The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) survives today chiefly as an idiom: “to kill the fatted calf,” celebrating a long-absent person's return to friends and family. This drastic impoverishment belies the parable's rich interpretive history, one that Pietro Delcorno's admirable study follows from the early Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. Delcorno contributes much to our thinking about how stories were remade to reflect and react to cultural and religious change. In a pellucid, richly documented study, we see the parable cross boundaries between genres, social settings, and historical circumstances to serve new pastoral functions. The parable became “an important master narrative that allowed people active in pastoral work to present their audiences with an emotionally engaging discourse on the . . . identity of the faithful and on the characteristics of God” (3). Preachers shared with playwrights, jongleurs, and poets the ability to shape stories and their hidden meanings to create vivid narratives that would hold up under centuries of repetition. To many religious historians, as well as to scholars of narratology and oral performance, this book will prove indispensable.

The prodigal son offered a religious model that could be applied to any believer's life, a form of autobiography by proxy of the penitent sinner. The parable made its way through more than a thousand years of repetition with variation, from lectern to liturgy, stage, art, and the margins of prayer books, becoming the most influential of the parables for teaching Christians the means and value of penitence and the willingness of a loving God to forgive. Following his introduction to the book's mode of argumentation, Delcorno begins with an overview of the reception history of the parable from the start of the Christian era to the early fourteenth century. He considers the diverse media that told the story, each contributing to its memorability, hence its effectiveness as a model for imitation. As preachers expanded their territory from isolated monasteries into urban, secular arenas, the parable's “relevance, function, and variety of interpretations” (1) changed, often in response to new catechetical imperatives. In cities, preachers tailored their sermons to the needs of their congregations. Some altered the allegorical identities of the characters or dropped them from the story; others added dialogue and characters such as prostitutes and guardian angels. Still others modernized the parable, casting it in the courtly setting of romance or expanding scenes in the city.

Delcorno then narrows his focus, first to fifteenth-century Italy, an era in which rich documentary sources record the performances of such charismatic preachers as Bernardino da Siena and Savonarola. Reportationes of their sermons give us not just their words but their gestures, tones, and the responses of the audience, among other performance details. Their ability to arouse pity, laughter, sorrow, and joy in their auditors made the story particularly memorable, a stable model for imitation. Florentine religious plays, written and performed in the second half of the fifteenth century, gave viewers additional means of identification with the penitent sinner. Evoking strong emotions through dramatic interaction and verse, the plays offered a framework for meditation and self-examination. Delcorno's analysis of the literary strategies and theological interpretations of prodigal-son plays by Antonia Pulci and Castellano Castellani puts into sharper focus the ways in which the story appealed to the expectations and tastes of the Florentine socio-political and cultural community.

In late fifteenth-century Basel, a pastoral phenomenon arose: a cycle of fifty sermons on the prodigal son by Johan Meder. Meder's preaching assumed a self-consciously dramatic form, as particular to him as his version's trajectory, ending not with the father's reception of his son but with a meditation on the Passion, in which the prodigal son assumes the characteristics of the sponsa Christi. The sermons were printed as an illustrated book, with a poetic introduction by Sebastian Brant and woodcuts by the artists who illustrated his Narrenschiff—a unique format for a fifteenth-century sermon collection. Delcorno turns at last to the new religious environment of the sixteenth century in German regions. In his consideration of both Lutheran and Catholic uses of the parable, he draws an intriguing conclusion: both saw the prodigal son as “the perfect mirror in which to contemplate one's own life. The image reflected in the mirror was, however, no longer the same for everyone” (17).