SOME of the most cherished arrangements, the most comforting statements, the most confident claims about the nature of a society living under a divinely sanctioned sacramental–sacerdotal order, were given very different meanings in late medieval Prague, Paris and Pontefract. Such divergence and difference had always been a pattern of European life, as variety applied not only to climate, economic systems, language and political institutions, but also to devotional styles. The consolidation of sameness which was attempted – and to a significant extent achieved – by the church between 1100 and 1300, was offered through a single system of law, of preferment, of ritual. This was embedded within a set of understandings about the relationship of ecclesiastical hierarchy to salvation as well as to social order. Yet by around 1400 doubt and discomfort had attached to several of the touchstones of this world view – eucharist, pope, clergy – and thus hindered the flow of communication and cooperation which both underpinned and represented it. The authority to discern truth was in the hands of rulers and prelates who, in turn, were empowered or catalysed by professional thinkers and communicators – scholars, preachers, teachers, lawyers and poets. Words mattered greatly because they could conjure a vision of possible peace and remedy. They were spoken in tens of universities, hundreds of city councils, in a growing number of representative assemblies. Polities – be they territorial lordships, cities or even at times the Emperor – were pressing these thinkers and communicators to help in the work towards revival, purification and healing, away and against schism, pollution and war. How is the confidence to judge and discern spiritual and ethical truth ever regained by institutions or by individuals? More than ever before we witness preoccupation with the re-ordering of a Christian world through the re-establishment of social, economic and ethical order.