^[1]

Resumen
Este artículo evalúa la función performativa de la celebración de la pilota en Auxerre, un juego litúrgico realizado en un laberinto eclesiástico el lunes de Semana Santa y del cual se tiene documentación desde el siglo XIV. En este rito festivo, miembros del clero bailaban mientras se lanzaban una pelota unos a otros y cantaban la secuencia Victimae paschali laudes. Este tipo de chorea circa daedalum sincronizaba lo temporal y lo sublunar en un ritual corporal que al mismo tiempo retomaba paradigmas neoplatónicos multivalentes dentro de la música y la danza. Esta cultura encarnada reunía lo secular con lo eclesiástico en su evocación concomitante de la armonía de las esferas, la Pasión de Cristo y las míticas trayectorias de Teseo y Orfeo. El artículo cuestiona las implicaciones socioculturales y comunales de este legado y el papel constitutivo de la música en esta práctica colectiva.

Palabras clave: Laberinto-danza-ritual-Victimae paschali laudes-performatividad-ludus-juego de pelota-Medioevo-Semana Santa.

Abstract
This article evaluates the performative function of the Auxerre pilota celebration, a liturgical game realized over an ecclesiastical labyrinth on Easter Monday and recorded as early as the fourteenth century. In the festive rite, members of the clergy engaged in a dance, enacted while tossing a ball back and forth, and singing the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes. This chorea circa daedalum synchronized temporal and sublunary in a corporate ritual, which simultaneously inscribed multivalent Neo-Platonic paradigms within the parameters of music and dance. The embodied practice coalesced secular and ecclesiastical in its concomitant evocation of the harmony of the spheres, the Passion of the Christ, and the mythical trajectories of Theseus and Orpheus. The article interrogates the socio-cultural and communal implications of this embodied cultural legacy and the constitutive role of music in this collective practice.

Key words: Labyrinth-dance-ritual-Victimae paschali laudes-performativity-ludus-ball game-medieval-Easter.

Chorea est iter circulare. Diaboli iter est circulare. Ergo chorea est motus diaboli.^[2]

This study will evaluate the performative function of the Auxerre pilota celebration, a liturgical game realized over an ecclesiastical labyrinth on Easter Monday and recorded as early as the fourteenth century.^[3] In the festive rite, members of the clergy engaged in a ritualized dance, performed while tossing a ball and singing the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes to organ accompaniment.^[4] According to the monastic Ordinatio de pila facienda of April 18, 1396, upon entering the Auxerre monastery, incoming clerics were expected to supply a large ball for this ludic Paschal observance.^[5] To cut costs, a later stipulation of April 19, 1412 qualified that the ball donated might be smaller, but must still be too large to be grasped in one hand alone. (Wright 2001: 139–142; 321 n. 35; Mehl 1948: 157–158)^[6] The Eastertide ceremony, possibly a rite of passage for the initiate, is described in detail by early-modern philologist Abbé Jean Lebeuf in a citation of a prior manuscript source:

The dean or his representative, who is dressed like all those present in the [amice], receives the ball from one who is newly baptized or from a newly admitted cleric. All sing the antiphon Victimae paschali laudes appropriate to the feast of Easter. Then the dean seizes the ball with his left hand and [performs a tripudium] (“tripudium agebat”) solemnly in time to the music. The others join hands and dance around the master (“choream circa daedalum ducentibus”). While they are dancing, the dean throws the ball to the individual dancers in turn, and they throw it back. The game proceeds to the accompaniment of the organ and the dance. When song and dance are ended, the company goes to lunch. (Trans. Mehl 1948: 157)^[7]

This liturgical game is not without precedent. While Erwin Mehl lists a number of ballgame rituals in Europe dating from the Stone Age, there are a few particular references that have more than a passing association with the Auxerre practice. (Mehl 1948). In the thirteenth century, Bishop of Mende, Guillaume Durand mentions that on Easter, and occasionally Christmas, priests and their clerks played ball games accompanied by song and dance. A decree of the chapter of the cathedral of Sens dated April 14, 1443 corroborates the execution of a similar ballgame around an ecclesiastical labyrinth on Easter itself.^[8] (Krönig 1979: 115)

The conflation of ludic and sacred typifies ritualistic phenomena across cultures. Yet, it also epitomizes the slippage between play and the ceremonial in numerous medieval Easter paraliturgical enactments such as the Quem quaeritis dialogue for Easter matins, where the three Marys are questioned by the angels at Christ’s tomb, or this dialogue’s development in the Visitatio sepulchri corpus.^[9] Though strenuously challenged, Osbourne B. Hardison’s hypothesis that modern performative theater may be traced back to such liturgical enactments is nonetheless provocative.^[10] Notwithstanding such scholarly overstatement, Stephen Spector observes: “twice in the history of Europe, drama [and I might substitute performativity] has emerged from ritual... As the performance became detached from its religious origin what remained was play.”^[11] (Spector 1997: 199) Play, ludus, the dialogic interstices of secular and the sacred...all come to perform in Auxerre’s rare alignment of game, liturgy, and rupture.

