Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter. Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England.

(Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama.) Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. x + 418 pp. index. illus. bibl. $84.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0230-3.

In the preface to Masks and Masking the authors observe that their first efforts to write a book on masks came to involve "researching the entire history of medieval theatre, festivity, pageantry, and folk custom" (xi). Recognizing the scope of the project as too broad, they paused to reform and subsequently offer what they describe as an incomplete but more pragmatic effort. It is, however, difficult to imagine how this book might be less comprehensive than the one originally conceived. The authors begin in the Anglo-Saxon period and move on to Kalends, Feasts of Fools, and other early folk customs. From there they take on carnival, first in Europe to establish context and then in Britain. The second part of the book covers all forms of courtly masking: tournaments, disguisings, courtly mummings, and what the authors have come to call "amorous maskings." Part 3 discusses the use of masks in the mystery plays before it turns to the morality plays. Because of the nature of the evidence pertaining to masked events, emphasis generally falls on the performance situations in which masks may have appeared rather than upon the masks themselves and for this reason the book, despite the authors' attempts to reign in their topic, reads very much like a history of the medieval performing arts. While the volume would have benefited from more rigorous editorial pruning, the study's comprehensiveness is by no means a shortcoming. Theater historians and practitioners will find the book to be a reliable index of masking evidence scattered about in medieval and Tudor historical chronicles, literature, theological and political commentaries, as well as in civic, guild, ecclesiastical, and state records. There is new primary research to herald here; the useful discursive footnotes reveal the authors' dedication to the pursuit of elusive archival clues and obscure literary references. Much of the evidence, however, has been carefully culled from eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century editions and archive inventories. In this respect, the book's indebtedness to E.K. Chambers (to whom it is dedicated) and to projects like REED is apparent. Where the evidence for English practices is scant, European records are summoned to fill in the lacunae. The final section of the book provides an inventory of medieval and Tudor responses to masks and masking, a chapter on materials and methods of mask-making, and finally a very useful chapter on the complications of contemporary terminology. The index is exhaustive and accurate and the bibliography is a compendium of writing on the field. The breadth of the research is indeed staggering.

Readers looking for a theoretical approach to masks and masking will not find it here. "Our aim," stipulates the introduction, "is not [...] to address directly any one of the cultural, psychological, philosophical, and anthropological questions raised by the various forms of medieval masking. Instead this study seeks to historicize and contextualize the moments and patterns of mask-wearing in the Middle Age" (3). The authors are correct to assume that "to adopt any single theoretical approach is to run the risk of imposing rather than elucidating meaning" but, ultimately, the effect of this rather trenchant claim is that the book lacks a governing thesis. The authors do not, in fact, stay as clear from theory as they might think. Much of the evidence is intelligently illuminated by astute commentary inflected with psychoanalysis, Bakhtin, and New Historicism. Not surprisingly, the subject of identity and how it is fashioned or disguised by masking emerges repeatedly. It would, therefore, have been interesting to see just how far the book could have traveled had the myriad of observations on this subject been tied together and hung upon a subtle hook. The theoretical limitations of the book are also apparent in the authors' repeated and overstated awareness of the lack of evidence or of the speculative nature of the observations. This is most evident in the book's epigram drawn from Sir James George Frazer's The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (1911) which calls for a separation of facts from hypotheses, suggesting that the latter are "temporary bridges built to connect isolated facts." Frazer concludes that while "light bridges should sooner or later break down," his hope is that his book will retain "its utility and its interest as a repertory of facts"; one gathers that the authors of Masks and Masking hope the same of their endeavor. It is obviously necessary to recognize the randomness of our archives and the tentative nature of our hypotheses, but it also the case that despite these limitations we must continue to draw conclusions. The authors promise, and indeed deliver, "an imaginative recreation of the physical, temporal, and social context in which masking took place"; this accomplishment needs neither excuse nor apology.

PATRICIA BADIR

University of British Columbia