Introduction Dana E. Stewart The ten essays in this volume tackle a broad range of issues from both new and traditional perspectives, with fruitful and compelling results. From a proposed reevaluation of the definition of medieval drama to an application of “thing theory” (in conjunction with other methods) to understand medieval notions of selfhood, property, and poverty, and from the implications of individual sin for the stability of medieval society to the representation of subjectivity, power, and resistance in the drawing of a “castle of shadows,” these essays reveal what a fascinating panoply of topics and approaches are currently being addressed in medieval scholarship. In “The Theme of Lay Clænnyss in Ælfric’s Letters to Sigeweard, Sigefyrð, and Brother Edward,” Shannon Ambrose explores a selection of Ælfric of Eynsham’s epistles in an effort to offer a fuller understanding of the abbot’s preoccupation with personal and communal spiritual reform in tenth-century England. Looking specifically at the theme of “cleanness,” or bodily purity, among lay people, Ambrose traces in Ælfric’s writings a deep connection between individual sin and the overall stability of Anglo-Saxon society at large, positing the argument that, in Ælfric’s estimation, individual sin threatened not only the well-being of the sinner but also that of the community as a whole. Francis J. Finan, in “Drama without Performance and Two Old English Anomalies,” invites us to reconsider what scholars have classified as drama and why, challenging the notion that drama as a literary form does not exist in Old English. He situates his query within contemporary debates on performance theory, and he focuses on two pieces of work that have not heretofore been considered drama, making a compelling argument for why, instead, they ought to be. Referencing what he calls “the modern preoccupation with drama as performance,” Finan details why scholars have wrongly limited what should be considered drama in the Middle Ages. [End Page 1] In “‘Look to Your Calling’: Reclusion and Resistance in Medieval Anchoritic Culture,” Joshua Easterling delves into institutional and societal anxiety about anchoritic misbehavior and resistance, as expressed primarily through anchoritic hagiography. Such texts generally walked a fine line between narrating the spiritual and psychological struggle of the anchorite: hagiographers would not want to downplay the anchorite’s heroism by dismissing too easily the gravity of the internal struggle, yet neither would it be appropriate to praise a “flighty” anchorite who continually fantasized about escaping from the cell. Analyzing three different treatments of anchoritic obedience and/or the lack thereof, Easterling focuses specifically on desire, and its inherent instability, showing how competing and complementary anchoritic desires (for example, the desire for the cell, for God, and to flee the cell) were portrayed as a never-ending series of negotiations. Karl Whittington’s “Picturing Christ as Surgeon and Patient in British Library MS Sloane 1977” considers a surgical manuscript’s perplexing set of illustrations wherein surgical scenes are juxtaposed with images of the life of Christ. Whittington launches an inquiry into why the theological and the surgical were placed side by side in these fourteenth-century images in this unusual manner. Considering such issues as the lower and/or shifting status of surgery (as differentiated from the more academic—and more highly regarded—medicine) in this period, the long-standing trope of Christus Medicus across theological and visual traditions, and the various connections between medieval surgery and the story of the life of Christ, Whittington indeed sheds much light on how and why this cycle of images can be read as relevant to the surgical text it accompanies. Joel Pastor’s “Sodomites are from Mars: Deconstructing Rhetoric in the Commedia” considers the role of political rhetoric in the Divine Comedy, highlighting both its importance and its limitations as portrayed in the text, and reevaluating Dante’s stance on the possibility of political redemption. Through this careful reexamination of the poet’s portrayal of civic oratory, and of a vast range of scholarship on the issue, Pastor offers a radical new view of what is well-trodden terrain, suggesting that Dante ultimately despairs altogether of the power of rhetoric to bring about political renewal, and that he places his hopes...