In the previous chapter, we explored the ways in which the scenes of everyday activities which abound on medieval misericords can be seen to have carried a spiritual message for a specifically clerical audience which was attuned to their iconographic significance and by whom, after all, they were commissioned. Without the barrier of such unacknowledged symbolism to distract us, we may expect images which address devotional and doctrinal matters more explicitly to communicate directly with the viewer and, in consequence, to be in some ways more readily understandable to a modern audience no longer steeped in the subtleties of the Christian visual culture of England in the later Middle Ages. Whilst this is often the case, we shall see in the present chapter that even symbols at the heart of Christianity may, depending on the contexts in which they appear, create perplexing puzzles for the viewer. Images, after all, have always had the potential to create disagreements. Writing around the middle of the fifteenth century, Bishop Reginald Pecock was moved to defend the use of images in churches from Lollard criticism in what are essentially commonplace terms: