Biblical drama is commonly associated with late medieval civic cycle plays, like those at York and Chester, and pigeonholed as Catholic, literal, even naïve. The essays in Enacting the Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama, edited by Eva von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt, cover drama from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, and bear witness to a much longer period within which biblical drama thrived, and to the variety of creative strategies and religious agendas—both Catholic and Protestant—involved in dramatizing the Bible. They simultaneously reveal complex networks of transnational influences. Many of the essays pay particular attention to how effectively the plays engaged and moved their audiences: something that deeply troubled the Wycliffite author of the Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, quoted by von Contzen in her chapter.

The book has its roots in a conference, “The Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama,” held in Freiburg in 2017. It is organized in three broadly chronological sections. The first is devoted to medieval cycle drama. The second ranges across medieval Easter plays, including one attributed to Héloïse; fifteenth- and sixteenth-century morality plays; John Heywood's The Pardoner and the Friar, here redated by Greg Walker to Christmas 1532; George Peele's The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe; and an exploration of the records of Elizabethan biblical drama. The third section, which focuses on works that are, for the most part, chronologically later, includes discussions of Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene's A Looking Glasse for London and Protestant plays by Nicholas Grimald and John Bale. Its final essays concentrate on Czech, German, and Yiddish plays, and the Comedie von der Königen Esther und Hoffärtigen Haman, a play apparently performed by an English travelling company, which intriguingly connects the early modern English and German theatrical scenes.

The three essays that make up the first section all offer nuanced readings with wider implications for how we approach cycle plays. The late Lawrence Besserman presents an engaging survey of Noah's wife, a figure approached and even named variously in medieval and earlier traditions, who in the Chester play Noah's Flood is a disruptive shrew. I was not completely persuaded by Besserman's reading of the Chester Uxor Noe as a Christ figure, but the essay does reveal the subversive potential of the human dimension of biblical stories—the wife's reluctance to abandon her friends in defiance of God's command is a moving dilemma, which the play foregrounds. Jonathan Stavsky explores how the N-Town Trial of Mary and Joseph presents the trial scene and the biblical community around it. He argues that medieval audiences were encouraged to imagine themselves as part of that community: the play does not aim to incite the audience against Jews or Lollards but instead emphasizes continuities between the characters of the drama and its medieval spectators. Von Contzen also pays attention to how audiences were invited to participate in biblical stories. She shows that mystery plays use deictic terms, narrations of gesture and action, and descriptions of foods and sensory experience as verbal anchors to hook their audiences into the action.

In the second section, I particularly enjoyed the essays by M. A. Katritzky and Cathy Shrank. Katritzky fascinatingly traces the development of the merchant scene in medieval Easter plays: a scene without biblical source where the three Marys buy ointment from a spice merchant before visiting Christ's tomb. She argues that the developing iconography of the Visitatio Sepulchri in the visual arts, where the women shift from carrying thuribles, or censers, to apothecary jars, suggests influence from a partly lost dramatic tradition. Shrank examines the citation of scripture in morality plays from the early fifteenth to late sixteenth centuries and thus from the period immediately after Arundel's Constitutions, designed to limit vernacular Bible translation, into the period when the English Bible was authorized. Perhaps surprisingly, scripture is cited in Latin throughout both periods and is also translated and paraphrased into English throughout; loose citation is not entirely the province of sinful and willfully misleading characters.

Paul Whitfield White's chapter documents the diversity of Elizabethan biblical drama. Mystery cycles continued to be staged into the 1560s and 1570s, often with revised texts. School plays were more popular than one might imagine: at Shrewsbury in the 1560s, the grammar school seems to have collaborated with the town to produce an annual Passion play that attracted as many as twenty thousand spectators. Biblical plays were also common on the London stage, and an apparent specialty of the Admiral's Men, although many of the texts are lost. Titles such as The Week may have veiled the biblical nature of some plays.

The third section of Enacting the Bible begins with Elisabeth Dutton's consideration of how Protestant plays (principally Nicholas Grimald's) handle time, space, and objects. Some of the props and staging seem to be designed to draw attention to the incongruity or emptiness of material object or place. In Grimald's Christus Redidivus, there is Christ's empty tomb, and the cloths left there called “nihil”; in John Bale's Three Laws, there are the props of cumbersome tablets of stone, and, oddly, a heart. Next, Hannibal Hamlin makes the convincing case that A Looking Glasse for London finds a way of putting God on stage after this was prohibited: a character designated as an angel in the script delivers God's speeches from the book of Jonah, and it seems likely that the audience would have understood the figure as God.

Some of the essays here are less centrally concerned with biblical drama—for example, Monika Fludernik's discussion of martyrdom on the early modern stage—and the chronological and geographical range makes it inevitable that most readers will find some parts more interesting than others. Nevertheless, there is much here to stimulate, and encourage new attention to the variety and complexity of biblical plays.