Scripture, Vision, Performance: Visionary Texts and Medieval Religious Drama

Abstract

‘W e are going to show you an image.”—“Wy willen ju eyn bilde W gheven.” This is how one of the late medieval northern German Easter plays introduces the viewer and listener to the performance. The play has been written down, as the manuscript tells us, in the year 1464 in Redentin, but it testifies to a much older tradition of religious drama.1 In a similar way, the guiding voice of the “proclamator” informs the viewer and listener at the beginning of a Passion play from Donaueschingen that the upcoming performance is to be seen as “a series of beautiful devotional images” [gar meng schon andachtig figur] that should be “contemplated” by the viewer.2 With these words, the play presents itself as a “figure,” as an “image” that has not only the function to stage the narrative “story” (geschieht) of the Gospel and to instruct the viewers, but also to produce the effect of a devotional image that should be “contemplated.”3