If Mikhail Bakhtin and Johan Huizinga marginalize and misrepresent a medieval culture of play, their perspicacious observations hold truth.^[12] Huizinga lays bare the intense struggle invested in the Latin term “ludus,” referring to the Vulgate transmission of II Samuel 2:14: “Surgant pueri et ludant coram nobis.” (Huizinga 1971: 41) This Biblical duel to the death, where adversaries from the opposing forces of King David’s generals, Abner and Joab, are enjoined to engage in hand-to-hand combat, enlists the Latin verbal “ludant.” Huizinga explains the etymological connotation of the original Hebrew word “sahaq” meaning “laugh,” “do in jest,” or “dance.” Whether explosive or concealed, ludus encodes violence, instability, and disjunction. Clifford Davidson states categorically that “none of the liturgical music-dramas, even the Daniel from Beauvais Cathedral, actually allows for subversive [Davidson’s italics] improvisation either in speech and singing or movement and gesture that might act to undermine the meaning of the play.” Yet Margot Fassler cogently demonstrates how the Danielis Ludus might actually exchange or sublimate playful features appropriated from the Feast of Fools and may also serve to upset and deregulate hierarchical orderings.^[13] (Fassler 1992) In like vein, Martin Walsh utilizes a 16th-c. version of “Till Eulenspiegel and His Merry Pranks,” Ein Kurzweilig lesen von Dyl Eulenspiegel (Strasbourg, 1515) to probe the subversive potential of the Visitatio sepulchri. In the episode, Eulenspiegel feeds a farmer turned player a new bawdy punch-line usurping the stock reply to the ancient “Quem quaeritis” query. Calling the narrative certainly apocryphal, Davidson nevertheless agrees that it serves as a “reminder that the possibility of subversive improvisation...is not to be ruled out” in the medieval liturgical drama. This study will seek to demonstrate how the performative juxtapositions of Auxerre’s ludus invert traditional hierarchies and balance, if only temporarily, notions of caste in the context of the labyrinth dance.

The incorporation of a labyrinth pattern on late-medieval French nave floors was ubiquitous and is attested in several cathedrals including Chartres and St. Quentin.^[14] Although numerous examples survive from antiquity, the earliest extant ecclesiastical labyrinth dates from 324 C.E., originally lying in the basilica of St. Reparatus in El Asnam, Algeria, and transported to Algiers in the early twentieth century.^[15] Similar to pavement mazes found at Harphan, Susa, and Sousse, Tunisia, this North-African specimen adopted a quadratic Roman format. However, around ca. 900 C.E., the prototypical “Chartrain” design began to emerge first in manuscripts primarily dedicated to computus, the arcane mathematical art of calculating Easter’s date.^[16] Computus resorted to the lunar cycle to determine when Easter would fall each year. The “Chartrain” labyrinth, an eleven-track unicursal maze of circular or less frequently octagonal shape, modeled the lunar calendar with its path.^[17] 

Both Paolo Santarcangeli and Dawn Marie Hayes signal the festive quality seemingly ascribed to these sites as attested by numerous accounts of celebratory games occurring over ecclesiastical mazes, particularly around the Easter season. (Santarcangeli 1974: 296; Hayes 2003: 30–31) As early as the efflorescence of the twelfth-century, Jean Beleth registered censure for the ecclesiastical dances performed over these labyrinth designs, possibly for the

Pl. 1. A drawing of the Chartrain unicursal labyrinth maze design. www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/maze/chartres.gif [Accessed: 1 November 2008].

subversive connotations. Erwin Mehl and Santarcangeli attribute pre-Christian roots to the rite. (Santarcangeli 1974: 297–298) Distinct references to a pagan subtext for the ritual abound. Writers dating from the Middle Ages define the tripudium as a clamorous Roman dance performed by priests in honor of Mars, and accompanied by the bellicose clash of shields and spears. (Arlt 1970: 42–43; Harris 2007: 6; Fassler 1992: 75) Counting four separate tripudia for Christmastide, Beleth informs that, in his day, the dance had become the express province of the subdeacons. Fassler notes that minor clergy, students, and choral members also participated in the dance. Like with the Decembrica ballgames excoriated by Beleth, every member of the ecclesiastical community, bishops and archbishops alike, might have taken part in these choreographed celebrations. (Harris 2007) Proposing that the church came to endorse or at least tolerate such performative acts as an infelicitous compromise, Fassler musters the exemplum of William of Auxerre. Fassler suggests that his reluctant acceptance of ludi was a concession, an imperfect middle ground intended to ground and sublimate more radical tendencies. The cleric viewed these performances as once diametrically opposed to orthodoxy, but now conscripted in the service of the faith. (Fassler 1992: 76–77)

In an article on the medieval reception of dance in the church, Louis Gougaud cites an exhaustive array of Patristic and other extra-Biblical texts disparaging dance. (Gougaud 1914) Patristic bans or at least discouragement of dancing can be traced at least as far back as Augustine. The maxim issued by church patriarch Cyprianus speaks profoundly to the Auxerre circumstances: “Chorea est circulum cuius centrum est diabolus, qui in medio tripudiantium ignem concupiscentiae inflammabat.” (Kirkendale 1984: 82) “The chorea is a circle whose center is the Devil, who, dancing in the middle, inflames lustful fire.” This quote, at least, clearly frames the deacon as the Devil, dancing a tripudium at the center of Hell, while Christ, as played by the celebrant host, charts the labyrinth in a dramaturgical harrowing of Hell.

