Cooper's book must surely take the prize for the most significant contribution to the appreciation of this drama since V. A. Kolve's work, The Play Called Corpus Christi. . . She has shown that far from being a "foreign country," the Middle Ages was a place with which Shakespeare was totally familiar in terms of the built environment in which he moved, the literary and dramatic conventions that he and his audience understood, and even the religious culture that had crossed the divide of the Reformation.

Margaret Rogerson, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Cooper's book is a timely one, and deserves to be a significant one, in reorienting perspectives to the important place of the medieval, visible and invisible, direct and intangible, in Shakespeare's mind . . . It covers a vast array of material with a swiftness of pace and ease of style that are sufficient to inform the under-graduate or interested layperson, without being laborious for the scholar . . . It will give Shakespeareans of all shades a fuller understanding of the world in which he lived and thought, and the ones he created.

Joanna Bellis, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Marginalia