We are living in a world and a time inhospitable to utopian thought, a time when all resources conducive to such thought are to be valued. Some of these resources are, fortunately, borne within language itself. These resources include the currently threatened devices of the subjunctive, that grammatical mood encouraging to the formation and expression of alternate social possibilities. In English, the subjunctive has been declining since the medieval period, and this essay returns to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in order to observe the subjunctive in a moment of relative flourishing, as a continuing and renewable source of imaginative refreshment and transformative social possibility.