While the account of the Auxerre enactment is brief, the portrayal affords valuable insight into the performative and performatic implications of this ritual.^[18] I take my lead on the delineation of these two terms from Diana Taylor. Speaking especially to the imposition of Austinian methodologies, Taylor states:

In this trajectory, the performative becomes less a quality (or adjective) of "performance" than of discourse. Although it may be too late to reclaim performative for the nondiscursive realm of performance, I suggest that we borrow a word from the contemporary Spanish usage of performance—performático or performatic in English— to denote the adjectival form of the nondiscursive realm of performance. Why is this important? Because it is vital to signal the performatic, digital, and visual fields as separate from, though always embroiled with, the discursive one so privileged by Western logocentrism.(Taylor 2003: 6)

Hence, “performatic” involves that which is thoroughly removed from the discursive logocentric realm, i.e. the material, the gestural, the choreographic, the temporal, the communal, the architectural, the spatial.^[19] In fact, the principal details documented for the Auxerre rite coalesce under this rubric: the amice, the ball, the exchange, the toss, the dance, the clasped hands, the tripudium step, the organ, the communal meal following.^[20] This particular excerpt omits location, but certainly both labyrinth and church nave signify profoundly. The only truly discursive element is, in point of fact, the corporate call and response of Victimae paschali laudes, but this is not a typical discursive modality. This line of inquiry will be taken up again in a close reading of the Victimae paschali laudes sequence below.

I first address the inherently performatic elements of the Auxerre game, beginning with material aspects. Clothing all participants, heedless of standing, in the generic amice (almutiam) democratizes, exhibiting the same predisposition towards anonymity of dress pinpointed by scholars of ritual.^[21] A common trait of such rites, non-specific attire donned by celebrants in rituals works to equalize, blurring sense of class, rank, and (obviously, not in this case) sex distinctions. Rabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mainz was the first ecclesiastical auctor to include the amice in a list of liturgical vestiture (ca. 820), but according to the Ordo Romanus I, the garment had already been adopted en masse by clergy from the early eighth century. (Hayward 1971: 304) Met Cloisters curator Dobrila-Donya Schimansky and costume historian Mary G. Houston verify the pedestrian grade of the Eucharistic vestment, put on the first when dressing, and worn by practically all clerical orders beyond the minor ones. (Schimansky 1971: 317; cf. Houston 1996: 23; Norris 2003: 85–88) So in the frame of the ritual, the prescribed dress serves to regularize, unify, and undermine any sense of elevated rank.

The yellow ball prescribed for the ceremony may signify several possible referents. Since the prototype for the maze was the structure mythographically commissioned by Minos to imprison the Minotaur, the ball may be equated with the balls of string and wax Ariadne gave to Theseus when he entered the labyrinth. The ball of string was intended to guide him out and the ball of pitch was to throw into the mouth of the Minotaur to kill the beast. In medieval Ovidian commentaries, Theseus becomes a type for Christ and the balls represent grace and Christ’s humanity, the weapon that ultimately confounded Satan. Of course, this anagogical spin problematizes the positioning of the dean, whether as Christ triumphans or as Minotaur cum diabolus at the center. Yet such multivalent explication is a commonplace in the medieval psyche. Indeed, the pilota may also connote the sun, since one designation for the Risen Christ is the sol salutis Christi, or alternately, the “sun of righteousness.” It also noteworthy that the Cretan bull cult venerated a solar deity, and that according to Greek mythology, Ariadne’s mother, and mother to the bastard Minotaur through her illicit union with a sacrificial white bull of Poseidon, was descended from the sun.

Although it is unclear why, the pilota needed to be too large to hold in one hand alone. The description of the ritual also stipulates that the dean handle the ball with his left hand.^[22] Coordination obviously factored into making the activity quite difficult to synchronize, together with choreography and singing. As confirmed by contemporary critics including Jean Beleth, the game was a coming of together of all members of the monastic community, regardless of station. Excelling at the sportive ritual must have engineered new rankings and leveled the playing field, as it were, if only momentarily. Certainly such temporary imbalance was not without parallel in ecclesiastical life. A more conspicuous role reversal occurred at the festum subdiaconorum, during which, for a day, the bishop ostensibly ceded his office, at least in token act, to a boy. (Fassler 1992: 70–72) In feigned revolt, subdeacons temporarily took control of the choir and even reversed the order of seating in choir stalls. (Fassler 1992: 65)

