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An intriguing mystery in early modern intellectual history is how and why European scholars came to designate Ethiopic, the sacred language of Ethiopia, as Chaldean. This article locates the designation’s origins in a deduction made by Vatican library personnel, partially inspired by a hoax perpetrated a quarter-century earlier. It then traces the influence of this designation on the progress of historical linguistics, where theories defending the appellation of Ethiopic as Chaldean, although often erroneous, nevertheless contributed to the accurate categorization of Ethiopic as a Semitic language, and on attitudes to Ethiopian Christianity that played a role in Catholic-Protestant polemic.

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Reviews 835 argument of Mervyn James, based on functionalist anthropology, that through the rituals of Corpus Christi the town achieved social solidarity to focus on the performative practices of division and ambiguity that have aesthetic and political effects. Drawing on the work of previous scholars on the staging of York plays throughout the city and on the civic government and craft guilds that sponsored them, Beckwith uses the concept of "ritualization" to suggest that the processes by which city and drama interact were never static or fixed but always fluid and "polysemous." She thus refuses New Historicism's political language of "dominance and subversion" or "resistance and containment."Part 3 (chapters 4-6) analyzes the York Passion and Resurrection plays, using semiotics to grasp the means by which the "phenomenal" body of Christ in its simultaneous visibility and invisibility defines Corpus Christi as a theater of sacrament. This section, based on the views of many religion scholars, is the theoretical core of Beckwith's argument that our understanding of both sacramental religion and medieval theater has suffered from our inability to appreciate the reality and importance of "presence." As she puts it, "it is in the drama of appearances and disappearances, exits and entrances, absences and presences, signification and reference in theatrical forms of life that the question central to sacramentality itself is asked: How do we encounter the glorified God who has withdrawn himself from our sight?" (p. 73).In part 4 (chapter 7) Beckwith traces the deliberate Reformation separation of theology and theater as well as the replacement of a theater of signs by a theater of disguise. She denies that there was direct suppression of the Corpus Christi plays in York, arguing rather that the multiple cultural and social transformations of the later sixteenth century-including abolition of the feast day, reorganization of civic space, reduction in the ubiquity of public role-playing, delegitimization of sacramental ritual-destroyed the capacity of the community to be present to itself through the drama of Christ's presence and absence.Both parts 1 and 5 examine the contemporary performances of medieval religious drama and story to make an argument about the "presence of things past." The revival of the York cycle for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and two recent productions of the Mysteries by Bill Bryden and Katie Mitchell provide opportunities for Beckwith to meditate upon what has been lost in our experience of presentness and absence that makes these theatrical efforts less than successful. Ironically, she suggests, the Barry Unsworth novel Morality Play and the movie Jesus of Montreal are able to take more seriously a relationship between religion and theater, where the world of actors replaces the church as the community in which "real presence" is possible.It is impossible in such a brief review to describe the rich and thoug~ht-provoking nature of Signifying God. If there is one aspect that may leave mediev...