The "festive drama" of the title denotes the plays, processions and customs of medieval and early modern Europe. Nine of the papers are on English material, 13 are on continental topics and one is comparative. Many of the papers explore international links, too. The volume's organisation into sections makes it useful for readers following up more specific interests, although an index would have been helpful.

In a thoughtful introduction, Meg Twycross distinguishes between the concerns of theatre history, in which the emphasis is on what she calls the "rhetoric" of an occasion, the way in which its contents are arranged and presented, and cultural history, in which the interest is in its social function and meaning.

Several of the papers are let down by their author's attempts to speculate about the function of the festival practices they investigate. For example, in his discussion of Christmas drama in English aristocratic households, Peter Greenfield argues that by rewarding local people for plays that involved some element of inversion or subversion, the lord was able to confirm his authority and improve his relations with his social subordinates. Similarly, Sally-Beth MacLean's discussion of hocking, the dynamic medieval festival in which men and women sought to bind and ransom one another, concludes with the assertion that this custom could only reassert the hierarchical principle. This kind of argument, which suggests that transgression by subordinate groups is necessarily a licensed affair that can only reaffirm established relations of power, will be familiar to many from discussions of Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnival. The obvious problem with such an argument is that there needs to be more critical thought about the sort of historical evidence on which such conclusions are based; how is it possible to discern the social consequences of a bout of hocking in a parish when all that survives are the receipts of the money that was collected? MacLean also suggests that hocking took place on the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter Sunday, whereas my own research indicates that, where it is possible to place the observance of the custom firmly in the medieval period, it took place on the third Monday and Tuesday after Easter.

On the whole the standard of the papers is very high (though one wishes they could have been published sooner). Of particular note are Sheila Lindenbaum's paper on the exclusive nature of English religious fraternities, which highlights the gap between the guilds' professions of brotherly love and their practice, and Tom Pettitt's consideration of the 15th-century morality play Mankind, which makes a case for its performance as an English Fastnachtspiel or Shrovetide play.

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Mention must also be made of Jarmila Veltrusky's fascinating analysis of an apparently blasphemous Easter play from 14th-century Bohemia. In this, the apothecary, who supplies the three Marys with the spices to embalm the body of Christ on Easter morning, carries out a mock-resurrection by pouring faeces on to the backside of Isaac, the dead son of a character called Abraham. Veltrusky's discussion of the importance of laughter to medieval worship reminds us of the need to overcome modern preconceptions when studying the festive drama of the past.

Chris Humphrey has just completed a doctorate in medieval studies, University of York.

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