Michael Norton's important and engaging book seeks to dismantle the notion that the repertory of "representational rites" (his preferred term) generally grouped under the term "liturgical drama" constitutes a distinct generic category that can be productively considered as a form of drama. Such an idea should have been discarded decades ago, he proclaims, since earlier scholars, Clifford Flanagan in particular, pointed out the flaws inherent in this arbitrary term and classification. Although Norton modestly positions himself as cultivating already sown ground, he also ponders the question of why such a category has remained with us and provides a compelling account of a scholarly field's stubborn ideological commitments. Well-footnoted with a substantial bibliography and short glossary of technical terms, Norton's study should be welcomed particularly by musicologists, liturgists, and drama scholars.
In early chapters, Norton pinpoints the origins and traces the development of scholarship that considers representational rites such as the Visitatio Sepulchri as a form of drama. Attributing to the French librarian and scholar Charles Magnin the origin of the term drame liturgique, Norton examines the 1834-35 Sorbonne lectures in which Magnin elaborated upon the continuity of the "dramatic impulse" throughout the Middle Ages, encompassing diverse areas such as sculpture and tapestry as well as representational rites. Although Magnin was not particularly interested in the representational rites per se, his lectures would have profound impact upon their categorization as drama. Norton argues that "there was a movement among the sophisticates of Paris toward a more theatrical expression of worship" (28), making "fertile ground" for seeing certain aspects of the medieval liturgy as dramatic. Yet, for these early scholars, the "focus was on the drama of the liturgy, not the drama in the liturgy" (31).
Norton credits the French scholar, jurist, and editor Edmond de Coussemaker for turning drame liturgique from a "metaphorical abstraction" to a "categorical descriptor" with his 1860 publication Drames liturgiques du Moyen Âge. Although Coussemaker attempted to make distinctions in his edited texts between those that were "bound more closely to the religious ceremonies" and those that were less so (34), according to Norton, he could not maintain this distinction, a problem endemic to considering these texts outside of their contexts. Norton concludes that "it was not the collection that defined the genre, but the other way around. The neologism spawned the collection that would gather around it. Indeed, this union of 'liturgical' and 'dramatic' was a novelty, and it would change the way that nearly all scholars approached the study of medieval drama thereafter" (38). Norton is claiming that the term "liturgical drama" came to be a categorical descriptor of a particular genre that never really existed yet had such heuristic value that it attracted texts to fit into its parameters.
Norton is indeed accurate to point out that this fabricated category has had a profound impact on the field of medieval drama. Because of the long scholarly dominance of the Darwinian evolutionary framework that saw the drama as developing from more simple to complex forms, moving from the church to the street, the relatively short texts of "liturgical drama" were located at the origins of the later vernacular drama, such as the English cycle drama and French confraternity plays. For years the standard introduction to the field was provided by David Bevington's 1975 textbook, Medieval Drama (Houghton Mifflin). Bevington begins his textbook with a lengthy section entitled "Liturgical Beginnings," which includes numerous excerpts from representational rites such as the Visitatio Sepulchri and from Christmas and Holy Week liturgies; the student is encouraged to see these liturgical rituals as precursors to the vernacular plays of the fifteenth century. Indeed, the textbook's opening sentence states, "it [medieval drama] grew out of the liturgy, or prescribed form of worship, of the tenth-century Christian Church." Yet even the most recent textbook for classroom use, The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (2013), edited by Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian, continues to pay homage to this standard approach, including the tenth-century Quem Quaeritis ceremony from the Regularis Concordia of St. Aethelwold alongside the Latin plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and vernacular pageants from the cycle drama. The introduction to the Quem Quaeritis in the Broadview anthology states:
"Although the ceremony in its most basic form bears little resemblance
to a play, it quickly developed into a more overtly theatrical work.
Within a few decades, a variant of the Quem Quaeritis with substantial
'stage directions' was recorded. In the Regularis Concordia (c. 970),
four monks act out the play, taking on the role of the Marys and, in this
case, a single angel. The altar of the cathedral is used as a set for the
sepulcher, and the text includes basic costume and properties notes." [1]
The editors forthrightly state that the tenth-century monks are "acting" in a "play," that the sepulcher is a "set" and that the liturgical directions are "costume and properties notes." The category of liturgical drama and concomitantly, the idea that parts of the Catholic liturgy are drama, has shaped and continues to shape the field of medieval drama.
