The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.

Paxson, James J., Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch, eds. The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.

Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1999. ix + 198 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-85991-527-1.

This collection of "thematically and methodologically interconnected essays" on medieval drama and Chaucer is dedicated to Martin Stevens, Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York and Dean of Baruch College. The concept of performance adopted by this study embraces both literal performance such as that which occurs on the stage and in civic and religious pageantry, and the theoretical idea that such performances and textual documents ideologically constitute the culture of which they are part. Essays include: Kathleen Ashley, "Sponsorship, Reflexivity, and Resistance: Cultural Readings of the York Cycle Plays"; Richard K. Emmerson, "Eliding the 'Medieval': Renaissance 'New Historicism' and Sixteenth-Century Drama"; Marlene Clark, S. Kraus, P. Sheingorn, "'Se in what stat thou doyst indwell': The Shifting Constructions of Gender and Power Relations in Wisdom"; Seth Lerer, "The Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality"; John M. Ganim, "The Experience of Modernity in Late Medieval Literature: Urbanism, Experience and Rhetoric in Some Early Descriptions of London"; Alfred David, "Noah's 'Wife's Flood"; Richard Daniels, "Textual Pleasure in The Miller's Tale"; Warren Ginsberg, "Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of the Clerk"; Robert W. Hanning, "The Crisis of Meditation in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde"; Peter W. Travis, "Reading Chaucer Ob Ovo: Mock-Exemplum in the Nun's Priests Tale"; William McClellan, "A Postmodern Performance: Counter-Reading Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Maxine Hong Kinston's 'No Name Woman'."