In her second book, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, Eleanor Johnson once again demonstrates the power of new formalism as an illuminating approach to Middle English literature. This ambitious study reads across genres and critical traditions to locate a distinct theological impetus within late medieval English literature, from the devotional prose texts The Cloud of Unknowing and A Revelation of Love to the visionary verse Piers Plowman and drama including the N-Town Mary plays, Wisdom, and Mankind. Arguing for these works as a coherent body of “contemplative literature” that both enables and reveals audience participation, Johnson makes a case for an accessible and inclusive model of contemplation which encourages a turn toward the world rather than a retreat from it. She defines contemplation as the “cultivation of a sense of participation between oneself and God,” and she argues that Middle English religious texts both “express that experiential sense of participation discursively” as well as “perform that contemplation in the formal apparatuses of the literary field” (p. 6). A theoretical introduction orients six subsequent chapters, divided into three sections of two chapters each. Each chapter analyzes the formal and sensory elements of a central text and argues for the ability of those elements to create linguistic fluency and disfluency. These different states of fluency, Johnson claims, facilitate contemplative participation and the reader's or spectator's awareness of it. Each section increasingly focuses on the communal experience of contemplative participation, ultimately concluding that by the fifteenth century, for Middle English texts “the life of participatory contemplation and the life of active participation in the social world are and should be one life” (p. 195).“Part I: Participating in Time and Eternity” focuses on fourteenth-century devotional prose: in chapter 1, “Feeling Time, Will, and Words: Vernacular Devotion in The Cloud of Unknowing,” and in chapter 2, “Julian of Norwich and the Comfort of Eternity.” Chapter 1 argues that the Cloud enables self-aware contemplation as a means of union with God, explaining that “through its artful prose style, the Cloud creates for its readership a sensory simulacrum of the experience of spiritual contemplation itself” (p. 26). It shows how the Cloud encourages monosyllabic prayer and devotion grounded in linguistic rhythm that makes time sensible, and also how it fosters an atomic understanding of time correlating to an understanding of divine eternity. Both reveal to readers their own linguistic, temporal, and theological participation in divinity. Moreover, they create both fluency and disfluency, evoking readers’ awareness of their imbrication in the participatory contemplation described and embodied by the text. The first chapter thus posits a vernacular logic of formal possibility and expectation as a Middle English mode of reading that facilitates “a feeling or sense of participation between the reading contemplative and the ever-present in God” (p. 47).Chapter 2 argues for a temporal Christology expressed through the structure, style, and form of Julian's texts. It offers a linguistic analogue of an Augustinian theory of participation in divine mentality, specifically through what Johnson terms “temporal prose,” or the reminder of participation in human temporality: “ever ylike prose,” or linguistic participation in divine eternity through Julian's verbal revelations, and “continual prose,” the interpenetration of human and divine temporalities through a prose style of perpetuity (pp. 57, 60, 67). Whereas the Cloud's atomic prayer and style can reveal to readers their likeness in God, A Revelation manifests the appositive coexistence of three different temporal modes that show readers their temporal participation in the divine. Chapters 1 and 2 thus argue for the contemplative potential of Middle English prose in particular as a mode able to facilitate readers’ recognition of temporal participation in the divine. They propose an insular literary theology moving slowly toward a more communal understanding of contemplation's goal. That goal emerges forcefully in the texts under consideration in the book's next section.“Part II: ‘Kyndely’ Participation” first brings us the only chapter that takes up verse alone: “Piers Plowman and Social Likeness: How to Know God ‘Kyndely.’” It demonstrates how Piers enables participatory contemplation through multiple cognitive and linguistic modes such as analogy, personification, and macaronic verse. The chapter further argues for the C-text as a revision guided by a focus on work and labor in the world, thus lending weight to the communal significance of Piers for Johnson's project. At times, one wishes that Piers alone did not support the book's poetic weight, as the chapter transitions from the divine participation of prose to the collective participation of drama. Yet it concludes with the observation, well taken, that in its verse poetics Piers prefigures how drama stages participatory contemplation already at work, revealing the audience to themselves as imbricated within the drama through linguistic and formal means. Johnson's argument for an insular contemplative