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Kathleen Ashley and Wim Hüsken, eds. Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama, 5. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. Pp. 257. $55.00.
Only recently has scholarly attention been directed to processions as performance, and this is, I believe, a very healthy development. Theatrical expression surely requires to be viewed as a larger category than scripted stage plays and the involvement of actors who impersonate characters in an action which has a beginning, middle, and end. Moving Subjects: Processional Performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance presents discussions of a number of aspects of processions and in some cases brings to bear "postmodern" methodologies with varying success. The essays in the book, however, are not intended to produce a taxonomy of processional performance since, with the exception of the survey article by the late and much missed C. Clifford Flanagan, each of the authors takes up a separate matter for treatment.
As visual, aural, and kinetic experience, processions vary greatly. In our time those familiar to most Americas are civic parades with floats or tableaux vivants, all quite different from the medieval variety, though many will have regularly observed or even participated in liturgical processions at the beginning of the Mass. The latter do of course bear a strong resemblance to medieval processions, and in Anglican churches even the order of the participants may follow the directions specified in the Sarum rite which was dominant in the late Middle Ages throughout a large segment of medieval England. Liturgical processions, as Flanagan notes, are either festal or penitential. Among the festal processions certain ones are of considerable complexity-for example, the Palm Sunday procession. In German and Polish territories this procession utilized a Palmesel, a carved image of Jesus on an ass that was used to represent Christ's entry into Jerusalem in sacred time. Beginning in the fourteenth century, however, the most elaborate festal procession may well have been the one on the feast of Corpus Christi, when the Host was taken out of the church or cathedral and paraded through the town with all the participants taking part in an established order that itself was regarded as sacred. At York the procession on this day...