d’être of the whole beguine movement and placed a question mark over the further functioning of their religious communities. In effect, Cum de quibusdam instructed the liquidation of beguine and beghard houses which functioned outside the structures of tertiaries, who were supervised by mendicant priories, while Ad nostrum accused the beguines of propagating the Heresy of the Free Spirit, which was condemned by the Council. Beguines were accused of lacking the necessary education to discuss the mystery of the Holy Trinity and other theological questions within their own circles. Key among the views condemned in Ad nostrum was the opinion censured by the Council Fathers that spiritual perfection and union with God could be attained without the pastoral services of the Church. Both Council documents became a turning point in the history of the beguines and beghards. The Council of Vienne regarded the further activities of this movement as a threat to the unity of the Church and Catholic orthodoxy. Based on obligatory Church regulations, Cum de quibusdam categorically forbade the continued existence of religious communities which did not adopt a monastic rule approved by the Church. Ad nostrum argued that groups of beguines and beghards were hotbeds of dangerous heresy that preached radical mysticism and pantheism.

Sometimes the restrictive regulations of the Council of Vienne are linked with the trial of Marguerite Porete, French mystic beguine, who was burned at the stake in May 1310. The Church authorities regarded her opus, Le miroir des âmes simples, a handbook of spiritual life dated to 1306, as being heretical and forbade its distribution. Porete's treatise, steeped in subtle mysticism, described the individual's way to attaining spiritual union with God, in whom a person freed herself from earthly desires and sins.