This book challenges any simplistic assertion of sermonic influence on late-medieval English drama—the idea of plays as a mere “handmaiden to preaching” (vii) that straightforwardly reinforces ecclesiastical authority. Acknowledging that both are performative genres arising from a common religious milieu and thus share features of form and content that may reflect “cross-fertilization” (11), Steenbrugge nevertheless argues that there is no automatic or indeed particularly close affinity between the two genres, and furthermore, that concerns about heterodoxy in England made sermons and plays more distinct and in some cases divergent than they were on the continent.

The first chapter examines clerical attitudes toward drama and (more briefly) lay attitudes toward sermons, arguing that these genres are much more closely intertwined in continental (mostly French and Italian) sermons and plays than in England—an attention to the European context that is welcome and sustained throughout the book. She also points out that drama drew much more visibly on devotional treatises than on sermons, an important reminder that these two genres were part of a larger tapestry of religious instruction and reception. Chapter 2, while acknowledging the role of delivery in preaching, suggests that sermons tended to avoid theatricality and focused on didactic content delivered in an authoritative mode. They are, “generally speaking, prescriptive, authoritative, and monologic” (38) and as such, they differ greatly in their mode of teaching from drama even when using direct address, rhetorical questions, and other such devices. The insistence on the monologism of sermons by contrast with plays is somewhat overstated, though Steenbrugge acknowledges the variety in both genres.

Chapter 3 argues that scholars’ tendency to dub dramatic speech “sermonic” based on its content rather than formal features ignores the generic specificity of sermons: religious content and a virtuous speaker are not enough to make a preacher. The point is a fair one, though her criteria for what makes something sermonic can seem to shift: qualities identified as characteristic of sermons (such as self-authenticating language or biblical interpretation) may not “count” if not accompanied by a use of Latin or practical advice to the audience—even as the latter are, in other cases, used to identify a speech act as specifically sermonic (see, for example, 48, 53). The relative lack of (formal) sermons in plays may be due, Steenbrugge suggests, to a desire for an independent authority, one not borrowed from the clergy, and to concerns about who could licitly preach. There nevertheless remain some instances of sermons in the Middle English drama corpus, usually—as she shows—assigned to figures easily, or even ideally, compatible with licensed contemporary preachers (Jesus, Saint Paul, Episcopus). At times authority seems to be read as a zero-sum game, in which the different modes of speech and interaction that characterize drama as opposed to preaching “diminish” (50) clerical authority rather than complementing it.

This line of thought continues in Chapters 4 and 5 on “presenter figures” in plays—“Doctor,” “Expositor,” and others—who mediate between audience and action and have often been treated as representations of preachers. Some of these take on a sermonic voice, but as “pragmatic characters who aid a fluent performance,” orienting and perhaps helping to manage the audience (75), they often emphasize the audience's own social and intellectual capacities in ways Steenbrugge considers uncommon in preaching. While sermon openings may “create a sense of fellowship and even conviviality with the audience,” they also “reinforce the spiritual and intellectual inferiority of the congregation” by comparison with the preacher (90). Acknowledging that the settings and cultural expectations surrounding sermons and plays—both treated thoughtfully—would naturally influence the relative need for audience goodwill, she reads the instructive modes of dramatic figures as deliberately eliciting affective response and allowing more room for controversy and varied perspectives than sermons do. She suggests, reasonably enough, that plays tend more toward “stimulating internal religious experiences” than to direct and explicit teaching, though the claim that preachers construct their audiences as “docile, unquestioning, passive recipients of well-defined, objective religious instruction” seems too strong (110). One can find a range of approaches in sermons as well as in plays, with more overlap than is sometimes acknowledged here.

Chapter 6 examines the difference between dramatic and sermonic treatments of the sacrament of penance in the vexed religious and political landscape of fifteenth-century England. Lollard critiques of both theatricality and penance, Steenbrugge suggests, may well have influenced playwrights’ choices, especially once Archbishop Arundel's 1409 Constitutions limiting vernacular religious teaching were fully in force: English plays are less likely to represent the sacrament directly than continental ones. Having figures like “Reason” or “the Virtues” encourage contrition or confession, in her view, departs from orthodox insistence on the role of the priest, and many protagonists fail to model a perfect approach to penance. Again, though, both plays and sermons have (as Steenbrugge acknowledges, particularly for plays) considerable internal diversity, and one might argue for complementarity as much as for a “quietly subversive” drama “at odds with ecclesiastical doctrine” (148): the differences, that is, are arguably due as much to genre and practicality as to any real divergence of views.

Throughout, Steenbrugge is scrupulous and thorough in her attention to earlier arguments, and the book offers a valuable, compact archive of medieval English views on the efficacy of religious performance and the forms it can and should take. It also makes a strong case for more careful attention to what links and distinguishes drama and sermons; if in doing so the author sometimes overstates the monolithic and monologic quality of sermons, this is balanced by her thoughtful account of the nuances of the plays and the ways in which they undertook their own teaching imperatives.