Reviewed by: Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams by Megan G. Leitch Jamie K. Taylor Megan G. Leitch. Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $130.00. We all know that sleep governs our lives. Too little and we cannot function; too much and we become lethargic. In Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature, Megan G. Leitch shows that sleep was also a central preoccupation throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval sleeping was not only an embodied practice investigated by medical and regimental texts; it was also an important literary resource for Middle English writers. Working at the nexus of affect theory, ethics, and sense theory, this book outlines a "hermeneutics of sleep" (95) that can gather together the somatic, social, and spiritual experience of sleeping in the service of tracking it as an important and mobile trope in a wide range of Middle English texts. Although the book asserts that there is a peculiarly Middle English investment in sleep, it moves across centuries, languages, and genres to demonstrate just how ubiquitous depictions of sleepers are in medieval literature more broadly. The range of examples is both the book's strength and its weakness. On one hand, it offers an enormous bibliography and intriguing readings, many of which draw our attention to easy-to-overlook moments and subjects. On the other hand, the stretch of texts dilutes the clarity of its argument. Throughout the book, linkages among texts and writers are more gestural than causal, resulting in a compilation of examples rather than a clearly legible analytical line. Moreover, although the book persuasively argues that sleep was a matter of both emotions and ethics, neither affect theory nor ethical theory appears very prominently. More direct examination of how medieval sleep both reflects and reframes these theoretical vocabularies would have provided much-needed definition of terms. [End Page 412] Chapter 1 compiles an astonishing number of texts to demonstrate just how ubiquitous the trope of the sleeper is. It begins by tracing the medicinal and regimental precepts around sleeping, focusing on humoral medicine to show how influential Hippocratic and Galenic vocabularies were to vernacular literary depictions of sleep. Whereas medical texts asserted that good sleep could restore humoral balance, vernacular writers took sleep's central role in bodily and emotional health as an opportunity to explore the ways the sleeping body might register unexpressed emotions. For example, Ywain's sleep in Ywain and Gawain permits a maiden to "read" his sorrow even when he does not articulate it himself; likewise, in the play Joseph's Trouble about Mary, Joseph's unmanageable and incommunicable despair culminates in falling asleep at the base of a hill. This first chapter thus establishes the broad parameters of sleep in vernacular literature, which draws from and then complicates medical and regimental understandings of it. The next three chapters focus on specific kinds of sleeping subjects to demonstrate how one might perform a hermeneutics of sleep. Chapter 2 focuses on those who engage in "untimely sleep"—that is, nappers—to show how daytime sleep functioned as an admonitory trope that warns against intemperance as unethical. The "politics of daytime sleep" (93) are especially pronounced in conduct manuals, pastoral texts, and romances, and reading across these disparate genres demonstrates the flexibility of regimental vocabularies to provide moral and ethical analysis of napping. Thus, for example, managing sleep hygiene (by resisting a nap) can function as a defense against sloth in Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne. Likewise, the fifteenth-century treatise "How the Wise Man Taught His Son" can present appropriate nighttime sleep as a bulwark against the ethical pitfalls of idleness. More surprisingly, romance nappers are repeatedly depicted as upending assumed structures of chivalric masculinity by presenting the knightly napper as vulnerable to attack. In exposing those breaches via napping knights, Middle English romance depictions of napping work to uphold the ethical and gendered requirements of the genre. In Chapter 3, we see that paying attention to where one sleeps can expose the emotional and social expectations of the sleeping subject. But sleep spaces...