It is a critical commonplace in Middle English studies to situate Pierce the Ploughman's Crede in the urban streetscape of late fourteenth-century London. This placement is justified, if mentioned at all, by the claim that certain details in the poem's rich architectural description of the London Blackfriars church and priory are matched by what is known of the actual site of medieval Blackfriars. But when the trail of scholarship is traced back to its source, it becomes clear that the evidence for the link between Crede and London Blackfriars, and thus also the link between Crede and London more generally, is very scant. After casting sufficient doubt on the accuracy of the London Blackfriars connection, this essay sets out to describe and contextualize, as counter-example, the case for Oxford as a site at least as likely as London as the setting for Pierce the Ploughman's Crede. In doing so, it also raises some higher-level historiographical questions about the relation between literary “description” and real material stuff on the ground. The method of investigation in the Oxford case study, moreover, is aided by, or, more accurately, shaped by, the use of new digital tools for historical visualization, specifically by the author's creation (with Michal Koszycki) of three-dimensional digital models of the lost Franciscan and Dominican convents in medieval Oxford. Thus this study, in its methods, results, and implications, falls under the category of the digital humanities, and the essay will be punctuated with several brief asides on the value and limitations of these technical innovations on the field of medieval studies. Are we at a moment when new technologies force us to look again at the vexed relationship between text and context that historicist literary criticism has struggled to theorize for decades? Do the tools provided by the digital humanities give us some new methodological purchase on these old problems? The essay argues, obliquely, that the answer is both yes and no.