Medieval English Attitudes to the Outside World

REVIEWS that women lack rhetorical ability. Further, she like Puttenham defines covertness and dissemblance as politic strengths as well as feminine spheres of operation. Private, coterie circulation thus came to be privileged as ‘‘not the opposite of public circulation, but rather a strategy that anticipated and even promoted such circulation’’ (p. 188). Yet Elizabeth ’s writing lost favor in later centuries, aligning her with other women writers whose perpetual fading away and recovery marks the boundaries of tradition and enhances the luster of its central figures. Lost Property is an admirable project in several respects. It moves across the unfortunate gaps that specializations have constructed between the medieval and early modern periods, between history and literature , and between intellectual and material culture. Its chronological and disciplinary capaciousness are impressive. The arguments are clearly in view throughout, and specific texts by women writers receive valuable close readings. Specialists may object to an occasional claim—for example , that English literature before Chaucer was ‘‘prenational’’ (p. 6)— but the book as a whole demonstrates for specialists in all the fields it touches that undertaking an inclusive account of women’s writing over three centuries can yield substantial rewards. Susan Crane Rutgers University D. A. Trotter, ed. Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Cambridge : D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. x, 237. $63.00. Though its main audience will be historical linguists and sociolinguists specializing in medieval English, this excellent collection of essays is essential reading for Chaucerians and for anyone else who wishes to understand the diverse linguistic and literary culture of later medieval England. The volume consists of thirteen papers out of the twenty that were given at an international colloquium at the University of WalesAberystwyth in September 1997. The picture of a multilingual society that emerges is new and exciting. Not entirely new, of course, for students of medieval English literature have long been familiar with ample evidence testifying to the interpenetration of English, French, and Latin in later medieval English literary texts. Macaronic literary texts are dis435 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:33 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER cussed in some detail in only one of the essays in the volume (that of Herbert Schendl), but the collection as a whole contains much that is relevant for students of medieval English literature, macaronic and otherwise . The essays are without exception up-to-date and in some cases also highly innovative in their approach to the major languages of late medieval Britain. Taken together, they demonstrate in illuminating detail how Latin, French, English, and Welsh were used for various liturgical , governmental, legal, literary, and everyday purposes. The volume contains the following essays: Llino Beverly Smith, ‘‘The Welsh and English Languages in Late-Medieval Wales’’; Begoña Crespo, ‘‘Historical Background of Multilingualism and Its Impact on English’’; Andres M. Kristol, ‘‘L’Intellectuel ‘anglo-normand’ face à la pluralité des langues: le témoignage implicite du MS Oxford, Magdalen Lat. 188’’; Michael Richter, ‘‘Collecting Miracles Along the AngloWelsh Border in the Early Fourteenth Century’’; Paul Brand, ‘‘The Languages of the Law in Later Medieval England’’; Herbert Schendl, ‘‘Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English Texts’’; Luis Iglesias-Rábade, ‘‘French Phrasal Power in Late Middle English: Some Evidence Concerning the Verb nime(n)/take(n)’’; Tony Hunt, ‘‘Code-Switching in Medical Texts’’; Laura Wright, ‘‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories: Everyday Trilingual Activities in the Business World of Later Medieval England’’; Frankwalt Möhren, ‘‘Onefold Lexicography for a Manifold Problem?’’; Edmund Weiner, ‘‘Medieval Multiculturalism and the Revision of the OED’’; Lisa Jefferson, ‘‘The Language and Vocabulary of the Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Records of the Goldsmiths’ Company’’; and William Rothwell, ‘‘Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactical Mixing in the Languages of Medieval England .’’ A brief account of four representative essays in the volume follows. Herbert Schendl’s ‘‘Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English Texts’’ is one of the two articles in the collection that deals with literary texts (see also Rothwell, below). Schendl’s discussion of macaronic poetry (lyrics, Piers Plowman, and drama) and macaronic sermons addresses questions such as the difference between ‘‘code switching ’’ (CS) and borrowing. He analyzes evidence for possible constraints on switches, and he presents a chart...

