Chapter 3 turns to the medieval Venetian ritual of the Festa delle Marie, a multiday celebration that began on the eve of the Feast of Saint Mark’s Translation (31 January) and ended on the Feast of the Purification (2 February). The feast centered around twelve wooden effigies of the Virgin Mary, each sumptuously dressed, adorned with gemstones and pearls, and crowned with a golden headpiece. From around 1267 until 1379, when the feast was abolished, the state threw all its financial backing behind a new facet of the celebration: a procession made on 31 January to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, where a sung Annunciation exchange, unique within the medieval dramatic corpus, was performed. This chapter provides the first in-depth musical study of this unique Annunciation drama and its sung ceremonial context. Using previously lost sources, I reconstruct the dialogue’s melodies, all based on the antiphonal repertory of San Marco, and show how this preexisting repertory was refashioned into a version of the Annunciation story that helped aligned the Festa delle Marie celebration with the interests of the state and its empire. Central to this chapter is a concern with the ways song worked in tandem with the plastic arts (effigies, thrones, costumes) to create the ceremony’s special representational effects.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

The Ordo virtutum (the Order of the Virtues) is a sung Latin drama that Hildegard of Bingen completed c. 1152 for her newly founded community at Rupertsberg. The drama has invited a multitude of modern responses due to the originality of its language and imagery and the many possible comparisons to her own visionary and theological writing. Yet this work is firmly grounded in the theology and liturgy of the twelfth-century Benedictine convent. This chapter examines how Hildegard draws on the Benedictine rule, the rite of the Consecration of Virgins from twelfth-century Mainz, and the processional and dramatic rituals of the medieval convent to create an embodied drama of the soul’s salvation that is specific to the female monastic experience. Hildegard further emplots the struggle for the soul’s salvation in a narrative which borrows elements from the Descensus Christi ad Infernos, a fourth-century addition to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and the liturgical commemorations of its central event: Christ’s descent into, or harrowing, of hell. These texts and liturgies provide important context for understanding the dramatic situation and poetic language of the Ordo virtutum.

Chapter 12: This chapter shows how theatre operates as a kind of cognitive prosthetic, helping us stage and imagine what we are not yet able to see around us or within us. Committed to embodied and extended theories of cognition, the chapter examines the relationship between the stories told onstage across the centuries and the shifting conceptions of the self and the other. Through a kind of wormhole between King Lear, the pageant wagon of the medieval period, and the off-off-Broadway theatre of today, the chapter connects the theatrical innovations around personation, or the taking-on of a character, in these different periods to argue that the theatrical conventions that set up the relationship between character and actor display a changing notion of the self. This shifting of theatrical conventions generates discomfort at first, as spectators learn to consume stories in a new way; and the discomfort unveils what we need to learn next.