Liturgical drama is a type of medieval performance that uses stories from the Bible or tales about Christian saints. The term is no longer commonly used by most researchers today. It was widely shared by famous theater historians such as Heinrich Alt (Theater und Kirche, 1846), E.K. Chambers (The Mediaeval Stage, 1903), and Karl Young. Young’s two-volume important book about the medieval church had a major influence. It was published in 1933 and is still read today, even though his ideas about liturgical drama have been rejected for more than 40 years. Many college textbooks, including books written by Oscar Brockett, taught the theory of "liturgical drama" as recently as the 21st century.

Critique

The words "drama" and "dramatic" were rarely used before the 1700s. Using these terms to describe the medieval era is not accurate. Similarly, the modern meaning of "performance" was not introduced until the 1700s. Medieval people used terms like "play," "ludus" (which means game or play), and "revels" to describe games, festivals, or performances of any kind.

In his 1955 book about the origins of theater, Benjamin Hunningher disagreed with the idea that plays developed from religious rituals, such as the Mass. He explained that the church setting of the Mass does not allow for entertainment. Christian theologians had criticized theater artists for many years. As McCall wrote in 2007:

Western Europe did not have popular drama from the time Christianity gained political power in the 400s. As early as the 200s, the decline of Roman drama and the reputation of its performers as immoral led to the theater being one of the professions people had to leave before being baptized. Augustine, a well-known figure, took pride in leaving the life of the theater behind.

In 1966, O.B. Hardison argued that using the idea of "liturgical drama" to explain medieval performance culture forced people to think of medieval performances as evolving in a way similar to biological evolution. After Hardison’s book, many scholars stopped believing these evolutionary theories. Critics said there is no clear or logical development in the structure of medieval play texts. Using evolutionary ideas suggested that "drama could only develop from a liturgy that already had elements of drama." However, no one could prove that simpler forms of liturgy evolved into more complex forms of drama. By studying the history, language, sources, and texts themselves, scholars like Clifford Flanagan and Michael Norton showed that the term "liturgical drama" is not accurate. Flanagan wrote in 1974:

[…] it has become clear in recent years that we are only beginning to understand liturgical drama; there is still much work to be done, and there may be surprises ahead. Unless we understand the nature of Christian liturgy, we may not make much progress.

Scholars argued that the term "liturgical drama" is too limiting. They pointed out that just because the Mass sometimes included dramatic elements, like stories or commentary, it did not mean the Mass itself was a drama. There may be drama in liturgy and liturgy in drama, but there are other possibilities. While some parts of the Mass include stories, other parts focus on visual displays, processions, or music. Stories are not always a main part of medieval liturgies, such as visitatio sepulchri, Passion plays, or Corpus Christi plays. For modern standards, liturgy and drama are types of a larger idea called performance or enactment.

An example of this is the Cistercian nuns at Wienhausen, who crowned statues of Mary in their monastery. Caroline Bynum explained that these ceremonies included changing the clothing of the statues and even donating royal crowns to them. The nuns dressed and crowned themselves on certain days of the year. This example shows clear connections between performance and liturgy.