From Dualism to Pluralism: The Third World in Judgment Under Uncertainty

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism

George Soros makes an important analytical contribution to understanding the concept of reflexivity in social science by explaining reflexivity in terms of how his cognitive and manipulative causal functions are connected to one another by a pair of feedback loops (Soros, 2013). Fallibility, reflexivity and the human uncertainty principle. Here I put aside the issue of how the natural sciences and social sciences are related, an issue he discusses, and focus on how his thinking applies in economics. I argue that standard economics assumes a ‘classical’ view of the world in which knowledge and action are independent, but that we live in a complex reflexive world in which knowledge and action are interdependent. I argue that Soros's view provides a reflexivity critique of the efficient market hypothesis seen as depending on untenable claims about the nature of random phenomena and the nature of economic agents. Regarding the former, I develop this critique in terms of Cauchy distributions; regarding the latter I develop it in terms of rational expectations and rational addiction reasoning.

But in a complex reflexive world, the manipulative or action function interferes with the cognitive function because people act on what they know, action changes what the world is, and thus changes knowledge. Action thus has a feedback effect on knowledge so thatworldˆmind ð2ÞSo it is incorrect to say as in (1) that the world is fully independent of us and independently determines our knowledge of it. The main direction of causation when we think of knowledge is still from the world to the mind, but the feedback loop from action in (2) produces a reverse causation that modifies the world and thus knowledge.1 The cognitive function modified by manipulative function might thus be represented asworld!mind ½worldˆmind� or'world!mind' ð3Þ(ii) In the case of the manipulative function, the direction of causation is from the mind to the world. Taken in isolation, people act on what they know as if their motivations in doing so were fully independent of their actions.

Divan edebiyatında çoğunlukla dinî ve tasavvufî bakış açısıyla değerlendirilen dünya kavramı, yüzyıllar boyunca çok farklı unsurlarla sembolize edilmiş, çoğu zaman fiziki ve coğrafi bir varlık olmaktan ziyade insanların ona yüklediği anlamlarla değerlendirilmiştir. Bu da dünya kavramının ahlaki bir kavram olarak ele alınmasına zemin hazırlamıştır. Bu anlayıştan dolayı edebî metinlerde dünya, çoğunlukla uzak durulması gereken bir unsur olarak telakki edilmiştir ve dünya kavramına ilişkin yapılan benzetmeler de bu doğrultuda çoğunlukla olumsuz nitelikte olmuştur. Edebî metinlerde, kimi zaman bir oyun yeri, kimi zaman bir pazar, kimi zaman bir acuze, kimi zaman da bir yılan olarak algılanan dünyanın vefasızlığına, dönekliğine, kararsızlığına da ayrıca dikkat çekilmiştir. Bu çalışmada öncelikle dünya kavramının Kur'an-ı Kerim ve hadislerde genel itibariyle nasıl değerlendirildiği ifade edilecek, ardından ilk dönem İslâmî ürünlerinden alınan metinlerle çalışma örneklendirilecektir. Bu bağlamda divan şiirinin büyük şahsiyetlerinin yetiştiği 15., 16., 17. ve 18. yüzyıllardan tespit edilen şairlerin divanlarında dünya kavramına yönelik var olan beyitler taranıp divan şairinin dünya algısına yönelik tespitler yapılmaya çalışılacaktır. Çalışmada değerlendirmeler üç başlık altında ele alınacaktır. Öncelikle dünya kavramına yönelik benzetmeler seçilen şairler noktasında tespit edilecek, akabinde metinlerde dünyanın niteliklerine dair yapılan göndermeler örneklendirilerek insanların dünya ve dünya hayatına dair alması gereken tedbirler şair gözüyle sunulacaktır. Bu zeminde divan edebiyatında dünya algısına dair tespitler dört asır ve dört şair bağlamında değerlendirilecektir. 

The author has published widely on syntactic and semantic questions of the English verb, mainly of the Old English period, and the present study accordingly draws on a large number of her previous articles as well as her monograph Verbs in Medieval English (1995). This could be one of the reasons for the book's descriptivism: while the investigation is extremely detailed in the presentation of quotations from a large, non-machine-readable corpus of mainly Old English texts and in the classification of types, it is, in my view, less convincing in its theoretical approach and the use of explanatory parameters. Sometimes the detailed statistics taken from previous work have not sufficiently been functionalised as parts of arguments concerning the language system and/or the history of Old and Middle English.

