Ordo Rachelis - Texts and Origins

Texts and Origins

The first modern critical edition of the Rachel plays was made by Karl Young in 1919. Young believed the plays developed from dramatic kernels in the Epiphany plays of the ninth and tenth centuries into full dramatic treatments of their own in the elventh and twelfth. The four extensive treatments which Young classified as ordines Rachelis differ considerably. There are the Lamentatio Rachelis from Saint-Martial at Limoges (eleventh century), a lengthy part of an Epiphany play from Laon (twelfth century), a play from Freising (late eleventh century), and another one from Fleury (thirteenth century). Only the last two can be regarded as "separate dramatic unit". In both of them the fuga in Egyptum and the pastores themes have been incorporated, and the Fleury play contains the only extant medieval dramatic representation of the return from Egypt. Chambers has gone so far as to suggest a coalescing of all the Epiphany themes in the Fleury ordo and of a merging of the Rachel and Herod (Herodes) themes in the Freising.

The late eleventh-century manuscript of the Limoges ordo is now lat. 1139 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, which contains many liturgical pieces, including the play Sponsus. The Fleury version is preserved in the famous Fleury Playbook, an important eleventh-century compilation of liturgical drama.

As to the origins of the tradition Karl Young concluded, like Heinrich Anz before him (Die lateinischen Magierspiele, 1905), that it was initially an independent trope at Limoges and then appended to the Officium stellae at Laon, representing a French tradition. This tradition was merged with a German one that arose at Freising at Fleury, though the ecclesiastical affairs that brought about this transmission (from Laon, Limoges, and Freising to Fleury) are unknown. Young differs from Anz in that the latter thought the Freising text also developed from the Limoges original. An older theory of origins was put forth by William Meyer (Fragmenta Burana, 1901). He hypothesised that a south German original, large and complex, disintegrated into a Freising play that was largely a whittled-down copy and three divergent French plays that were influenced by the French liturgy.

Peter Dronke believes it was to the dialogic poem Quid tu, virgo by Notker the Stammerer, written probably in the 860s, that the eleventh-century dramatists were responding with their Rachel sequences.