Defining Acts

Wisconsin Bookwatch, July, 2005

Defining Acts

Ruth Nisse

University of Notre Dame Press

310 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556

www.undpress.nd.edu

0268036020 $23.00 1-800-621-2736

Associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Ruth Nisse presents Defining Acts: Drama And The Politics Of Interpretation In Late Medieval England is an in-depth reflection upon surviving English theatrical works of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and how they represent competing interpretations. The plays compose a sequence of contests concerning who could legitimately determine the meaning of texts--men, women, clerics, laity, rulers, subjects, Christians or Jews. A heavily researched and documented examination of discourses that revealed cultural intelligence in heated conflict, Defining Acts is geared towards college and graduate-level studies, libraries and reference shelves in medieval literature, and spares no depth in its struggle for interpretation.