Words and Images in The Late Middle Ages: The Social Functions of Drama and Art

Words and Images in the late Middle Ages 11
Chapter 1
Words and Images in the late Middle Ages:

the Social Functions of Drama and Art
1.1 Iconography and Textual Studies
At least since the end of the nineteenth century, students of iconography have
been trying to find direct and close connections and derivations between texts
and images, in the attempt to reveal the social significance of iconographic
patterns in a given social milieu. This tendency has spread to such an extent as
to engender methodological pitfalls in which it has become very easy to step.
Not only is there the risk, common to all disciplines with a diachronic interest,
of superimposing modern views and concepts onto previous historical stages,
but also the related risk of basing one’s observations on evidence whose pre
servation is necessarily haphazard, and of confusing different planes of dis
course and social spheres.1
Systematic attempts at reconstructing patterns of thought and belief that
could be at the basis of art production are typical of the Positivist era and its
aftermath, notably with the work of Aby Warburg and of its followers, espe
cially Erwin Panofsky.2 Although Warburg’s influence has not been uniform or
continuous in Western criticism, and although he did not develop a full ‘the
ory’, reference to his work is almost unavoidable in the present study. Warburg
dealt extensively with the expression of emotion, and particularly of pathos, in
art; moreover, at least one recent study has established that his views were
deeply influenced by the then budding discipline of linguistics. Guillemin
brings out this influence by noticing how much, in Warburg’s terminology and
conception, the author was influenced by Vossler’s work, and particularly by
1 In the same way as historical linguistics has for a long time been in danger of yielding to the
temptation of a ‘reification’ of its object of study and of operating sweeping generalisations,
so iconography and art history run the same risk, partly for the same reasons. In the same way
as the linguistic analysis of manuscripts produced by a minority of learned professionals does
not really entitle us to make general statements on the language spoken by a whole commu
nity, so the examination of doctrinal and philosophical texts does not tell the whole story
about the production and fruition of works of art.
2 Michael Diers, Thomas Girst & Dorothea von Moltke, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition
of Cultural History,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 59-73.
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12 Chapter 1
the idea of style as individual expression.3 With a focus on the cultural and
communicative aims of art, Warburg developed these concepts with reference
to the tension between ‘norms’, in this case artistic canons, and individual cre
ativity, producing ‘style’. The idea of ‘creative selection’ as a form of paradigm
was somehow antagonistic to the then predominant Neo-Grammarian theory,
and the well-known concept of Pathosformel was introduced in a form that
recalls the establishment of a set of ‘signs’ that could be variously combined to
be used as ‘visual language’, i.e. what Dante called visibile parlare (Purgatory
10.94). Guillemin emphasises further parallels: the term “superlative”, bor
rowed by Warburg from grammar to refer to intensified facial expression or
gestures depicted, the idea of art formulae migrating through local cultures
like language forms spreading over an area, and the continuous tension
between the pressure to conform to ‘rules’ on the one side and individual sty
listic choices on the other.
Warburg’s focus on the deep connection between artistic creation and its
cultural context has been extremely productive, since it has prompted iconog
raphy4 to search for close parallels between art and texts produced in the
same cultural milieu.5 Warburg considered visual expression as an attempt to
express the collective, unconscious, and often traumatic memory of dramatic
events, reflected in a visual code that allows one to relive those events while at
the same time interposing artistic conventions that create a form of
“distancing”.6 Similar notions have been entertained about much popular
literature and, as far as drama is concerned, one cannot ignore the parallel
with the classical theory of tragedy, subsumed under Aristotle’s category of
catharsis.7
3 Anna Guillemin, “The style of linguistics: Aby Warburg, Karl Vossler, and Hermann
Osthoff,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 605-26.
4 Also used in this tradition is the term iconology, i.e. the analysis of meanings behind
images (Frank Büttner & Andrea Gottdang, Einführung in die Ikonographie: Wege zur Deu
tung von Bildinhalten [München: C.M. Beck, 2006]). The term, indicating the ‘interpreta
tive’ side of iconography, is not widespread beyond the Warburgian tradition, especially
in socio-historical accounts, so it will not be adopted here.
5 Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte (München: Wilhelm Fink
Verlag, 2004), 150 ff.
6 Adi Efal, “Warburg´s ‘Pathos Formula’ in Psychoanalytic and Benjaminian Contexts,”
Assaph 5 (2000): 221-38.
7 According to Eugenio O.P. Marino (“Art Criticism and Icon Theology,” in Christianity and
the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon
& John Henderson [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990], 584), one limit of the
approach represented by Warburg and Panofsky is that they were looking at “formal and
Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

Warburg did not concentrate on late-medieval art: for him, the Italian
Renaissance was a much more interesting time, a time of shifting from a sym
bolic to an allegorical mode of expression, which systematically recovered
‘signs’ codified in antiquity and re-inserted them in the visual arts, particularly
for the expression of emotion. The Pathosformeln identified by Warburg may
include gestures, postures, details of representation that channel the pathetic
elements in a conventional way, in accordance with Vischer’s theory of empa
thy as stimulated by imagination. The latter, in turn, can be stimulated by the
‘looking at’ (i.e. schauen, a more psychologically complex and active process
than simple sehen, ‘seeing’) a symbolic depiction of emotion.8 In the work of
sixteenth-century Italian painters, for instance, Warburg saw a search for mod
els to trigger heightened pathos, while at the same time creating a sense of
balance and classic tranquillity: according to him, this is a marker of a certain
Zeitgeist, conveyed through symbols.9 This system replaced the former
‘Northern realism’, which, according to Warburg, did influence later art but was
more inclined to a symbolic type of representation, to a stylisation of real life.
For Warburg, an important element was the fact that Italian artists borrowed
from classical models “certain fully articulate formal motifs that were particu
larly appropriate for the rendering of great suffering (physical and mental),
violent drama, and turbulent emotions”.10
The connections between a theme and the shape of a concrete detail, in
spite of an intrinsic ambiguity whereby the same gesture and detail can convey
equally expressive and intense representations of different attitudes, will be a
focus of interest in the present book too, as in Warburg’s work.11 Although the
time span considered here goes further back than the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and although there is not much, in Warburg’s work, that relates
directly to our analysis (while Panofsky’s work does include a monumental
study of Flemish art), the basis of his approach, which has influenced so much
ensuing research, cannot be considered extraneous to our study. If anything,
this book tries to go even further than many previous contributions by attempt
ing a systematic search for linguistic correspondences and analogues with
visual arts. The detail of language forms, in addition to the general content of
semantic patterns” as basis of a culture, rather than at religious faith as being the founda
tion for artistic and textual production, as it was in the products considered here.
8 Matthew Rampley, “From symbol to allegory: Aby Warburg´s theory of art,” The Art Bulle
tin 79 (1997): 44-45.
9 These are conceived as indivisible from their referents, contrary to allegories, where form
and context are external to one another.
10 Moshe Barasch, Imago Hominis. Studies in the Language of Art (Vienna: IRSA, 1991), 119.
11 Ibid., 124-27.

14 Chapter 1
dramatic scenes or theological treatises, will be the counterpart of the Pathos

formeln traceable in medieval visual arts. In order to carry out this attempt, it
will be necessary to retrace not only visual conventions and their develop
ments, but also the birth of religious drama and its relations to other texts.
These developments, as well as the dense network of interrelationships
between different expressive means, can hardly be tackled without referring to
the crucial analyses of the medieval world and mentality carried out by Duby,
Le Goff, and Delumeau, as well as recent socio-historical analyses such as those
gathered by Horrox and Ormrod.12 These and similar works highlight the
importance and overarching presence of the Church, shaping most public
manifestations and the vast majority of artistic production with its own dis
course and with the symbols employed to convey it. The Church was present in
every moment of public life and, particularly in the later Middle Ages, made it
its priority to encroach onto a large part of individual life, providing models of
representation and ritual that will survive well beyond the onset of a ‘human
istic’ culture. Be it the hieraticity of the early Middle Ages, the lyricism of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or the emotional immediacy of the four
teenth and fifteenth centuries, these models, which were models of discourse
about God and about the world at the same time, were largely successful over
the whole of Europe. The ‘scenic’ element of representation is at the basis of
this form of communication, in spite of the ambiguous relation of the Church
with entertainment and laughter, and of its suspicious attitudes towards the
classical heritage of Aristotle’s Poetics and of classical rhetoric and drama.
This scenic element was readily appropriated by lay authorities in many of
their manifestations, be it royal triumphs, replicating some of the rituals of
Advent, or public executions and tortures, with their emphatic spectaculari
ty.13 Within a constructionist perspective, this means that the enactment, even
more than the showing, takes on social functions of admonition, instruction, or
regulation of the community’s behaviour. While an iconic-symbolic system
attaches importance to the permanent display of a fixed image (the display of
12 George Duby, Le temps des cathédrales. L’art et la société, 980-1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976
[first ed. 1966-67]), Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981),
Jean Delumeau, Le péché et la peur. La culpabilisation en Occident (XIII-XVIIIe siècles)
(Paris: Fayard, 1983), and A Social History of England 1200-1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox &
Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13 Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Mitchell Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel.
Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (London: Reak
tion Books, 1999); Karlheinz Desschner, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums VII Band:
13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 2002), 18-19.

the ‘sacred face’ on a shroud, or the ostension of a dead enemy’s head impaled
on the city wall), the general feelings of the late Middle Ages veered towards
valuing the performing of a dynamic action, however immanent and episodic.
The belief in a deep connection between all events and individuals, especially
developed in relation to Christianity, shifts the emphasis from the eternal to
the immediate as representative of the eternal. This shift produced notable
changes in the expression of values, both religious and civic: sermons start to
illustrate exempla; lives of saints multiply; the crucial scenes enacted both in
liturgy and in drama become crowded. At the same time, trials become public,
peripheral characters in the Bible receive a distinct identity through careful
depiction of facial traits or through the attribution of a name, common people
are explicitly addressed and involved in civic and religious rituals. The shift
involved partly reusing ancient schemata,14 and partly inventing new ones,
which will form culture-specific, but also pan-European, canons of representa
tion, both in verbal and in visual terms.
At the same time, there is an effort to increase the emphasis on human fea
tures that the viewer can relate to: images of children acquire more child-like
features, old people are shown in their weakness, and the criminal brought to
the stake or the wheel is given the opportunity to be an actor / agent and to
find a voice. More notably, Mary becomes a suffering mother, and the agonis
ing Christ is shown in his human frailty for all to see; while very early
representations, both pictorial and dramatic, do not portray the Passion at all,
and the Christ is hardly represented except as a triumphant ruler, this ‘humani
sation’ becomes the focus of later products. At the same time, the linguistic
means used to represent sacred scenes and events come gradually closer to the
language of the community of viewers, and dialogues lose some of the fixity of
liturgy and acquire some ‘naturalistic’ (we cannot actually say ‘realistic’) fea
tures. Taken all together, these elements point to an increased importance of
presence, both the presence of the living exemplum and the presence of the
audience, of the witnesses of the action, and no longer just the image, happen
ing in front of them. The strategies through which this takes place, both in
pictures and in texts, are the object of the present work, starting with the fol
lowing pages.
14 By schema we mean here a way of representing “whereby a form is used generically for
any instance of a particular image” (Mary Olson, Fair and Varied Forms. Visual Textuality
in Medieval Illuminated Manuscript [New York-London: Routledge, 2003], xxi). This view
can be extended to verbal formulae, as we deal with a time in which “language is not just
read, decoded, but also seen, the body is involved in an interaction process with the envi
ronment” (ibid., 7).

16 Chapter 1
One very important element that has to do with this development, and
which will be tackled at the end of this chapter, is the function of these cultural
products as objects of memory. This very fundamental function, i.e. that of
reminding the audience of a whole set of societal practices and values, per
tains both to the icon and to the spectacle, and it could be argued that it is
therefore independent of the means used to elicit the memory itself. Therefore,
the connection between memory and action (and presence as opposed to allu
sion) in the late Middle Ages will be investigated further, and will in fact be a
recurrent theme in the following chapters.
1.2 The Development of Visual Narratives and New Images
Within the cultural changes outlined above, the role played by images is cru
cial. This could seem like a truism, given the rates of illiteracy in the Middle
Ages: images could well be, and were often programmatically claimed to be,
the most immediate means of public communication. This aim is explicitly
mentioned in religious treatises from the late medieval centuries, with the idea
of Church art as Biblia pauperum, the Bible of the poor and illiterate, contrary
to most images in the Roman and Jewish traditions, which were mostly for the
elite. This development goes hand in hand with a development of rhetoric and
of verbal ‘performance’, especially in the ars predicatoria of sermons, but there
does not seem to be a real integration of the two planes, that of the word,
whether spoken or declaimed, but still based on written, learned sources, and
that of the image. They seem to be addressed to different spheres of society, at
least until an integration is sought precisely with the development of vernacu
lar drama, which embodies a synthesis between the two levels. Previous forms
of integration, which will be briefly reviewed in the following sections, are rare
and tend to reach the ‘higher’ pole of social communication.15 There are, cer
tainly, the presence of scrolls and other ‘words’ in visual art (see 2.3), as well as
the crucial, scripture-derived ‘utterances’ in the otherwise nearly silent early
liturgical drama, but these contaminations, though important, remain mostly
marginal, as compared to later manifestations, where the integration is devel
oped to a much greater extent.
Some of the crucial transitions in European religious art have been widely
studied, and these seminal studies constitute necessary references in the pres
ent work. One first fundamental change, which is also partly shared by the
15 The obvious example is that of manuscript illuminations, not accessible to the whole
community.

history of drama, is the transition from object (icon, symbol) to action.16 In the
initial stages of Christian art, the image was conceived as sub specie æternitatis;
although derived from the Bible, which is essentially narrative and to some
extent ‘dramatic’ in its use of dialogue, art did not capture this element from its
inception. The early figurative representation of Christian subjects was either
symbolic (for example the fish, and later the lamb, or the cross) or iconic, an
example of the eternal truth: something that is there, not something that hap
pens.17 Moving away from the dynamic and poignant narrative element of
classical bas-reliefs,18 the beginnings of Christian art do not seem to be influ
enced even by rites, which were necessarily dynamic themselves, but recoil
from making the mystery any closer to human transient reality.
Changes in this pattern, therefore, start from the representation of scenes
that are removed from the crucial mysteries of the Incarnation, Crucifixion,
and Resurrection, and include, for instance, episodes from the Old Testament
such as The Fall, or are projected into the future, for example the Last
Judgement; only later will the changes approach the Gospels. The latter step,
representing a shift in attitudes in the Church and in Christian mentality in
general, seems to start, like many others mentioned in this work, from the
Church of the East, and to reach Western Europe only between the twelfth and
the thirteenth centuries, although there are traces of earlier ‘experiments’ of
pictorial narrative.19 Often starting with the illustration of non-religious top
ics, the developments are still subject to conventions, but stylistic innovations
had to be part and parcel of this evolution. The main change is the introduc
tion of the element of time in a static image, for instance by conveying
dynamism in gesture and posture, or by duplicating figures in successive
16 Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy. Narrative Painting, Franciscan
ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-11.
17 Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962), 1-4.
18 Lawrence Nees, Early Medieval Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17.
19 These also show the relative stylistic freedom with respect to the models that is found in
Western artistic production as opposed to the Byzantine tradition, where both subject
matters and forms were more rigidly codified (Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology
and Image-Making in Medieval Art [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 204-
05; Veronica Sekules, Medieval Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 56). The conti
nuity and connections between the two traditions, at least until the fall of the Eastern
Roman Empire in 1453, should thus not be overemphasised, although certain links are
undeniable (John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art [New York: Phaidon Press,
1997], 5-8).

18 Chapter 1
vignettes to represent their movements,20 which also involved a higher degree

of specificity in vestments and physical appearance, to make characters recog
nisable through the episodes.
The consequence of this change was a greater amount of leeway for the
individual artists’ creativity, depending on their cultural background. For
instance, “[i]n all probability the Anglo-Saxon artist allowed himself just as
much poetical licence in reinterpreting his pictorial model as the Anglo-Saxon
poet had done in paraphrasing his literary source”.21 Possibly because of this
literary tradition, there seems indeed to be a primacy of Britain in developing
a particularly original style in visual cycles, a style that was displayed in many
forms: illuminations, embroidery, stained glass, floor tiles, besides the panels
and mural paintings also widespread in the rest of Europe.22 The picture cycle
acquired an important role in church imagery in most countries also because
of this instructive function, which came to be conveyed through the telling of
a story. Entering a church meant to be shown images that reminded of a narra
tive through the use of the istoriated wall, door, retable, altarpiece. The whole
conception of Christianity becomes cyclic, with central figures but also with a
tendency to geometry and repetition.23
This new development of the narrative in art corresponded to a more gen
eral change of perspective from a single image with a clear focus to a more
choral, but also necessarily less concentrated, vision, and from the representa
tion en état to that en action, signalled by whole new sets of gestures and pos
tures.24 Of course, this development had predecessors in the equally, though
differently, encoded narratives of early Christian catacombs and Byzantine
mosaics, nor did the development of narratives interrupt the production of
static and ‘iconic’ representations,25 more on which in the last part of this sec
tion. It was not a move in the direction of a greater ‘realism’ in the modern
20 C.M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1500 (London-Turnhout: Har

vey Miller, 2003), 110-11.
21 Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative, 8.
22 Margaret Josephine Rickert, Painting in Britain. The Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books,
1965), 2; Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase, English Art, 1100-1216 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953).
23 Wolfgang Kemp, “Medieval Pictorial Systems,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed.
Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 126-32.
24 François Garnier, Le langage de l´image au moyen âge. II. Grammaire des gestes (Paris:
Leopard d’Or, 1989), 53-54; Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God
Through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York-Makwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 81.
25 James Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and
Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Nar
rative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979), 6-7; Viladesau, Theology and the Arts, 137.

sense: the imitation of nature in art is a post-medieval concept, which replaced

the previously predominant ‘imitation of Christ’, a concept in turn subsuming
several schemata.
For Rickert,26 it is notable that a Byzantine influence in Britain, visible in
early wall paintings, led to the development of Passion cycles, but style tended
to go in the direction of elegant decoration rather than ‘crude’ depiction, devel
oping towards the Gothic27 and Anglican styles in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. At that point, an influence from Flanders also started to be visible, in
mural paintings as in illuminated manuscripts, where a delicate manner pre
vailed also in scenes of sorrow. Even the later ‘international style’, which
developed under influences from France and Italy, did not open the way to the
themes and styles of the Renaissance, but remained anchored to the decora
tive style of illuminations.28 This conventional style, especially in narrative
cycles within mural paintings, entrusted the dynamic and emotional aspect to
codified depictions of facial features and, as from the fourteenth century, to
the expressivity of hand gestures, down to the position of every finger.29
Whether this can be identified as an early version of a ‘pathos formula’, how
ever, is highly debatable.
What seems to be less disputable, as mentioned, is the importance of facial
expressions and gestures in the shift from the image as icon to the ‘istoriated’
image, i.e. the narration of a story, as well as the connection between this
development in visual arts and the development of religious drama. Mulvaney
finds specific similarities between Duccio di Buoninsegna’s highly influential
narrative polyptych Maestà (c. 1310) and some Italian passion plays;30 some
26 Rickert, Painting in Britain, 62 ff.

27 The shift towards ‘naturalism’, derived from changes in piety and cultural climate, had its
main intellectual centre in Paris (Elfrida Saunders, A History of English Art in the Middle
Ages [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932]: 109-10), and from there it was later imported
into Britain.
28 Ibid., 112-19. Detailed information on the intricate network of relations that, through the
marketing of images and the copying and circulation of manuscripts, created an inter
change of iconographic patterns can be found in Rickert, Painting in Britain, or Susie
Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (New York: Oxford University Press), 2008. Specifically on
cross-influences in alabaster carvings see W.L. Hildburgh, “English Alabaster Tables of
about the Third Quarter of the Fourteenth Century,” The Art Bulletin 32 (1950): 1-23.
29 Frank Kendon, Mural Paintings in English Churches during the Middle Ages (London: John
Lane, 1923), 10-30, 86; Ernest William Tristram, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Cen
tury (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 8-9.
30 Beth Mulvaney, “Reading Gesture on Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà: Art, Drama, and
Ritual in Late-Medieval Siena,” in New Approaches to European Theatre of the Middle Ages.

