the main determinant of religious thought in the fourteenth century, which would eventually affect every aspect of public worship and private prayer, was the concentrated effort, in the previous century, to marshal, state logically and resolve questions according to an agreed theological language, establishing thereby a coherent method of religious education. The enduring issues of God’s relation to the world, the human soul and the nature of redemption were not resolved, but they had been successfully contained within an abstract and largely Aristotelian language, and were generally discussed by a trained and conscious elite at Paris or its satellites in Oxford, Cambridge and the schools of the friars. The attempt to resolve them had created and continued to create philosophical syntheses of greater or less cohesion. That of Thomas Aquinas, promoted by the Order of Preachers and universally known after his canonisation in 1323, was matched in the first decades of the century by the more amorphous body of ideas associated with the Franciscan doctors Duns Scotus, Peter Auriol and François de Meyronnes: among whom the influence of current logic brought about, some twenty years later, a critical reexamination of theological language, associated with William of Ockham, and as the moral and social aspects of religious thinking began to dominate debate, a vigorous return to Augustinian ideas. These bodies of ideas did not create distinct schools of thought: virtually all theologians of the fourteenth century were independent thinkers who can be classified as Augustinians, Thomists, Scotists or followers of the via moderna – only in a broad sense.