Early on, Michael Norton declares that his new book on “liturgical drama” (my reason for using these scare quotes will shortly become apparent) “is not an introductory text” (16). He is right: this book is likely to have a fairly limited audience of those who possess both some background in the medieval verbal and musical texts that have, since the nineteenth century, been grouped under the rubric “liturgical drama” as well as some interest in exploring what this rubric might mean. For that specialized audience, however, Norton's book will be of considerable interest.

The book's title itself might have benefited from using those scare quotes around the term “liturgical drama” since Norton, an Associate Professor at James Madison University, argues convincingly that the term is meaningless; the texts it has been taken to designate are either liturgical but not in any way drama, like the famous Visitatio Sepulchri, or else very likely drama but not demonstrably liturgical, like some of the titles in the so-called Fleury Playbook. As Norton regularly acknowledges, this is not a novel argument: he refers often to the work of C. Clifford Flanigan and those who followed him in drawing similar conclusions, especially Nils Holger Petersen. But Norton also suggests that the research of these earlier scholars has not been sufficiently influential, especially among literary researchers, and that their findings need to be revived and reintroduced to a new generation of scholars.

Norton does so through a wide-ranging historical approach, moving backward and forward in time in his investigation of how the category of “liturgical drama” came into being and became ingrained in scholarship on medieval drama despite being, in his view, empty of content. After an introduction laying out his views in general terms, Norton turns to various aspects of this problematic category in a series of chapters that build on one another. Chapter 1, “A Prodigious Birth: Creating ‘Liturgical Drama,’” takes us back to the introduction of the term by Charles Magnin in a series of lectures in 1834–1835. Norton finds that Magnin used the term only metaphorically as a way of signaling the dramatically expressive nature of some medieval liturgies. Other nineteenth-century historians followed suit, but with less emphasis on the metaphorical nature of the term, until the metaphor eventually was reimagined as an ontological reality. Chapter 2, “An Improbable Fiction: Confronting ‘Liturgical Drama,’” moves forward historically and traces twentieth-century attempts to conceptualize these texts in different terms, especially Flanigan's efforts, as well as what Norton sees as their failure to take hold. Chapter 3, “Past as Prologue: Preceding ‘Liturgical Drama,’” once more moves backward in history, examining how the texts subsumed under the rubric “liturgical drama” had been understood before that category was established, finding essentially no overlap in the conceptualizations of drama and liturgy before the nineteenth century. Chapter 4, “Strange Bedfellows: Unfolding ‘Liturgical Drama,’” moves further backward to the medieval sources themselves and directly examines the different kinds of text taken to make up this group, dividing them into the two unrelated categories of liturgy (“representational rites”) and drama (“religious plays”) based on the manuscript contexts in which they are found, along with a third category of “ambiguously placed works” (14). Chapter 5, “What's In a Name: Defining ‘Liturgical Drama,’” takes up the terminological difficulty by examining the histories of the usage of the two terms “liturgy” and “drama,” an examination that demonstrates how far they are from belonging together. Chapter 6, “All That Glitters: Dismantling ‘Liturgical Drama,’” proposes an alternative way of seeing the “representational rites”—purely as liturgy rather than drama—using the Visitatio Sepulchri as a test case. A brief but helpful glossary, primarily of terms relevant to medieval liturgical practice, completes the volume.

One might argue with some of Norton's specific findings. In particular, the category of “ambiguously placed works” listed in the tables that make up much of chapter 4 muddies the waters of an argument that Norton wishes to make crystal clear. If certain texts cannot be reliably assigned to either the category of “liturgy” or that of “drama,” might that not suggest a greater degree of overlap between the two than Norton is willing to admit? It would be good to see him address this question more directly. Indeed, throughout this volume Norton's forthright denial of any such overlap can seem too categorical; for example, he cites Pope Gregory IX's 1234 prohibition of dramatic performances within the church, excepting liturgical representations, as evidence of the difference between the two (100–101). But might the need to spell out the exception not also be understood as evidence for the possibility that the two categories might be confused? Again, it would be good to see this question addressed, but Norton does not do so.

Nevertheless, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater is an important contribution to the history of medieval drama and deserves a wide readership among its specialized intended audience.