This is a work of meticulous scholarship that maps the rediscovery of the medieval mystery plays in the nineteenth century, and the recovery of sacred drama since its disappearance in England during the Protestant Reformation. But what is immediately striking is how little we have progressed in properly interdisciplinary work in our understanding of the long nineteenth century – how an exemplary work of literary scholarship can stand alongside similar theological and liturgical work, yet almost in isolation from it.

The removal of the medieval dramatic tradition by the liturgical ‘revisions’ of the English Reformation had its consequences in the censorship of ‘sacred drama’ in the early nineteenth century. Antiquarian and later theological scholarship was engaged in the recovery of the literature of the late medieval period and in the case of the Mystery cycles, Schramm links this with the developing democratic spirit of the age. It is a pity that she does not link this more closely with the recent work of David Matthews in his book The making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis, Mn 1999), although Matthews's subsequent book The invention of Middle English (Turnhout 2000) is in her bibliography, or with O. B. Hardison Jr's classic work Christian rite and Christian drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, Md 1965). This would provide the link with the recovery of liturgical study in the Church of England in which certain similarities can be discerned, though in a very different key. Schramm does mention Peter B. Nockles's standard work The Oxford Movement in context (Cambridge 1994), but she does not appreciate the careful nuances in the terms Protestant and Catholic examined by Nockles as part of the Church's search for continuity with the late Middle Ages in its claims for catholicity. Influential nineteenth-century works like William Maskell's The ancient liturgy of the Church of England (London 1844), William Palmer's Origines liturgicae (London 1845), and the Camden Society's Hierurgia Anglicanae (London 1848), detailing the ceremonial of the Church's liturgy, provided the basis for volumes of late medieval liturgical texts by the Early English Text Society such as Thomas F. Simmons's Lay-folk's mass book (London 1979) which sought to link the Church's liturgy with the religious practice of the ‘lay people’. It was followed by the Lay-folk's prayer book (London 1895–7) and the Lay-folk's catechism (London 1901).

Both within the secular and the ecclesiastical world in the Victorian age, literature and theology were extending religion to a more democratic public. In chapter iv of her book, Schramm examines Dickens's well-known religious dismissal of Millais's painting ‘Christ in the house of his parents’ (1849–50), and, at length, George Eliot's ‘powerful descriptions of ritual worship’ (p. 155) in Romola, together with her social uses of ceremonial. Mikhail Bakhtin is a powerful critical presence in her argument, but there is a danger lurking in this thesis. The theology of the popular, or at least secular, tradition of drama has parallels with the theology of the Church, but these two forms of medievalism sustain different narratives. Thus, while it may be correct to acknowledge the theological power of Byron's verse drama Cain (1821) as an example of ‘poetry's power to intervene in theological debate’ (p. 95), Byron was utterly dismissed by John Keble in his Oxford Lectures on poetry (1832–41), which were hardly for a popular audience as they were given in Latin, as by a man who had ‘sullied his splendid powers by many serious vices, inexcusable in any one, to say nothing of a great poet’. The Church and popular or ‘secular’ religion often stood apart.

It may be that the underlying theme of Schramm's work is the shift in the idea of religion, as the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of the Church's decay and its replacement by the secular. There was an ancient tradition in the Christian West, going back at least as far as Amalarius of Metz in the ninth century, which sought to distinguish between the liturgy of the eucharist and the representative in dramatic performance. Liturgical performance has never been ‘theatrical’. Johan Huizinga's celebrated study of the play element in culture, Homo ludens (1938), is problematised by the responses of Victorian English tourists who witnessed the Oberammergau Passionsspiele. In 1872 Anne Buckland felt, in Schramm's words, that ‘the play could not be transplanted from its cultural context without blasphemous offence’ (p. 174). The vestiges of the play's liturgical roots remain in an echo of the clear distinction between the drama of the sanctuary and that of the stage. But the problems of ‘acting liturgically’, to use the title of a recent book by the theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff, finally disappear in Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1891–2), which abandons any Christian interpretation of the Bible for Freudian psychoanalysis.

Wilde paves the way for the interesting questions that are opened up by the mid-twentieth century in the performance of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the cathedral (1935) in Canterbury Cathedral. Eliot's play marks the culmination of a tradition of ‘Becket’ plays and novels (in 1843 the liturgical scholar J. M. Neale published a fictional life of ‘S. Thomas of Canterbury’ entitled Agnes de Tracy) and raises the question as to whether it is more liturgical than dramatic. In a way it is the return to sacred drama from the suppression of the Mystery cycles, though if they were popular theatre emerging from the sanctuary, then Eliot's play is high-brow drama's return to its roots in the Church at a time when the Church and its place in society was finally waning.

Schramm's fine and scholarly book is exemplary as a work of literary and cultural analysis. Where it falls short is in its appreciation of the complex and multi-layered relationship between literature and theology in a Victorian age when the growing democratic spirit and the spread of education were having a profound effect on religious understanding at a popular level, while the theology of the Church and its liturgy, embracing for its own ecclesial purposes the cult of the medieval, was becoming less appreciated even while the Church sought to recover its place in the hearts of people. Schramm's conclusion concerning the recovery of the ‘drama of sacrifice’ after its release from the ‘regulatory frameworks of the Renaissance’ (p. 241) is just a little too simple.