This focused and beautifully written study of the theory and practice of fraternal correction in late medieval England by a scholar who has devoted his career to investigating the possibilities and restrictions of Christian speech, deserves to be read, not only by students and scholars of the history of the medieval and Reformation periods, but by anyone interested in the complex questions that cluster around the ethics of critique or denunciation. Craun's first two chapters take us on an authoritative tour of fraternal correction in the largely unedited pastoralia of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: a body of moral theology in which the question of when and how it might be proper for a given member of the Christian community to call attention to the failings of another was addressed with a seriousness and flexibility that belies any view of the Latin pastoral tradition as narrowly prescriptive. The decorum imposed by the hierarchic structure of Church and society was, indeed, a factor in deciding whether reproof was legitimate, not least because it was a factor in deciding when reproof had a chance of being effective. But pastoral writing still ‘portrayed lay people, including women, and cleric subordinates as ethical agents who could resourcefully negotiate both existing power relations and ethical perplexities in carrying out correction of sin’ (p. 2). In this area, medieval pastoralia was inherently reformist. With the exception of chapter iv, a learned treatment of Wyclif's radicalising theology of correction, the other chapters turn to vernacular texts, chiefly Langland's Piers Plowman, a number of works in the Wycliffite canon, and The book of Margery Kempe, elucidating central passages of these difficult works with exemplary clarity. Craun argues for a fundamental continuity between the earlier Latin scholarly discussions and these, generally narrative, explorations of the workings of Christian community, most of them written with actual lay readerships in mind. However, although the book ends with a most astute analysis of Margery Kempe as an ‘impeccable corrector’, taking on lay and cleric alike with a confidently nuanced sense of her responsibilities towards her fellow Christians, its later chapters also trace a shift in the ethics of correction in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, under pressure both from the Wycliffite controversy and from Wycliffism itself, as the inclusive optimism that had characterised the pastoral tradition hitherto came under threat in increasingly divisive times. In Wycliffite thought, so Craun argues, fraternal correction came to be understood as a political tool, applied not to individuals but to entire classes of people. In the process the corrector, now a satirist or polemicist, was relieved of the responsibility to maintain a humble guard over his own charitable intentions in correcting others which had been his in earlier times and which had given discussions of correction their psychological acuity. Standing alone against the public hypocrisy of the institutional Church as a whole, the role of the Wycliffite corrector was instead to maintain, in the face of persecution, an equally public notion of truth. Vernacular Wycliffism, which is still not well understood, may have had a more varied attitude to correction than this quite acknowledges. The need to combat the view that Wycliffism, still often seen in its own, heroic terms, as a movement of liberation from ecclesiastical authority, effectively rediscovered a lost way of thinking about the laity's role in Christian community, makes it hard for even a book so balanced as this one not to regard the movement with some hostility. Yet Craun's demonstration of Wycliffism's deep roots in the pastoral tradition makes a significant contribution both to our slowly developing ability to recognise the movement as an expression of strong central tendencies in late medieval English religiosity, not necessarily fringe or radical ones, and, as a result, to our growing understanding of the religious thought of the period as a whole as drawing, albeit variously, on a largely common ground of discussion and debate. This is an important book which will have an immediate impact on the field while also containing enough material to keep many of us thinking and reading in its wake for years.