Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays by David Mills (review)

REVIEWS The University of Calgary Press hosts a Web site that contains a pared-down version of the CD's contents for evaluation-SGML files for Thynne's edition and the Fonteinne amoreuse plus updates that can be downloaded for free. The contents of the CD may be accessed directly from a CD­ ROM drive without copying any files onto a local hard drive, but doing so makes using the updates rather problematic. For example, the Cal­ gary Web site has a corrected copy ofthe Tanner transcription available for downloading, but as the CD itself cannot be modified the only way to replace the bad version is to copy all the files from the CD onto a hard drive, replace the flawed file with the corrected one, then run the pro­ gram from the hard drive. I tested this method and it works, but be warned that the entire contents of the CD eat up 324 MB of disk space, a considerable amount of storage for someone who may want to use the CD primarily on a home computer. Other than this space consideration, the CD makes very few demands on the computer and can be used on either a Windows 3.1/95/NT PC or a Macintosh with a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM (to accommodate the sizable enlarged manuscript images) and running either Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher (includ­ ing Communicator) or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher. Planned improvements include a bibliography and further SGML ver­ sions of the transcriptions, critical edition, and source texts on the Web site, revised explanatory notes, and hyperlinks between the critical edi­ tion and its textual notes. In its present form, the hypertext Book ofthe Duchess is a worthwhile experiment in making widely scattered but re­ lated scholarly materials available in one densely interwoven package. It will be interesting to see what innovations find their way into its later incarnations. SUSAN ARVAY Rutgers University DAVID MILLS. Recycling the Cycle: The City ofChester andIts Whitsun Plays. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 281. $55.00. The majority of his scholarly career having been focused on the task of documenting, editing, and analyzing the social and dramatic records of 517 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER medieval Chester, David Mills brings that career to impressive summa­ tion in Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays. Al­ though in part a recycling and synthesizing of his many previously pub­ lished notes and articles, this lucid, trustworthy, and highly readable compendium will be a great service to students of medieval drama and medieval culture for decades to come. A conservative scholar who es­ chews "speculative" or "theoretical" interpretations of empirical data, Mills's major purpose is not to re-interpret the Chester Plays themselves but rather to position them inside the "local context" of their city. This context includes the city's urban geography, its major religious and sec­ ular buildings, its social networks (most notably its guild alliances), its calendar of secular and sacred celebrations, and its influential local histo­ rians and political personages-all seen in light of the city's changing economic, political, social, and religious circumstances from the four­ teenth until the late seventeenth century. Because only a very few early documents survive, however, Recycling the Cycle is mainly an indepth profile of Tudor Chester, the city's many late documents providing sometimes reliable, sometimes antiquarian, and sometimes politically expedient accounts of the city's and the plays's earlier history. Acknowl­ edging that such an ambitious project requires that certain matters be "simplified" and "tailored," Mills succeeds nevertheless in providing a rich sense of the Tudor city and the central importance of such Cestrian documents as the Life of St. Werburg, Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, Rogers's Breviary, as well as the plays's pre-Reformation and post­ Reformation Banns. Mills is equally informative in his scrupulous ac­ counting for the plays's eight surviving manuscripts, characterizing their scribes, copyists, and owners, and evaluating the cycle's editorial history from the Deimling/Matthews EETS edition (1892/1916) to Mills's and Robert Lumiansky's magesterial EETS edition and commen­ tary (1974...