20 Chapter 1
years earlier, Mary Anderson had already systematically analysed parallels

between biblical episodes, drama, and imagery in English medieval churches,
in the form of ‘scenes’ that are recurrent through several ‘media’.31 Italy was the
first to adopt the new iconography coming from Byzantine formulae and to
adapt these through a process of ‘Westernisation’, as argued by Sandberg Vavalà
about a cycle narrative painted in Verona dated around 1360, but unquestion
ably linked to the earlier Padua cycles by Giotto.32 From Italy, in close
connection with the Benedictine environment, cyclic visual narratives start to
appear in Fleury and other locations on the continent and then also in Britain,
both in pictorial products and in reliefs (for example in Durham). Pächt traces
the connections that appear in visual evidence of cycles between Italian,
French and British sources, including illuminations, as well as the develop
ments both in representing the transition between scenes and in portraying
action through perspective and gestures.33 In his opinion, it is this type of tran
sition that accounts for the similarities between pictorial cycles and drama, i.e.
the transition towards representing the biblical episode as a staged story. Later
on, the reciprocal influence will become more direct. Both in Pächt’s work34
and in other contributions, precise correspondences have been found in details
of portrayal and of costumes and scenery, without forgetting the appearance
of actual words and ‘utterances’, for example in scrolls, which seem to point to
specific dialogues as sources for the painted scene.35
An Ontology, ed. Barbara I. Gusick & Edelgard E. DuBruck (New York: Peter Lang, 2004),
13-19.
31 Mary Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1963).
32 Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà, “A Chapter in Fourteenth-Century Iconography: Verona,” The Art
Bulletin 11 (1929): 376-412. Individual influences of Byzantine models on changes in West
ern European art are traced also by Rudolf Leeb (“Die Entwicklung der Kreuzigungsiko
nographie im frühen Mittelalter bis zum Utrechter Psalter” [PhD diss., University of
Vienna, 1986]) and Robert Scheller (Exemplum: Model-Book Drawings and the Practice of
Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages (ca. 900 - ca. 1470) [Amsterdam: Amsterdam Uni
versity Press, 1995], 50, 302-05), with special attention to influences on Venice (through
Dalmatia, which belonged then to the Venetian Republic) and on Germany, especially in
manuscript illumination. The degree of closeness of the Italian developments to the Byz
antine model, however, has been debated (Rona Goffen, “Review of Picturing the Passion
in Late Medieval Italy, by Anne Derbes,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 [1999]: 207).
33 Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative, 18 ff.
34 Ibid., 34 ff.
35 Garnier, Le langage de l´image au moyen âge, 229 ff.; Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medi
eval England, 13.

Further links that highlight possible connections between Psalter illumina

tions and dramatic productions, and specifically between Byzantine and
Coptic frescoes, mosaics and carpets and early products of English and Irish
manuscript illustration, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (715-20 ad), the Kentish
Vespasian Psalter and the Durham Gospels are reviewed by Michelle Brown.36
Illuminated manuscripts had quite an important role in this connection: “As
the visual representation of an essentially oral text, the medieval illuminated
manuscript has a certain theatrical – at the risk of anachronism one might
even say cinematic – quality; it does not merely describe events but, rather,
stages them”.37 Hildburgh and Evans studied the evidence for English alabaster
carvings as ‘records’ of drama, including references to French and Dutch in
fluence,38 and considering their circulation throughout Europe as part of a
flourishing trade related to the spread of altarpieces and to the commissioning
of works of art by parishes and guilds.39 Stubblebine analysed the sources of
Duccio’s Maestà, and argued for a textual source of the cycle, especially Ger
man and English early manuscripts that include the same images in the style
of the Ottonian tradition, in turn derived from Byzantine sources.40 This rela
tionship between visual cycles throughout Europe continued during the late
Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, along with expanded or cyclic drama,41
36 Michelle Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London: The British Library,
2007), 10-14.
37 Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Nar
rative Poetry (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 3.
38 W.L. Hildburgh, “Iconographical Peculiarities in English Medieval Alabaster Carvings,”
Folklore 44 (1933): 32-56; 123-50; Id., “English Alabaster Carvings as Records of the Medi
eval Religious Drama,” Archaeologia 93 (1949): 51-101 and Joan Evans, English Art, 1307-1461
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 100 ff.
39 Ibid., 218 ff.
40 James H. Stubblebine, “Byzantine Sources for the iconography of Duccio’s Maestà,” The
Art Bulletin 57 (1975): 176-85.
41 The term ‘cycle’ is problematic when applied to some dramatic collections that seem to
be quite diverse internally, and for which there is no certainty that they were ever per
formed in a sequence even close to that of the manuscripts in which they are preserved
(Garrett P.J. Epp, “The Towneley Plays and the Hazards of Cycling,” Research Opportunities
in Renaissance Drama 32 [1993]: 122-23); the term is nevertheless used in this book as in
many other analyses, although ‘anthology’ could be a better label. For the idea of ‘cyclic
ity’ as an innovation of vernacular (or anyway not only Church-related) drama, already
visible in earlier texts. See William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages. Western
European Stage Conditions c. 800-1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 128-
29. For a critical analysis of the medieval dramatic ‘cycles’, an irrenounceable reference is,
of course, Peter Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays: A Comparative Study of

22 Chapter 1
which was still performed well into the sixteenth century.42 Furthermore,
Schmitt43 emphasises the importance of stained glass windows in the develop
ment of the cyclic form in Britain, which takes place at the time in which
pageants become expressions of ‘living truth’, and contextual elements such
the Hundred Years’ War and the Great Plague were bringing the horrors of
death to the forefront.44
If the cycle represents a device to provide a diagrammatic synopsis of a
whole theological system, mirroring the co-temporary theory of the architec
ture of memory (and its connection with meditation; see also 1.5), it was
perhaps natural for a cyclic form to evolve also in drama. The istoria expanded
in plays as it did on the walls and windows of medieval churches, or was devel
oped in smaller portions on the panel and on the illuminated page, especially
in Books of Hours,45 and even on copes, tapestry and other textiles.46 The
dynamic portrayal of the action became at least as important for devotion as
the icon, and thus it was perhaps to be expected that drama would extend,
stretch, and expand over multiple stages, multiple days or months, and that
dialogue would be elaborated far beyond the Scriptures. These developments
were the product of the same cultural climate, which gave rise to a vast, not
only dramatic, textual production, briefly discussed in the next section.
Other developments within the medieval period are equally important for
the themes of this book and are not related to the development of pictorial
narratives. If anything, in fact, they testify to the undiminished importance of
the other long-standing Byzantine type of figuration: the icon. These develop
ments concern the way in which the ‘portraits’ of Jesus and Mary were
represented, and consist in the shift of these ‘characters’ from supernatural to
the English Biblical Cycles and their Continental and Iconographic Counterparts (Amster
dam-Atlanta: Éditions Rodopi, 2004).
42 Véronique Plesch, “Sixteenth-Century Pictorial and Dramatic Religious Cycles in the
French Alps: Time for the Renaissance Yet?,” in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow.
Studies in Paintings and Manuscript Illumination of the Late Middle-Ages and Northern
Renaissance, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger & Anne S. Korteweg (Turnhout: Harvey Miller,
2006), 381-93.
43 Jean-Claude Schmitt, “L’exception corporelle: à propos de l’Assomption de Marie,” in The
Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger &
Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 175.
44 Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the Mystery Plays. A Re-evaluation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1961), 13-14.
45 Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in
Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 199.
46 Rickert, Painting in Britain, 141.

humanised, and from triumphant to sorrowful. As masterly illustrated by

Belting,47 icons of the holy faces, including the Mother and Child, were initially
developed in the Byzantine tradition with precisely the combination of reli
gious and civic aims that is of interest in this book. They were “alien to the
official institution, just as holy hermits and miracle workers stood outside the
church hierarchy properly speaking. Both posed the question whether the
social hierarchy (essentially the court and the official church) could or should
be the sole representative of the sacred on earth”.48 At the same time, there are
connections between these representations and the models established by
imperial iconography, for example in the portrayal of surrounding or ‘attend
ing’ figures around the protagonist.49
In a page of his Chronica Majora (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Parker
Library, MS 26 page 283, c. 1240), Matthew Paris includes three ‘portraits’: a
Virgin and Child, a Face of Christ Triumphant, and a Man of Sorrows (inclined
head, closed eyes with contracted eyebrows and downturned mouth).50 This
juxtaposition is emblematic of the spread of the Christus patiens type, which
started in Byzantium (according to Belting,51 in relation to the tradition of
funerary portraits in the classical age) and had already become popular all over
continental Europe and Britain by Paris’ time, as a model for ‘imitation’ and
meditation.52 The beginning of the tradition of the Andachtsbild in Western
Europe is traced by Belting, who mentions its functions and interpretations
and its possible relations with medieval drama, in connection with the devel
47 Hans Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion früher Bild
tafeln der Passion (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981) and id., Likeness and Presence: A His
tory of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994),
48 Ibid., 46.
49 Mariëlle Hageman, “Between the Imperial and the Sacred: The Gesture of Coronation in
Carolingian and Ottonian Images,” in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed.
Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 132-33.
50 Barasch (Imago Hominis, 61-72) claims that the original model for the icon could be the
tragic mask of classical theatre, which developed precisely to communicate intense emo
tions to the public. Conversely, the depiction of Jesus’ features that was already canonical
in the Middle Ages (with long hair and beard) is not based on the Scriptures, but on late-
Roman descriptions (Henk W. van Os et al., The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in
Europe. 1300-1500 [London: Merrell Holberton, 1994], 42). On the development of these
features in the portrayal of Jesus see, for example, Helmut Fischer, Von Jesus zur Christusk
rone (Petersberg: Michael Imhof), 2005.
51 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 120-21.
52 Paul Binski, “The Faces of Christ in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora,” in Tributes in Honor
of James H. Marrow, ed. Hamburger & Korteweg, 85-92.

24 Chapter 1
opment and spread of affective piety and modern devotion. A number of

details about these shifts in representation will be given in Chapter 3, but a few
general remarks are offered here. According to Belting, the first public images
of the Christus patiens appear at the end of the twelfth century;53 there are
reports of an image in Jerusalem painted in such a way as to move beholders to
great compassion. Later, this type of imago pietatis will move more and more
away from the heroic style of Hellenism, which focussed on the power and
energy emanating from Jesus’ body, especially when the cult of the image of
the Veronica started to spread.54
The aesthetic and theological revolution represented by the depiction of
the suffering Christ can only be fully appreciated if we remember that the por
trayal of Jesus, either alive or dead, was relatively recent. Moreover, Byzantine
icons initially avoided stressing the human side of Jesus’ appearance, as this
would detract from his divine nature, which should remain central. Therefore,
depicting a suffering Christ was even more revolutionary.55 According to
Miles,56 the appearance of such portrayals was crucial because it made “pos
sible and important for artistic images to represent the incarnation, an effective
reminder of the historical event, capable of attracting the worshipper’s atten
tion and affection to the figure represented”.57
Although the icon of the Man of Sorrows seems to have been established as
an object of cult by Gregory the Great, its main success was attained with the
spread of private devotion and contemplation,58 and with the idea of identifi
cation with the suffering of Christ as conducive to salvation, as explained in
Panofsky’s work. The imago pietatis was well suited for these aims: if the
53 Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter, 19-20. The first official authorisation to
emphasise the sufferings of Christ in visual art came with the synod of 692. The delay with
which art established this line of representation can be interpreted as a sign of the reluc
tance that authors had to face the controversy that surrounded the ‘excessive’ humani
sation of Christ (Nigel Spivey, Enduring Creation. Art, Pain and Fortitude [London: Thames
& Hudson, 2001], 48-49).
54 Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter, 35, 187 ff.
55 Alexander Kazhdan & Henry Maguire, “Byzantine Hagiographical Texts as Sources on
Art,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 10.
56 Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 143.
57 An emphasis on the sufferings of God that generates the empathetic response of pathos
was important also in the Jewish tradition, independently of the figure of Christ (Stephen
Post, “The Inadequacy of Selflessness: God’s Suffering and the Theory of Love,” Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 56 [1988], 215-16), but was of course amplified in the
Christian tradition of the humanised figure.
58 Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus
& Gerd Mohn, 1966-80), vol. I, 211.

development of crowded, choral, narrative scenes aimed at creating a bridge

between everyday life and the narration of the Gospel, the isolated image of a
suffering Christ aimed at generating a moment of personal, intimate reflection
focussing on the central element of the Passion, and indeed of the whole exis
tence of Jesus: redemptive pain.59
The apparent incompatibility between the status of ‘dead body’ and the
divine (and thus immortal) nature of Christ is bridged by the standing posture,
particularly visible when the depiction is wider than the torso (Figure 1).60 In
several cases, the Christ is embraced by Mary or supported by other figures,
especially angels,61 while the fact that he is still, at some level, alive is shown by
his gesturing, especially in later (and Northern) depictions.62 More often, how
ever, the hands are crossed over the chest, to display the wounds made by the
nails; in the fourteenth century, the crown of thorns also appears.63 As can eas
ily be seen, this ostentatio vulnerum, or displaying of the wounds, was quite
central for the practice of pathetic identification.64 A further value of the
ostentatio had to do with its relation to the episode of Thomas and his doubt
ing of the Resurrection. The overcoming of this doubt through inserting a
finger in the wound represents the triumph of the faith that has to proceed
precisely through the witnessing of the human sufferings of Christ.65 This high
59 Bernhard Ridderbos, “The Man of Sorrows. Pictorial Images and Metaphorical State
ments,” in The Broken Body. Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture, ed. Alasdair A.
MacDonald, Bernhard Ridderbos & Rita Schlusemann (Groningen: Forsten, 1998), 145-49.
60 Especially in German environment, the sitting or standing position is complemented by
open eyes, thus reinforcing the idea of ‘non-death’ (Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen
Kunst, vol I, 212). For Italian examples of this posture see Belting, Das Bild und sein Publi
kum im Mittelalter, 71 fig. 15, 85 fig. 23-42 and ff.
61 See, for example, the highly ‘pathetic’ version by Cosmé Tura (1475); for other examples
see Rickert, Painting in Britain, 177 and Kunstschätze des Mittelalters, ed. Wolfgang Meig
hörner (Innsbruck: Alpina Druck, 2011), 78-79.
62 Ridderbos, “The Man of Sorrows,” plates 11, 14.
63 Émile Mâle, L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1925), 43.
64 The specific issues of the erotic messages related to the nudity of Christ and to the fact
that the traditional shape of the wounds may be reminiscent of the vagina (see Richard C.
Trexler, “Gendering Jesus Crucified,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Cassidy, 107-19;
Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval
Europe [New York: Zone Books, 2011], 94 ff., 197 ff.), or of the mandorla within which holy
figures were earlier depicted (see David S. Areford, “The Passion Measured: A Late-Medie
val Diagram of the Body of Christ,” in The Broken Body, ed. MacDonald, Ridderbos &
Schlusemann, 220 ff.), are not dealt with in this work.
65 Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol I, 215; Gabriele Finaldi, Neil McGregor &
Susanna Avery-Quash, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery Company Ltd.,
2000), 90-91, 118-19.

26 Chapter 1
Figure 1 Workshop of Aelbert Bouts (The Netherlands, c. 1541-49), The Man of Sorrows,
c. 1525. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Friedsam Collection), New York, USA
(Source: The MET website).

importance of the wounds is shown by the fact that they make a prominent
appearance, highlighted by red colouring, in relatively early paintings and
manuscript illuminations, including some in which Jesus is still portrayed as
triumphans, not only in the East but also in Britain.66
Once established, the icons of the Man of Sorrows and of the Mater Do
lorosa67 became immensely popular, and are still produced in different ver
sions (Figure 2). This representation was not eliminated by the Protestant
Reformation, since in fact many examples of a particularly ‘pathetic’ character
(for example portraying tears, or especially haggard faces with doleful ex
pressions) are to be found in the sixteenth century.68 The blood flows, covering
a pallid skin and running along more and more emaciated limbs, the face in
creasingly shows pain and suffering, and takes on a livid colour (from Van Eyck
to Cosmé Tura and Carpaccio). The Man of Sorrows epitomises everything that
the narrative had been leading to, and will become the maximum expression
of the rhetoric of pathos, much as the icon of the Mater Dolorosa, as developed
in the Crucifixion by Rogier van der Weyden and in the Pietà by Andrea del
Sarto. These two portrayals, often coupled in the increasingly popular form of
the diptych, represent a return to the icon. At the same time, the icon was reno
vated during the Middle Ages, as it became more animated: “from the eleventh
century on, the appearance of icons changed as they began to include narra
tive elements and depict states of emotion ... these transition features might
seem to contradict the claim of timelessness of icons”.69
According to Belting, the increased variability in both istoriated pages and
iconic representations in the late Middle Ages was a means to reflect growing
complexities in society, which made statements of identity and ‘speech acts’
addressed at the audience more sensitive to the needs of different groups and
categories.70 In this sense, the inclusion of dramatic ‘close-ups’ or portraits in
Books of Hours represents one of these returns to the icon as an “embodiment
of timeless, enduring, never-ending moments of supreme spiritual pathos or
joy”.71
66 Rickert, Painting in Britain, 34.

67 Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol I, 228.
68 Finaldi, McGregor & Avery-Quash, The Image of Christ, 118-19.
69 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 261.
70 Ibid., 409.
71 Robert G. Calkins, “Sacred Image and Illusion in Late Flemish Manuscripts,” Essays in
Medieval Studies 6 (1989): 8.

28 Chapter 1
Figure 2 Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), cropped, copy after Simon
Marmion, last quarter of the 15th century, Groeningemuseum, Bruges
(Photo: Vassil 2015).

1.3 The Word Enacted
It would be far too ambitious to attempt here an exhaustive reconstruction of

the history of medieval drama, and possibly even a mere recapping of the main
evidence available and of the debates surrounding it. I will therefore only try to
sketch some points that are relevant to the focus of the present work. One of
these points is the variety of sources of emotionally charged expression, an
other is the amount of similarities and dissimilarities across local cultures.
These are of course interrelated to quite an extent, since the study of both re
quires an investigation into the circulation of ideas, texts, and images across
medieval Europe, along with the spread of similar ideologies emanating di
rectly from the Church.
Like visual art, early medieval rites gradually start to show higher interest in
enacting, in telling as opposed to pronouncing. Beyond the ritual responses of
the liturgy there emerged the need for a re-living of a scene, for an identifica
tion with the original speaker. This shift, combined with other cultural trends,
produced the phenomenon of medieval drama; the Word shown and enacted,
not just told. An astonishing body of literature has been devoted to tracing the
origins and early steps of this transition; in many cases, the related arguments
have been influenced deeply, as in other fields of the humanities, by the evolu
tionary vision imported from philology and from the natural sciences in the
late nineteenth century, a vision characterised by an anxiety to look for direct
and unilinear filiations. More recent research tends to establish a wider inven
tory of sources and contributing factors, and to connect the flourishing of
vernacular drama with other changes in medieval society, but of course any
wide-ranging examination of the phenomenon has to deal with the patchy dis
tribution (rather than the absolute scarcity) of records. Nevertheless, religious
drama in the various vernaculars can clearly be seen as a massive and wide
spread phenomenon of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
which was certainly very prominent in the lives of late-medieval European
communities, especially in towns.
Various elements testify to this prominence: first of all, the evidence for ver
nacular drama emerges in many smaller and larger urban centres, which shows
that the staging of religious plays was not an exceptional event connected only
to the main cities. Secondly, town records concerning drama show its high
costs and the wide collective efforts devoted to it, which also indicates the
salience of the event in the life of the community (more on this in 2.4 and
2.5). Thirdly, many dramatic texts, whether reproductions or distant approxi
mations of the texts that were actually performed, were deemed to be worth
re-copying in careful hands and well-organised manuscripts, though not

30 Chapter 1
always of the most ornate and prestigious type, and later in print. In spite of
the fact that this kind of drama was hardly considered ‘literature’, therefore, the
texts were considered worth preserving for reading, i.e. as texts, independently
from performance.72
Before briefly reviewing some of the available sources, I will touch on the
long-standing controversy about the relationship between drama in the ver
nacular and liturgical drama in Latin, which can be divided into ‘evolutionary’
approaches and ‘big-bang’ approaches. Subsequently, I will mention the other
possible sources of vernacular religious drama, as well as other forms of expres
sion; this will involve at least a brief review of other types of religious writing.
This will be followed by mention of other types of spectacle in the late Middle
Ages. In spite of its importance, religious drama was by no means the only
form of public display or of ‘enactment’ in medieval towns. Some attention will
also be devoted to similarities and differences in the structure and features of
religious drama across different communities: although the phenomenon was,
as mentioned, so widespread as to be considered a ‘pan-European’ phenome
non, this does not entail complete homogeneity between the ways in which
religious drama developed in different countries and communities.
Before looking in greater detail at the individual vernacular traditions, we
must return to the vexata quaestio of the relationship between the two main
types of medieval religious drama, i.e. liturgical drama and popular religious
plays, as it is fundamental to establish in how far the ‘affective’ component was
already present in the former or is an innovation of the latter. The perspective
taken here leans towards the recent view of considering these as two separate
72 This entails that these manuscripts are also worth studying per se. If anything, past
research has often ignored the gap between the manuscripts we possess and the actual
performance, and sometimes also the fact that early editions have superimposed, quite
silently, an interpretation onto the texts (on these issues see Cornelia Herberichs, “Lek
türen des Performativen. Zur Medialität geistlicher Spiele des Mittelalters,” in Transfor
mationen des Religiösen. Performativität und Textualität im geistlichen Spiel, ed. Ingrid
Kasten & Erika Fischer-Lichte [Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007], 169-85). For recent contributions
on the relation between text and performance see, for example, Taku Kuroiwa, Xavier
Leroux & Darwin Smith, “De l’oral à l’oral: réflexions sur la transmission écrite des textes
dramatiques au Moyen Âge,” in Théâtres du Moyen Âge, ed. Iogna-Prat & Smith, 23, and
the innovative book by Laura Weigert, French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval
Theater (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Furthermore, in an age in which
religious reading came to be of capital importance, the production of dramatic texts in
manuscripts for reading is itself of relevance (see Sabrina Corbellini, “Introduction,” in
Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Idem [Turnhout: Brepols, 2013],
4-5).

and relatively independent phenomena, in spite of the unavoidable relations.