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre Claire Sponsler The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 400; 38 illustrations. $90 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). A glance at the Index to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatrehighlights some of the changes that have taken place in the field of early English drama studies since 1994, the year in which the original edition was published. Newly added entries covering such topics as animals in plays, audience, Boy Bishop, church ales, Clerkenwell, Lord of Misrule, suppression and decay of plays, transvestism, traveling companies, and Yiimimimangaliso—The Mysteries, chart a broadened field that includes more paratheatrical material, a wider geographic scope, and new areas of scholarly inquiry. These changes extend to other parts of the volume as well. The revised edition still contains twelve chapters, but there is an additional editor (Alan Fletcher, joining Richard Beadle), three new authors, one topic dropped and another added, several changed titles that reflect currently preferred terminology in the field, and updated and expanded discussions and bibliographies. Fresh content is provided for the introduction; a chapter on the Cornish drama has disappeared, replaced by one on "The Cultural Work of Early Drama"; and chapters on "The York Cycle," "The Towneley Cycle," and "Saints' Plays" are now renamed "The York Corpus Christi Play," "The Towneley Pageants," and "Saints and Miracles." The volume also includes a number of new illustrations, especially of modern productions, and a map of East Anglia showing places mentioned in the text. The bibliography and notes to individual chapters have been brought up-to-date, while new subheadings have been added throughout for easier reading. These deletions, additions, and expansions mirror recent work on medieval English theatre. The scholarly activity of the past decade and a half has led to a rethinking of the kinds of performances the extant dramatic texts represent (hence the change from "The Towneley Cycle" to "The Towneley Pageants"), has pushed beyond the well-known scripts of the Biblical plays to embrace texts that today look non-dramatic but may well have been performed, and has discovered performances for which no play-texts survive. At the same time, inquiry has shifted away from the two critical modes that dominated medieval drama studies in the 1990s—archival research and modern reenactments—and toward cultural studies approaches that are attuned to the complex relations linking past and present. Like its predecessor, this revised edition presents itself as a standard guide to [End Page 234]the field of English drama from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Its chapters cover the major kinds of plays in the period—especially Biblical cycles and pageants, moralities, and saints' plays—while providing an introduction to key interpretive issues, extensive discussion of modern performances or medieval plays, and a guide to criticism. As we might expect from a volume that envisions itself as an authoritative handbook of the field, there is little that's cutting edge in this revised edition, but the material has been updated and accurately reflects current scholarship. Thus the wealth of new material that has been discovered about early theatrical conditions is for the most part adequately represented in this revised volume. The reediting of many texts of early English plays, work that has yielded important bibliographic information about the textual corpus, is frequently noted. Also making an appearance are results from the archival evidence that continues to be published (particularly under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama [REED] project) and interpreted, as well as findings about original performance occasions that have been gleaned from modern revivals of early plays. To accommodate this fresh material, individual chapters from the first edition have been revised, some more extensively than others. These include "The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays" (Meg Twycross), "The York Corpus Christi Play" (Richard Beadle), "The Chester Cycle" (David Mills), "The Towneley Pageants" (Peter Meredith), "The N-Town Plays" (Alan Fletcher), "The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition" (John Coldewey), "Morality Plays" (Pamela King), "Saints and Miracles" (Darryll Grantley), and "A Guide to Criticism...