In subsequent chapters, Norton identifies scholarship that attempted to contest this scholarly framework, attentive to differences among Anglo-American, French, and German academic traditions. He seems amused by and quotes at length from the scholarly attacks on those who, in the early and mid-twentieth century, attempted to challenge the status quo on the liturgical origins of drama. Indeed, the scathing rhetoric deployed in support of what decades later proves to be a fundamentally flawed theory provides an interesting, almost nostalgic, glance back at a moment in which scholarly battles waged in the humanities could be framed with such vehemence. Are our scholarly disagreements today articulated in such polite and tepid terms partly because we in the humanities have internalized our own marginality? If so, perhaps we have much to learn from this tale of a fabricated generic category that became an established part of medievalist scholarship.
Later chapters deal with how representational rites were understood through the ages before Magnin's invention of drame liturgique. In chapter three, he traces the post-medieval commentary on representational aspects of the liturgy, concluding that "liturgical rites such as the Visitatio Sepulchri, no matter that dramatic qualities may have been perceived by later observers, were seen as ritual acts" (93), not as "theatrical." This chapter, covering polemicists and antiquarians from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, includes an interesting section on the Protestant attacks on medieval liturgy, attacks which condemned the theatrical fakery of Catholic religious rites. However, while condemning all of Catholic ritual as theatrical, Protestant polemicists did not single out the representational rites as different from other elements of "Catholic superstition."
The fundamental claim that Norton wants to make is that medieval people and even people in centuries following did not view the representational rites as drama; they were part of the liturgical ritual, embedded in the temporale of religious institutions. Nineteenth-century scholars, seeking to locate an origin for western drama, turned to these representational elements in the liturgy and deemed them as "drama" and, as such, precursors to later vernacular plays. While recent scholarship has largely abandoned the evolutionary approach to these rites as precursors, the notion that they might be considered as "drama" and the widespread use of the term "liturgical drama" remains. Norton does not argue that the representational rites are not "dramatic" when used as a descriptive term, but that they should not be considered within the same generic classification as drama. Attentive to the manuscript contexts in which the representational rites appear, Norton provides nineteen pages of tables showing the locations of the rites within their manuscripts and, if possible, specific liturgical placements. Situating the representational rites in their liturgical context and considering them alongside other part of the liturgy enables Norton to argue (as does Michal Kobialka, whom he cites extensively) that rites such as the Visitatio Sepulchri share many representational qualities with other part of the liturgy, although these other parts are never considered "liturgical drama."
Norton addresses also the category of "religious plays," which he delineates as different from representational rites by their lack of placement in the liturgy. In this category he includes the texts from the Fleury Playbook as well as the texts like the Ordo Pastorum, Ordo Stellae, Ordo Peregrinorum and Ordo Rachelis, which are generally longer than representational rites and typically not included in liturgical manuscripts where the rites are found. Instead, they may be copied with sermons, songs, gestae, etc. He argues that while some of these texts "might have been associated with a particular liturgical moment (such as the end of Easter matins or before the Mass of Epiphany), these would likely have been occasional events, performed in place of the rite specified in the liturgy of that place at that time, and likely performed only when the performing forces were sufficient to make such an event possible" (123). Although he uses the term "religious play," he questions whether they "were understood at the time as drama, theatre, or even spectacle" (123), suggesting that some served exegetical purposes for an educated community.
Norton's penultimate chapter examines the imprecision of the terms "liturgy" and "drama," both of which had ambiguous premodern connotations. Indeed, he notes that the term liturgia did not enter into western vocabulary until the sixteenth century. While he observes that the term "liturgy" can be used to refer to popular devotions that even medieval commentators might group with offices, his examination of "drama" focuses more on the term than on the concept. Indeed, like liturgy, what constituted "drama" could be very elastic and also encompass "popular devotions," suggesting that there may be some points of convergence. After much erudite polemical scholarship, carefully dissecting previous arguments, he turns in the final chapter to some of his own theories. Norton proposes that "the Visitatio Sepulchri was sacramental in nature, and that, even in its matins placement, the Marys' visit to the empty tomb was more closely allied with the celebration of the Mass than with the observance of the nocturnal office" (192). He also suggests that the Visitatio Sepulchri "served as the juncture between the historical and the sacramental rites of the Holy Week liturgy" (194). However, he is careful to point out that celebrants' and observers' understanding of such rites would have varied among institutions and regions. Norton includes a transcription of a Visitatio Sepulchri rite from the cathedral of Salzburg, integrating textual and musicological analyses to argue that "the ceremony thus reinforces in both its theme and its structure the role of the priesthood as intermediary between the Word and Salvation" (200). He deems this "an altogether different cast from what we see in the larger religious plays" (200). In fact, I would argue that there are vernacular plays with the same agenda, although that might be one message among many. While I agree with Norton that representational rites are usefully understood within their extended liturgical frame and that the musical notation forms an integral component of such rites, I believe that it is less precise to argue that a representational rite promotes a particular theme that can distinguish it from a dramatic text.