This is what Normington calls the ‘big bang’ approach,73 which postulates a
relatively fast and sudden flourishing of vernacular drama due to a complex
network of circumstances, prominently including the escalation in impor
tance of the guilds and the development of town life.
This view, however, is far from being unanimously supported, and has in fact
been hotly opposed by eminent scholars. The ‘evolutionary’ approach, voiced
at the beginning of the twentieth century, posits a rather clear derivation from
liturgical drama in Latin to vernacular plays. This claim is based not only on
correspondences between specific elements in the two types of drama, but
also on the existence of documents that can be interpreted, as in any evolu
tionary theory, as ‘hybrids’ or linking items between the two traditions.74 A
great deal of this evidence concerns specifically language mixture, and will be
mentioned in 2.2 below, while other mixtures concern the degree of liturgical
orthodoxy of scenes, the types of music played, and the general visual refer
ence respectively to Romanesque or to Gothic style. One example is the
Carmina Burana Passion play, which shows signs of the shift towards a more
affect-based piety, typical of the late Middle Ages.75 The most authoritative
supporter of this view, apart from precursors like Matthews,76 was Young,
whose systematic analysis of the gradual expansion of liturgical dialogues and
scenes is unquestionably suggestive.77
According to Young’s thesis, the turning point that finally separated theatre
from ritual was impersonation or ‘pretence’, but it is unclear whether we even
know enough about the way in which an event was performed and perceived
as ‘liturgical’ at that time to be able to categorise this or the other piece as
73 Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2009), 70-71.
74 See, for example, Oscar Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages
[Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965]) for a specific interpretation of different
rituals in the mass as ‘drama’. See Sandro Sticca (The Latin Passion Play: Its Origins and
Development [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970], 149-59) for ‘transitional
forms’ that apparently prove the passage to the vernacular. Conversely, see Bruno Quast
(Vom Kult zur Kunst. Öffnungen des rituellen Textes im Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit
[Tübingen: Francke, 2005], 21-37) for some radical differences between ritual text and
dramatic text.
75 Theresa Coletti & Pamela Sheingorn, “The Carmina Burana Greater Passion Play at the
Cloisters,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 25 (1982): 139-44.
76 Brander Matthews, “The Medieval Drama,” Modern Philology 1 (1903): 71-94.
77 Karl Young, The Drama of Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933).

32 Chapter 1
‘already’ theatrical or not.78 Nevertheless, Young’s view was quite authoritative

for some time, and it still finds supporters who stress that the turning point
was the introduction of ‘directions’ or instructions to the ‘actors’ of liturgical
drama. This, some contend, is what transformed liturgy into spectacle, it was
the seed of a theatrical intention further developed in later times.
Other scholars have followed along this line, taking in turn the ‘scenic’ ele
ments of the use of props and movable images, along with costumes and
directions about attitudes and postures, facial expressions and tones of voice,
or expansions in dialogues, as signs of the ‘transition stage’. Examples are Craig
and Williams,79 who claim that the English cycles developed rather directly
from the liturgy, and should thus not be considered ‘literature’. Conversely, if
we consider the influences from the East that were decisive for the develop
ment of vernacular drama and of visual arts, we can see that the evidence of
early religious theatre in Constantinople clearly indicates a ‘literary tendency’,
given the adoption of stylistic patterns from Euripides and other classical play
wrights, for example in the Christos Paschon discussed by Tydeman.80 Toschi
notes that several late-medieval Byzantine tropes, musical dialogues and short
mysteries could have also been influential, especially if imported through
Venice.81 Given the strong Byzantine influence in artistic developments, there
would be a direct connection between images and drama in the acquisition of
new pathos-oriented elements from the East.
In Byzantium, the development of popular religious drama has been inter
preted as the expression of a renewed relation between the Church and the
population, after the beginning of lay religious theatre in the fifth century had
created some tensions between religious and lay authorities.82 The first Byz
antine vernacular plays seem to date from the ninth century, although extant
manuscripts only date from the fourteenth century onwards. In spite of the
traces of dialect and of lower language registers, and of the similarity with reli
gious epics, this drama seems to stay closer to scriptural authority, and to
exploit spectacularisation only moderately. The themes of Christ’s suffering
78 See A Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Ronald Vince (New York: Greenwood Press,
1989), 207.
79 Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955)
and Arnold Williams, The Drama of Medieval England (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University Press, 1961).
80 Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages, 38 ff.
81 Paolo Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano (Torino: Einaudi, 1955), 646-47.
82 Leonard Goldstein, The Origin of Medieval Drama (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni
versity Press, 2004), 57-67.

and the emphasis on the human side of Mary, however, are already present in
Byzantine texts that could date back to the tenth century, and there are indica
tions pointing to an insistence on gestures of despair, with characters hitting
themselves, grasping their hair, and copiously crying.83 The emotional element
in early medieval drama, conversely, is often represented conventionally in li
turgical plays, and not in any concrete or ‘realistic’ way,84 as the main aim is the
representation of joy, of the final triumph of salvation. The early tropes and
Latin liturgical dramatisations are in fact those related to the Quem Queritis,
the scene of the three Marys at the grave, which is of course reproduced and
expanded later in vernacular drama,85 and which represents mourning and
grief only marginally, the prevailing emotions being surprise, suspense and
then joy.
The Latin Passion play was studied by Sticca,86 who considers of particular
importance, for the birth of religious drama, mimes (partly derived from clas
sical drama) and tropes, “a verbal amplification of a passage in the authorized
liturgy”.87 The latter often had vernacular parts, as had the responsoria, where
Jesus and Mary spoke in the first person during ceremonies, thus starting a
form of ‘impersonation’.88 Hardison reviewed similar evidence on the different
liturgies and masses at different times of the year, and hypothesised that the
link between religious practices and vernacular drama may have been con
nected more to ceremonies than to tropes, which would explain the relative
staticity of the pieces until the twelfth century.89 At this point, also given a
wide circulation of ideas and forms through Europe in which Norman England
played a central role,90 the production branched into a more complex form of
83 Vénétia Cottas, Le Théâtre à Byzance (Paris: Gheutner, 1931); more on this in 3.5.
84 M.H. Marshall, “Aesthetic Values of the Liturgical Drama,” in Medieval English Drama, ed.
Jerome Taylor & Alan Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972): 39-41.
85 Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot-Burlington:
Ashgate, 2007), 28-29.
86 Sandro Sticca, “The Montecassino Passion and the Origin of the Latin Passion Play,” Italica
44 (1967): 209-19, and id., The Latin Passion Play.
87 Ibid., 19. The trope, which developed especially in France, Switzerland and Italy into a
dramatised form around the tenth century, did not often represent the Passion (favouring
the Resurrection) until the twelfth century, i.e. with the shift towards ‘Christocentricity’.
88 Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano, 654.
89 Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama, 231.
90 This is demonstrated especially by a network of influences concerning the Seinte Resur
recion and the Northern Passion. Sticca (The Latin Passion Play, 149-50) connects the for
mer with some early Italian Passion plays, and the same applies to the Jeu d’Adam
(c. 1140), also of British provenance, which shows hybrid features in language and tone,

34 Chapter 1
liturgical play on the one hand and vernacular drama on the other. More
recently, Symes has claimed that neglecting to take into account drama before
the fourteenth century leads to downplaying the influence of liturgical
models;91 similarly, Castro Caridad notes that the deep stylistic differences
between liturgical and vernacular drama lead to ignore the liturgical connec
tions in the latter, for example in the sung parts of vernacular plays.92
Conversely, Vince highlighted the influence of ancient, classical theatre,
especially in elements like agon (the struggle between opposites), pathos (the
death of a god), threnos (the lamentation over this death), and theophany (the
resurrection, with sorrow turning into joy), all elements that will be very prom
inent in late-medieval religious drama.93 The prominence of the affective
element, and the aim of ‘touching the heart’ of the audience, are common to
classical tragedy and medieval religious drama, although the Passion does not,
strictly speaking, qualify as tragedy because of the joyous conclusion of the
Resurrection. Many stylistic elements also seem to have been taken over from
tragedy to religious drama, also encouraged by some further thematic similari
ties, such as the emphasis on undeserved punishment, the accusation and
vituperation of the enemy, and the downfall of powerful ‘criminal’ or anyway
negative characters.94
As for other sources of vernacular drama, Harris noticed that secular, comic
drama was also influential, and offered remarks on the complex cross-influ
ences with visual art, which many of the aforementioned scholars also investi
and can thus be considered semi-liturgical (see Mary Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Lit
erature and its Background [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963], 311-14; John Wesley Harris,
Medieval Theatre in context. An Introduction [London: Routledge, 1992], 35-57). Interest
ingly, the presence of more ‘humanised’ elements in the Anglo-Norman plays, which are
quite early, seems to indicate that this shift in emphasis is not exclusively due to the
Franciscans, who were not established or influential in England at the time of the plays’
composition (see Richard Axton, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages [London:
Hutchinson, 1974] and William Tydeman, English Medieval Theatre, 1400-1500 [London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986], 11).
91 Carol Symes, “The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays: Forms, Functions, and the
Future of Medieval Theater,” Speculum 77 (2002): 790.
92 Eva Castro Caridad, “Transmisión y recepción de la obra dramática en la Edad Media,” in
Historia del Teatro Español 1. De la edad media a los siglos de oro, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo
(Madrid: Gredos, 2003), 198 ff.
93 Ronald Vince, Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1984), 14, 25 ff.
94 Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press), 1993.

gate.95 The relative independence of liturgical and vernacular drama is shown,

for Harris, not only by the different use of scenic detail and characterisation,
also in terms of linguistic registers, but by their respective general aims as
macro-communicative acts. For him, liturgical drama stayed “a very inward-
looking artistic form, devoted exclusively to reaffirming the faith of true believ
ers by reinforcing their emotional response to the Passion and the Resurrection.
It has none of the missionary zeal, or sheer energy, of the vernacular plays”.96
Liturgical drama, however, produced single forms which, according to Sticca
and others, are innovations;97 pieces such as the Planctus Mariae, i.e. Mary’s
Complaint, although expanded in early documents like the Easter Plays of
Cividale and of Monte Cassino and there ‘dramatised’, frequently with a cor
responding switch to the vernacular, remain essentially lyrical rather than
dramatic. Nevertheless, it is still often claimed that this piece was to give rise to
vernacular drama, being the first to be composed in the vernacular and to
adopt real ‘dramatic’ accents.98 While the meditations on Christ’s human suf
fering, later amplified by works such as the Meditationes Vitae Christi, started
quite early, the element of Mary’s suffering was new, and gave rise to a new
form of devotion, an element that contributed to feed vernacular drama,
although it was not sufficient to found it.
The Crucifixion itself, which will later be such an important part of vernacu
lar drama, seems to be rarely, if ever, actually represented in liturgical and
Church drama in Latin. The real connecting element between the two types of
drama is then perhaps to be found in other texts; rather than pointing to a
direct filiation, the evidence tells a story of common cultural climate, imbibed
with new concepts and formulae that will be found later in several text-types.
On the one hand, therefore, it is important to determine more clearly the
sources for vernacular drama, while on the other hand it is crucial to look at
ways in which other genres have contributed to its stylistic development, start
ing with religious rites themselves.
Among the clearest signals that, according to the advocates of the evolu
tionary approach, indicate a direct source in the liturgy there is, for instance,
95 Harris, Medieval Theatre in context, 32.

96 Ibid., 35, 47-57.
97 Sandro Sticca, “The literary genesis of the Latin Passion Play and the Planctus Mariae:
a New Christocentric and Marian Theology,” in The Medieval Drama, ed. Idem (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1972), 39-68.
98 Christoph Petersen, Ritual und Theater. Meßallegorese, Ostfeier und Osterspiel im Mittelal
ter (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 52.

36 Chapter 1
the reference to certain gestures; these were part of a canon in visual art and,
as mentioned, were mostly codified rather rigidly. Drama was deeply influ
enced by this tradition, to the point of minute detail. Apart from ritual gestures
like kneeling down, the gestures and postures that are usually more insisted
upon are those of grief, lamentation and sadness, such as capitibus inclinatis
(with bowing heads) or exertibus manibus (with extended hands). Some of
these were taken over in vernacular drama, while other tended to be borrowed
by other dramatic forms such as pantomime, and were adapted to different
‘characters’, in contrast with the fixed and immutable gestures of liturgy.99
Some early works, such as Hilarius’ Latin Lazarus, seem to have been com
posed as an addition to the mass; according to Kroll, this indicates that “by the
late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, dramatists regarded imaginative rep
resentations of various human characters’ active participation in salvation
history as a proper complement to the liturgy”. Anyway, as the same author
states, “the Latin plays differ radically from the church services and the trope,
because they incorporate far more complex and ambiguous theological and
philosophical principles”.100
Thus, scholars ranging from Kretzmann to Coogan and Brantley101 empha
sise that early ‘dialogic’ forms in the liturgy such as responses, antiphones and
versicles inserted a measure of interaction not only within readings of gospels
and epistles, but also within the delivery of homilies and special readings, thus
forming a pan-European basis of ‘dramatisation’.102 Looking more specifically
at linguistic forms, however, parallels emerge more clearly with other types of
texts (rather than with the liturgy itself) that were developing in vernacular
traditions more or less at the same time, such as religious lyrics and sermons,
more on which later on in this section. Any discourse on sources for this type
99 Anke Röder, Die Gebärde im Drama des Mittelalters (München: Beck, 1974).
100 Norma Kroll, “Power and Conflict in Medieval Ritual and Plays: The Re-Invention of
Drama,” Studies in Philology 102 (2005): 473 and 483.
101 Paul Edward Kretzmann, The Liturgical Element of the Earliest Forms of the Medieval
Drama, with Special Reference to the English and German Plays (Minneapolis, MN: Bulletin
of the University of Minnesota, 1916); Marjorie D. Coogan, “The Influence of the Liturgy
on the English Cycle Plays” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1942); Brantley, Reading in the
Wilderness.
102 Other scholars, such as Goldstein (The Origin of Medieval Drama, 46-67), downplay any
hypothesis of ‘dramatic’ character of these first dialogic forms, and rather emphasise their
continuity with liturgy, because of their ceremonial tone and of the absence of any ‘popu
lar’ element, which, conversely, will be crucial in vernacular drama.

of artistic message must necessarily include the Bible, and the directly related
and derived texts.103 104
The dissemination of the biblical text in the Middle Ages can hardly be over
estimated. The Bible “framed the world view of the literate,” and even those
who did not have access to a written Bible “would have heard texts read, sung,
and synthetised in the liturgy and sermons”.105 Ever since the establishment of
the Vulgate in the fourth century, and although often appearing in fragments
(Gospels, Psalms, Epistles) and not in a unified book as we conceive it today,106
the Bible has inspired most writings of the clergy, i.e. the group most directly
exposed to the scriptural text. To clerical writers we owe not only the elabora
tion of the liturgy, but also the production of a myriad other texts related to the
biblical source more or less directly, and belonging to different text-types.107 A
large portion of these texts, especially in the earlier part of the Middle Ages,
consists of exegetic and instructive treatises that aim at explaining the
Scriptures and connect their message to public rituals.108 Reilly notes that the
miniatures that start to appear in Bibles equally aim at being “both educative
and political in nature,”109 as well as being a visual commentary to the Bible
itself. This holds especially for the first large Bibles, while the monumental
Bibles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries enjoyed the luxury of full illustra
tive cycles: they were not only very expensive, but also very elaborate and
103 On some crucial aspects see Sister John Sullivan, A Study of the themes of the Sacred Pas
sion in the medieval cycle plays (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1943)
and the contributions in The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, ed. Stephen
Prickett (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
104 That includes early contaminations between the Gospels and Roman classical texts,
related for instance to the punishment of criminals, with several details that also appear
in the Flagellation and Mocking of Christ (Peter Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the
Passion,” The Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 462); see 3.2.
105 Susan Boynton & Diane J. Reilly, “Orientation for the Reader,” in The Practice of the Bible in
the Middle Ages. Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Idem
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1.
106 Laura Light, “The Bible and the Individual. The Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible,” in idem,
228-46; Stephen Prickett, “Introduction,” in Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the
Arts, ed. Prickett, 1-8.
107 Susan Boynton, “The Bible and the Liturgy,” in Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed.
Boynton & Reilly, 10; Isabelle Cochelin, “When the Monks Were the Book. The Bible and
Monasticism (6th-11th Centuries),” in idem, 66-67.
108 Ibid., 68-73.
109 Diane J. Reilly, “Lectern Bibles and Liturgical Reform in the Central Middle Ages,” in Prac
tice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Boynton & Reilly, 107.

