The Mystery (Play) of Christmas

The Medieval Year: Third Day of Christmas, and Sixth Day before the Kalends of January

The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!

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I hope that you are all still brimming with the Christmas spirit, because I have some wonderful Christmas artwork and poetry to share with you today.

The artwork, as usual, is drawn from the vast treasury of illuminated medieval manuscripts, and as you make your way through these depictions of the birth of Christ, see if you can identify a somewhat enigmatic detail that appears in every image. I’ll discuss this detail at the end of the post.

The poetry is drawn from the extraordinary corpus of religious drama that delighted young and old alike in late-medieval and early-modern England. Written in charming, homely verse, these productions are often called mystery plays, and they were indeed a reenactment of various “mysteries”—that is, sacred events possessing mystical significance—of the Christian religion. They have also been called miracle plays, where “miracle” has the more general sense of a wondrous supernatural occurrence, and cycle plays, because individual plays were part of a long series that extended from the beginning to the end of salvation history. However, for many of the fortunate folk who actually saw these plays in their original form, they were simply “Corpus Christi plays,” because the cycles were performed as part of the celebrations for that feast day. The two drawings below are nineteenth-century attempts to convey the experience—undoubtedly one of the highlights of the year, especially for children—of attending a medieval cycle play.

The mystery plays have been mentioned a few times in the pages of Via Mediævalis, and I hope that over time we can give them the attention, appreciation, and careful study that they deserve. Below I have included a lovely excerpt from one of the plays for the Nativity, and I also made some voice recordings so that you can get an idea of what these poetic texts sounded like in the late Middle Ages.

Early sixteenth century