The most salient performatic feature of the ritual, the dance itself, reveals a much deeper theme. The spatial model outlined by participants and ball exposes the neo-Platonic underpinnings of the ceremony. Oppositional choreographical circuits, reversal of steps, and the trajectory traced by the ball combine to chart a veritable universe in the imaginary. As noted below, the labyrinth dance recreated the Timaean cosmogony, coalescing neo-Platonic and biblical notions of time, creation, and rebirth. The labyrinth symbolized the cosmos and its creation for medieval writers ranging from Marius Victorinus to Jean de Meun to proponents of the Chartrian School.^[23] It is noteworthy that the ball was contributed by the initiate, the newly-admitted cleric or newly-baptized. This detail is of particular interest, since typically, Easter Sunday was the traditional date for annual baptisms, and since the less frequently employed octagonal labyrinth design, the standard geometrical configuration for baptisteries, refers specifically to baptism.^[24] Baptism signifies death and rebirth.^[25] Baptismal fonts dating as early as the fourth century in Milan bear this shape. The form connotes eternity, symbolically the “eighth day”, and also Resurrection Sunday. Preaching a sermon around the date of this Milanese font’s construction, Ambrose of Milan clarifies: “Yesterday we discussed the font, which shows, as it were, the form of the tomb, which we enter as we profess our faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy spirit, and in which we are dipped under and come up, that is, rise again.” (Trans. Overbeck 1998: 13)

The earliest octagonal labyrinth to survive is located at Amiens. The octagonal labyrinth at Reims, where an Easter chorea or liturgical dance is actually documented, remained intact until the eighteenth century, when it was summarily razed.^[26] The thematics of regeneration speaks to Christ’s reversal of death, as well as the new spiritual life of the baptized, and the natural cycle of the earth signaled by spring’s awakening. But it also speaks to the ultimate beginning, of the cosmos, and of the birth of divine Savior and the actualization of salvation.

Pl. 2. A drawing of the Reims octagonal labyrinth. Extract, 'Le Jubé et le labyrinthe dans la cathédrale de Reims' (1885), Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims, CR IV 161 M. (By permission of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Reims.)

With its evocation of the movement of the spheres and the angels, the pilota game forges a complex relationship to architectural space. Choreographing this embodied practice within the frame of the cathedral and the labyrinth sanctifies, but also arrogates orthodoxy. Physical setting often imbues ritual with rich meaning and rituals may also reinterpret space in new enlightening ways. The labyrinth dance at Auxerre implicates its performance space on multiple levels: as the site where Easter liturgy has played out in its manifold instantiations, as a metaphysical tool for accessing the cosmos and approximating the path of Christ’s passion, and, closer to home, as a reconfiguration of architectonic power paradigms.

Susan Rodgers & Joanna E. Ziegler have identified similar multivalence in a mystic Beguine’s ecstatic dance episodes and the relationship established to architectural space. Utilizing I.M. Lewis’s perspective of ritual as a locus for subversion and resistance, the authors construe the mystical dance of Elisabeth of Spalbeek as an “implicit critique of the idea that only the official church could mediate divinity and regulate believer’s relationships to the body of Christ.” (Rodgers & Ziegler 1999: 303)^[27] While the Auxerre ludus stands as ontologically distinct from Elisabeth’s performance, this essential reading obtains. In Rodgers & Ziegler’s epistemology, Elisabeth is empowered to embody divinity by realizing her choreography in the sacrosanct space of the church. The earliest verifiable portrayal of God in a medieval drama dates from only a century prior, since the Paschon Christos, although attributed to Gregory of Nazarius, survives only in a 12th-century transmission. (Muir 1997: 27 n. 4) Technically, the Auxerre practice might better be referred to as hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred, rather than theophany, actual divine revelation. But for all intents and purposes, the clerical ring dance around the dean unites the entire community as Christ incarnate in a choreographical staging of the “Harrowing of the Hell.”

The connection between Christ’s harrowing of Hell and circular dances runs deep. The association of round dances with Easter festivities recurs in medieval texts, and is reminiscent of the account of Jesus’ Passiontide ring dance, rendered in the apocryphal Acts of St. John.^[28] This Gnostic transmission records a hymn of Jesus, which is essentially a round dance. The sumptuous Magnus Liber recension in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana contains some thirty dances specifically designated for Easter. Full-page miniatures illustrate this choreographical practice. The Boethian explication of the music of the spheres or musica mundana is pictured as an illumination of the heavens, alongside an image of musica humana, depicted by four dancing clerics. This stark juxtaposition displays figuratively the metaphysical drama enacted at Auxerre metaphorizing the ethereal process the dancers embodied. (Baltzer 1972)

Analyzing these same monophonic Latin rondelli from the Magnus Liber, Benjamin Brand identifies iconographical strategies alluding to Christ’s harrowing of Hell, an event fleshed out in the Gospel of Nicodemus and alluded to metaphorically in Psalm 24, according to medieval theologians. (Brand 2003; Smoldon 1980) It is no accident that Doob and others locate this same narrative in the Auxerre labyrinth ludus. (Doob 1990: 125–128)^[29] Indeed, the thematics of the harrowing of Hell also bears a close relationship to the Victimae paschali laudes sequence, and the figure of the labyrinth itself. The sequence text not only narrates this passage, but is also employed in medieval Paschal dramas, as a signifier of the event. The location of this drama in the maze has its own ramifications. While one medieval interpretation of the labyrinth was the cosmos, another frequent explication of the maze was Hell. And further elaborating this symbology, the Biblical cosmogony was viewed to prefigure Christ’s harrowing of Hell. This trope on a trope circles back on itself with the harrowing of Hell signifying the creation and by extension the cosmos and its dance of the spheres.