38 Chapter 1
powerful ‘objects’ of a more symbolic than practical value, often used as gifts to
royalties.
The educational aims of visual and textual commentaries to the Bible
became a primary goal during Carolingian times, and later, thanks to the influ
ence of the mendicant orders, this educational agenda cascaded onto the
lower levels of the clergy, and generated many further texts. Thanks to the
same influence sermons, homilies, treatises started to appear also in the ver
nacular, while the texts pursuing a more intellectual debate on the interpreta
tion of the Bible, mostly emanating from the universities, tended to remain
exclusively in Latin for much longer.110
Some differences should however be drawn between monastic orders: both
Dominicans and Franciscans produced huge masses of authoritative commen
taries and contributed to the spread of ‘pocket bibles’ for individual medita
tion, but the latter were more focussed on meditations about the meaning of
the message in everyday life, while the Dominicans were more interested in
doctrine and biblical learning.111 It is clear that the texts produced by the
Franciscans, with their simpler language, their use of exempla and their
addressing of all humankind, are more relevant to the development of late-
medieval drama.112 Although England has the longest tradition for vernacular
versions of the Bible, starting with King Alfred and proceeding through the
110 Edward Oakes, “Apologetics and the Pathos of Narrative Theology,” The Journal of Religion
72 (1992): 37-58; Frans van Liere, “Biblical Exegesis Through the Twelfth Century,” in Prac
tice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Boynton & Reilly, 157-78. A further reason for the
persistence of Latin is of course the mobility of scholars and the need to maintain a viable
lingua franca (Corbellini, “Introduction,” 3). This motivated even Wycliff to employ Latin
in some of his writings, which circulated as far as Bohemia, where they influenced
the Hussite movement, even though vernacular writings were also known there (Anne
Hudson, “From Oxford to Prague: The Writings of John Wycliff and His English Followers
in Bohemia,” The Slavonic and East European Review 75 [1997]: 642-57]; more on language
choices in 2.2). Conversely, the Wycliffite Bible provided an important vernacular model,
also for orthodox priests and preachers, and vernacular works became more and more the
default source in the fifteen century, not only in Britain but all over Europe (Eyal Poleg,
“Wycliffite Bibles as orthodoxy,” and Koen Goudriaan, “The Church and the Market:
Vernacular Religious works and the Early Printing Press in the Low Countries, 1477-1540,”
in Cultures of Religious Reading, ed. Corbellini, 71-91 and 93-116).
111 Bert Roest, “Mendicant School Exegesis,” in Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed.
Boynton & Reilly, 179-204.
112 Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000-1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 195 ff, 201 ff.; Poleg, “Wycliffite Bibles,” 71-91.

first ‘complete’ version, i.e. the Wycliffite Bible,113 the greatest popularity was,
however, enjoyed by the French Bible Moralisée,114 and later by the Bible
Historiale Complétée (1314), with their common emphasis on moralisation.115
French exemplars probably influenced also the first vernacular Bibles in Cas
tile, especially the Biblias Romanceadas, which develop the narrative tendency
of popularising medieval accounts of the Scriptures until the end of the fif
teenth century.116 The importance of mediation through exegetic texts resides
also in the latter’s tendency to emphasise human elements, and in the fact that
there are virtually no dramatic scenes drawn from a single source, one of the
Gospels for example, but rather forms of synthesis or hybridisation between
different accounts.117
Illustrations in bibles are also important for our theme.118 Among the texts
cascading from the Bible and including images is the Biblia Pauperum; the best
example from Britain is the Holkham Bible, in which several ‘everyday’ details
of the life of Christ are developed.119 The first locus for this type of illustration
113 Richard Marsden, “The Bible in English in the Middle Ages,” in Practice of the Bible in the
Middle Ages, ed. Boynton & Reilly, 272-95.
114 On the thirteenth-century Bible Moralisée as a text-type, including the specific communi
cative aims of its ‘layout’ of text and image, see John Lowden, “‘Reading’ Images and Texts
in the Bibles Moralisées: Images as Exegesis and the Exegesis of Images,” in Reading Images
and Texts. Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of communication, ed. Marielle Hageman
& Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 495-525.
115 Light, “The Bible and the Individual,” 228-46; Prickett, “Introduction,” 1-8.
116 Emily C. Francomano, “Castilian Vernacular Bibles in Iberia, c. 1250-1500,” in Practice of the
Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Boynton & Reilly, 315-37.
117 Jutta Eming, “Simultaneität und Verdoppelung. Motivationsstrukturen im geistlichen
Spiel,” in Transformationen des Religiösen, ed. Kasten & Fischer-Lichte, 46-62; see contri
butions by Prickett, Jeoffrey, and Ossa-Richardson in The Edinburgh Companion to the
Bible and the Arts, ed. Prickett.
118 Overviews in Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters: Essays in Honour of Janet
Backhouse, ed. Michelle Brown & Scot McKendrick (London: British Library, 1998) and
Scott McKendrick & Kathleen Doyle, Bible Manuscripts: 1400 Years of Scribes and Scholars
(London: The British Library, 2007).
119 Frederick Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages, trans. from German (Coral
Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970), ill. 28. 29; Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in
Medieval England, 231 ff.; Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 103-12. Accord
ing to Anton Houtepen (“Pascha domini. An iconic hermeneutics of the Christian faith,”
in Aesthetics as a Religious Factor and Western Christianity, ed. Wil van den Bercken &
Jonathan Sutton [Leuven: Peeters, 2005], 379) it is somewhat a myth that the Biblia Paupe
rum was so called precisely because, having images, it could be of use to illiterate people.
The latter had hardly any access to books anyway, so the reference to ‘poverty’ should

40 Chapter 1
is certainly the Psalter, which starts to appear as an independent ‘book’ with

illuminations relevant to the text around the sixth century.120 The Psalter was
often also the first ‘book’ that children came into contact with, in the form of
primers with bright illustrations, to learn one’s Latin ABC and basic prayers;121
a similar development can be observed slightly later in missals. The primer was
at some point textually ‘crossed’ with illustrated books for women, instructing
not only on the Bible but also on exemplary female behaviour.122 With the
beginning of private devotion practises, these elements were replicated, on a
smaller scale but without renouncing the details or the sequential narration, in
the Book of Hours, which connected meditation and liturgy. In this text-type,
the integration between texts and images for individual prayers and devotional
practices reached a higher level than in previous texts.123 All these illustrated
texts developed the affective element to a much greater extent than the bibli
cal source. However, the private dimension was not the only one in disseminat
ing the Bible, as there was also a strand of public communication contributing
to this aim.
A connection between scriptural texts, devotional and exegetic treatises,
and the masses, is provided by the sermon, a highly developed text-type itself.
It was the pulpit that provided the necessary channels through which the
thoughts and expressions typical of the churchmen flowed into the popular
mind and were turned to secular advantage, in close connection with drama
refer rather to the spirit, as the book offered the basic tenets of the faith and of moral
conduct.
120 Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 105-18; Olson, Fair and Varied Forms,
70-71; Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 87-92.
121 The catechism itself as a text-type starts to appear in the late Middle Ages and develops
fully in the Renaissance (Robert James Bast, “Strategies of Communication: Late-Medi
eval Catechisms and the Passion Tradition,” in The Broken Body, ed. MacDonald, Ridder
bos & Schlusemann, 133-44). The quite different ‘primers’ for adults eventually merged
with the text-type of the Book of Hours (see Michael Clanchy, “The ABC Primer: Was It in
Latin or English?,” in Vernacularity in England and Wales, c. 1300-1550, ed. Elisabeth Salter
& Helen Wicker [Turnhout: Brepols, 2011], 17-39).
122 Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse. From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2008), 69; Stella D. Panayotova, “The Illustrated Psalter: Luxury
and Practical Use,” in Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed. Boynton & Reilly, 247-71.
123 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New
Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1992), 209-30; Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medi
eval England, 149 ff.; Bronwyn Stocks, “Text, image and a sequential ‘sacra conversazione’
in early Italian books of hours,” Word & Image 23 (2007): 19.

on the one side and visual art on the other.124 In the new orientation intro
duced by the mendicant orders, preaching outside the church had become a
fundamental activity, which was carried out in the vernacular125 and often
with the support of portable images.126 Preaching was increasingly aimed at
touching the heart of the common people, interpreting the biblical message
and employing an emotional tone that would embody the message itself in an
accessible code. The preacher was trained to use an excited and emotional
speech style, and there were manuals indicating which elements of paralan
guage, i.e. use of different ‘voices’ in dialogic parts, gestures and facial expres
sions, were to be used to elicit the audience’s reactions, a set of ‘theatrical’
124 Carolyn Muessig, “Preacher, Sermon, and Audience in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,”
Augustine Thompson, “From Texts to Preaching: Retrieving the Medieval Sermon as an
Event,” and Phyllis Robert, “The Ars Pradicandi and the Medieval Sermon,” in Preacher,
Sermon, and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Boston: Brill, 2002), 3-10,
13-38 and 41-62.
125 It is crucial not to identify ‘vernacular’ with ‘everyday language’ in this context. Federico
Doglio (Il teatro in Italia. Medioevo e umanesimo [Roma: Edizioni Studium, 1995], 52)
reminds that the decisive step of prescribing the translation of homilies into ‘rustic
speech’ was taken already in the Capitulary of Tours (813 ad). Gerald Owst (Literature and
the Pulpit in Medieval England. A neglected chapter in the history of English letters and of
the English people [Oxford: Blackwell, 1961; 2nd ed.], 6-7) notes that this contributed to the
‘literarisation’ of European vernaculars.
126 This visual support was also necessary because preachers circulated through different
countries. See examples from Italy discussed by Carla Dauven van Knippenberg (“Ein
Anfang ohne Ende: Einführendes zur Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Predigt und
geistlichem Schauspiel des Mittelalters,” in Mittelalterliches Schauspiel. Festschrift für
Hansjürgen Linke zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ulrich Mehler & Anton H. Touber [Amsterdam-
Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994], 157), and by Giancarlo Andenna (“La devozione confraternale per
la Passione di Cristo nel tardo Medioevo,” in Il teatro delle statue. Gruppi lignei di Depo
sizione e Annunciazione tra XII e XIII secolo, ed. Francesca Flores D’Arcais [Milano: Vita &
Pensiero, 2005], 21-31), who also reports the highly emotional reactions of the audience of
one such ‘multi-modal’ sermon. There are also reports about a preacher who, at the end
of the thirteenth century, used ‘props’ such as whips to illustrate the Flagellation, chains
and other instruments of violence, and went to the extent of covering his face with blood
(Carolyn Muessig, “Performance of the Passion: the enactment of devotion in the later
Middle Ages,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance. Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed.
Elina Gertsman [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008], 129-35; Damien Boquet & Piroska Nagy, Sen
sible Moyen Âge. Une histoire des émotions dans l’occident médiéval [Paris: Seuil, 2015],
343). This kind of ‘performance’ was also somehow appropriated by mystical women, who
displayed physical signs of suffering as part of their ‘imitation of Christ’.

42 Chapter 1
devices that were also employed in painting and drama.127 Particularly in Italy,
but also gradually elsewhere, this tendency gave rise to the sermone semidram
matico, which included some form of impersonation, to the point that the
Anglo-Norman play Jeu d’Adam has been claimed to be an expansion of a
pseudo-Augustinian sermon.128 Moreover, several instructive ‘speeches’, usu
ally pronounced by authoritative characters in drama, have various features in
common with sermons, both linguistically and rhetorically.129
This development reaches a peak in the fifteenth century, to an extent that
Owst130 feels entitled to claim, about some English sermons, that
the dramatic intensity of their language in no way lags far behind … the
intensity of the Coventry Passion Play, or that of the well-known Norwich
Retable which depicts in line and colour the horrors of the Flagellation …
[some of these sermons are] worthy alike of the pathos as well as the real
ism of the religious stage.
127 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the
Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 48-49, 64-71;
Charles Mazouer, “Sermons in the Passions of Marcadé, Gréban and Jehan Michel,” in Les
Mystères. Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happé & Wim Hüsken (Amster
dam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2012), 247-69. One such manual is the Forma Predicandi by Robert
of Basevorn (1322), who quotes the English and French schools as the most ‘modern’
(John Wheatley Blench, Preaching in England in the Late 15th and Early 16th Centuries
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964], 114-15; James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle
Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance [Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1974], 346 ff.). Their preaching methods, which he considers
as emanating from university theologians, included modulation of voice, gestures, and
even use of humour to help the listener retain the message. Viable techniques were also
using examples from nature, history and art, or frightening the audience with a horrid
tale, without forgetting an appeal to the Scriptures or to some other ‘authoritative narra
tive’ for validation (ibid., 346-54).
128 See Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Vince, 325-26.
129 There is evidence that homilies were interspersed in dramatic representations in late-
fifteenth-century Italy (Luigi Allegri, Teatro e spettacolo nel medioevo [Bari: Laterza, 1988],
248) and England (Rafael Portillo & Manuel J. Gómez Lara, “Holy Week Performances of
the Passion in Spain: Connections with Medieval European Drama,” in Festive Drama, ed.
Meg Twycross [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996], 89). Similarly, some dramatic sequences
based on sermons (though not whole plays) are known from the eleventh century
onwards (Kretzmann, Liturgical Element, 25).
130 Owst, Literature and the Pulpit, 508, 541.

The actual interplay between sermons and drama is dealt with by several
scholars.131 Whether in ‘plain’, ‘colloquial’, or ‘ornate’ style,132 whether influ
enced by classical rhetoric or not, the sermon aimed at influencing people’s
ideas and behaviour, particularly through indulging in details, especially those
pertaining to the Crucifixion.133 Mack reminds that several features of classical
rhetoric, for example amplificatio (expansion) and anargeia, or the vivid repre
sentation of events, were widespread techniques imported from Aristotelian
rhetoric into medieval literature, including religious texts.134 Ong emphasises
that dispositio (or the ordering of elements, for which mnemotechnics was
particularly important) and copia (abundance) were in this context as impor
tant as inventio (see also 1.5 for the connection between these aspects).135
Mayne Kienzle applies performance theory to sermons and notes that there
was a distinct performative element in preaching.136 Although medieval theol
ogy frequently expressed recommendations to limit exaggerations, it also
offered advice on rehearsal practice and on effective delivery. Its view of rhe
torical devices was therefore at best ambivalent.137
One main feature of many sermons,138 apart from direct address of the lis
teners (see Chapter 4), was the exemplum, i.e. a story, often connected to the
131 For example Axton, European Drama, 163-64; David A. Flory, “The Social Uses of Religious
Literature: Challenging Authority in the Thirteenth-Century Marian Miracle Tale,” Essays
in Medieval Studies 13 (1996), 66; and Blench, Preaching in England.
132 According to Quintilian, ornato was the additional element of rhetoric that made a text
distinguished and effective, apart from clarity and correctness, which were considered
the basic qualities in oratory language use (Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 131).
133 Blench, Preaching in England, 260 ff.; Stefania Biscetti, “Stylistic Variation in 17th-Century
Conduct Manuals for Women,” in Socially-Conditioned Language Change: Diachronic and
Synchronic Insights, ed. Susan Kermas & Maurizio Gotti (Lecce: Edizioni del Grifo, 2008),
157-80.
134 Peter Mack, “Argument and Emotion in Troiolus and Criseyde,” in Medieval Rhetoric:
A Casebook, ed. Scott D. Troyan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 109-26.
135 Walter Ong, “Tudor Writings on Rhetoric,” Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968), 45-47.
136 Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Medieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record,”
in Preacher, Sermon and Audience, ed. Muessig, 89-124.
137 Wil Van den Bercken, “The ambiguity of religious aesthetics. Reflections on catholic and
orthodox religious art,” in Aesthetics as a Religious Factor and Western Christianity, ed. Van
den Bercken & Sutton, 37-51.
138 As in the case of dramatic texts, we should not assume that the sermon collections copied
as manuscripts were to be delivered exactly in the form in which we read them today.
Nevertheless, the focus on discipline and devotion, and on the practice of religion rather
than on theological points, emerges clearly, as does the use of visual and verbal rhetoric
devices (Robert Norman Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe c. 1215-c. 1515 (Cam

44 Chapter 1
lives of saints and martyrs, that could be emblematic of some specific message
of the sermon, and could attract the attention (and appeal to the memory) of
the masses.139 In some cases, for example in Savonarola’s sermons, a form of
cyclicity was also developed – collections of sermons, connected to specific
times of the year, were developed, forming another link with the emergence of
drama. The description of images, rather than offering a purely narrative pat
tern (also typical of some of Savonarola’s sermons), provides a form of ekphrasis
with instructive aims that creates a link with visual art, making of the preacher
a ‘painter of images’.140 Saints’ lives were cherished in medieval times, and we
have a number of texts that show the development of such exempla as a textual
genre. Patterns of this type were circulated intensively throughout Europe
from rather early on, and similar pictorial cycles also developed co-temporally.
Some of these texts indulge in details that are meant to inspire pathos and
empathy, and show parallels with biblical representations, especially when the
saint’s life is considered an imitatio Christi; this was the case with St. Francis or
St. Sebastian, where the stigmata, or the numerous wounds, respectively, are
the most visible signs of the typological parallel.
The capillarity in the spread of such details, and the way in which they have
inspired dramatic representations in the numerous saints’ plays that were
written in Europe alongside biblical cycles, would be a large object of study in
itself. Here we will only mention an enormously influential collection, the
Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend. Written by the Italian Dominican Jacobus de
Voragine in the last part of the twelfth century, and partly based on previous
collections and ultimately on the apocryphal gospels, this monumental work
became one of the most widely read books in the late Middle Ages and well
into the Renaissance, judging from the number of manuscripts and early prints
that have survived.141 The work, although with omissions, additions, changes,
and alterations, was translated several times during the fourteenth and fif
teenth centuries, especially in Germany and in the Netherlands,142 but also in
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64 ff.; Wolfert S. van Egmond, “The Audience of
Early Medieval Hagiographic Texts: Some Questions Revisited,” in New Approaches to
Medieval Communication, ed. Mostert, 57-58.
139 Dieter M. Schmidt, Die Kunst des Dialogs in den Wakefield-Spielen (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1980), 34; Swanson, Religion and Devotion, 68.
140 Miriam Gill, “Preaching and Image: Sermons and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval Eng
land,” and Nirith Ben-Aryeh Debby, “The preacher as goldsmith: The Italian preachers’ use
of visual art,” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience, ed. Muessig, 155-80 and 229-54.
141 Jacques Le Goff, À la recherche du Temps sacré (Paris: Perrin, 2011), 7-8.
142 Werner Williams-Krapp, “German and Dutch legendaries of the Middle Ages: a survey,” in
Hagiography and Medieval Literature, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense: Odense
University Press, 1981), 66-75.

Britain, especially with William Caxton’s translation at the end of the fifteenth
century. The Legenda contains not only episodes that are relevant to the life of
Christ and to the Passion, but also a large number of scenes from the lives of
saints and martyrs, many of them stressing gory details and including lively
dialogues. It therefore provides a narrative, but also a visual, and even a perfor
mative, model.
Apart from the fundamental Legenda, the late Middle Ages saw a large pro
duction of other hagiographic, contemplative and devotional writings, often
for the use of monastic life (to aid meditation), but also increasingly for lay
readers. Some of these are translations, like the Ayenbite of Inwit or the Mirrour
of the Blessed Life of Jesu Christ, translated respectively from the French Somme
le Roi and from the Latin Meditationes Vitae Christi,143 an extremely influential
text for later representations of suffering. Many of these works were directed at
women, like the Katharine Group or the Ancrene Riwle or Ancrene Wisse.144
Many similar texts were produced throughout Europe, and several of them
state clearly that they were written in order to encourage lay devotion; they are
often in dialogic form, as doctrinal treatises also often were.145 Although
focussed on spirituality, these texts equally encoded social values and ideolo
gies, and aimed at regulating communal behaviour.146 This involved making
specific decisions not only in terms of the use of the vernacular but also in
terms of the imagery and of the themes chosen with the precise intention of
stirring the readership’s feelings, a strategy explicitly encouraged in most devo
tional writings from Anselm of Canterbury onwards.147 In some cases, passion
plays seem to have been directly inspired by such narrative texts. The French
Passion Isabeau (1398) and the German Die Erlösung (early fourteenth cen
tury), for example, seem to have devotional literature among their most direct
143 Sarah McNamer (“The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi,” Speculum 84 [2009]: 905-
55) hypothesises, after careful philological analysis, that the Latin text of the Meditationes
is not the original, but that the latter was initially produced in Italian, in a convent envi
ronment, and possibly even by a woman.
144 See Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, 2008. For remarks connecting English vernacular drama to
Anglo-Saxon religious literature, preceding the time investigated here but important
to establish the sources of the tradition see, for example, Tydeman, English Medieval
Theatre, 30-31.
145 Tanja Rütten, How To Do Things with Texts. Patterns of Instruction in Religious Discourse
1350-1700 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 86 ff.
146 Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Phil
adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 16-20.
147 Ibid., 35-49.