While in chapter three Norton discusses some texts with ambiguous placement in the liturgy that defy classification and also accepts scholarship that views the liturgy and representational rites as "dramatic," he suggests that there was a clear distinction in the medieval mind between a liturgical ritual and a dramatic event--a play. Vernacular drama, as it represented the spiritual aspirations of laity (often with clerical collaboration), did however strive to appropriate the thaumaturgical value and nature of liturgy, often referencing and incorporating sacred liturgy into vernacular plays. These hybrid plays are not preserved in liturgical texts like Ordinals and Tropers, but they might seek the kind of spiritual intervention associated with the liturgical cursus nonetheless. I am not saying that liturgy and drama were indistinguishable, because, in fact, it was liturgy's more rarified status, its Latinity, its location in the Church, its anointed singers, which designated a divine ideal that plays sought to access.
Yet, by the end of the Middle Ages, the distinction between liturgy and drama may have become a bit messier than Norton acknowledges. In chapter 3, he quotes from and translates Pope Gregory IX's well-known 1234 injunction and accompanying gloss against clerical spectacles. While the injunction prohibits ludi theatrales, ludibria, larvae et spectacula, the gloss by Bernard de Bottone of Parma clarifies that "this should not be construed as prohibiting representations of the Manger of our Lord, of Herod, the Magi, and Rachel crying for her sons, et cetera, that touch the feasts that we have already mentioned, that more effectively induce men to repent for their wantonness or pleasure, just as the sepulcher of the Lord and other representations excite devotion at Easter" (100). Norton argues that "this gloss made two important distinctions: first, that there was a qualitative difference between the religious spectacles that were being prohibited and the liturgical representations and possibly plays of the Christmas season and second, that there was a further distinction between the representational rites of Easter, including presumably the Visitatio Sepulchri, and their siblings from the Christmas season as well, the latter requiring special dispensation" (100-101). Indeed, "the sepulcher of our Lord" is used here as an example of a laudatory representation that stimulates devotion, and is distinguished from the Manger of the Lord, the Magi, and Rachel, which could be examples of the "religious plays" that Norton places in a separate category from representational rites.
However, the injunction's gloss reappears in the fifteenth-century Middle English treatise, Dives and Pauper, in a context in which plays, likely plays involving laity, are being discussed.
"Steraclis, pleyys, & dauncis that arn don principaly for devocioun &
honest merthe to teche men to love God the more & for no rybaudye
ne medelyd with no rybaudye ne lesyngis arn leful, so that the peple
be nout lettyd therby fro Godys servyce ne fro Godis word herynge
and that ther be non errour medelyd in swyche steraclis & pleyys agens
the feyth of holy chirche ne agenys the statys of holy chirche ne agenys
good levyne. Alle other arn defendyd bothin the halyday and the warke
day...[T]he glose seyth that for to representyn in pleyynge at Cristemesse
Heroudis & the thre kyngis & other proces of the gospel bothin than & at
Estryn and in othir tymes also it is leful and comendable." [2]
About 170 years later and translated into Middle English, the original intention of Bottone's gloss may have become a bit mangled. Now the gloss fails to distinguish between "religious plays" and "representational rites" like the Visitatio Sepulchri. Whatever the intention of the original, here the example of the representational rites of Easter is being used to establish that there are commendable forms of drama. Indeed, the commentary is framed as though plays and rites are comparable forms of generic or aesthetic experiences, so much that the canonically approved status of one is relevant to that of the other. While such a slippage may signal unreliable transmission or an imprecise commentator, it may also reveal that by the fifteenth century, medieval people perceived continuities between the liturgical rites of the church and the vernacular plays outside of it. Maybe the rise of vernacular drama altered the lens through which people experienced religious rituals.
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Notes:
1. Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian (eds.), The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2013), 21.
2. Priscilla Heath Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper (Early English Text Society; London: Oxf