Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIX LITURGICAL PLAYS (continued) fTHE ' Twelve days' of the Christmas season are no less important than Easter itself in the evolution of the liturgical drama. I have mentioned in the last chapter a Christmas trope which is evidently based upon the older Easter dialogue. Instead of Quern quaeritis in sepulchre, o Christicolae ? it r begins Quern quaeritis in praesepe, pastores dicite? It occurs I in eleventh- and twelfth - century tropers from St. Gall, Limoges, St. Magloire, and Nevers. Originally it was an Tntroit trope for the third or ' great' Mass. In a fifteenth- century breviary from Clermont-Ferrand it has been transferred to Matins, where it follows the Te Deum; and this is precisely the place in the Christmas services occupied, at Rouen, by a liturgical-drama known as the Officium Pastorum, which appears to have grown out of the Quern quaeritis in praesepe ? by a process analogous to that by which the Easter drama grew out of the Quern quaeritis in sepulchro l t A praesepe or ' crib, ' covered by a curtain, was made ready behind the altar, and in it was placed an image of the Virgin. After the Te Deum five canons or vicars, representing the shepherds, approached the great west door of the choir. A boy in simililudinem angeli perched in excelso sang them the' good tidings, ' and a number of others in voltis eccksiae took up the Gloria in excelsis. The shepherds, singing a hymn, advanced to the praesepe. Here they were met with the Quern quaeritis by two priests quasi obstetrices. The dia- 1 Printed by Du MeVil, 147; 904); it is also in . N. Lot. 1213 Caste1, 25; Davidson, 173, from (fifteenth century) and Bibl. Maza- Rouen Ordinaria (Rouen MSS. rin. 216 (Du Me'ril, 148). Y. 108 of fifteenth century, Y. 110 a The ' obstetrices' figure in the of ...

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Excerpt from The Medieval Stage, Vol. 1 Resolved one dramatic representation elaborately described by Collier into a satiric or sweetmeat. More scholarly writers, such as Dr. A. W. Ward, while dealing excellently with the medium] drama as literature, have shown themselves but little curious about the social and economic (acts upon which the mediaeval drama rested. Yet from a study of such facts, I am sure, any literary history, which does not confine itself solely to the analysis of genius, must make a start. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.