46 Chapter 1
sources of inspiration.148 In a recent investigation, Rütten has described medi

eval religious texts in terms of discursive functions that can be visible both in
monologic and in dialogic texts, which points to further connections between
drama and other texts.149
A supplementary reason for expressive similarities across text-types lies in
their overarching educational aim, leading to the employment of persuasive
language. Liturgical and vernacular religious plays, like the prose works men
tioned and religious poetry, were trying to stimulate repentance and gratitude
for God’s mercy, as well as to provide a behavioural model for various situa
tions, including receiving the sacraments. Increasingly, late-medieval texts
tend to do this through recourse to the pathos of suffering, which became
more important than the representation of the triumph of God over evil, or of
the celebration of the resurrection.150 The influence of sermons and of the
Legenda can be seen particularly in the narrative passions, i.e. those texts in
which the scene is narrated ex post, rather than enacted. This form developed
in Latin and then in various vernaculars, for example the Northern Passion or
the Auto de la Pasión by Alonso del Campo, with attempts at reproducing dia
logue extracts but maintaining an essentially narrative structure, as in many
saints’ lives.151 These narratives introduced concrete details on the one side
(gestures, postures, actions and direct speech), and elements for reflection and
meditation on the other, and they formed the basis of, or were a source of
inspiration for, many later dramatisations.152
The cross-fertilisation between secular literature, which often contained a
strong religious element in any case, and religious drama and art remains only
partly explored.153 There is a general tendency to highlight the emotional and
148 Edelgard E. DuBruck, “Death: Poetic Perception and Imagination (Continental Europe),”
in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard DuBruck & Barbara Gusick (New York:
Peter Lang, 1999), 309.
149 Rütten, How To Do Things with Texts, 41-55.
150 Ellen Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
151 Joaquin Martínez Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle
Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 20-50.
152 Ulrich Köpf, “Die Passion Christi in der lateinischen religiösen und theologischen Litera
tur des Spätmittelalters,” in Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters,
ed. Walter Haug & Burkhart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 35-41.
153 For some remarks specifically related to the English tradition see, for example Evans, Eng
lish Art, and Carolyn P. Collette, “Chaucer’s Discourse of Mariology: Gaining the Right to
Speak,” in Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative, ed. Robert Edwards (Cam
bridge: Brewer, 1994), 127-47.

pathetic element also in late-medieval secular literature, often in connection

with specific religious theories and beliefs. Narration thus tends to emphasise
these elements, in a similar way to what happens in religious lyrics and in other
secular literature, not only in Dante, but also in Chaucer’s Tales154 or Langland’s
didactic poetry. The latter parallel is emphasised by Coleman,155 who connects
this type of poetry to a climate of social unrest and criticism of the official
power structures while keeping the edifying purpose central, as was also typi
cal of other types of art. A fundamental text-type for the shift to the rhetoric of
suffering is religious lyrical poetry, which could also contain some ‘dialogic’
elements: many English poems about the Passion are in the form of a dialogue
between Jesus and Mary, while in others Jesus addresses man, reminding of the
sacrifice he is undergoing for mankind’s sake.156
Apart from the fact that these poems were often accompanied by actual
illustrations, the texts themselves were also conducive to ‘visualisation’, espe
cially corresponding to icons such as the Man of Sorrows or to scenes such as
the Pietà (see also 3.5), through the use of what Huizinga called “pathetic
naturalism”.157 Similarly to art, religious poetry initially focussed more on the
glory of the Resurrection, but then it increasingly expanded on suffering and
pain.158 Although not separated from other literary forms, religious poetry was
seen as part of devotional practice, and therefore it expanded more and more
on details and employed ‘common’ language, to appeal to feelings rather than
to the intellect. As Belting puts it, “in vernacular poetry, identification with the
emotions of the holy person was one of the means whereby the laity took part
in religious life”.159 This is one of the elements that most clearly connect devel
opments in poetry with those in drama.
The different vernacular traditions show of course some differences, also
linked to the various manuscript practices in different linguistic regions, but
there are decisive unifying factors linked to the fact that drama tended to rep
resent a whole Weltanschauung, a cosmological (but also social and political)
154 William A. Davenport, Chaucer and his English contemporaries (London: Macmillan,
1998).
155 Janet Coleman, English Literature in History, 1350-1400. Medieval Readers and Writers (Lon
don: Hutchinson, 1981), 43, 274-75.
156 Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Rout
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 136-39.
157 Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink & Zn., 1919). Quoted
and translated from the Italian edition L’autunno del Medioevo, 2nd edn. (Rome: Newton
Compton, 1997), 302.
158 Gray, Themes and Images, 12-20.
159 Belting, Likeness and Presence, 375.

48 Chapter 1
interpretation of the world.160 Quite apart from indirect references to, and
testimonies of, dramatic performances, such as those in town and guild records
or witness accounts, there is certainly a wealth of texts that has reached us, in
manuscript or printed form.161 One could derive the impression of sudden
‘births’ of new forms of spectacles, but this is connected to the lack of continu
ous records: for some countries, we have gaps of whole centuries, although the
fully fledged form of the later texts that do survive suggests that these tradi
tions have developed over time, and have known previous phases that are
unfortunately undocumented. The texts that we do possess, however, indicate
a time frame of religious drama in the vernacular from the twelfth century162
to the sixteenth. After that, religious reforms put a restraint, or imposed modi
fications, on the type of drama performed in some countries, while at the same
time the practice started to spread to Eastern Europe, Hungary and Russia.163
Although some Passion and Saints’ Plays continued to be performed much
later than 1600, the acme of development and creativity in the direction rele
vant to this book can be said to have been over by then. Both religious attitudes
and social structures had changed, and this required a shift to new means of
public communication.
Besides the main traditions of France, Germany, and England,164 which
have been widely studied, as have, less extensively, those of Spain and Italy,
160 See Johann Drumbl, “Spazio scenico e attori nell’alto medioevo,” and Claudio Bernardi, “Il
teatro politico del Corpus Domini (1300-1500),” in Dramma Medievale Europeo, ed. Fiorella
Paino (Camerino: University of Camerino Press, 1996), 35 and 83-108; Sarah Beckwith,
“Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature 1100-1500, ed. Larry Scanlon
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 83-94.
161 Lists of extant plays are provided in many references, for instance in Vince, Ancient and
Medieval Theatre, and Lynette Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Vince, includes
a full chronology. Specifically for Britain see also Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and
Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1984), which highlights both the common developments and the mismatches
between countries, especially in the dating of extant texts.
162 The Anglo-Norman Seinte Resurrecion and Jeu d’Adam, and the Spanish Auto de los Reyes
Magos are among the first records, along with about ten plays in various French dialects
(Symes, “Appearance,” 778-831).
163 Ignac Jan Hanuš, Die lateinisch-böhmischen Osterspiele des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Prag:
Bellmann, 1863); A. Polak, “Die altböhmischen Oster- und Passionsspiele” (PhD diss., Uni
versity of Vienna, 1909); Hildegard E. Wanous, “The Bohemian Liturgical Drama” (PhD
diss., University of Minnesota, 1916).
164 The term ‘England’ is used here to refer to the name of the kingdom at the time, thus
including, for example, Yorkshire. Other parts of the British Isles also developed some

there are sparse contributions about theatrical activities in other communi

ties, for instance Poland,165 Denmark,166 and Sweden. The evidence for the
whole Scandinavian, Slavic and Hungarian regions is however quite limited,
since political circumstances influenced both development and content of
drama.167 Patchy evidence is available for the Netherlands, although this is
considered one of the communities where the link between drama and visual
arts was stronger, as part of the relevant indirect evidence demonstrates, and
for Croatia, which shares with Italy a deeper and more visible influence of the
Byzantine world and did develop cyclic drama.168 Different traditions devel
religious drama in Celtic languages, notably Cornwall (Normington, Medieval English

Drama, 110-11), and Scotland, where there is evidence of some mid-fifteenth-century Cor
pus Christi plays that may also be more mime than actual drama, and of dramatic poems,
such as Kennedy’s Passioun (Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland [St Andrews: St
Andrews University Publications-Oxford University Press, 1927]; Edith C. Batho, “Review
of Mediæval Plays in Scotland by Anna Jean Mill,” The Review of English Studies 5 [1929]:
211; Alasdair A. MacDonald, “Passion Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture,” in The Broken
Body, ed. MacDonald, Ridderbos & Schlusemann, 124-28).
165 Nina Király, “The Religious Theatre in Poland, Hungary and Russia of the 15-16th Centu
ries,” in Esperienze dello spettacolo religioso nell’Europa del Quattrocento. Convegno di
studi, Roma 17-20 giugno, Anagni 21 giugno 1992, ed. Maria Chiabó & Federico Doglio
(Viterbo: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, 1992), 259-68.
166 Graham D. Caie, “Drama on the Wall: Medieval Drama Illustrated by Danish Church Wall
Paintings,” European Medieval Drama 3 (1999): 11-18.
167 Heinz Kindermann, Das Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag,
1980), 198-99, 244-53; Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Vince, x, 310-12; Audrey
Ekdahl Davidson, Holy Week and Easter Ceremonies and Dramas from Medieval Sweden
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990).
168 On these communities see H. Rupprich, “Die Beschreibungen niederländischen Passion
spiele durch A. Dürer und Hieronymus Köler d. Ä.,” Maske und Kothurn 1 (1955): 88-102,
Hans Borcherdt, Das Europäische Theater im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1969), 130-48, Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Vince, 218-25, and Happé,
Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 206-13, and August Leskien, Altkroatische
geistliche Schauspiele (Leipzig: Edelmanni, 1884), Francesco S. Perillo, Le sacre rappresen
tazioni Croate (Napoli: A. Pastore, 1975), Zrinka Pulišelić, “A Survey of Croatian Medieval
Drama,” in New Approaches to European Theatre of the Middle Ages, ed. Gusick & DuBruck,
127-37, respectively. For several scholars, among them David Staines, “The English Mystery
Cycles,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama, ed. Eckehard
Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 80 ff., the cycle is a uniquely Eng
lish form. The first records of multi-day performances are from Cividale, Italy, in 1295, and
a century later from London; thus, although the expansion in the format does not concern
all traditions equally, it is still a visible general tendency (Alfred Rohde, Passionsbild und
Passionsbühne [Berlin: Furche-Kunstverlag, 1926], 17). French passion plays are divided

50 Chapter 1
oped in partly diverging ways, responding to specific social, political and

intellectual developments. After having explored the possible common sources
of textual production, we turn now to a brief review of the main fully-fledged
vernacular dramatic traditions.
Early dramatisations developed first and foremost in the Italian Laude,
especially those from Central Italy, which already around the time of the pro
duction of the Legenda Aurea show all the emotional and human elements
that will shortly afterwards be expressed in the Devozioni and later still in the
Sacre Rappresentazioni.169 The best-known example is Jacopone da Todi’s
Donna de Paradiso, which includes a narrative from the Arrest onwards and a
Complaint.170 At the same time, the ‘comic’ and grotesque elements were
mostly expressed in saints’ plays and other types of drama, while the Rappre
sentazioni based on biblical episodes were centred on lyrical and pathetic
elements, and highlighted Mary’s maternal grief, i.e. the point of contact
between the human and the sacred.171 This primacy in chronological terms
mirrors that in the production of visual cycles, and is due to the direct absorp
tion, in Italy, of developments coming from the East. Later, Italian theatre
evolved a type of ‘semi-cyclical’ form, and showed influences from other
European countries, although still maintaining its identity, based more on the
visualisation of scenes than on the elaboration of dialogues.172
Borcherdt173 attributes these differences between traditions to the different
levels of influence of the clergy, as opposed to the spiritual brotherhoods, in
turn in opposition with an “appropriation of liturgical dramatization by the
laity”.174 Doglio underlines the role of the fraternities, especially in Umbria,
into journées (although it is not clear to what extent this is only a convention), while
Spanish plays were rather brief.
169 Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano, 652-704; Kathleen Falvey, “Italian Vernacular Religious
Drama of the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries: A Selected Bibliography on the
Lauda Drammatica and the Sacra Rappresentazione,” Research Opportunities in Renais
sance Drama 26 (1983): 125-44; Sandro Sticca, “Italy: Liturgy and Christocentric Spiritual
ity,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. Simon, 169-88; Doglio, Il teatro in Italia.
170 Testi e Lingue dell’Italia Medievale, ed. Odile Redon, trans. Roberta Cella (Roma: Salerno
Editrice, 2009), 286-94.
171 Kindermann, Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters, 203-04.
172 Ibid., 201; Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 196-205.
173 Borcherdt, Das Europäische Theater, 68-72.
174 Allegri, Teatro e spettacolo nel medioevo, 211. Toschi (Le origini del teatro italiano, 645)
notes that Italian homilies also contained dialogic parts that are elaboration of canonical
texts, which can have influenced the development of drama. Raimondo Guarino, “Pro
spettive dello spettacolo religioso nell’Italia del Quattrocento,” and Paola Ventrone, “La
sacra rappresentazione Fiorentina: Aspetti e Problemi,” in Esperienze dello spettacolo

where the main elements that would later form the core of passion plays seem
to have emerged early on.175 A more limited role seems to have been played by
the giullari or minstrels, whose influence cannot therefore be compared to
that of the French jongleurs. Also significant is the related tradition of Italian
lyrical poetry, which, as in other countries, emphasises the visualisation of
highly pathetic scenes, and explicitly encourages the reader to ‘imagine’ the
Passion.176
A partly different direction was taken in the Spanish area. Plays in Castilian
are attested only from the fifteenth century onwards, with initial influence
from the Mozarabic tradition.177 However, ‘professional’ theatre, with paid
actors and musicians, seems to have started relatively early in Spain, as it did in
France.178 Castilian drama shows a highly didactic tone, no doubt influenced
by the flourishing of a homiletic tradition.179 Although the sources of medieval
Spanish drama have not been studied in depth, the frequent use of direct
speech and of deictics in many types of medieval literature is mentioned by
Stern as a possible influence on dramatisation.180 In Castile, the suspicious
attitude against dramatic productions from a theological perspective (with
spectacular elements seen as a potentially dangerous distraction from the seri
ousness of the matter treated) probably prevented deeper developments,
keeping religious drama in the shorter and more compact form of the Auto.181
Dramatic pieces comparable to the English mystery plays available to us from
Spain date only from the sixteenth century, and they appear connected to the
rise of professional acting, not to groups like the guilds and other spiritual and
civic aggregations, as in other countries. A similarity with other traditions is
religioso, ed. Chiabó & Doglio, 25-58 and 67-99, also note the relation of early drama with
sermons, which would emphasise the monastic origin of the former and a didactic,
instructive intention as common denominator.
175 Doglio, Il teatro in Italia, 97 ff.
176 For an example see Elisabetta Crema, “Iconografia della Passione nel ‘Pianto della Vergine’
di Enselmino da Montebelluna,” in Il teatro delle statue. Gruppi lignei di Deposizione e
Annunciazione tra XII e XIII secolo, ed. Francesca Flores D’Arcais (Milano: Vita & Pensiero,
2005), 33-59.
177 Charlotte Stern, The Medieval Theater in Castile (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renais
sance Texts & Studies, 1996), 269.
178 Kindermann, Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters, 233; Ronald Boal Williams, “The Staging
of Plays in the Spanish Peninsula Prior to 1555” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1934).
179 Carlos Alvar, Angel Gomez Moreno & Fernando Gomez Redondo, La Prosa y el teatro en la
Edad Media (Madrid: Taurus, 1991), 89-92; Stern, Medieval Theater in Castile, 269.
180 Stern, Medieval Theater in Castile, 145-73.
181 Ibid., 84, 88; Alvar, Gomez Moreno & Gomez Redondo, La Prosa y el teatro en la Edad
Media, 201-05.

52 Chapter 1
however that the gory and horrific effects were even further intensified in
saints’ plays rather than in the representation of biblical episodes,182 as
revealed by the important Códice de Autos Viejos, which gathers about ninety-
six plays on the Bible and on saints’ lives, and is thus one of the main sources
for Spanish religious drama.
The Catalan production of religious drama shows a very rich, separate tradi
tion already in the fourteenth century,183 as shown by the records in the Llibre
de les solemnitats de Barcelona, a crucial piece of evidence on a whole range of
processions and festivals, religious drama being one of them. Other important
information concerns the involvement of both clergy and laity in the produc
tions, and the range of biblical episodes represented, which extends to the Old
Testament, with an amplitude comparable to that of other traditions.184 Thus,
Happé hypothesises that Catalonia may have been influenced by the French
tradition in undertaking the production of whole cycles. 185
The relation between Latin and vernacular drama is particularly complex
for religious theatre in German,186 where the link between the two dramatic
strands seems to be based on the connection between specific scenes and indi
vidual moments rather than whole episodes, whose choice seems quite differ
182 Norman Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage from Medieval Times until the end of the
Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
183 Richard Donovan, The Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1958), 169 ff.
184 Stern, Medieval Theater in Castile, 25 ff., 112-13.
185 Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 214.
186 Here we include modern Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Analyses of specific dra
matic tradition that were consulted, apart from those mentioned in the text, are Maximil
ian J. Rudwin, A Historical and Bibliographical Survey of the German Religious Drama
(Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1924), Walther Müller, Der schauspielerische Stil
im Passionsspiel des Mittelalters. Form und Geist, Heft 1 (Leipzig: Eichblatt, 1927), Wolfgang
F. Michael, “The Staging of the Bozen Passion Play,” The Germanic Review 25 (1950): 178-95,
and Idem, Das deutsche Drama des Mittelalters (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971), Maria Müller,
“Tragische Elemente im deutschen Passionsspiel des Mittelalters” (PhD diss., University
of Göttingen, 1952), Gerd Seewald, “Die Marienklage im mittellateinischen Schrifttum
und in den germanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters” (PhD diss., University of Hamburg,
1952), Anton Dörrer, “Heiliggräber, Grabandachten, Karwochenspiele, Beispiele aus Tirol,”
in Ostern in Tirol, ed. Nikolaus Grass, Emil Berlanda & Georg Schreiber (Innsbruck: Wag
ner, 1957), 181-219, Francis Gentry, A Companion to Middle High German Literature to the
14th Century (Boston: Brill, 2002), and Christoph Petersen, “Imaginierte Präsenz. Der Kör
per Christi und die Theatralität des geistlichen Spiels,” in Das Theater des Mittelalters und
der Frühen Neuzeit als Ort und Medium sozialer und symbolischer Kommunikation, ed.
Christel Meier, Heinz Meyer & Claudia Spanily (München: Rhema, 2004), 45-61.

ent between the two strands. Particularly visible in the Passionsspiel rather
than in the Osterspiel (the Resurrection drama being more connected to lit
urgy), this independence is suggested also by dating, since there is evidence of
vernacular plays produced already at the beginning of the thirteenth century,
while some Latin plays were composed later.187
Linguistic analysis, on the other hand, proves that Latin texts of other types,
and especially sermons, were quite influential, as was the French tradition;
some scenes seem nearly ‘translated’ from corresponding French sequenc
es.188 The appeal to emotion, the compact format, the concentration on the
Passion at the expense of other themes, are all elements in common between
the French and the German traditions. These are connected also by another
aspect, i.e. that for both we have examples of what seem to be ‘performance
copies’, not elegant manuscripts gathering collections of plays, like most of the
English cycle plays, but real ‘working texts’, which can offer precious insight.189
In spite of these similarities, however, there are also deep differences, with the
German plays focussing more on doctrine, on solemnity and liturgical connec
tions, and the French ones focussing on characterisation and on the depiction
of vented emotions.190
The German tradition shows higher homogeneity of treatment as opposed
to others; it will be enriched by increased ‘realism’ and humanisation only in
the fifteenth century, including the comic element, while early plays are more
hieratical: costumes, colours, and gestures express a symbolism that does not
initially rely much on dialogues.191 There is however also variation in the forms
of this representation. In the Muri Osterspiel, for instance, the action
187 Rolf Bergmann, Studien zur Entstehung und Geschichte der deutschen Passionspiele des 13.
und 14. Jahrhunderts (München: Fink, 1972), 234-55. It must however be remarked that
there are more extant mixed-language plays in the German tradition than in others, rang
ing from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries (Hansjürgen Linke, “A Survey of
Medieval Drama and Theater in Germany,” in Medieval Drama on the Continent of Europe,
ed. Clifford Davidson & John H. Stroupe [Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications,
1993], 17-23), indicating a relative contiguity of the two types.
188 Ruprecht Wimmer, Deutsch und Latein im Osterspiel. Untersuchungen zu den volkssprachli
chen Entsprechungstexten der lateinischen Strophenlieder (München: Beck, 1974), 102-07.
189 These are for Germany the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle (1350) and the even earlier Muri Diri
gierrolle (1240-60), and for France the Livre de Conduite du Régisseur of the Mons Passion
of 1501. Stephen Wailes (“Drama,” in A Companion to Middle High German Literature to the
14th Century, ed. Francis G. Gentry [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 310-12) notes that the German
Dirigierrolle antedates all other extant plays.
190 Hadassah Posey Goodman, “Original Elements in French and German Passion Plays.
A Study of the Passion Scenes” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1951), 105-06, 117-21.
191 Borcherdt, Das Europäische Theater, 8-39; Linke, “Survey,” 17-23; Wailes, “Drama,” 289-318.

