Refreshingly, when Daisy Black's Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama opens with Augustine's conceptualizations of divine time (pp. 1–3), it does so not to attribute lay plays’ sophistication to patristic sources, but rather to assert that “the kinds of theological and temporal problems which have conventionally been read by historians as being carried out chiefly within the religious classes were, in fact, being engaged with, embodied and even laughed at by the middle-ranking guild classes . . . and their diverse audiences” (p. 11). The “mechanical theatrical necessities” (p. 8) of any Creation play, for instance—Black's introduction focuses on the York version—necessarily lead to “the glib question ‘what was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’” (p. 3); Black shows that the York Creation/Lucifer thinks through that question, sometimes paralleling Augustine, but just as often constructing different but “every bit as complex” conceptualizations (p. 20). Black dilates fascinatingly on the practicalities of bringing the first play of a cycle across multiple urban stations, requiring a preshow “fashioning structure out of incoherence” (p. 10) that mirrors God's opening speeches. From there she introduces her overall thesis: that the Biblical plays “supported multiple, co-existing and subjective” temporalities (p. 4) by asking “what happens to characters’ experiences of time when they are placed in dialogue with differing or opposing understandings . . . between two characters inhabiting the same moment” (p. 11), most visibly in the “moments of gendered and Jewish-Christian conflict” (p. 26) on which the chapters focus, wherein “certain arrangements of time act to obfuscate the times of others” (p. 20).Each subsequent chapter features a sustained, incisive close reading, as well as a sometimes chimeric set of theorizations about temporality; my summary here will focus on the close readings first. Chapter one reads the N-Town Joseph's character arc as a conversion narrative—which, like the medieval conversion narratives it resembles (pp. 56–58), leaves its conversion unsettlingly incomplete. Even after he accepts the miracle of Mary's pregnancy, Joseph is “dogged by associations with impotence, suggesting he is not manly enough to be fully assimilated,” with a compelling connection to “the popular ‘snow child’ narrative” (pp. 60–61). No wonder that the N-Town Joseph is sullen about the miraculous cherry tree: “While obliged to repeatedly perform acts of conversion, Joseph, it seems, has nevertheless internalised (later) doctrine in a manner which makes him, like the cherry tree compelled to bear fruit out of season, an untimely entity” (pp. 63–64). Black shows that “plays depicting Joseph's doubts about Mary hinge on his ability to change” (p. 56). As a result, as much as these plays are “heavily invested in promoting” the Christian appropriation of a Jewish past through “models of supersession” (p. 43), they are haunted by the incompleteness of the conversion on which they rely, so that they “present the introduction of Christ into time as a continuous process of re-figuring” (pp. 64–65).Both Chapter one and Chapter two argue that “character conflicts in these plays are . . . due to the presence of remnants of the past, which challenge supersession when they threaten to muddy the distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’” (pp. 194–95). In Chapter two, the York Noah's “supersessionary ideal” (p. 87) of “a Flood which cleanses the world and leaves a blank space” (p. 80) is disrupted by his Wife's “feminine counter-narrative” (p. 79), which guild drama's repeated public performance “legitimises” (p. 94). Deeper than the “belated, past-oriented ‘Jewish’ character type” (p. 85) or the “unruly woman” archetype (p. 78) usually used to explain her, the York Wife's “questions concerning the drowned world” embody “women's roles as future-makers [and] memory-holders” (p. 89), short-circuiting Noah's attempts “either to forget or to cut himself away from what has been destroyed” (p. 80). Having shown that the York Noah only conjures its massive scene shifts through descriptive speech in the first place, Black argues that “worlds destroyed in speech acts may just as easily be re-called” (p. 91), hence Noah's anxious silencing of his Wife (pp. 89, 92). I was less sure about Black's brief coda on the Chester Noah: it treats as meaningfully distinctive (p. 99) the stanza form in which the bulk of the Chester plays are written, while suggesting that the Wife's anachronistic swearing is based on “knowledge her husband does not appear to share” (pp. 24, 101–102); Chester's Noah swears, just as his Wife does, by St. John (l. 112), and then by Mary (l. 247).The kernel of chapter three reads the Towneley Mak's complaints about his unmanageable brood of children (pp. 124–30) against the fact that no children are audible or visible when the Second Shepherds Play shifts the scene to his home (pp. 130–37). Black's analysis and argumentation in these sections is exemplary: I found my initial skepticism about “what happens if we dare take Gyll and Mak seriously” (p. 119) systematically dismantled by her close