Chapter 1 explores modern adaptations of the medieval passion play, analyzing dramas by Sadakichi Hartmann, W. B. Yeats, Djuna Barnes, and Sophie Treadwell that return to narratives of the Christian Passion in order to summon theater’s own artistic resurrections. These profane works were composed in the conceptual penumbra of Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconic The Anti-Christ. Although they seem to announce a radical departure from medieval sources imagined to have a purely devotional function, they actually follow the medieval passion play in sliding between profanation and consecration. Such dramatic experiments pry open the layered temporalities of the passion play as they generate halting improvisations toward a new theatrical future, developing an orientation to the past that is at once resistive and recursive. The figure of Christ’s body in the genre of the passion play thus brings into view modern drama’s rites of renewal, anxiously heralding a new theater waiting to be born.

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.

‘Giving history a voice’ explores the process of designing sound installations for heritage sites. It discusses the role of technology in communicating intangible cultural heritage by focusing on a case study based on research on the acoustics linked to the medieval drama cycle known as the York Mystery Plays.