Like the Auxerre ludus, one of the earliest written descriptions of a dance practice also mirrored the celestial dance. The Neo-Pythagorean Philo Judaeus of Alexandria (ca. 20 B.C.E.–50 C.E.) commented on the dance ritual of the Therapeutics, an ascetic sect who reputedly performed round dances in pursuit of divine revelation. The religious community danced what Philo understood to be a replication of the cosmic dance of the harmony of the spheres; for the Hellenistic philosopher, the Platonic cosmogony of De republica and Timaeus, for medieval readers, viewed through the lens of Boethius’ musica mundana. (Morrison 2004: 301–302) Philo mentions that, as with Auxerre, the ritual involved antiphonal singing. Writing well over a century later, Clement of Alexandria reinterpreted this pre-Christian rite as channeling the dance of the angels. According to Clement, the chorea participates in the “dance with the angels around the unbegotten and the imperishable and only true God, the Word of God, joining with us in our hymn of praise." (Morrison 2004: 303) The topos is picked up by St. Gregory of Nyssa, whose exegesis of the Hebrew inscription “Maeleth” in Psalm 52 and 87 clarifies: “Choral dancing and rejoicing await those who have prevailed in the struggles [over evil]...The entire spiritual creation joins in an harmonious choral chant, as it were, with the victors.” (Ludlow 2000: 73–74) Pseudo-Dionysius also conflates the two celestial dances of the nine angelic spheres and the Platonic movement. Hugh of St. Victor and Thomas of Aquinas both wrote extensive commentaries on the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius, and his opus on angelic hierarchies occupied a central place in late-medieval theology. In fact, these authorities were well known and avidly researched by the Chartrian philosophical school, located in the same bishopric with Auxerre, where reports of Easter dances are most ubiquitous.

Although it is not clear how exactly the dance step was executed, it has been speculated that the dancers might have actually followed the course of the maze, winding back and forth, thus emulating the trajectory of Christ harrowing the gates of Hell, or Christ’s mythological counterpart Theseus. Somewhat doubtfully, Tessa Morrison identifies the steps of the tripudium as turn, halt, counterturn, thus bodying forth the motion of Plato’s cosmogony, with the circle of the stars seeming to travel westward, and the circle of the known planets in reverse. (Morrison 2008) This choreography metonymically conjures up the harmony of the spheres, the Passion of the Christ, and the mythical trajectories of Theseus and Orpheus. However, in this instance, the dance of the cosmos goes yet further to circumscribe musica humana within the larger sphere of musica mundana, the Platonic cosmogony, and the angelic adoration of the divine.

The conjoining of human and divine lies at the heart of the Auxerre rite fueling its capacity to make collective identity and to equalize and subvert. Like many other non-European cultures, the medieval world interpolated music and dance within a social framework, which invested this quadrivial science with metaphysical, spiritual, and communal aspirations. Such desires project themselves poignantly into the performative realm. As such, the Easter game synchronized temporal and sublunary ambitions inscribing multivalent Neo-Platonic paradigms within the parameters of music and dance. Beyond approximating divinity, this physicalized tool created community and retranslated identity.

Auxerre’s collective merging of identities and ranks interrogates, undermines, and restructures received hierarchies and power dynamics. The communal implications of this embodied cultural artifact extend beyond the confines of the monastic unit insinuating broader constructions of spiritual and political identity and community. The ritual facilitated what J. Lowell Lewis has recently dubbed “embodied experience” in his recasting of the more one-dimensional Turnerian notion of “communitas”.^[30] According to Victor Turner, the temporary provision of a liminal “betwixt and between” framework precipitated the initiate’s transition into the community. It also temporarily effaced distinct boundaries between clerical rank and even human and divine, since all wore the same attire, and since the participants believed this act translated into the heavenly plane, that they, in some metaphysical way, interfaced with the angelic dance. Turner has been criticized for his sharp distinction between everyday structure and the anti-structure of ritual, his neglect of play, and his portrayal of a ritualized subversion, which does not allow for day-to-day creative conflict resolution. (Bigger 2009) Indeed, in certain cases ritual might have only reinforced tradition. But it is the spontaneity and inherent chaos of play which truly subverts and democratizes rank in community. Lewis qualifies that it is both the non-discursive modes of dance and singing, and the interactivity and creativity of the ludus that heighten the sense of shared participation achieved in “embodied experience.”

