Larissa Tracy, editor of Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame, begins her introduction to the volume with the subjective nature of treason as a concept. The slippery distance between rebel and loyal subject is often determined by success or failure, an important distinction for how such acts are remembered throughout history. She also ties the US definition of treason to its medieval English precedent while also bringing it forward into the 2016 American presidential election. The book's subject, in this regard, is made urgent in its historical and contemporary moments. With three sections—“The Politics of Treason”; “Religious Treason and Heresy”; and “Treasonous Love: Adultery and Shame”—the book is organized in its traditional form as an act against the church and the state but also as a domestic matter, especially in its adulterous form as petty treason.

Several chapters provide overviews of sources and literary texts that perhaps not all of us are familiar with. Among these are Inna Matyushina's chapter that focuses on chastity tests that functioned both to shame husbands and wives and to contribute to a healing of the social fabric; Peter Sposato's chapter presents a series of Tristan romances that, he argues, redefined knightly chivalry to discourage extreme forms of violence among knights in favor of valor and prowess as criteria for victory. Chapters such as these place historical texts in conversation with historical moments that are important in a long process of defining and redefining notions of loyalty and treason.

The most exciting chapters in the collection are those that acknowledge and openly work with the ambiguous nature of disloyalty. Freddy C. Dominguez's essay is the standout in this regard. Fully immersed in the notion of treason as something hardline Catholics could rationalize as a just form of rebellion against a tyrant, the chapter is the most nuanced in its presentation of treason as a material threat that also served to stabilizing monarchies. Dominguez also unravels strategies used by Catholics whose day-to-day existence under a Protestant monarch placed them between that monarch and Jesuits they saw as a more threatening enemy. As a consequence, they ultimately strengthened the Protestant state.

Other excellent chapters include Frank Battaglia's “Wiglaf's Sword: The Coming of the State,” which traces the ownership history of Wiglaf's sword to the moment it is used to wound the dragon mortally, before Beowulf finishes him off. This moment becomes the culminating moment in which violence in the name of one's lord becomes legitimate. As the first essay in the collection, it sets the stage for a series of chapters that offer an assessment of treason as an act that requires punishment by the state (with Dominguez's essay excepted) while complicating that story as one in which the violence of the state is sanctioned. This is a contradiction, Battaglia notes, still at issue in human rights abuses and protections. The violence of the state against traitors is graphically central to Ian A. MacInnes's “‘A Somewhat Cruel Vengeance Was Taken for the Blood of the Slain’: Royal Punishment of Rebels, Traitors and Political Enemies in Medieval Scotland, c. 1100–1250.” Samuel A. Claussen's “Royal Punishment and Reconciliation in Trastámara Castle” shifts us away from Christian Europe to study, in part, Castilian historical narratives about the loss of Spain to Islam that emphasize the destruction of Spain by “infidels” invited to invade by a Spanish traitor.

The final section of the book, “Treasonous Love: Adultery and Shame,” includes quite a few stories of duplicitous women, especially Guinevere. Melissa Ridley Elmes's chapter connects anxieties about Guinevere's fidelity to Arthur, to a larger feeling of insecurity about state and judicial processes. Dianne Berg reads Arden of Faversham's staging of petty treason (the murder of a husband by a wife) as a text anxious about Queen Elizabeth, whose long reign remained both husbandless and childless. I wondered, here, about the legacy of Henry VIII, whose laws making adultery treason (so beautifully read by Karen Cunningham in Imaginary Betrayals, 2013) might have added to Berg's reading. Larissa Tracy's own reading of Cercei Lannister's walk of shame in HBO's Game of Thrones in comparison with that of Jane Shore in 1483 brings the collection to a close. While I might point out that Game of Thrones did much to complicate Cercei by this moment in the series, Tracy's point is that treason can become a convenient claim made by a corrupt state. And she closes by connecting this reading to her introduction. She reminds us that the current political moment in US politics has been a time during which we have had to think about treason as an act possibly committed by a president, but also as an accusation launched against those deemed to be an enemy of that president.

Tracy's volume offers a great deal to those interested in the workings of treason (and loyalty) in the medieval and early modern periods, not least for anyone interested in German and French literature and history, as well as in religious forms. I have left discussion of other fine chapters out due to constraints of space, but let those mentioned here recommend the others, as well. Tracy is right that an understanding of the history of treason is useful to thinking about the uses and abuses of accusations of treason today. The chapters assembled in this collection testify to the enduring struggle with how treason was defined, punished, used in the interest of the state, and sometimes deployed as a legitimate form of rebellion against the tyrant.