54 Chapter 1
represented takes place after the Entombment, and the Crucifixion itself is
narrated, mostly within the Lamentation of the three Marys, as a ‘flashback’.192
The political dimension is also very visible, through the insistence on the
maintenance of a social order. The tone is rather ‘serious’; there seems to be
less space for emotional and popular elements.193 Nevertheless, there are
attempts at involving the audience, and this tradition is still based on a form of
sharing: this is however achieved through exposition and direct appeal, and
through stressing the connection between religious and civic / political
values,194 rather than by triggering emotions through indulging on the human
detail.
The study of affectivity in English plays is made more complex by their lack
of continuity and homogeneity, both in terms of linguistic styles and in terms
of organisation of the ‘cycle’, for example choice and length of episodes.195 For
historians of drama and social historians, a further problem is represented by
the scarcity of exemplars that could be close to ‘stage copies’, as opposed to
other traditions.196 Even the exact localisation of the plays is doubtful, not only
for the N-Town collection, but also for the large ‘anthologies’ called York,
Towneley and Chester, as well as for many other isolated plays.197 If, on the one
side, the wide contamination and interspersion processes revealed by the
192 For similar early English examples see David Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), 90-92.
193 Wailes, “Drama,” 289-95.
195 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300-1576, vol. 1-4 (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1959-2002); John Coldewey, “From Roman to Renaissance in Drama and Theatre,” in
The Cambridge History of British Theatre, vol. 1: Origins to 1660, ed. Jane Milling & Peter
Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3-69; Happé, Cyclic Form and
the English Mystery Plays, 222 ff.; Clifford Davidson, “The Dramatic Tradition of the
Middle Ages,” Comparative Drama 40 (2006): 259-62.
196 Stanley Kahrl, “The Staging of Medieval English Plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe,
ed. Simon, 130-48. On the extant manuscript types in English environment see, for exam
ple, Peter Meredith, “Scribes, texts and performance,” in Aspects of Early English Drama,
ed. Paula Neuss (Oxford: D.S. Brewer-Barnes & Noble, 1983), 13-29. The bibliography on
this is quite extensive. See, for instance, Williams, Drama of Medieval England, 116-36;
Epp, “Towneley Plays,” 121-50; Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the
Saints: Theatre, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: Univer
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 15; and Normington, Medieval English Drama, 73 ff. For
general considerations on evidence of public and private reading of medieval plays see
Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 284.
197 Some are collected in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, EETS s.s. 1 (Lon
don: Oxford University Press).

manuscripts are not a problem when one is trying to reconstruct a whole

cultural climate and a series of recurrent topoi, motifs, and linguistic phenom
ena, on the other side the state of the evidence does pose some problems of
comparability with other traditions.198
The English tradition shows relations with the French one, as part of the
massive input provided by French sources via translations, and via other texts.
One case is the demonstrated influence of the French passion plays on narra
tive poems like the Northern Passion, which contains several elements that will
then be transferred to cyclic drama.199 The influence of France was also indi
rect and more general: via lexical borrowing, syntactic calquing and the
adoption of stylistic patterns that are found in much late-medieval written
English, both literary and of other types. There is also evidence of reciprocal
influences between the different English cycles, in that specific passages of
English plays appear to be directly related to each other and to contemporary
religious lyric, as well as to isolated plays.200
One question debated by critics is to what extent this type of drama can be
considered a ‘literary’ product.201 Contrary to what applies to some French,
Spanish and Italian texts, we do not have names of, or references to, ‘authors’,
and it is possible to hypothesise multiple authorship,202 particularly for the
N-Town Plays. At the same time, the English cycles show quite complex pat
terns of alliteration and various relatively sophisticated metrical devices, while
198 Similar constraints are created by the absence of Latin or mixed-language plays of English
origin.
199 Grace Frank, “Vernacular Sources and an Old French Passion Play,” Modern Language
Notes 35 (1920): 259.
200 See Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Davis, xvii, and Peter Happé, “The Towneley Cycle
without the Wakefield Master,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 45 (2006):
32. Specifically on parallels between the English cycles see also Sullivan, Study of the
themes of the Sacred Passion. On morality plays, which adopt a partly different style and
are also based on other premises, see, for example, David Bevington, “Castles in the Air:
The Morality Plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe, ed. Simon, 97-116. On saints’ plays
and other religious dramatisations see English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes:
Specimens of the Pre-Elizabethan Drama, ed. Alfred Pollard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927
[8th ed.]), Glynne Wickham, “The Staging of Saint Plays in England,” in The Medieval
Drama, ed. Sticca, 99-119, and Victor Scherb, Staging Faith: East Anglian Drama in the
Later Middle Ages (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001).
201 Robert Withington, “The Corpus Christi Plays as Drama,” Studies in Philology 27 (1930):
573-82; Waldo McNeir, “The Corpus Christi Passion Plays as Dramatic Art,” Studies in Phi
lology 48 (1951): 601-28; Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages.
202 Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 322.

56 Chapter 1
they have probably lost many performative / scenic elements.203 Much has
been written about the so-called ‘Wakefield Master’, supposedly the author of
part of the Towneley cycle,204 and about the ‘York Realist’, especially for what
concerns their ‘realistic’ tendency in portraying certain characters and rela
tions through dialogue, thus creating a highly emotionally charged drama.205
Conversely, McNeir206 claims that the Chester cycle does not show much indul
gence on ‘popular accretions’ such as comic interpolations, colourful details
and anachronisms, which indicates its connection with clerical, doctrinal lit
erature.207 Meredith and Tailby208 attribute the differences in style and tone
between the English cycles to the fact that these ‘messages’ were sent by differ
ent senders, since York was more a ‘civic-controlled exercise in public display’,
while Chester was ‘much more of a combined product of City and Church’.
Unfortunately, some extant texts of the English cycles are later than many
other European plays, so that a long tradition of performance remains un
known to us. This also means that we know relatively little about the details of
the performance, to the extent that even the staging techniques, whether on
moving pageants, on fixed platforms or in public squares, and a number of
other contextual elements have been hotly debated.
Similarly to the English cycles, the large French passion plays (for example
the Passion Michel, Gréban, Passion Ste Geneviève)209 show episodes both from
the Old Testament and from the Gospels, with the inclusion of several apocry
203 Omer Jodogne, “Le Théâtre Français du Moyen Age: Recherches sur l’aspect dramatique
des textes,” in The Medieval Drama, ed. Sticca, 1.
204 See, for example, Hans-Jürgen Diller, Redeformen des englischen Misterienspiels (München:
Fink, 1973).
205 Mary Meda Burke, “Realism in the Religious Drama of Mediaeval England” (PhD diss.,
University of Minnesota, 1932); Clifford Davidson, “The Realism of the York Realist and
the York Passion,” Speculum 50 (1975): 274.
206 McNeir, “Corpus Christi Passion Plays as Dramatic Art,” 608-09.
207 Arnold Williams, “Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria,” Speculum 43 (1968): 677-
84; see also Richard Kenneth Emmerson, “‘Nowe ys common this daye’: Enoch and Elias,
Antichrist, and the structure of the Chester Cycle,” in Homo, Memento finis: The Iconogra
phy of Last Judgement in Medieval Art and Drama, ed. David Bevington (Kalamazoo, MI:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 89-120.
208 Peter Meredith & John Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle
Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Pub
lications, 1982), 3.
209 Note that some of the well-known texts in this tradition come from locations that were
not administratively ‘French’ at the time, for example Namur, Valenciennes, and Lille
(Jelle Koopmans & Darwin Smith, “Un théâtre français du Moyen Âge?,” in Théâtres du
Moyen Âge, ed. Iogna-Prat & Smith, 6.

phal details and with clear connections to lyrical poetry and to a sort of
‘melodramatic’ or ‘illusionistic realism’.210 The first texts that are extant, on the
contrary, are much more restricted in subject matter and more simple in struc
ture, as in the German tradition.211 DuBruck specifically compared the plays of
the Crucifixion in all French cycles, and he found that the treatments of the
sequence differ, but that they all insist on details about bodily sufferings that
could elicit compassion.212 Conversely, Accarie213 notes regional differences in
the levels of dramatic treatment, differences that appear also in the drama in
Latin,214 and which probably point to subcultural differences.
Accarie also notes that, in the French tradition, the influence of narratives
such as the Legenda Aurea is more indirect, with fewer precise references than
in other traditions.215 This is probably connected to the fact that the French
tradition is the one for which we have the most ‘hybrid’ forms between liturgi
cal and popular drama, including some bilingual texts with an ‘intermediate’
level in the development of characters and action, which has lent credit to the
evolutionary approach.216 On the other hand, the first and very influential pas
sion from the French areas, if we except the Anglo-Norman plays, is the Passion
des Jongleurs (c. 1245), which is a recited or possibly sung narrative that cer
tainly had non-clerical origins.217
The Passion Gréban is considered the most insistent on emotional inten
sity,218 as well as the most developed in the elements accompanying and
surrounding the play.219 The French plays also show considerable attention to
210 Borcherdt, Das Europäische Theater, 52-53; Edelgard E. DuBruck, “Passion Plays in Conti
nental Europe. Adapting biblical Stories to the Stage,” in New Approaches to European
Theatre of the Middle Ages, ed. Gusick & DuBruck, 76.
211 Goodman, “Original Elements,” v.
212 Edelgard DuBruck, “The Death of Christ in French Passion Plays of the Late Middle Ages:
Its Aspects and Sociological Implications,” in Dies Illa. Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Jane
H.M. Taylor (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 81-91.
213 Maurice Accarie, Le théâtre sacré de la fin du moyen âge. Étude sur le sens moral de la pas
sion de Jean Michel (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1979).
214 On these micro-regional traditions see also Charles Mazouer, Le Théâtre Français du
Moyen Âge (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 21.
215 Accarie, Théâtre sacré, 229.
216 Mazouer, Théâtre Français, 50-88.
217 Bernard Ribémont, Le théâtre français du Moyen Âge au XVIe siècle (Paris: Ellipses, 2003),
63-64.
218 Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays, 144 ff.
219 See Jacques Chocheyras, Le théâtre religieux en Savoie au XVIe siècle (Genève: Droz, 1971)
and contributions in Les Mystères. Studies in Genre, Text and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happé
& Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Éditions Rodopi, 2012).

58 Chapter 1
the portraying of ‘common people’, which often leads to long scenes that high
light comic or grotesque elements and episodes (see also 3.3).220
This section closes with a few further remarks on some unifying elements of
religious drama. The first of these is the importance that music seems to have
had in all medieval religious drama. Chants and choral pieces directly related
to the religious tradition were incorporated in many plays (as we glean from
explicit references to the Magnificat or the Te Deum), and instrumental music
is also mentioned. Many records of performances include information on the
musicians who were hired (contrary to the ‘actors’, the musicians were usually
paid performers) and to the instruments that were employed.221 The liturgy
already incorporated antiphonal singing, often with vernacular portions to
make it more intelligible,222 but the inclusion of musicians also had to do with
the ‘entertainment’ part of the performance, with ‘lighter’ songs introduced
(as, for instance, in many Shepherds’ plays) by the minstrels or jongleurs. The
sources of the latter include popular narratives and romances, as well as the
music that was very popular in secular drama, mummings, and even as a form
of entertainment in its own right. Itinerant musicians played in squares and
inns, narrating heroic or romantic stories with the help of portable images.223
There are several surviving carols and songs related to the Passion and to the
sufferings of Mary, several of which are in the first person, and thus show a
‘mimetic’ quality.224 A possible connection here is in the French Passion
d’Autun, where the ‘songs’ interspersed in the text are in the vernacular, while
musical pieces are usually in Latin in other plays.225 An occasional exception is
Mary’s Complaint – this is the only musical piece in the vernacular in the
Passion Ste Geneviève, for instance.226 The same happens in many German
220 Henri Rey-Flaud, Pour une dramaturgie du Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1980), 153-54.
221 Companion to the Medieval Theatre, ed. Vince, 260-62.
222 Kretzmann, Liturgical Element, 7-8.
223 Coleman, English Literature in History, 185.
224 Steven E. Plank “Wrapped all in Woe: Passion Music in late-Medieval England,” in The Bro
ken Body, ed. MacDonald, Ridderbos & Schlusemann, 93-108.
225 A particularly interesting example in this respect is the Admoniter Passionsspiel, where
the spoken parts in the vernacular often provide a translation of the sung parts, which are
in Latin. All references to this play are from Das Admoniter Passionsspiel, ed. Karl Konrad
Polheim (München: F. Schöning, 1972).
226 Le Mystère de la Passion Notre Seigneur du manuscrit 1131 de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Gene
viève, ed. Graham A. Runnalls (Genève-Paris: Droz-Minard, 1974).

plays while, according to Remnant,227 England introduced musical elements

prominently with a certain delay with respect to the Continent.
In spite of the frequent objections from the sternest theologians and reli
gious authorities, most were in favour of using music in religious contexts, as a
form of ‘universal language’ that, especially with the gradual decline of Latin,
could appeal directly to feelings.228 Chants connected with the Psalms, later
expanded with the addition of tropes, were an important part of monastic life
after the introduction of the Benedictine Rule, creating a sort of commentary
to the biblical text.229 The presence of monastic chants in drama seems to
point occasionally to a clerical participation in the writing (for example in the
Donaueschinger Passionsspiel230). Music could thus form a further connection
of drama with liturgy, and was especially cultivated in the French tradition. It
is from France, for instance, that Gerson (1363-1429) came; his musical compo
sitions and his short treatise on emotions highlight the centrality of the
Crucifixion and of empathy with Mary’s sorrow in an emotional experience
that generated virtue through sound.231
The discussion of the relation of drama with music brings us to the relation
between drama and festivities, which has been investigated, for instance by
Humphrey, Winkelman, and Granger for Britain, and by Castro Caridad for
Spain.232 Granger, in particular, emphasises the social value of misrule and
reversal of order, which was employed also in a religious context. Although
227 Mary Remnant, “Musical Instruments in Early English Drama,” in Material Culture and
Medieval Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson, 141-94 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publi
cations, 1999).
228 Viladesau, Theology and the Arts, 16-48; Frans Jespers, “Authenticity and universality in
religious art. The case of the catholic church music in western Europe,” in Aesthetics as a
Religious Factor and Western Christianity, ed. Van den Bercken & Sutton, 209-24; Penny
Granger, The N-Town Play. Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2009): 86-94.
229 Susan Boynton, “The Bible and the Liturgy,” in Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages, ed.
Boynton & Reilly, 12-28.
230 Das Donaueschinger Passionsspiel, ed. Anthonius H. Touber (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985), 266,
n. 108.
231 Jodogne, “Théâtre Français du Moyen Age,” 5-10; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of
feeling: a history of emotions, 600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 227-
49.
232 See Chris Humphrey, The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England (Man
chester: Manchester University Press, 2001), Michael A. Winkelman, “Review of The Poli
tics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England by Chris Humphrey,” Medieval and
Renaissance Drama in England 16 (2003): 318-23, Granger, The N-Town Play, and Castro
Caridad, “Transmisión y recepción,” 197-216.

60 Chapter 1
transgressive, reversal was not by definition subversive: it could provoke

healthy laughter, but also elicit reflections on morality and folly. This element
was present, for instance, in the various caricatural or scurrilous illustrations at
the margins of manuscripts,233 and therefore it was, precisely, marginal to the
main message. Similarly, the ‘carnival’ of the Mocking of Christ is no more than
a marginal incident on the way to salvation. In a reversal of the reversal, the
‘real’ king of Heaven is made into the transvestite of a carnival king, and this
both condemns and pre-empties the potential subversion of medieval reversal
festivities.
In spite of the critical stance of many plays against secular power, the com
monality of intents between religious and civic communication becomes clear
when we look at evidence on the staging of tableaux vivants of biblical epi
sodes, along with secular scenes, within King’s Triumphs, a type of evidence
that emerges mainly in France.234 Although past scholarship has emphasised
the close relation of vernacular religious drama with official celebrations such
as the feast of the Corpus Christi, a connection that seems confirmed by abun
dant evidence, others235 tend to downplay this relation, since cyclic drama
does not show a special emphasis on the Eucharist, while this feast focussed
precisely on the Incarnation. It is however important to stress that public fes
tivities, like public executions, contained a strong element of spectacularisation,
of staging, which was common to royal processions and other lay displays.236
233 Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The symbolic significance of Figurae Scatologicae in Gothic manu
scripts,” in Word, Picture, and Spectacle: Papers, ed. Clifford Davidson, 1-19 (Kalamazoo,
MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984); see also contribut ions in Farce and Farcial Ele
ments, ed. Wim Hüsken, Konrad Schoell & Leif Søndergaard (Amsterdam: Éditions
Rodopi, 2002).
234 Elizabeth A.R. Brown & Nancy Freeman Regalado, “La grant feste: Phillip the Fair’s Cele
bration of the Knighting of His Sons in Paris at Pentecost of 1313,” in City and Spectacle in
Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt & Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: Univer
sity of Minnesota Press, 1994), 56-86.
235 See Clifford Davidson, “Corpus Christi Play and the Feast of Corpus Christi,” Research
Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 44 (2005): 1-37, and Idem, Festivals and Plays, 62-63.
236 City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Hanawalt & Reyerson; Eckehard Simon, “Manu
script production in Medieval Theatre: the German Carnival Plays,” in New Directions in
Later Medieval Manuscript Studies. Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek
Pearsall (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2000), 143-65; Moving Subjects. Processional
Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Ashley & Wim Hüsken
(Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 2001); Laurence Clopper, Drama, Play and Game. English
Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago-London: The University
of Chicago Press, 2001).

The rationale behind these common elements lies in the importance of the
fact that the community could witness these spectacles, and that the notion of
the sacred, as well as institutions like the Crown and the Law, could be physi
cally visible to the community. It is on this concept that we will focus in the
next section.
1.4 ‘Modern Piety’ and Identification: the Importance of Presence
The developments reviewed in the previous sections were only made possible
by deep changes in the theological orientation and in evangelisation strategies
of European Christianity, changes that are briefly reviewed in the present sec
tion. An overarching element to consider is certainly the insistence on visual
experience in general in religious contexts, for instance within the liturgy.
Examples are the increased ‘spectacularisation’ of rituals like the mass and
practices such as ‘ocular communion’ or Augenkommunion, which equates
viewing the consecrated host to receiving communion.237 The etymological
relation between mirum / mirare and miraculum is only one of the connections
between visual and mystical experience that is developed in the Middle Ages
with its obsession with vision(s).238
Theological developments of the Middle Ages interact, more than in other
epochs, with general conceptions of mankind and of human life. In a well-
known, fundamental volume, Jean Delumeau portrays these conceptions in
relation to two elements that are fundamental to the topic of the present vol
ume, i.e. the concept of sin and the feeling of fear.239 These two elements
preside over most public communication of the late Middle Ages, where the
spectacularisation of penitence and the insistence on the horrid details of
Purgatory and Hell as supreme punishment for sin are omnipresent, either in
‘hyper-realistic’ or in symbolic or allegoric form.240 If vastly popular writings
like the Imitation of Christ or, before that, the Legenda Aurea, dwell on the
237 Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71
(2002): 686.
238 Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Prac
tice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80 (2005): 4. On the importance of vision in
medieval thought, including the dangers of ‘infection’ through sight of negative ‘impres
sions’ (as part of a general mistrust in sensory experience) see Sibylle Baumbach, Litera
ture and Fascination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
239 Delumeau, Le péché et la peur.
240 See Le Goff, La naissance du Purgatoire, and L’uomo medievale, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Bari:
Laterza, 1987), especially the contributions by Cardini, Gurevič, and Vanchez.

62 Chapter 1
Christian virtue of contemptus, i.e. contempt of the body and of its sinful
nature, later visual and textual elaborations exacerbate the contrast between
body and soul in depicting the former as frail, transient, corrupted and cor
ruptible. The body is thus portrayed in all its shortcomings, either leading to
sin (as so eminently depicted in caricatures of gluttons and lechers, of which
Bosch and Bruegel will be sixteenth-century masters) or subject to decay, as in
all representations of wounds, deformities, and death that will impregnate the
depictions of martyrs and even of the dead Christ. This trend will in turn gen
erate an obsession with the ‘good death’, and create the ars moriendi that
prescribes the cleansing of body and soul through appropriate preparations
and ‘rites of passage’, of which the exemplum of Christ, but also that of the
‘good thief’, with his last-minute repentance, will become a paradigm.241
The notion of presence, which triggered many views that would influence
the dramatic and artistic production for several centuries, went back to Anselm
of Canterbury. He lamented the fact that he was not present at the actual
Passion, and yearned to become part of the original events, a participation that
could only be achieved by beholding, and meditating on, depictions or
descriptions of events such as the Crucifixion.242 The importance of direct par
ticipation was developed within theories of compassion in its spiritual sense,
when the initial idea of ‘contagious’ sensory feelings extended to emotions and
spiritual movements.243
This idea of presence became the focus of much preaching, writing, and
painting in the late Middle Ages, and developed into a key element of devotion
as predicated in the fifteenth century.244 The final aim was inciting the audi
ence to repent, to become aware of their frailty and mortality through
participating in collective catharsis or through re-enacting images and events
in order to ‘imitate’, or identify with, the victim. Thus, being present, being a
witness and a participant, did not have the same meaning as for a modern
‘audience’, but meant a form of identification that was argued to be instrumen
tal to salvation itself.245 This level is precisely the element that, according to
241 Delumeau, Le péché et la peur; Swanson, Religion and Devotion, 32.

