The breadth of dramatic activity within the Middle Ages is one of the most astonishing of any period of time. The records of performance that survive, through both extant texts and documentation of dramatic events, indicate that a huge number of theatrical events took place during the medieval year. The nature and purpose of medieval drama were far-reaching. Medieval drama included religious and liturgical plays, miracle plays, saints' plays, folk plays, mummers' plays, and interludes as well as more diverse performance events such as chivalric displays and love games. But there were many other ways in which performances took place. Events such as processions, dancing games, the Boy Bishop feast, masquerades and funeral corteges all formed part of the cultural practices of the Middle Ages. Itinerant performers such as troubadours and waits added another dimension to the dramatic events of the medieval year. Part of the reason for the large scope of dramatic activity is that it was not contained by a theatre building. The performances that this book discusses were executed on the streets or inside churches, halls and other public spaces. As Glynne Wickham points out, it takes ‘an effort of imagination to rid our minds of the image of the normal modern theatre built deliberately to exclude daylight, and illuminated artificially by electricity’.

The plethora of dramatic events in the Middle Ages has provided critics with a problem of how to categorise them. Glynne Wickham separates events into three fields, that of worship, recreation and lastly commerce, but admits that they overlap and are ‘never wholly distinct from one another’. Other scholars have followed this pattern. William Tydeman introduces the subject by dividing it into ‘drama of devotion’ (church drama), ‘drama of pastime and profit’ and ‘drama of salvation’ (those with a religious purpose). Tydeman notes that previous academic fashion divided medieval drama into miracle plays, moralities, moral interludes etc. but that these were often arbitrary since there is ‘a wide range of elements within a single piece, and similarities of staging that cut across generic boundaries’