The Test of Venery in Ipomadon A

‘ XEVl'EWS David Wallace, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.1043. Cloth. The Cambridge History of English Literature, begun in 1907 and finished twenty years later, remained a standard reference work for many decades after that. In his gracious Preface to this new history, David Wallace ventures to hope for a long shelf-life for his volume too, while he acknowledges that “it can scarcely hope to outlast its immediate predecessor” (xi). This is one of many such gestures throughout the volume as the con­ tributors, a dazzling roster of senior scholars and rising stars, acknowledge their own debts to the scholars of the past. But this new volume is not at all shy about challenging almost every paradigm and construct established in that past. Indeed, each main term of the title is immediately challenged. “Medieval” begins around 1050 and carries on well into the sixteenth cen­ tury. “English” means written in England, as essay after essay seeks to restore English vernacular literature to the multilingual contexts in which it was produced. And “literature,” too, means something quite different at the end of the twentieth century than it did at the beginning. In the Introduction to one section of the book, for example, Wallace writes that “Much of the writ­ ing considered here — classroom exercises, penitential manuals, legal transcripts, fragments of translation — may not be consid­ ered ‘literature’ at all: but the acknowledged canonical authors of Middle English writing [... ] can hardly be understood as medieval English texts without reference to this under-studied, under-edited corpus” (313). The reference to editing is telling; Wallace is clear about his desire to “ease the bottleneck that has formed, in literary criticism and in curricular design, around later fourteenth-century England” (xii). In this aim the volume should, by all rights, succeed brilliantly, and leave one, as it does, dizzied by the size and richness of the world it describes. ESC 26, 2000 ESC 26, 2000 The book is organized into five sections: After the Norman Conquest, Writing in the British Isles, Institutional Produc­ tions, After the Black Death, Before the Reformation. These imply a chronological organization, and there is a progression from the late Saxon world in the opening chapters to the early Tudor world in the final pages. But the volume’s five-hundredyear history is often repeated in the individual essays, regardless of their placement in the overall design. The reader is sometimes confused as a result, particularly through the first three sec­ tions. But resistance to neat narratives of progression is one of the volume’s hallmarks, and one does become habituated to the embedding of these miniature histories within the larger one. As with the chronology, so with the thematic emphases im­ plied by the section titles. While the section on Institutional Productions, for example, gives particular prominence to the monasteries, schools, courtrooms, and universities, the aware­ ness of modes of production is found in almost every essay in the book. It is no accident that Pierre Bourdieu is a touch­ stone for many of the essays: to take one at random, Sheila Lindenbaum’s chapter on “London Texts and Literate Prac­ tice” opens by stating its intention to study London as a site of social practice (285). This overarching concern with produc­ tion and circulation is one that Wallace notes at the outset: “It is perhaps through resisting the divorce of literature from history in literary history [... ] that this volume makes its most distinctive contribution. [... ] Medieval literature cannot be un­ derstood (does not survive) except as part of transmissive pro­ cesses” (xx-xxi). It is, then, no surprise that later chapters in the book, such as Steven Justice’s account of Lollardy, continue to offer accounts that are deeply embedded in historical and institutional contexts. The emphasis on medieval institutions is doubtless respon­ sible for another of the volume’s most distinctive features, its emphasis on Latinity. Christopher Baswell’s “Latinitas” ad­ dresses Latin culture directly, but Latin texts feature promi­ nently in many other chapters as well, among them Andrew Gal­ loway’s “Writing History in England,” Christopher Cannon’s “Monastic Productions,” John V. Fleming’s “The Friars and...

Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of 'development' as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a timely intervention in anthropological debates about development, moving beyond the critical stance to focus on development as a mode of engagement that, like anthropology, attempts to understand, represent and work within a complex world. By setting out to elucidate both the similarities and differences between these epistemological endeavors, the book demonstrates how the ethnographic study of development challenges anthropology to rethink its own assumptions and methods. In particular, contributors focus on the important but often overlooked relationship between acting and understanding, in ways that speak to debates about the role of anthropologists and academics in the wider world. The case studies presented are from a diverse range of geographical and ethnographic contexts, from Melanesia to Africa and Latin America, and ethnographic research is combined with commentary and reflection from the foremost scholars in the field

Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of ‘development’ as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a timely intervention in anthropological debates about development, moving beyond the critical stance to focus on development as a mode of engagement that, like anthropology, attempts to understand, represent and work within a complex world. By setting out to elucidate both the similarities and differences between these epistemological endeavors, the book demonstrates how the ethnographic study of development challenges anthropology to rethink its own assumptions and methods. In particular, contributors focus on the important but often overlooked relationship between acting and understanding, in ways that speak to debates about the role of anthropologists and academics in the wider world. The case studies presented are from a diverse range of geographical and ethnographic contexts, from Melanesia to Africa and Latin America, and ethnographic research is combined with commentary and reflection from the foremost scholars in the field.

