Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England Book

"Medieval drama, itself immensely confident, subtle, and profound, meets in Ruth Nisse a scholar able to match its demands. From her pyrotechnic opening discussion of the Miller's Tale to her penetrating final chapter on Wisdom, Nisse's cultural intelligence remains unfailingly alert and illuminating. Defining Acts is itself a defining act." ?James Simpson, Harvard University "This is an original, well-researched book of enormous interpretive richness and subtlety whose readings unostentatiously but tenaciously and persuasively build on and reinforce each other. It is certain to become a set text for students of medieval English drama." ?Sarah Beckwith, Duke University "This forcefully argued and immensely detailed study makes a new case for the relationships among drama, dissent, and religion in the English fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It will be valued for its development of key ideas and motifs, its detailed working-through of textual associations and allusions, and its intuitive associations." ?Seth Lerer, Stanford University Defining Acts considers how the surviving English theatrical works of the fourteenth and fifteenth century represent competing practices of interpretation. The plays take up a series of contests over who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts?men or women, clerics or laity, rulers or subjects, Christians or Jews?and transform these questions for audiences far beyond their original medieval academic contexts. Ruth Nisse focuses in particular on how theater translates the temporal ideas of textual exegesis into spatial models and politics. She situates medieval drama both in its vernacular literary setting, as a genre composed against the same cultural background as The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and The Book of Margery Kempe, and in its performances, which negotiate a range of contemporary social and political issues.Read More