The Franciscan friar called, after his place of birth in Scotland, John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) was also called the subtle doctor, doctor subtilis. The English Jesuit priest, poet and honorary Welshman Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) called him ‘Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller.’ But unravelling itself calls for unravelling. When nowadays someone says ‘Then everything began to unravel’ the intention appears to be to say that things then began to fall into a state of confusion. Likewise, when Shakespeare writes of sleep that it ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’ his meaning seems to be that a state of confusion or entanglement of threads is tidied up. But when in a journal entry for February 1870 Hopkins writes of ‘sunlight fallen through ravelled cloud’, does he mean that the cloud is entangled, so that the unravelling of it would signify its becoming untangled? That he does mean this is likely, but not obvious. A trace of ambiguity survives. This ambiguity hardens into a contradiction when the Concise Oxford Dictionary gives ‘entangle’ as the first meaning of ‘ravel’, cites as illustrations ‘the ravelled skein of life’ and ‘fray (intransitive and transitive)’, then gives ‘disentangle, unravel …’. This ambiguity or contradiction may be resolved for a given occasion by checking the context of the text in question. Doing this restores a degree of order in so far as it reveals that the difference between the two meanings corresponds to the difference between transitive and intransitive uses of the verb ‘to unravel’. A clue to the meaning Hopkins intends is his distinction between ‘the scattered’ and ‘the ravelled’ made in his letter of 24 March 1885 to Robert Bridges. He writes of one of Shakespeare's History plays that there may be many references to matters alluded to in it which are not integrated into the main story being told and which the uninitiated may therefore ‘want you to unravel and to gather up’. I shall presume that this is a reliable guide to the sense in which Scotus is for Hopkins ‘Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller’.