In recent years, tropology, the moral sense of scripture, has not received the attention devoted to the literal and historical senses. Ryan McDermott suggests that the situation was different in premodern England, where tropology was the pulsing heart of spiritual life: “It pushes the blood of the literal sense into action and circulates it through the lungs of the allegorical sense in order to animate and inhabit the body with an anagogical completeness” (12). He takes a capacious approach to tropology, treating it as “a range of interpretive and inventive practices” (21). He draws on Paul J. Griffiths's position on “religious reading” (26) and Matthew Levering's idea about “a participatory metaphysics of history” (30–31) for his theory of tropology: “Readers of scripture . . . participate in the history of salvation when they turn the words about salvation history into works in their own lives” (31).

McDermott's selection of texts is ambitious, including Latin biblical exegesis (throughout), Patience (chapter 2), Langland's Piers Plowman (chapters 1, 3, and 4), the York Doomsday pageant (chapter 6), and a large array of Reformation works by Martin Luther, Erasmus, Nicholas Udall, and others (throughout and especially chapter 5). Each chapter develops close readings of a number of works, composed over several centuries, in order to demonstrate the historical persistence and range of tropologies. The first chapter, for instance, investigates a number of works to define a theory of tropology, draws on Piers Plowman to disclose a closely connected theory of ethical reading, and concludes with the sixteenth-century Protestant Stephen Bateman's Langlandian tropology. The next chapter posits that the Glossa Ordinaria and other exegetical works gave the Patience-poet a model for treating the literal details of the Jonah tale as the basis of tropology. McDermott then pursues his idea of metaphysical religious reading into reformist works by Martin Luther, William Tyndale, and others.

Chapters 3 and 4 center on Piers Plowman. The main contribution here is the idea that Langland presents his poem, with all its counsel about sin and sacrament, as a work of his own penitential satisfaction. McDermott's formalist chops are on display in his attention to the ways Langland's chiasmus “performs a theological argument about Christ's passion” (202). McDermott reads spiritual failures in Piers Plowman—the abandoning of virtue after confession, the corruption of the Church—as steps in a cyclical penitential process. In this reading, Will's penance and Langland's penitential act of writing integrate the poem into a sacramental economy. McDermott ends by suggesting the persistence of penitential writing into the Reformation. Here and elsewhere, reproductions of manuscript pages parallel the argument (there is no development of the images beyond their function as illustrations).

The argument about the Reformation threaded through earlier chapters becomes the focus of chapter 5, which presents tropology as a continuous practice that undergoes some sixteenth-century shifts in emphasis and implication. For instance, tropology remains Luther's “primary sense of Scripture” even though he does not see good works as necessarily participating in salvation history—morality lies in the faith of the doer rather than in the deed (244, 249). McDermott foregrounds drama as vital to reformist tropologies: the Protestant player John Careless conceived of martyrdom in the model of the Coventry Play; Bernardino Ochino directed an anti-papal tragedy to King Edward VI. McDermott discerns a new trend in this era: tropology separates from a sacramental economy.

In his final substantive chapter, McDermott proposes that the York Doomsday pageant offers Christ's body to the audience as a Eucharistic “counter-experience,” in which Christ's gaze turns on the spectators (338). By means of hypothetical reformist interpretations circa the 1660s, McDermott challenges the pageant's apparent “works-based soteriology” (298).

McDermott positions his contribution at the intersection of exegesis and literature, aligning himself with scholars who have improved on D. W. Robertson Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 1962), a work alluded to but not mentioned in the bibliography; Mary Dove and E. Ann Matter are also central to the book's positioning, but their titles are likewise missing (4–5). Similarly casual citations throughout limit the book's usefulness for readers unfamiliar with the field of study (e.g., John Bossy, 361). A number of scholars whose names I would expect to see (myself included) are not mentioned (Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer's Biblical Poetics [University of Oklahoma Press, 1998]; Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible [D. S. Brewer, 2003]). Finally, the author does not display a consistently strong command of textual or performance histories (e.g., the dating of the York Play, 302, 320, 320n42). In short, some loss of scholarly depth is a down side to the broad scope of the study.

The extensive selection of primary texts presents rhetorical challenges as well: outlines of the chapters too often look like lists, and discussions of multiple texts are not always cohesive. The author engages in overly long conversations with other scholars and theorists, both in the body of the argument and in frequently distracting footnotes. There is room for improvement, then, in the management of the argument. There is also, however, a great deal of solid scholarly food in this book, worth the effort of chewing and digesting.

McDermott makes substantial contributions to the study of vernacular theology, to our understanding of the dialogic possibilities of literature and exegesis, to models of religious reading, and to the history of premodern religion. He persuasively argues that tropology was a continuous and vigorous practice, knitting together the medieval Christian and early modern Protestant. Tropologies fits perfectly into Notre Dame's ReFormations series which, according to its website, “interrogates and challenges the ways in which the academy has divided the study of early English literature and its history into two separate, almost incommensurate realms, medieval and early modern” (http://undpress.nd.edu/series/S00166).