Book Review| June 01 2021 Review: Proximities: Art, Education, Activism, by Linda Brooks Proximities: Art, Education, Activism by Linda Brooks. TC Photo, 2020. 260 pp./$45.00 (sb). Sally Stein Sally Stein Sally Stein is professor emerita at UC Irvine, who after retiring from teaching continues to research and write about the history of photography while still based in Los Angeles. More details on her work can be found at www.sallystein.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2021) 48 (2): 144–151. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2021.48.2.144 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sally Stein; Review: Proximities: Art, Education, Activism, by Linda Brooks. Afterimage 1 June 2021; 48 (2): 144–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2021.48.2.144 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search For those mature artists still struggling (in all senses) and wondering if they will disappear with little notice, let alone any fanfare, Linda Brooks’s Proximities: Art, Education, Activism offers a DIY alternative: forget the white knight, the blue-chip gallery, the well-funded promotions. Instead, gather what resources you can muster (with the help of friends and a game new publisher) to take stock of where you came from; what you aimed to accomplish; how you and your work changed; and what artworks, writings, and human encounters inspired you along the way and just might inspire others. What results in this case is a cross between an album of artworks and graphic mementos, and a memoir with autobiographical text segments punctuated by bibliographies of formative books from each decade—all providing strong scaffolding for the visual assemblage.1 A half century ago, when I was in my early twenties, I had a roommate... You do not currently have access to this content.

REVIEWS THOMAS HONEGGER. From Phoenix to Chauntecleer: Medieval English Animal Poetry. Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten/Swiss Studies in English, vol.120.Ti.ibingen, Basil: A.Francke Verlag, 1996.Pp.ix, 288.N.p. There have been any number of studies of medieval English literature dealing with animals and its Latin, French, or Italian background, but no examination concentrating exclusively on the major functions of the animal figures in the chief examples of medieval English animal poetry. It is such a task that Thomas Honegger has set himself in this disserta­ tion, completed at the University of Zurich.His monograph provides the reader with a wealth of information for understanding the role played by animals in the Physiologus tradition in Old and Middle English (chapter 2); in "bird poems" from The Owl and the Nightingale to Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls (chapter 3); and in two Middle English beast fables/epics, The Vox andthe Wolfand Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale (chapter 4). Honegger's extensive study of the Physiologus tradition (pp.17-100) proceeds along structuralist lines, developing a model of an "ideal" chap­ ter from Latin representatives of the Physiologus that serves as a point of reference for his analysis of the Old and Middle English texts in this grouping.Such a typical chapter begins its presentation of an animal with a biblical citation that mentions that animal explicitly, develops "scientific" data about the animal adopted from natural history in a first section, then interprets these characteristics s piritually and allegorically in the next section, and concludes with a brief statement of affirmation ("And so the Physiologus has spoken well concerning ... ").Honegger's analysis of The Old English Physiologus concludes that the structure of its entries recapitulates this model, though generally without the explicit citation of a biblical verse at the beginning and with a more extensive moralizing epilogue.The function of the animals in the Old English text remains that of providing an occasion for the significatio: only those char­ acteristics that support a consistent spiritual interpretation of the ani­ mal are mentioned in the section of "scientific" data.It is on structural grounds as well that Honegger justifies his analysis of The Phoenix here, for the implicit division in this poem between a section of characteris­ tics of the phoenix derived from natural history and one devoted to the eschatological and typological signification of these characteristics par­ allels the model he has developed of the typical chapter in the Physiologus 255 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tradition. Unlike its Old English precursor, The Middle English Physiologus demonstrates an increased interest in the sensus moralis in its interpretation ofanimal characteristics. As Honegger emphasizes in par­ ticular in his analysis of the chapter on the dove in The Middle English Physiologus (which has no equivalent in the Theobaldi "Physiologus" that served as the Latin source for most of the English work), moral inter­ pretation is the characteristic method ofsignificatio in the Middle English text. Ofthe uses ofanimals in secular Middle English literature, Honegger is concerned mainly with two traditions: that which employs the alle­ gorical and symbolic (and generally courtly) dimensions ofanimal char­ acteristics on the one hand (pp. 103-66), and the genres ofthe beast epic and beast fable on the other (pp. 169-227). Symbolic qualities of ani­ mals are used in a number ofMiddle English genres, such as political po­ etry like Mum and the Sothsegger (identified here by its outdated title, Richard the Rede/es, and erroneously attributed to William Langland [p. 10}), but the examples in this tradition analyzed by Honegger, in which animals play a major role, generally involve questions oflove and frequently employ the debate form. Although that form regularly pre­ sents the question ofthe animals' usefulness to human beings as the piv­ otal point of the debate, the author of The Owl and the Nightingale ini­ tially frustrates this expectation, reminding the reader frequently of the avian nature of the debate's protagonists instead. In Honegger's under­ standing, the shifting nature of the symbolic reading the birds give of each other-the owl attempts to identify itselfwith the nycticorax tradi­ tion, for example, while the nightingale attempts...

