At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages

Andrew Cowell, At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, and Bodies in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 279 pp. ISBN 0-472-- 11007-1. $47.50.

This book is about the tavern and its associated thematics in a group of twelfth- and thirteenth-century `comico-realist' texts, not just in the wellknown Arras dramas of Le Jeu de saint Nicolas, Courtois dArras, and Le Jeu de la feuillie but also in a selection of fabliaux, in the poetry of the Goliards, and in Rutebeuf's poems of misfortune, the only work specifically excluded being the Roman de Renart. More originally, Cowell seeks to consider the tavern as a crucial locale for the development of the medieval notions of profit and play, and the extent to which the two concepts together formed the basis of a new sign theory reflecting the participation of new voices in the discourses of medieval culture. Though Cowell's investigations, heavily grounded in critical theory as they...