Lewis translates communitas into “embodied experience” which might include singing and dancing. Turner linked this to explanation: the voices of participants and outsiders linked together into “polyvocality” and “multiperspectival” work. Lewis emphasised the shared experience of the participants as they shared touch, taste, smells, sights and sounds. He used the terms “intersubjectivity” and “intercorporeality.” He retained the distinction between special events and everyday life, which interact; order and disorder; the potential for events to become patterned [performativity]; the creativity of play and the solemnity of ritual. (Bigger 2009)

Ritualized moments often mediate a metaphysical departure. Turner would have termed this a “falling outside the social structure” or “liminality.” In her problematization of this phenomenon, Sharon Rowe extends the “liminal” and “liminoid” tags to encompass the trance of sport and play.^[31] (Rowe, 2008) This hiatus from the normative represents a continuum from quotidian, to a “betwixt and between” liminal phase, an altered state of consciousness, as it were, infused with spiritual volatility and possibility, ultimately returning to a new state informed by experience acquired in the transitional stage.^[32] As with induced trance states, the mechanism of repetitive dancing and chanting aids in transporting the celebrant to this breakthrough in level of consciousness. In Auxerre’s ludus, periodic rhythmic structures are articulated in the antiphonal dialogue, the steps of the tripudium, the cyclical repetition of the toss, all the while, the mantra of the sequence further heightening this trance-like state. Linguistic features of the sequence create their own sense of patterned rhythmic repetition. Indeed, the melody exhibits one of the earliest instances of disyllabic rhyme, capitalizing on inner rhyme, as exemplified by “Sepulcrum Christi viventis, Et gloriam vidi resurgentis” and “Angelicos testes, Sudarium, et vestes.” All converge to heighten the ritual’s liminal qualities.

Beyond the repetitive rhythmic cadences set up by the sequence, one must take into account the type of language used and how this informs the liminal. As Maurice Bloch breaks it down succinctly, “You can’t argue with a song.” (Bloch 1974: 71) Often, ceremonial speech sets a frame for performative ritual, even enabling or colluding with reticent or insidious social hierarchies. Following Bloch’s theory and the subsequent extensions by Bambi Schieffelin (1985) and Donald Brenneis (1987), song (and I would qualify, particularly in such ritual settings) is essentially void of propositional force. This is what Austin names the constative, basically the informational or reportative capacity of an utterance. Song characteristically confers strictly illocutionary force, i.e. the power to register acknowledgement of its performance and potentially to influence reaction or response.^[33] Albeit persuasive, the highly formalized language conscripted in ritual contexts has lost its informative value, as evidenced by phenomena such as the need to enunciate every word of a given formula verbatim in the recitation of a prayer or incantation. When questioned about the imperative to sing narrative master epic singer Ram Swarup responds: “It is impossible for someone to reach Delhi directly and not go through the middle towns.” (Wadley 1991: 201–202) Translated, in ritualized language, sequential propriety is critical. In Bloch’s words, "Song is, therefore, nothing but the end of the process of transformation from ordinary language which began with formalisation.” (Bloch 1974: 70) This reading must be collated with Austin’s somewhat outmoded characterization of theatrical performatives as parasitic linguistic etiolations. Though ritual occupies a different terrain and in many respects constitutes itself oppositionally vis-à-vis presentational theater per se, as the opus of Schechner et al. convincingly argues, the two practices also share common ground.

The Auxerre ritual clearly demonstrates some of the typical characteristics of “liminality.”^[34] These features include the absence of rank, a sense of anonymity, the establishment of “embodied experience,” and the profound immersion in humility. (Cf. Turner 1977: 366) The universal quality of “embodied experience” or Turnerian “communitas” created by such ritual practices, cuts across all nationalistic or rank divides, thus potentially embracing all humanity. A common strand in such processes involves what Turner termed “status reversal”, the redistribution of ranks and roles antithetical to normative societal position. Carolyn Walker Bynum’s critique of Turnerian “role-reversal” is particularly interesting for this specific ludic enactment, with its textual references to Mary Magdalene discussed below.^[35] Bynum considers this process a distinctly male phenomenon. The Auxerre ludus provides a unique performative locus for examining this phenomenon, and understanding how the construction of meaning and status may also incorporate issues of gender status within an overwhelmingly patriarchal frame.

The destabilization of status afforded by ritualized play allows for communal differentiation and restructuring, but also refers meaning inherent in the Passiontide thematics. The metalinguistic codes co-opted in performance recall lost ideals and deeper signification. Status reversal also references basic life and death reversals cued by these ceremonies. Quite often the calendric placement of such rites refers specifically to such thematics. Rituals are often synchronized to correspond to large-scale life cycles such as the awakening of spring from the barrenness of winter or the opposition of life vs. death. Though surely responding to the seasonal cycle of life and death marked by spring, the situation of the Auxerre labyrinth dance at Easter refers the very junction of the sacred and sublunary, the portal of “betwixt and between.”

