Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England by Ruth Nisse (review)

REVIEWS 267 Italian edition of the Dialogues, but it documents the Jewish-Spanish interest in Leone Ebreo’s texts. The fifth part, “La edición veneciana de traducción de los Diálogos de amor y su recepción,” comprises six chapters. The first chapter, “La edición veneciana de los Diálogos de amor y de las Opiniones sacadas de los más auténticos philósopofos que sobre la alma escrivieron y sus definiciones de 1569,” deals with the first Spanish translation published in 1560 in Venice and attributed to Guedallah ben Yosef ibn Yahia; Nelson Novoa relates it to the work of Aron Afia. Chapter 2, “El opúscolo filosófico las Opiniones sacada de los más auténticos y antiguos philósofos que sobre la alma escrivieron y sus definiciones ,” focuses on the work of Aron Afia, emphasizing the important interrelation between West and East and Christian insights into Jewish intellectual activities. Chapter 3, “Aspectos lingüísticos de la edición de 1568,” analyses the first Spanish translation of the Dialogues. Chapter 4, “La emissión de los Dialogos de amor en 1598 y su relación con la edición de 1568,” deals with the reprinting of the first translation in Spanish of the Dialogues. Chapter 5, “La edición de la traducción de Yahia en el encuadramiento de los mecanismos de la imprenta y de la censura en Venecia durante el Quinientos,” underlines important issues connected to sixteenth-century printing, most of all in connection to the inquisition and the index of forbidden books, which included the Dialogues. Chapter 6, “La suerte de la traducción de Guedallah Yahia,” deals with the distribution and the reception of the first Spanish translation of the Dialogues in Italy and in Spain and Spanish territories, i.e., the new colonies in America. The sixth part, “Problemas textuales, comparación de las traducciones españolas con el texto italiano de los Diálogos de amor y conclusiones globales,” includes three chapters. Chapter 1, “Consideraciones textuales acerca del texto italiano y los dos testimonios de la traducción en lengua española,” deals with interesting philological problems related to the original text of the Dialogues and discusses what text or texts the Spanish translator or translators could have used for the Spanish translation of 1568 and the translation into Aljamiado. Chapter 2, “Reflexión global sobre los dos testimonios,” relates the two translations to a common Italian text. Chapter 3, “Los Diálogos de amor de Léon Hebreo y su recepción como retrato del mundo sefardí del siglo XVI,” contains interesting insights into the importance of the Dialogues among the Sefardic communities and Jewish intellectuals during the sixteenth century. Nelson Novoa’s study is an outstanding and accurate work that helps to contextualize Leone Ebreo and his Dialogues. Providing new archival documentation and a vast bibliography, Nelson Novoa’s book is an excellent reference for further studies of the many aspects of the Dialogues of Love and its times; it is very useful for scholars interested in Jewish, Italian, and Iberian studies. ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, UCLA Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2004 ) x + 226 pp. REVIEWS 268 Ruth Nisse’s exceptional study of the political implications of interpretation both represented in, and occasioned by various dramatic enactments of religious texts offers a fascinating glimpse into not only the performance history of her dramatic texts, but also the interweaving of the great intellectual and cultural threads which produce the unique texture of the period: the identification with regional localities, the relationship of the individual to the corporate or civic bodies of communities defined by church, state, or guild, and, most importantly, what she terms the “politics of interpretation,” or “the process by which poet-playwrights, players, and spectators brought specifically hermeneutic problems to a public stage in order to negotiate their potential communal consequences” (5). Nisse’s own interpretive project locates paradoxical, interpretive fissures in the “vernacular theatrical language” of late medieval England in the “hermeneutic methods of scholastic biblical commentaries and dialectics” (2), carefully tracing the often dizzying derivative...