242 Michael Camille, “Mimetic Identification and Passion Devotion in the later Middle Ages:
A Double Sided Panel by Meister Francke,” in The Broken Body, ed. MacDonald, Ridderbos
& Schlusemann, 183-210; Rittgers, Reformation of Suffering, 65-67
243 Beatrice Delaurenti, La contagion des émotions. Compassio, une énigme médiévale (Paris:
Classiques Garnier, 2016), 68, 151 ff.
244 Van Os et al., The Art of Devotion, 142-43.
245 The Imitation of Christ, circulated in different vernaculars from a Latin or Italian original,
is the manifesto of this kind of devotional practice. On the circulation of this work and its
cascading effect on the production of similar texts see John J. Thompson, “Reading with a

Kiening,246 differentiates vernacular religious drama247 from other texts and

from visual art, a differentiation that in turn mirrors the distinction, in late-
medieval mysticism, between the ‘affective’ and the ‘intellective’ approaches;
the former was clearly predominant in textual and artistic production of the
later period.
The plays offer an incarnation-based model of treatment of certain con
tents, with an ‘as-if’ effect based on the participation of a much wider number
of people, both performers and recipients, than in other public ‘events’. This
presence is however based on a ‘simulation’ that aims at being equivalent with
the ‘real’ (necessarily absent) event, a mechanism that was partly extended to
liturgy and to the mass.248 Only this form of presence could lead to identifica
tion, to feeling the torments (and the ensuing joys of salvation) as one’s own.
In the words of a Florentine spectator of the time, mi parea tra mille punte di
spiedi l’anima mia col corpo essere crociata.249 The focus of this presence and
identification is the body of Christ, which, with the institution of Corpus
Christi as a moment of celebration, display of power and ceremony, becomes
also a metaphor for the whole ‘social body’.250 The development of these con
Passion: Fifteenth-Century English Geographies of Orthodoxy,” in Cultures of Religious

Reading, ed. Corbellini, 55-69.
246 Christian Kiening, “Präsenz – Memoria – Performativität,” in Transformationen des Reli
giösen, ed. Kasten & Fischer-Lichte, 144.
247 The element of mimesis, which is crucial to create a rhetoric of presence, was not promi
nent in liturgical drama in Latin (Petersen, “Imaginierte Präsenz,” 21 ff.).
248 Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Lon
don: Faber and Faber, 1968), 18. This extension also concerns images: some documents
about Flemish paintings claim that they should look “an vif” (as alive) or “alsoer werkelic
sy” (as if they were real), although establishing what this may mean exactly could be a
moot point (Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, 50). One could appeal here to the concept of
‘remediation’ mentioned in Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understand
ing New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). On the complex relation between per
formance and audience see the recent book by Laura Weigert (French Visual Culture), who
downplays the standard notion of participation of the audience. Her fascinating book is
limited to French evidence, however, often from rather late dates (mid-sixteenth-cen
tury).
249 Elvio Lunghi, “Mistici umbri: parole e immagini,” in Il teatro delle statue, ed. Flores
D’Arcais, 148. Quoted by Klaus Krüger, “Bild und Bühne. Dispositive des imaginären
Blicks,” in Transformationen des Religiösen, ed. Kasten & Fischer-Lichte, 220. In transla
tion: “it seemed to me that my body was crucified with my soul among a thousand spear-
ends”.
250 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (Lon
don: Routledge, 1993), 22-45.

64 Chapter 1
cepts reached its peak, both textually and visually, with the spread of the
so-called devotio moderna.
The root principle of modern devotion,251 generally traced back to works
like Anselm’s writings and the Meditationes Vitae Christi,252 is that devotion
should be performed through a private and intense practice of ‘seeing’ the
events of the Passion as if one were in their midst, reflecting on each aspect
with zeal, earnestness and compassion.253 This form of devotion was not really
‘modern’, but looked back to the origin of monastic orders;254 what is new is
perhaps its influence on the Church as an institution, starting with Italy in the
thirteenth century, then spreading to Bohemia and the Netherlands at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, and from there to Germany and to other
parts of Europe.255 The practice of vision was central to this type of devotion,
a much sought-after experience frequently narrated in mystics’ accounts, typi
cally with ambiguity between “I saw / I imagined / I dreamed,”256 thus
gener ating a further ambiguity between sensorial seeing and internal seeing.
251 This term is mostly associated with Flanders, but is used here to indicate a whole wave of
new ideologies and devotional practices that crucially involved feelings and sensory per
ceptions (Éric Palazzo, L’invention chrétienne des cinq sens dans la liturgie et l’art au Moyen
Âge [Paris: Les éditions du cerf, 2014], 87 ff.); I will also employ the more general ‘affective
devotion’ to refer to this ideological and cultural strand (Mark Johnston, The Evangelical
Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West around 1300 [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996]).
252 The Meditationes reached wide popularity all over Europe, and was translated into Eng
lish in the 1410s by the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love (Monasticism in late medieval
England, c.1300-1535, ed. Martin Heale [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009],
27).
253 Gray, Themes and Images, 126-27; Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion
of Christ in Theology and the Arts, from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166.
254 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 52.
255 See Kaspar Elm, “Die ‘Devotio Moderna’ und die neue Frömmigkeit zwischen Spätmit
telalter und früher Neuzeit,” Manfred Gerwing, “‘state in fide vera, viriliter agite, omnia
vestra in caritate fiant.’ Zum dreifachen Weg in ‘Malogranatum’,” and Wojciech Mrozow
icz, “Schlesien und die ‘Devotio Moderna’. Die Wege der Durchdringung und Verbreitrung
der ‘Neuen Frömmigkeit’,” in Die ‘Neue Frömmigkeit’ in Europa im Spätmittelalter, ed.
Marek Derwich & Martial Staub (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 19-21, 85-110
and 133-50; and Brigitte D’Hainaut-Zvevny, “L’ivresse sobre: Pratiques de ‘rejeu’
empathiques des images médiévales,” in Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge, ed. Piroska
Nagy & Damien Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2008), 393-413.
256 Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?,” 7.

With the English version of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, from the
first half of the fifteenth century, we find this idea of presence and identi
fication translated into the culture of the time, along with other prominent
features such as the Marian cult, which appealed particularly to women.
Writings inspired by the Imitatio started to appear all over Europe, such as the
Italian De vita et passione d. n. Jesu Christi by the Benedictine Ludovico Barbo
and the Melogranatum by David d’Augsbourg, a Franciscan who spread the
model of devotio moderna as far as Poland and Russia.257 Handbooks to guide
the faithful in this everyday practice of devotion multiplied quickly in various
vernacular European languages, as did the ‘witness accounts’ of mystics like,
for England, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.258 A crucial element of
this devotion is ‘embodiment’, or the physical, human side of the divine;259
another, equally central element is its individualism.260 As is known, this is
also the time of the emergence of the private reader. Since this implied a move
ment away from the performative and recitative elements in texts, new
expressive means had to be found in order to recreate the necessary ‘presence’.
According to Brantley,261 monastic reading practices were in a reciprocal
dependence relation with dramatic practices, down to details like the etymo
logical relation between page and pageant or to the common metaphor of
drama as a ‘living book’. In the spread of the idea of imitation as practice and
as performance, started with St. Francis of Assisi, the influence of monastic
orders is paramount, so their impact needs to be mentioned, at least as con
cerns the English environment.
After their arrival at the end of the sixth century,262 monastic orders had
enjoyed a long period of expansion, as well as of cultural development, culmi
nating in the Regularis Concordia, produced in Winchester around 970, which
testifies to the political connections between the orders and the king. Several
257 Marek Derwich, “Les orders religieux et le développement de la ‘nouvelle piété’ en

Pologne,” and Daniela Rando, “Le avventure della ‘devotio’ nell’Italia del Tre-Quattrocento,
fra storia e storiografia,” in Die ‘Neue Frömmigkeit’ in Europa, ed. Derwich & Staub, 171-85
and 331-51.
258 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 80-93; Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, 50 ff.; Rosenwein, Generations of feel
ing, 204.
259 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 54 ff.
260 Martin Heale (Monasticism in late medieval England, ed. Heale, 19-20) notes that historical
records show that monastic life increasingly encouraged more private practices of devo
tion, as shown by the fact that individual cells or rooms started to be built in several
monastic houses around this time.
261 Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 2-19.
262 The crucial reference for what follows is Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain.

66 Chapter 1
religious houses were also founded during the Norman rule, not only Bene
dictine, but also Cistercensian and Cluniac, and later Augustinian, all produc
ing manuscripts and training scribes for the court. Many of the recruits in later
centuries were literate adults, often coming from affluent, sometimes noble
families, which is of no small importance for their contribution to textual pro
duction. The presence of mendicant orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augus
tinians and Carmelites) is recorded in Britain from the 1220s, and soon they
joined the established monasteries and convents of most major towns in
founding schools of arts and theology. These orders trained scribes in their
studia and developed extensive libraries, both by copying and through bene
factors’ bequeaths, so that by the fourteenth century their influence was
noticeable, particularly in urban contexts, to the extent that they became the
object of protest and opposition on the part of the Lollards.263
The mendicant orders made it possible for the ‘aesthetic theology’ that, ac
cording to Viladesau,264 was always typical of Christianity, to spread in Britain,
in connection with the belief that emotions, or ‘affect’, should be excited in
order to create identification, specifically achieved through ‘witnessing’.265
Through outbursts of emotions, the re-enactment of the past could trigger
both the historical memory and the ritual memory, and the verbalisation of
sorrow became paramount for penance and thus for salvation. Pain, its phe
nomenology, its witnessing and its narration, became thus a fundamental ele
ment in communication, not only between humans but also with God: through
abnegation of the self and immersion in this pain, a transcendental union with
God could be attained.266
263 Erwin Panofksy, Gothic architecture and scholasticism (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press,
1951), 22; William J. Courtenay, Schools & Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66-67, 84-87, 115-16; Monasticism in late medieval
England, ed. Heale, 26.
264 Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross, 4.
265 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Seeing and seeing beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fif
teenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye, ed. Hamburger & Bouché, 220-38; Sarah Stanbury, The
Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsyl
vania Press, 2015), 171 ff.
266 Maureen Flynn, “The Spectacle of Suffering in Spanish Streets,” in City and Spectacle in
Medieval Europe, ed. Hanawalt & Reyerson, 156-67; Swanson, Religion and Devotion, 133;
Benoît Beyer de Ryke, “Une Souffrance Christiforme. Émotions et déification dans Le livre
qui se nomme Suso,” and Paulette L’Hermite-Leclercq, “Introduction to ‘Les contours du
sujet émotionnel’,” in Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge, ed. Nagy & Boquet, 297-319 and
376; Christopher Swift, “A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and Tears,” in Crying in the
Middle Ages, ed. Gertsman, 79-101.

The reflexes that the ‘privatisation’ and the insistence on ‘seeing’ of modern
devotion had on visual arts and religious texts were vast and manifold; these
aspects were even integrated in the liturgy to some extent.267 From the per
spective of textual analysis, this integration implied an increase in the
frequency of words related to seeing (see also 2.2), while in visual arts it took
various forms: 1) the use of gaze in characters;268 2) the pointing gesture, vari
ously codified in different traditions but developed on a pan-European basis;
3) the depiction of donors, patrons, artists, monks and other anachronistic fig
ures269 within or at the margins of the scene itself, as happened already in
illuminated manuscripts.270
One early such example is a Franco-Flemish Book of Hours, written and illu
minated around the year 1300 for a rich laywoman; here, both the text and the
illustrations depict the lady as a witness. She addresses Jesus directly, and
appears in most of the illustrations concerning the Passion as “a compassion
ate eyewitness from the periphery”.271 At one point, she is depicted standing
next to the Cross, pointing at one of the nailed hands (fol. 179v), so that the
presence and the witnessing are not passive, but have the role of mediating
with the reader.272 A form of such mediation that became quite popular in the
fifteenth century is a specific type of altarpiece, the sacra conversazione, in
which saints are introduced in the same physical space as the sacred scene (for
example the Mother and Child), with an obvious anachronism that has an
important function in terms of presence, witnessing and mediation between
mystery and congregation.273 The importance of witnessing and of compas
267 Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum, 92-93; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 40 ff.
268 The gaze of witnesses concerns not only John at the Crucifixion, whose main role is pre
cisely the ‘witnessing’, but also the bystanders and the crowd of soldiers and peasants
depicted in such scenes; more on this in Chapter 4.
269 It has been argued (V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi [Stanford: Stanford Univer
sity Press, 1966], 101-04), that all forms of anachronism (e.g. those concerning buildings,
costumes or character names) are a means to increase the sense of presence at the ‘real’
event.
270 Van Os et al., The Art of Devotion, 12-14, 56-80.
271 Adelaide Bennett, “Christ’s Five Wounds in the Aves of the Vita Christi in a Book of Hours
about 1300,” in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow, ed. Hamburger & Korteweg (Turn
hout: Brepols, 2006), 77.
272 Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum, 216. In several medieval plays there is a specific char
acter with this role of explaining the play and of providing the link between action and
audience. One typical example is the N-Town character Contemplacio (Brantley, Reading
in the Wilderness, 291), but such figures are rather widespread, as briefly mentioned in
Chapter 4.
273 Stocks, “Text, image and a sequential ‘sacra conversazione’,” 18.

68 Chapter 1
sion is apparent in the depiction of participating crowds variously gesturing or

talking to each other. At the textual level, not only the already mentioned refer
ences to ‘seeing’, but also various exhortations to cry and mourn with the Virgin
should be considered.274
Johan Huizinga, the author of several books on the Middle Ages that illus
trate interesting, though controversial, theses on several socio-cultural aspects
of medieval life, emphasises that ceremony, spectacularisation and ritual char
acterised every aspect of life, both public and private. In turn, this led to the
development of several forms of ‘entertainment’ and to displays of power that
often triggered cathartic reactions, especially tears. In order to be despoiled of
its overtones of sinful enjoyment, the spectacle had to be associated with
sacred elements and supported by religious and civic authorities. If we think
that presence at birth or death ceremonies was rigidly regulated,275 as were
other patterns of public behaviour, it is not surprising that the first religious
theatre displayed the Nativity and the Resurrection, adding the Death of Christ
as a specific device: mourning was inserted only so that it could be turned into
joy. On the one hand, this meant that patterns of appropriate behaviour for
these ceremonial events could be available for playwrights and audience, also
drawing from classical models.276 On the other hand, audiences enjoyed the
impressive ‘special effects’ that reinforced the fear of Satan and of hell; at the
same time as they laughed in relief at the comic interludes and at the coarse
humour, medieval viewers thought that witnessing the miracle led them to
understanding it better. The translation or transmediation of thought and
dogma into religious image and dramatic scene marked a decisive step towards
the salvation promised by the Scriptures. Making the religious content visible
meant reproducing the incarnation process, and was socially salvific precisely
because it made the sacred accessible to the audience, and provided a space
for the community to have a common and communal experience.277 As
Viladesau put it, “the power of religious images is that of images in general: the
ability to unite ideas with an affective state evoked by associations … that are
connected with a heightened visual experience of a concrete reality”.278

275 Elina Gertsman, “Performing birth, enacting death: unstable bodies in late medieval
devotion,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance, ed. Gertsman, 83-104.
276 Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 25-91.
277 Ibid., 220-44; Kindermann, Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters, 20.
278 Viladesau, Theology and the Arts, 161.

Paradoxically, according to Merback,279 patronage, originally often pro

moted by a desire of the patron to be depicted in a religious scene ‘as if present’,
was later one of the components that led to a reduction of the importance of
presence. Not only did Protestant iconoclasm restrain the expression of feeling
and the need for compassionate participation, but also the rise of the bour
geoisie, for whom secular interests became as important as religious ones,
brought a greater distancing from actual biblical references.
In spite of the success enjoyed by drama and other spectacular productions
to implement the notion of presence, there was always a section of the com
munity of practice that emphasised the dangers of an ‘excess of presence’, even
before the Protestant Reformation and its iconoclastic fury.280 The acceptance,
and even the endorsement of religious art of whatever kind on the part of the
Church has always been, at best, ambiguous.281 The emphasis on ‘seeing’ and
‘witnessing’ in devotional theories and practices during the centuries on which
the present work focuses must not lead us to think that displays of the more
graphic and ‘realistic’ types went without opposition, especially within the
official ranks of the Church, but also partly in other milieux under its more or
less direct influence. For Britain, the obvious examples are the various Wycliffite
treatises accusing the faithful of worshipping images and relics even more
than the ideas they represent, like the anonymous Dives and Pauper (c. 1405).
This work not only criticises those who border on idolatry by praying to images
(and not just ‘before’ them), but also complains about the money spent to pro
duce religious art instead of helping the poor, thus inserting a strictly political
and social issue into the theological debate.282
The danger of irreverence when dealing with religious matters was felt as
impending, not to mention the interspersion of comic elements, which could
induce unholy laughter; the elements of social critique, moreover, could lead
to ‘misrule’, and therefore civic authorities often joined the clergy in frowning
upon such ‘excesses’. The main point of criticism against drama, from a reli
gious point of view, was the fact that a humanised representation of religious
matters could make these too accessible, nearly banal, and thus the
279 Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, 266-77, 279.
280 Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious
Stage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946); Ann Shukman, “What’s wrong with
images? Reflections on the English iconoclasm of 1536-1553,” in Aesthetics as a Religious
Factor and Western Christianity, ed. Van den Bercken & Sutton (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters,
2005), 303-11.
281 See contributions in Clifford Davidson & Ann Eljenholm Nichols, eds. Iconoclasm vs. Art
and Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1988).
282 Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire, 5-13, 23-24.

70 Chapter 1
congregation could lose some of the reverence and awe that are due when
approaching such ‘mysteries’. It is precisely the insistence on the human ele
ment, the use of devices to trigger identification that were so crucial in modern
devotion, which becomes problematic for orthodox thinkers. This view is
reported in several devotional works, the most popular and widely researched
certainly being the English Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, which is preserved in an
early fifteenth-century collection of documents (British Library Tenison
Manuscript). The two-part treatise, which addresses the issue of dramatic rep
resentation also beyond religious drama proper (miraclis is to be interpreted in
a wider sense, as ‘displays’ or ‘spectacles’), was compiled by two different
authors. They show Lollard or Wycliffite tendencies (for instance, they claim
that drama can spread false beliefs, do not show much support for the role of
art in general, and are strongly anti-Franciscan), but also embrace positions
that are more orthodox.283 This text is extremely informative to understand
the ideology of the time concerning drama and art in general, as it also sums
up, before refuting them, most arguments emphasising the positive aspects of
drama as conducive to devotion.284
One main point of criticism concerns, for instance, those who take part in
such representations, the ‘actors’, who were often not professionals, especially
in Britain, but simple citizens, and occasionally also clerics.285 In the Tretise,
they are compared to a servant mimicking or ‘playing’ the lord – an excessive
identification, a close exposure to the humanity of Christ and Mary, is a viola
tion of the distance that should separate the deity from the faithful, and could
lead to a loss of respect.286
283 A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: University of West
Michigan Press, 1993).
284 Clifford Davidson, “Saints in Play: English Theatre and Saints’ Lives,” in Saints. Studies in
Medieval Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts
& Studies, 1996), 145-60, [repr. in History, Religion, and Violence. Cultural Contexts for
Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, ed. Davidson (Bury St. Edmunds: Ashgate,
2002), 254-66.]
285 Jésus Menéndez Pelaez, “Teatro y iglesia: Las Constituciones Sinodales, documentos para la
reconstrucción del teatro religioso en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento Espanol,” Archivum
48-49 (1998): 271-332; see also 2.4.
286 Heather Hill-Vásquez, “‘The Precious Body of Christ That They Tretyn in Ther Hondis’:
‘Miraclis Pleyinge’ and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Early Theatre 4 (2001): 53-55.
The same criticism is voiced in the Anglo-Norman Manuel des pechiez (c. 1300), and in the
slightly later Handlyng Synne, a loose translation of the former, which accuse of commit
ting sin both the performers and the spectators, except for those taking part in liturgical
and ecclesiastical representations (Young, Drama of Medieval Church, vol. II, 417). Similar

Excesses in the human figuration of Christ had the objective of achieving a

physical and emotional immediacy of experience that could completely oblit
erate, according to the critical view in the Tretise, the gap between body and
soul, between flesh and spirit. The treatise actually mentions a ‘reversing’ of
Christ, of his suffering, and of discipline, as one of the possible dangers.287
Furthermore, the pleyinge of drama means a “scorning of God” (l. 129), because
it mimics and replays in bourde (i.e., in jest) the life and death of Jesus, which
are a very serious matter. Among other supporting arguments are that plays are
onely signis (just words, l. 200), without any action that can be considered real,
and that, by displaying evil, plays offer as much opportunity to pervert as to
convert, and it is thus particularly unseemly for members of the clergy to take
part in such plays. Even the value and authenticity of the weeping triggered by
the plays is questioned, thereby exasperating the conflict between truth and
falseness that is one of the focal points of medieval religious thought.288
These ideas entered into synergy with more general ideas on the dangers of
spectacles, according to which an ‘excess of vision’ is potentially detrimental:
The eyes were a powerful and dangerous portal into the soul, the specta
cles were the quintessential threat to Christian well-being because,
through the power of the gaze, they incited feelings of desire and blood
lust. Because of the power of the images …, the soul became brutalized,
coarsened, and assimilated to the violence and duplicity of the perfor
mances.289
accusations, especially directed at the spectators, are to be found in Mirc’s Instructions for
parish priests (ll. 330 ff.). This can be compared to the few indications we possess about
‘acting’. From the detailed directions of a twelfth-century passion play from Cyprus, Mer
edith & Tailby (Staging of Religious Drama, 61) report passages that (in their translation)
indicate that the players should be instructed “to play their part in such a way as not to
excite laughter and mockery, but with piety and great attention in the fear of God … Fur
ther let them not make the spectators laugh. But let all things be done to arouse awe or
fear”.
287 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Davidson, ll. 57, 76.
288 See Blanchfield, “Prolegomenon,” xxi-xxx; for similar arguments in Spanish environment
see Menéndez Pelaez, “Teatro y iglesia,” and Castro Caridad, “Transmisión y recepción,”
203-07.
289 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), 117.

