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William Tydeman, ed. The Medieval European Stage: 500-1550.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. lxii + 720. $140.00.

This invaluable book belongs to a series of collections of primary source materials intended to provide reference documents for teachers and scholars in theater studies, under the editorial supervision of Glynne Wickham, John Northam, and W. D. Howarth, published by Cambridge University Press. The series includes volumes on Restoration and Georgian England, Northern and Eastern Europe of the years 1746 to 1900, German and Dutch Theater in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Naturalism and Symbolism in the European Theater of 1850 to 1918, French Theater of the Neoclassical Era (1550-1789), and English Professional Theater of the Renaissance. To this impressive list is now added a large and comprehensive volume on the Medieval European Stage from 500 to 1550.

William Tydeman has assembled a distinguished list of contributing editors. In the first place, Nick Davis has put together materials on "The Inheritance," presenting us with early documents and artifacts such as a bronze figure of second-century Syria in the pose and costume of a mime, sixth-century warnings to the clergy not to attend spectacula under any circumstances, images from an eleventh-century manuscript of Terence's The Eunuch vividly portraying a tricky female servant and a comic slave as imagined in that era, Isidore of Seville's speculations on Roman theatrical spaces as guessed at in the seventh century, and a narration of a ninth-century representation of the Harrowing of Hell that intersperses dialogue with narrative description in a manner that may have been sung by a choir and soloists or may simply have been designed for private devotional reading. Cumulatively, the selections provide us with numerous if tantalizing glimpses of long-lost dramatic activity during the centuries when drama was officially banned from the Roman Empire. As in the rest of the volume, the materials are richly varied:...

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