As confirmed by Lewis, the constitutive role of music in this collective performance, including the compelling appropriation of the Easter sequence Victimae Paschali laudes was pivotal to this alignment with the sacred. Assisting the protocols of the liminal, the text problematizes or destabilizes class and gender hierarchies, and even placement in actual time. The primacy of Mary Magdalene’s voice interrogating the location of Christ and the ambiguous chronological relationship to the harrowing of Hell situates the actions of the Auxerre participants in the sacred imaginary. The text and its translation follow:

Victimae paschali laudes was sung throughout the Eastertide celebration, on Easter Sunday at matins and vespers, and on the octave of Easter Sunday (i.e. the Sunday thereafter).^[36] (Wright 2001: 144; 322 nn 48–49) It also functioned as a prompt for devotion. In a 1288 account of a visit to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem communicated by Ricoldo of Monte Croce, a procession sang repeated verses of Victimae paschali laudes as they approached the tomb. (Peters 1985: 34) This lieu de mémoire became a repository for the accumulated experiences associated with Eastertide festivities. Joseph Roach reveals how this type of “surrogation,” the ambivalent replaying of previous performances, memorializes and recreates the past, whether real or imaginary, in the present: "Traditional rituals recovered and reinterpreted as 'internal locutions' [remit] to a direct experience with the realm of sacredness." (Roach 1996: 1–3) Petersen decries the anachronistic boundaries imposed on liturgical enactments by modern scholarship, whereby these dramatic moments arbitrarily are separated out from the general liturgical flow. (Petersen 2007) In fact, the ludus was probably understood as but another punctuation of the ongoing liturgical continuum.^[37] The reiteration of the sequence exposes a broader schema threading the “extra-liturgical” ludus together with the gestalt. The inclusion of this liminal and rebellious liturgical act emphasizes the subversiveness of Christ’s revolt against the hierarchies of death. The association with Christ validates and confirms the clerical subversion as orthodox.

Beyond its use during Eastertide, the melody was also employed for the Feast of Mary Magdalene, July 22nd. Resorting to Mary Magdalene’s testimony to substantiate the miraculous, the sequence performs the ultimate reversal. As a woman and as a prostitute or adulteress, she is the least likely to attest, but the choice to foreground her voice merely amplifies the textual reversal of normative hierarchies and the subversion of sex and rank distinctions at the hands of the liminal.^[38] The sequence dialogue between the interlocutor and Mary also puts a woman’s voice in the mouth of men. This is a remarkable event mirroring the transitional quality of liminality where all status and denomination is momentarily suspended. Multiple inversions and subversions only extend the implicit resonances of the text. Hélène Cixous posits that “a feminine text can not fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic. As it is written it brings out an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investment.” (Cixous 1981: 258) Luce Irigaray continues this discourse, stating, (and in this instance, quite aptly) that “a woman is never anything more than the scene of more or less rival exchange between two men.” (Irigaray 1981)

As David Rothenberg relates, another text on Mary Magdalene, Jacobus de Voragine’s “Golden Legend,” codifies a medieval supposition that Christ had appeared to the Virgin Mary after his resurrection, paralleling the biblical account and blurring the issue. The Biblical reference to Mary pertains to Mary Magdalene, but the absence of appellative and the common medieval coalescing of Marian identities leave purposeful ambiguity (Rothenberg 2004: 178–187; id. 2006: 369) This omission of appellative, and the routine swapping out of one, two, or three Marys, in accordance with the differing gospel transmissions, recurs frequently in Quem quaeritis plays. De Voragine believes the second apocryphal Mary appearance (to the first, pre-eminent Mary to be corroborated by the Roman church’s Easter celebration of a station at the Church of St. Mary and by the alleged testimony of Ambrose in De virginibus. The move to elide Marian identities performs the remarkably subversive action of integrating mother of God with prostitute and social outcast, obliterating all sense of rank, status, or caste.

The semantic deep structures embedded in this musical text work a parallel revolt. The sequence prose reorders with its ludic reversals of death vs. life, victorious sacrifice, and most strikingly Lamb as savior to sheep. Since the celebrants of this ritual hold lower ecclesiastical ranks they effectually enact this theological reversal of meek Lamb becoming triumphant king and dying to live. The text makes specific reference to angelic witnesses’ testimony to the whereabouts of Christ. This would trigger the discourse raised in the Quem quaeritis so thoroughly interwoven textually and in liturgical practice with the Victimae paschali laudes. Mary’s questioning of Christ’s location and the angels’ “He is not here, but he is risen as he said” probe the geographical and metaphysical positioning of the divine. This actually speaks to manifold levels. There is firstly the medieval anxiety regarding actual chronology of Christ’s passion, whether his descent into Hades precedes his appearance at the tomb or follows. The question also raises implications as to the psychical site of the divine. The insertion of angels in the dialogue and its frequent reinterpretation in Quem quaeritis plays as disciples or pilgrims, accentuates the fusion of sublunary and divine and reinforces the angelic presence at the Auxerre ritual.