Reviewed by: The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England Zbigniew Izydorczyk The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England. By Karl Tamburr. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. Pp. xii + 212; 18 illustrations. $85. Karl Tamburr’s book offers a collection of essays exploring the motif of the Harrowing of Hell in medieval English literature and art. The book is the fruit of the author’s life-long fascination with the tradition of Christ’s Descent into Hell, a once pivotal but now mostly neglected tenet of Christian belief. Tamburr convincingly demonstrates its centrality in popular medieval view of salvation and, with a wealth of illuminating detail, exposes the larger trends in its reception and treatment in the medieval England. The collection opens with a brief exposition of the ancient tradition of incorporating the themes, imagery, and typology of the Descent into Hell in liturgical celebrations, especially those connected with Easter. That tradition not only remained very much alive in the Middle Ages but was further expanded, as the fourteenth-century Latin liturgical play of the Harrowing of Hell from the Abbey of Barking clearly shows. The second chapter introduces two important themes of the Descent: the deliverance of the righteous souls and Christ the warrior-king. The author surveys early Christian sources for the two motifs and investigates their adaptations in visual arts and in selected Old English texts. Chapter 3 presents in-depth analyses of representations of the Descent in several Old English poems (Christ I, the Exeter Book Descent into Hell, Christ II, Christ and Satan, the seventh Blickling homily, etc.) and in Anglo-Saxon art. These nuanced readings reveal that, while acknowledging the historicity of the event, Old English writers tended to view the Descent as a nexus of typological, tropological, and eschatological meanings and as a focal point in “the larger, providential scheme of human history” (p. 102). The Harrowing took on for them “significance as a paradigm for the salvation of the individual Christian as well as an image of the redemption of the race as a whole” (p. 70). The fourth chapter discusses later medieval representations of the Harrowing, inspired—directly or indirectly—by the Gospel of Nicodemus. In contrast to their Anglo-Saxon antecedents, these later depictions emphasize the human dimension of Christ’s salvific work and usually occur in the context of other episodes from his life. Since the dramatic potential of the Gospel of Nicodemus was most fully realized in medieval plays, the bulk of this chapter is devoted to medieval English drama, although other texts (e.g., Piers Plowman) also receive some attention. Recognizing that not all later medieval versions of the Harrowing were influenced by the Gospel of Nicodemus, the fifth chapter investigates several independent, often highly creative and idiosyncratic depictions of the Harrowing, both visual (psalters) and textual (e.g., Dunbar’s “Done is the battell on the dragon black,” St. Erkenwald, Malory’s Morte Darthur, the Digby play of Mary Magdalene, and Julian of Norwich’s Showings). The final, sixth chapter traces the post-medieval decline of the Descent into Hell as a tenet of belief, challenged by Reformation and downplayed by Counter-Reformation, and the demise of the Harrowing of Hell as a literary motif, making its last stand in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Since the book is a collection of “interrelated essays” (p. ix) rather than a fully integrated monograph, it does not always provide full background information for the sometimes complex uses of the motif. A reader might have appreciated, for instance, a brief, strategic exposition of medieval theologians’ views on the Descent (like the exposition of the sixteenth-century attitudes that opens chapter [End Page 533] 6), or a brief summary of the relevant theories of redemption. As it is, the format of the book makes such information, given piecemeal in several places in the text, rather difficult to locate. Because the essays were written over a period of several years, the opening remarks on “The Harrowing of Hell and the Easter Liturgy” and, more generally, the treatment of patristic sources might benefit from some bibliographic updating. While MacCulloch’s 1930 study remains useful because of its thematic approach, R. Gounelle’s La...