Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. By Claire Sponsler. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 235. $35.

Who knew? Less than a decade after the construction of the first modern theatre building (The Theatre of Southwark, 1576), an Englishman bound for the wilds of Newfoundland found room in his luggage for the equipment needed to perform mumming plays and May games for the savages and settlers of colonial Canada. At the same time, the Pueblo people of New Mexico were performing the matachines dances that continued to dramatize and contest the conquest of Mexico well into the twentieth century. Now the blandly seasonal Tulip Fest, the Pinkster Festival of Albany began as Pfingsten, a Pentecostal celebration of Dutch origin that metamorphosed into a celebration of African American culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War. During the charged decades after that war, in the midst of movements to end the slavery of low-wage laborers, newspaper coverage of Philadelphia's controversial New Year's revels helped to transform displays of masked banditry into well-regulated community revels. Simultaneously, theatrical entrepreneurs in America's heartland capitalized on popular accounts of the Passion Play at Oberammergau by mounting successful spectacles of quasi-medieval piety that influenced, directly and indirectly, the fortunes of commercial theatre in the twentieth century (one of these launched the career of an actor called James O'Neill, father of America's first major playwright). In the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, some 250 men still participate in the annual raising of the giglio, a gigantic metal and papier-mâché monument honoring the miraculous deeds of St. Paulinus of Nola, which is carried aloft in a ritual based on the increasingly distant customs of medieval Italy. Meanwhile, college campuses in both the United States and Canada regularly provide the venues in which North American academics strive to recreate the sights and sounds of medieval drama, in the name of intellectual inquiry.

Carol Symes
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign