In a distinguished career of teaching, research, editing, and writing, Clifford Davidson has produced an impressive number of publications. For more than thirty years he was an editor of Comparative Drama, the standard journal in the field. He has published widely on medieval and Renaissance drama, with articles and books on topics of vital interest - violence in early plays, the matter of illusion and truth, iconoclasm and iconography, and the stability of symbolic images. With On Tradition: Essays on the Use and Valuation of the Past, he argued that the past "may serve to heal the wound of post-modernity and to make its skepticism seem irrelevant."

This collection presents one previously unpublished essay and harvests some of the best of Davidson's shorter writings, published in a wide range of journals and monographs not always readily accessible today. He is now professor emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, home of the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies, through which Davidson's guiding presence has moved for more than thirty-eight years.