poetics raises intriguing questions about vernacular, theological possibilities writ large. What might be the contemplative or theological valence of medieval allegorical verse in other vernacular traditions—like Le Roman de la Rose, famed for its cunningly punning language and allegorical, thaumaturgical poetics both secular and sacred? Might it encode a francophone participatory theology? To put it another way: is Johnson's theory exportable beyond Middle English?Part two then turns to drama with chapter 4, “There's Something about Mary: Staging the Divine in ‘Kyndely’ Language, Time, and the Social World.” It begins, surprisingly, with a reading of Nicholas Love's Mirror as representative of an East Anglian ethos of contemplative participation with a specific Marian valence. Johnson argues that “in order fully to grasp and experience the staged and participatory dynamics of contemplation in the play, one must think seriously and carefully about the play as a poem, keen to explore and exploit poetic effects as dramatic effects” (p. 110). For Johnson, the sensory perception of dramatic staging exists on a spectrum with the sensory perception of rhythm in language, joining multiple temporalities through performance and inviting viewers to recognize their own participation in human and divine temporalities. The conclusion considers the comedic register of drama and doubt as an integral stage of faith. The chapter marks several differences between prose, verse, and drama as contemplative, participatory vehicles. It suggests less overtly articulated questions: whether dramatic participatory contemplation can function without performance, and whether textual participatory contemplation functions through reading alone; whether dramatic performance and spectatorship might differ theologically as participation, and how both differ from the performance of reading.“Part III: Vernacular Comedy and Collective Participation” turns entirely to drama with chapter 5, “Likeness and Collectivity in the Play of Wisdom” and chapter 6, “Laughing Our Way toward God; or, Dramatic Comedy and Vernacular Contemplation.” Chapter 5 analyzes linguistic features such as slang and argot, and staging techniques such as music and dance, in its reading of Wisdom's exhortation to charity as both contemplative as well as active. It returns to fluency and disfluency as mechanisms for revealing likenesses between the medieval self and God. Johnson's virtuosic formal analysis comes to the fore here, persuasively connecting the literary and formal corruption of the Lucifer character with the moral and religious corruption in which the audience participates. This focus on comedy in particular demonstrates how “the play's disfluent frissons are pleasurable, and that pleasure embodies the dangerousness of sin” (p. 167). Most broadly, the chapter inaugurates section three's argument that participatory contemplation must be worked through during the human lifetime—and that as they progress through the stages of contemplation, “true contemplatives must define their likeness to Christ by their ability to serve and care for the larger Christian community” (p. 161).The final chapter on Mankind analyzes the social register of reform performed by late medieval drama, arguing that participatory contemplation in sinfulness becomes the path to God. Attention to the fluent and disfluent registers of Mankind support Johnson's larger argument that the failure of language to signify stably leads to participatory despair, then to the embrace of Mercy—the labor of contemplative participation. The chapter also performs an important critical reorientation. Rather than deploy the now familiar Bakhtinian approach to Mankind, Johnson turns to Stanley Fish, arguing that “Mankind's surprising of its audience members by despair is designed to make them understand the true depths to which they can fall and the salvific capaciousness of mercy in the wake of that fall” (p. 180). Reform comes home to roost as the consequence of participatory theology, as Johnson brilliantly demonstrates a bidirectional influence between Mercy and Mankind, revealed through the language and staging of Middle English drama.One of Johnson's expert talents is the ability to clearly explain conceptually complex arguments in accessible yet challenging terms. Staging Contemplation showcases this skill at its finest, offering six dazzling close readings that function as object lessons in the possibilities of formal analysis. Yet the book does more than that. As she notes in the conclusion, three interconnected core arguments emerge as the unifying forces of the study: an argument for contemplative participation through common formal and linguistic features across insular genres; an argument for the Middle English vernacular as a particularly fecund linguistic location for such participatory theology; and an argument for drama's importance, and particularly for comedy's importance, within the collective performance of Middle English participatory theology. The ramifications of this larger argument for the study of medieval English literature remain to be seen, yet the significance of each powerful case study will surely influence a wide array of new scholarship for a long time to come.