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Liturgical drama refers to medieval forms of dramatic performance that use stories from the Bible or Christian hagiography. The term has developed historically and is no longer used by most researchers. It was widely disseminated by well-known theater historians like Heinrich Alt ( Theater und Kirche, 1846),Alt claims that the altar was the originary site of Christian performance, which then gradually moved westward in a process of evolution that led through the nave, later reaching the portal. Heinrich Alt, Theater und Kirche: In ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältniß (Berlin 1846), p. 336ff. E.K. Chambers ( The Mediaeval Stage, 1903) and Karl Young. Young's two-volume monumental work about the medieval church was especially influential. It was published in 1933 and is still read today, even though his theories on liturgical drama have been rejected for more than 40 years. Many college textbooks, among them the popular books by Oscar Brockett, propagated the theory of "liturgical drama" even into the 21st century.
Western Europe was effectively without mainstream drama from the moment that Christianity gained political influence in the fourth century. As early as the second century, the decadence of late Roman drama and the reputed immorality of its practitioners had made the theater one of the professions that had to be abandoned before receiving baptism. Augustine, as is well known, prided himself for having left behind the life of the theater.By using the liturgical drama theory, authors like Young and Chambers had imposed the Darwinism model of evolution on medieval performance culture, argued O.B. Hardison in 1966. In the wake of Hardison's book, the evolutional theories were commonly considered to have been disproven. Critics argued that there is no logical or structural chronological development in the various play texts that have survived from the Middle Ages.Clifford Flanigan, Liturgical Drama and Its Tradition: A Review of Scholarship 1965–1975, in: Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 18 (1975) 81–102 und 19 (1976) 109–136. Using Darwinian precepts implied that "drama could develop only from a liturgy that was somehow already embryonically 'drama' itself." Yet no one was able to present a demonstrable "evolution" of simpler into more complex forms when it came to comparing liturgies and dramas.
By examining factors such as "historiography, etymology, source study, and analysis" of the texts themselves, Clifford Flanagan and, most recently, Michael Norton, have shown that the term liturgical drama is problematic. Flanagan wrote in 1974:
... it has certainly become evident in the last few years that we are only beginning to understand liturgical drama; there is very much to be done yet, and there are probably surprises in store for us. Unless, however, we ground our efforts in a sympathetic understanding of the nature of the Christian liturgy, we are not likely to get very far.
The example of Cistercian nuns crowning Marian statues in their monastic enclosure at Wienhausen Abbey shows the limits of the notion of "liturgical drama." Caroline Bynum has shown that the crowning ceremonies included alternating clothing for Mary, even royal crowns were donated to the statues. The nuns, for their part, dressed and crowned themselves on given occasions in the liturgical year. The example shows clear aspects of performance and liturgy.
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