Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250–1800. Cornelis van der Haven and Jürgen Pieters, eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 198 pp. €95.
mance in ways heretofore unconsidered. Durham studies the illustrations accompanying a medieval French drama, the playtext of which has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry, while Sponsler scrutinizes The Beauchamp Pageant, a richly illustrated narration of the life and works of Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), for traces of medieval theatrical practices and as an unlikely but important “part of the visual archive for performance history” (97). Sponsler’s essay is particularly exemplary for the energy of its prose and for the way its inquiry is structured, with engaging and important questions about its close reading for performance. (The book’s dedication gently signals the sad fact of Sponsler’s untimely death in 2016.) Her essay also is emblematic of the collection as a whole, in the quality of its writing and scholarship and in its grounding in significant and often complex questions about the precise nature and function of the performances being located and traced. I did find myself wishing for several features whose absence somewhat undermined the book’s intention to represent a cultural and disciplinary diversity in the study of performance. Foremost of these absences was any list of contributors supplying disciplinary affiliations. The omission of an index and a slightly more developed introduction from the editor also would have strengthened the overall project, given the book’s scope and theoretical investments. For years, however, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has published and thereby made available to the field important and current conversations in medieval and Renaissance studies, and this latest volume impressively continues this work.