EVEN AFTER 1424, live donkeys in Palm Sunday processions were few and far between. The Franciscan guardian's use of a donkey under Muslim rule in Jerusalem, between 1480 and 1757, was exceptional. I have found no other record of a high-ranking Roman Catholic cleric riding a donkey on Palm Sunday. The occasional parish priest did so in the nineteenth century, and I’d like to think that some did so before then, but I have yet to find any evidence.

Live donkeys did, however, sometimes appear at other times of the year in civic dramatizations of Christ's entry. In England, for example, a donkey was ridden by the lay actor playing Christ in the York and Chester Corpus Christi dramatizations of the entry into Jerusalem, in the Hereford Corpus Christi procession, and in the Cornish Ordinalia. The most enduring of these dramatizations, the York and Chester plays, were suppressed in 1569 and 1575 respectively. Like the occasional use of donkeys in continental church drama and tableaux during the Christmas season, the inclusion of donkeys in English civic drama only sets in starker relief the surprisingly long absence of live donkeys from contemporary Palm Sunday processions throughout Europe.

So does the variety of ways in which the Palm Sunday figure of Christ has more recently been represented on a live donkey. In this chapter, by way of further contrast, I fast-forward to the nineteenth century and beyond, while travelling to places as far from Udine and Jerusalem as Mexico and Bolivia, to consider some of the mimetic options that were ignored by medieval Palm Sunday processions.

I begin in Ecuador. In the capital city of Quito, on the morning of Palm Sunday, 1830, the French traveller M. de Raigecourt attended “the blessing of the branches” in the cathedral. The branches were from palms, rose bushes, and banana trees. Leaving the cathedral afterward, de Raigecourt caught sight of a procession returning to the Franciscan convent. At the heart of the procession, he recalls, was an image of Christ, “which at first I thought was carried by human strength; but the strange movements I saw it make prompted me to examine it closely, at a time when the procession had stopped beneath the arcade of the convent.