A rule for living can hide in a story, in an ascetic admonition, in a theological treatise, in a letter, in a charter, in a law, or in the acta of councils of concerned bishops. This lecture explores some of the myriad, different, ways in which rules were made explicit in Late Antique Christian communities. What, for example, can the genre of village contracts or written covenants with 'holy men' tell us about the ways in which political space and social action were imagined and re-imagined? And how might Late Antique examples of associational constitutionalism help us to re-shape our own, 21st-century, 'democratic imaginaries’?