72 Chapter 1
The real ‘performative practice’, according to the Tretise, is the sermon: preach
ing can achieve effects that drama cannot attain,290 and at the same time
invites to employ imagination, rather than pure physical vision.
Such ideas, however, did not prevail for quite some time, as the importance
of presence dominated the Middle Ages; it echoed the doctrine of presence
(i.e. the physical presence of Jesus at the cross), as well as the complex network
of beliefs and practices connected to the materiality of sacred images and
other objects. An examination, or even a short summary, of the significance of
relics, as well as of the tradition of ‘speaking’ or ‘living’ images, would take us
too far beyond the scope of this book, but specific aspects cannot be over
looked. One of the most thorough studies of these themes, Bynum’s Christian
Materiality,291 notes that, in the fourteenth century, images “replaced relics as
conveyors of healing powers”. Similarly, images often became objects of devo
tion in themselves, as well as objects of hatred by various iconoclastic strands
(for example by the Lollards in Britain). According to Bynum, the idea of ‘pres
ence’ when confronting a visual representation was attained not through
naturalism or illusionism, but precisely through the fact that the viewer per
ceived the presence of the work of art as object in itself as relevant. This idea,
in turn, was part of a wider religious argument about the Incarnation or,
indeed, of the fact that a material element may manifest or embody God.
By creating the appropriate emotional arousal, this witnessing could help
the viewers’ imagination, which was a fundamental element in the practice
of devotion. Pain and suffering were essential components in this process:
“Medieval devotion on the suffering Christ was of a truly passionate nature: a
devotion that wove wonder and weeping into a daily round, so that even a
routine chore became an investment in Christ’s agony, and the slightest bodily
pain could suffice for meditative praise”.292 In turn, the ‘imitation of Christ’
triggered by sensory input could be ‘performed’, as in the case of those mystics
who ‘replayed’ the sequence of the Passion with gestures and postures that
distinctly remind of painted images, and that, in turn, could have inspired the
‘actors’ of medieval plays.293 The devotional practices thus created, whether
aided by works of art, by texts or by dramatic performances, triggered an affec
290 Erick Kelemen, “Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Mid
dle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in A Tretise Of Miraclis Pleyinge,” ELH (English
Literary History) 69 (2002): 1.
291 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 19-48.
292 Spivey, Enduring Creation, 57.
293 On an early case of such ‘mimetic performances’ see Jesse Njus, “What did it mean to Act
in the Middle Ages? Elisabeth of Spalbeek and Imitatio Christi,” Theatre Journal 63 (2011):
1-21.

tive cycle that involved several sensory and intellectual faculties, and whose
end product would be the salvation of the believer. Another fundamental ele
ment in this cycle is memory, which is the focus of the next section.
1.5 Witnessing and Social Control: the Value of Memory
[T]he fifteenth-century experience of a painting was not the painting we

see now so much as a marriage between the painting and the beholder’s
previous visualizing activity on the same matter.294
Public communication (if not, arguably, all communication) is based on a deli

cate balance between the known and the unexpected. Each case of
apprehension, it could be further claimed, is formed by a certain quota of ‘rec
ognition’ of something already familiar and a portion of new information to be
processed. This mixture can be seen at various levels: examples include the
paradigms (vs. the ‘irregularities’) of language itself or the many principles of
text construction where cohesion, coherence, and intertextuality, for instance,
grant continuity and recognisable elements, while informativeness refers to
the new elements. Further examples can be given from literature, where genres
and patterns of metre contribute to shape a canon of recognisable forms
within which authors can move creatively (with forms of ‘experimental’ writ
ing being based on a deliberate and equally recognisable deviation from such
norms).
Memory plays a crucial role in this recognition, and was even more impor
tant in the Middle Ages: remembering words, images, lines, sentences and
whole stories was fundamental in oral literature, as well as in the transmission
of many cultural values, in literate as in illiterate parts of the community, in lay
as in religious contexts.295 ‘Memory’ is in fact to be understood, within medi
eval discourse, not just as mere retention, but also as a crucial element of
invention and composition, and in turn imagination is important in activating
the memory. Pietro d’Abano, one of the first to extend the idea of ‘compassion’
to spiritual matters, also insists on the importance of imagination (both fanta
sia and ymaginatio) within the virtus memorialis.296 Without memory, also
294 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 45.

295 Horst Wenzel, Hören und Sehen. Schrift und Bild. Kultur und Gedächtnis im Mittelalter
(München: C.H. Beck, 1995), 31-44.
296 Delaurenti, La contagion des emotions, 68-69, 76.

74 Chapter 1
intended as interiorisation of contents and forms, there would be no invention

either.297
The ‘art of memory’ was essential in the classical world of Greece and Rome
in connection with rhetoric and public speech, as testified by the well-known
treatise Ad Herennium, often attributed to Cicero, and to which the monastic
tradition is deeply indebted.298 The respective roles of images and words are
often emphasised in the treatise, as is the importance of creating loci, i.e. spe
cific sets of images and words that can be used to aid the memory. A special
role was assigned, in this text, to helping the memory through the representa
tion of actions as well as of emotions, which could be aroused through the
depiction of “striking and unusual images, beautiful or hideous, comic or ob
scene”.299 This tradition was also important in medieval times, with Thomas
Aquinas as one of the main representatives. In the medieval context, several
works refer to the need to help the memory, for instance in relation to remem
bering sermons. Using one’s imagination and evoking images becomes a duty
in the scholastic tradition, and this concurs to explain its importance in medi
eval theology and religious instruction;300 memoria gradually comes to be
identified, in the late Middle Ages, with the praxis of meditation and devo
tional prayer.301
The medieval art of memory was particularly important to preachers, al
though the increase in literacy and the spread of preaching handbooks in the
late Middle Ages led this art to fall gradually into disuse.302 The main centres
for the study of related theories, in close connection with, and under direct
influence of, the monastic orders (first the Dominicans and later the Fran
ciscans), were the universities, which were still strongly focussed on theology.
Courtenay illustrates this and other elements that can have had an influx on
late-medieval devotion practices through the networks existing between
European universities,303 although we cannot hypothesise a direct participa
tion in artistic and dramatic practices. There were also other contexts in which
297 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Idem, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric,
and the Making od Images, 1100-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.
298 Ibid., 10.
299 Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” 456-92; Frances A. Yates, The Art of Mem
ory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 4-10.
300 Ibid., 82-104.
301 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 46 ff.
302 Coleman, English Literature in History, 171.
303 Courtenay, Schools & Scholars, 147-66. The different extant forms of ‘university drama’
were not composed according to the principle that is behind ‘popular’ drama, i.e. the

memory and performance were directly connected, one of them being legal
rhetoric, which often included reconstruction or re-enactment,304 as well as
impersonation, in turn also appropriated by preaching in order to trigger an
emotional response. This influx is also reflected in the prominence of legal ter
minology and discourse modes in medieval drama (see 3.2). The latter includes
figures of speech, interjections and invocations, rhetorical questions, but also
syntactic parallelism, or repetition of clause patterns, typical of oratory, espe
cially in forensic discourse, but also in sermons and other instructive speech-
related texts.
In late medieval times, public displays also exploit the value of memory for
their own aims, i.e. mainly through admonitory representations ranging from
public torture and execution to royal processions and festivals, to dramatic
representations proper. The exercise of memory in watching a spectacle com
bines presence and absence, thus creating a tension between transcendence
and immanence, and a ritualised channelling of emotions.305 This tension was
not only created by performance, but was crucial in monastic texts and other
devotional writings: “There was a measure of control implicit in the theology
of meditative devotion, an attempt to harness the expression of subjective
emotional religiosity, and to direct it along paths compatible with traditional
Christian doctrine”.306
This way of understanding the function of religious texts and images con
tinued well beyond the Lutheran Reformation, although gradually the aid to
memory started to be interpreted in a way that is more similar to the mne
monic tables and devices that became popular in the scholarly world. Images
including not the Crucifixion itself, for instance, but only geometrically
arranged representations of the Arma Christi and of the Five Wounds became
a regular feature of devotional texts, much more often than in earlier times.307
In this way, the gaze became more detached, and images came to be more sub
ordinate to texts, as Lewis has shown concerning the evolution of the Book of
Hours.308 Gradually, variation from the model increases, and pictures repre
principle that drama should most of all appeal to emotions, in order to elicit the ‘right’
state of mind for meditation and instruction (Delumeau, Le péché et la peur, 823).
304 Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Ithaca-London: Cornell Univer
sity Press, 1992), 44-56.
305 Kasten, “Transformationen des Religiösen,” xvi.
306 Marrow, Passion Iconography, 18.
307 Van Os et al., The Art of Devotion, 114-15.
308 Flora Lewis, “From Image to Illustration: The Place of Devotional Images in the Book of
Hours,” in Iconographie médiévale. Image, Texte, Contexte, ed. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux
(Paris: CNRS, 1990), 29-48.

76 Chapter 1
senting only a pierced hand or a blood-stained cloth replace the more ‘realistic’
crucifixion scenes with a sort of ‘shorthand’ reference to a whole memory
chain triggering devotional processes. In this sense, the image loses dynamic
and narrative character and becomes an ‘illustration’, thereby recovering some
of the iconic quality of earlier times.
To recap, memory was triggered by embodiment or presence, and by a num
ber of symbols which would become increasingly important during the Middle
Ages in relation to images.309 Moseley notes that this is why most medieval art
is synecdochal, as it “presumed a rich interior grammar / discourse of visual
vocabulary and memory consciously being used and expected”.310 It is in this
sense that Warburg’s theories can be relevant, viewing art as “an inventory of
the emotions of a given epoch,” which are therefore “images” of a whole cul
ture.311 In fact, this ‘pathetic’ element, i.e. the emotional and mnemonic
involvement as basis of public (especially, but not only religious) communica
tion is a fundamental element of society.312 This type of communication, with
a combination of visual and verbal elements, had both instructive and regula
tive aims in late-medieval societies.313 Therefore, art became mostly sequential
or diagrammatic, but at the same time very affective, and this is further testi
mony to the association between memory and meditation as devotional
practice in the Middle Ages.314 Composition combined memory and imagina
tion in the thinking process, and was social as well as rhetorical, precisely
because it played on affectivity: “the deliberate production of melancholy, a
‘sorwful ymagynacioun’ even to the point of tears, was a commonplace means
(though not the only possible one) of initiating one’s cognitive, mnemonic
image-making”.315 Memory was thus rarely seen as detached from emotional
309 Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cor
nell University Press, 1999), 62-76.
310 Charles Moseley, “Speaking Pictures: Medieval Religious Art and its Viewers,” in Edin
burgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts, ed. Prickett (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2014), 183.
311 Michael Diers, Thomas Girst & Dorothea von Moltke, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tra
dition of Cultural History,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 67 ff.
312 Guido Ferraro, “Antenato totemico e anello di congiunzione. La connessione tra ‘sacro’ e
‘segno’ nel pensiero di Emile Durkheim,” in Destini del Sacro, ed. Nicola Dusi & Gianfranco
Marrone (Roma: Meltemi, 2008), 7.
313 Carruthers, Mary, “Mental Images, Memory Storage, and Composition in the High Middle
Ages,” Das Mittelalter 13 (2008): 63-79.
314 Parshall, “Art of Memory and the Passion,” 456-92.
315 Mary Carruthers, “‘The Mystery of the Bedchamber’. Mnemotechnique and Vision in
Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess,” in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Recon

involvement; moreover, painful experiences seem to have been considered

particularly conducive to helping the memory. Both the physical and the spiri
tual experience of pain and suffering were relevant to get closer to salvation, as
confirmed by the positive view of brutality in educational practice that contin
ued long after the Middle Ages.316
Many examples show how this connection between imagination and mem
ory, words and images, should work: in a richly illuminated fifteenth-century
Book of Hours probably belonging to Mary of Burgundy, and now in Vienna
(National Library, Cod. 1857), some illuminations display a book in the front,
and at the back a ‘window’, in which a scene is presented. In one of these (fol.
14v), a richly dressed woman (probably Mary herself) is shown while reading a
book; behind her, a Nativity scene is depicted, framed by the ‘window’.
According to König,317 these framed pictures are virtual, imagined scenes, elic
ited by meditation on religious events such as the Nativity or the Crucifixion, a
meditation that triggers imagination and is in turn prompted by reading the
book. This demonstrates that imagination could trigger memory, a very ‘active’
skill, i.e. imagining being present at the event and ‘painting’ the scene on the
basis of the memory of having seen similar scenes.318
Although heavily relying on the symbolic,319 the art of memory also had a
strong mimetic element, and in this sense the performance as reminder, as
admonition, is directly connected not only to religious liturgy but also to other
forms of ‘ceremony’ and to ‘liturgies’ of a lay nature. A connection of late-
medieval religious drama with “dramatic festivity”320 can be noticed not so
much in relation to popular festivities, but to institutionalised celebrations,
structive Polyphony. Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, ed. John M. Hill & Deborah M.
Sinnreich (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 79.
316 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 101; Mary Carruthers & Jan Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of
Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2002); Herlinde Menardi & Karl Berger, “Was weh tut,” in Au! Schmerz, ed. Wofgang
Meighörner (Innsbruck-Wien: Haymon, 2010), 11-21.
317 Eberhard König, “Zur Wirklichkeit im Fensterbild der Kreuzannagelung des Wiener Stun
denbuchs der Maria von Burgund,” in Tributes in Honor of James H. Marrow, ed. Ham
burger & Korteweg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 281.
318 Fritz Oskar Schuppisser, “Schauen mit den Augen des Herzens,” in Die Passion Christi in
Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, ed. Walter Haug & Burkhart Wachinger (Tübin
gen: Niemeyer, 1993): 189.
319 David D’Avray, “Symbolism and medieval religious thought,” in The Medieval World, ed.
Peter Linehan & Janet L. Nelson (London-New York: Routledge, 2001), 273-74.
320 See Festive Drama, ed. Meg Twycross (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1996).

78 Chapter 1
along a model that ultimately goes back to the Roman times. It can be recalled
here that the medieval representations were also called ludi.
Although certain festivities produced allegory through cumulation, it was
crucial to many lay and religious rituals that they could be interpreted as nar
rative, for instance processions, among which the Corpus Christi processions
deserve naturally a special place.321 In southern Europe, ceremonies represent
ing the Via Crucis, although mostly without words, fulfilled the same function
by creating a ritual bridging between liturgy and narrative, in which parallels
with some passion plays have been found concerning a number of details.322
This is of course connected with the fact that the senders of the dramatic, artis
tic and processional messages were largely overlapping, as they were mostly
linked to the same guild and patronage systems.323
This multimedial / multimodal experience, whether publicly or privately
performed, is at the root of the memory-trigging mechanism: although vision
was predominant among the five senses in the practice of devotion and for the
establishment of collective memory, the text was a useful complement in
drama, a correlate to the gaze.324 An effective phrasing that sums up this view
is by the Florentine Feo Belcari, the mid-fifteenth-century author of several
religious plays, who opens his Abraham and Isaac with the following quatrain:
Lo Occhio si dice che e la prima porta

Per la quale lo intellecto intende e gusta.
La seconda e lo Audire con voce scolta
Che fa la nostra mente essere robusta.325
This is a poetic version of the common argument of visual contemplation as

the first and foremost element leading to meditation, encompassed by the
maxim ante oculos cordis ponere (to put the eyes before the heart): this impera
tive refers to the eyes of the imagination, which would trigger the rememoratio
which would in turn lead to compassio.326
321 Meg Twycross, “Some Approaches to Dramatic Festivity: Especially Processions,” in Festive
Drama, ed. Meg Twycross (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1996): 12-13.
322 Portillo & Gomez Lara, “Holy Week Performances of the Passion in Spain,” 88-89.
323 Saunders, A History of English Art, 123 ff.; more details in 2.5.
324 Clifford Davidson, “The York Corpus Christi Plays and Visual Piety,” Research Opportuni
ties in Renaissance Drama 46 (2007): 26-31.
325 “The Eye is called the first of all the gates / Through which the Intellect may learn and
taste. / The Ear is second, with the attentive Word / That arms and nourishes the Mind,”
quoted and translated by Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 153.
326 Schuppisser, “Schauen mit den Augen des Herzens,” 176-87.

The bridging of the distance between sacred and human concurred to the
‘humanisation’ of the sacred, made it attainable and thus recognisable.327
Reversing the idea that man is modelled on the image of God, religious art and
literature built a canon based on an increasing anthropomorphisation of the
sacred, in the conviction that this is the only way in which the inexpressible,
the unattainable, can be made accessible to human imagination and memory,
which can work better with the already known rather than with the unknown.328
By ‘seeing’ pain and glory, viewers could ‘imagine’ the sufferings and the joy,
and this could empathise them acquiring the necessary disposition of mind.329
These bridging elements entail making the invisible visible, and thus mak
ing it accessible to the imagination and ‘memor(is)able’. The construction of
these messages as communication in the late Middle Ages involved the trigger
ing of emotions; how exactly these messages were shaped in art and drama, by
whom and for whom they were produced, and in what ways they obtained the
desired effects, all form the object of the next chapter.
327 Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, 662 ff.

328 Umberto Eco, “Rappresentazioni iconiche del sacro,” in Destini del Sacro, ed. Nicola Dusi
& Gianfranco Marrone (Roma: Meltemi, 2008), 112-14.
329 Delaurenti, La contagion des emotions, 111.


Words and Images in The Late Middle Ages: The Social Functions of Drama and Art

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Words and Images in the late Middle Ages 11

Words and Images in the late Middle Ages:

1.1 Iconography and Textual Studies

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

dramatic scenes or theological treatises, will be the counterpart of the Pathos­

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1.2 The Development of Visual Narratives and New Images

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vignettes to represent their movements,20 which also involved a higher degree

20 C.M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1500 (London-Turnhout: Har­

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sense: the imitation of nature in art is a post-medieval concept, which replaced

26 Rickert, Painting in Britain, 62 ff.

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years earlier, Mary Anderson had already systematically analysed parallels

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Further links that highlight possible connections between Psalter illumina­

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

humanised, and from triumphant to sorrowful. As masterly illustrated by

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opment and spread of affective piety and modern devotion. A number of

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development of crowded, choral, narrative scenes aimed at creating a bridge

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Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

66 Rickert, Painting in Britain, 34.

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

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1.3 The Word Enacted

It would be far too ambitious to attempt here an exhaustive reconstruction of

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and relatively independent phenomena, in spite of the unavoidable relations.

73 Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge:

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‘already’ theatrical or not.78 Nevertheless, Young’s view was quite authoritative

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gate.95 The relative independence of liturgical and vernacular drama is shown,

95 Harris, Medieval Theatre in context, 32.

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is certainly the Psalter, which starts to appear as an independent ‘book’ with

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

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Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

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sources of inspiration.148 In a recent investigation, Rütten has described medi­

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pathetic element also in late-medieval secular literature, often in connection

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

Gabriella Mazzon - 9789004355583

there are sparse contributions about theatrical activities in other communi­

dramatic scenes or theological treatises, will be the counterpart of the Pathos

20 C.M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England 700-1500 (London-Turnhout: Har

Further links that highlight possible connections between Psalter illumina

sources of inspiration.148 In a recent investigation, Rütten has described medi

there are sparse contributions about theatrical activities in other communi

transgressive, reversal was not by definition subversive: it could provoke

Paradoxically, according to Merback,279 patronage, originally often pro

Public communication (if not, arguably, all communication) is based on a deli