reading, leaving me convinced that the play does indeed imply ambiguity about “whether Mak is telling the truth about his huge family” (p. 131), picking up important points about labor and waste (pp. 128–29) and the “parallel unnaturalness of Mary's pregnancy” (p. 128) along the way. Yes, Gyll has a cradle ready to hand for her ruse; Black masterfully brings that cradle, which is conspicuously unused at nighttime, into contact with a 1518 court case regarding a childless couple (p. 132).Chapter four's standout reading is of the Towneley Herod's “recourse to his ‘bookys’” (p. 161): his preference for “classical texts (as opposed to Hebrew texts)” (p. 165) and his failed attempts “to read backwards to find scripture that will defend his position” (p. 166). Hence the poignancy of Herod's furious “command to destroy the books,” and so to finally “refuse the prophetic power of Hebrew scripture by cutting it away from his own time . . . to detach his own time not only from those times preceding it, but also from any potential fulfilment in future scriptures” (p. 167). From there the chapter argues, if less convincingly, that “the thing that makes the Towneley mothers the greatest threat to Herod” is “time” (p. 170)—because their dialogue resonates with earlier enactments of “the lamb of the Passover and Christ, Lamb of God” (p. 172), “the grief of both the Hebrew Rachel and that of the Virgin Mary” (p. 173), “the murdered Abel” (174), and “the social defence mechanism of hue and cry on a medieval street” (p. 171). Thus, they “fold together the times of the Crucifixion, Passover, and the first murder in Genesis” (p. 175), sabotaging Herod's attempted detachment from prophetic histories and futures.Chapter five, Black's conclusion, picks up her introduction's discussion of practical staging at York. After examining the verbal tenses of the York Creation/Lucifer alongside the visible inevitability of its preconstructed hellmouth (pp. 188–91), Black turns cleverly to the lost York Fergus, citing the Masons’ infamous complaints about their play as evidence of “an unauthorised shadow-script . . . of pre-meditated audience unruliness” (p. 192), in which spectators, like playmakers, could intervene in and complicate the temporality of a Biblical cycle. To close, Black rightly critiques the “supersessionary models of theatre” (p. 198) in which the inadequacy of periodization is rooted, then ends with the understudied Cornish Creation of the World, in which Seth buries massive antediluvian history books in flood-proof containers: “the play, like Seth's books, participates in an attempt not only to preserve the past, but to recognise its ability to release meaning for future generations” (p. 201).The chapters also import multiple metaphorical models for the nonlinearity of time. Joseph's supersessionary conversion manifests the broader “shattering” of time (pp. 43–49, 63) discussed by Kathleen Davis; Noah's Wife's persistent remembering is “explosive time” (pp. 89–94), borrowed from Jonathan Gil Harris; the Towneley mothers’ resemblance to earlier and later forms is “temporal origami” (pp. 152, 155), in Black's rendering of Michael Serres's “topological understanding of time” (pp. 155–78), also metaphorized as a “handkerchief” (pp. 155–56, 160, 175) and a “telescope” (p. 160). Black offers these models as theoretical-historiographic contexts or bases for her close readings, but little in the readings seems to be substantially illuminated by or built upon the models—not in the simplified form that is required here to fit them all in. These models do not do justice to, and sometimes seem only to decorate, Black's skilled analyses of the texts’ already complex handling of supersession, typology, and prophecy. Black is certainly right to connect her queer reading of Gyll and Mak with some prior queer scholarship (there is an impressive turn involving Lee Edelman at p. 128), but I could not follow her from Mak's stolen sheep's “temporary reprieve from being eaten” to the “reassessment of queer futurity in the wake of the availability of antiretroviral drugs” (p. 142), nor from the Towneley manuscript's “nostalgic compilation” (p. 121) and its Second Shepherds’ conventionally digressive plot (pp. 142–44) to Carolyn Dinshaw's work on “temporal displacement” (p. 113) and “‘queer touch’ across cultures and times” (p. 143). Dinshaw's tenaciously intricate work is especially resistant to Black's simplifications. For instance, Black positions herself against a “presupposition that there is a normative or homogenous way of experiencing time” that she attributes to Dinshaw (p. 113, see also pp. 96, 116–17), though no presupposition so broad is apparent to me in the pages of Dinshaw she cites, nor does a solid refutation of the presupposition come through in Black's reading of Mak and Gyll.That said, the backbone of Black's Play Time is sturdy, built on close-to-the-text investigations that not only shift critical keystones laid upon well-trodden plays but also carry Black's primary argument forward thoroughly. Black's innovative perspective, informed by her work both as a bibliographic reviewer (see p. 196) and as a performer (see pp. x–xi), is valuable to our field indeed.