The York Mystery Plays, performed annually on Corpus Christi for around two hundred years from the 1370s onwards, invite enquiry from a wide variety of angles, for not only does most of the lengthy text survive (over 13,000 lines of Middle English verse), but so also does a remarkable wealth of documentary information about the organisation of the performance, mostly still in the civic archives at York. Pamela King's book subsumes a series of studies she has previously published in article form, seeking to situate the cycle in the religious life of late medieval York, giving particular attention to the cult of Corpus Christi, and a more general view of the local liturgical observances of the time. She finds the plays to have been deeply rooted in the formal practices of conventional piety and orthodoxy, and her careful documentation of the congruities between the biblical subject dramatised in the plays and annual round of readings from the Scriptures found in the liturgical books of the York rite is a valuable contribution. The implication is not that the liturgy forms the ‘sources’ of the plays as such, but that the two are different but related expressions of a particular mentalité shared by the audience and the dramatists. The approach is readily acceptable as far as it goes, but the manifest gap between the esoteric, Latinate, clerical realm of the liturgy and the often abrasively demotic and sometimes comic vernacularity of the plays remains to be bridged. There is probably a missing piece of the jigsaw here, in the shape of the pastoral and often para-liturgical vernacular texts on which significant sections of the cycle are based, which probably did as much, if not more, to form and inform northern lay consciousness of scriptural narrative and its interpretation as the liturgy proper. The preconditions for the flourishing of biblical drama must have been in large part established, from the late thirteenth century onwards, in northern narrative verse texts such as the Northern homily collection, the Cursor mundi, the Middle English metrical paraphrase of the Old Testament, and the Northern passion, to name but a few. All are still extant in numerous manuscripts that were plainly designed to be read aloud to lay audiences, but they remain to be studied closely as background to the drama. When and where were these texts read out, by whom, and to whom? Notwithstanding this general reservation, there is a great deal in this open-minded and sane study that is valuable and timely. It deserves to be widely read, not least because its feel for what the cycle was really about is far better informed and more consistently illuminating than much other recent work, which has sought to regiment our understanding of the plays so as to conform with routine tropes of literary theory and cultural materialism that have for some time been past their sell-by date.