A locus for exploring heterogeneities of religious culture, the Auxerre maze dance entwines religious and secular, heretical and orthodox, in its syncretistic web. Carlos Alberto Steil grapples with the assimilation of ambivalent strands in religious practice:

Part of this internal heterogeneity is that different meanings can be attached to the same references and signs, referring us to a performatic perspective – of inscription of the alterity in the dominant narrative – more than a historic vision, centered on the dialectic of different temporalities. Following the performatic perspective, the alterity inside the Catholic system does not present itself as diverse forms of such pre-modern, modern, and post-modern Catholicism, but is there as an alternative language that constantly seeks insertion into the dominant narrative without allowing itself to be diluted in its totality. (Steil 2006)

Ethnographic investigation of ritual games sheds meaningful light on this incursion in embodied rituals. Mehl notes several ball games that perform ritual agrarian functions, namely the southern Indian puļāt and the bombāţ games of the Kota tribe. (Mehl 1948: 148–149) In North America, the Mesoamerican ball game serves a distinctly sacred purpose as well. Like the Auxerre game, the Hohokam ball courts used in this indigenous game described the cosmos. The axial quartering of the court signified the four cardinal directions, the divisions of the day, and the seasons. In a further miming of the labyrinth ritual, D. R. Wilcox construes the ball as sun, moon, and stars. (Wilcox 1991: 197) However in Auxerre, the performative realization of sacrosanctity in spatial parameters not only sanctifies the play site but is itself infused with the labyrinth’s signification.

While the Mesoamerican ball game’s use of a designated sacrosanct space resembles Auxerre, it is particularly worthwhile collating the Auxerre celebration with a ritualistic practice enacted at Easter by the Yaquis for the perspective it offers on the syncretistic reappropriation of liturgy.^[39] Richard Schechner sees the Lenten cyclical drama, “Waehma” as recasting the Easter narrative according to a prescribed cultural agenda. (Schechner 1993: 94–130) By superimposing indigenous forms upon the orthodox Christian text received first from Jesuit interlopers proselytizing the Yaqui, Waehma reinterprets the traditional meanings of the Eurocentric text, thus negotiating status, power, and difference. Waehma exposes the rupture between ambivalent indigenous and European strands respectively, warring and assimilating with each other. This performance of Yaqui identity via the appropriated codes of the Easter narrative reinterprets the traditional, subverts European hierarchies, and asserts in its stead Yaqui cultural identity and historiography. By embracing orthodoxy, Waehma resists it. As Wenner-Gren reveals, dances incorporated into the Waehma cycle, including the deer dance, actually preserve and transform traditional ritual war dances of the Yaqui people originally bearing no relationship to the Easter narrative. (Schechner 1993: 104) Ritual spaces redefine themselves as hallowed Christian terrain. "Through Waehma, the Yaquis act out both their acceptance of Catholicism (and certain European ways) and their resistance to this very same Catholicism and the European ways…[playing] with symbols simultaneously honoring and mocking them." (Schechner 1993: 118)

While scholars identify no specific historical antecedent to the Auxerre ludus, Mehl reports the gamut of indigenous ballgame rituals retained till much later than the fourteenth century in Europe. (Mehl 1948) These various games surface in regions ranging from Scandinavia to the Frankish region west of the location under consideration. Survivals of Easter Monday ball games spread to the New World as well.^[40] Whether actual pagan strands infused themselves in this particular ritual, there is no doubt that it signaled the subversive. Auxerre’s labyrinth dance blurred status and appropriated sacred space for the secular. For Beleth, one of the salient offenses of the similar Decembrica games was its suborning of clerks to play with archbishops and bishops and vice versa, desecrating hierarchical protocols and causing higher ranks to abase themselves. (Hayes 1999: 30) It was precisely in order to safeguard the sacrality of these sites that the French parliament forbade children to play games on nave labyrinths in 1538. (Santarcangeli 1974: 296) In fact, Canon Jaquemert destroyed the Reims labyrinth due to the incessant hopscotch played by local children on the maze. (Rosenstiehl & Repensek. 1983: 18) Like the Yaqui festivities, such games incorporate religious doctrine but interpolate alternative narratives into a syncretistic heteroglossia that blends individual and communal aspirations, all the while enacting, explicating, and clarifying orthodoxy. How such embodied practices refine notions of power and the divine is given eloquent articulation by Rebecca Sachs Norris:

Ritual practices are subject to selection because of embodied and established attitudes and concepts. These ways of knowing the world are so deeply ingrained that we do not normally even recognize the ways in which they shape our experience…But gradually the physical and emotional dimensions of worship become embodied, personal experience, and each time a gesture is repeated, the kinesthetic, propioceptive, and emotional memory of that gesture is evoked, layered, compounding, and shaping present experience. Images, ideas, and emotional and physical associations are all active and present in the experience of a ritual gesture or posture. These gestures and postures express inner attitudes or states and they correspond to a particular concept of deity or the transcendent. (Norris 2003: 177–178)

To sum up, the ludus at Auxerre performed the simultaneous dance of the cosmos and the harrowing of Hell, images conflated in medieval symbolism, thereby justifying incongruent Biblical and neo-Platonic discourse. The synchronization of this event on Easter, termed by Isidore of Seville in a computus manuscript as the first Sunday of Creation, coordinates temporalities on all planes. The rite of passage also reminded the enactors of Christ’s rite of passage and took up the cause of the lowly through the agency of Christ’s exemplum. Exchanging roles, dean became aligned with both devil and deity, and the dancers were invested with Christ-like sanctity. And while the transitory marginal quality of this paraliturgical event fosters reversal, it is rather the destabilizing mechanism of play, as explicated by Lewis, which most potently reformulates communal identity and signification.

Notes

• [1] I would like to express my deep gratitude to Penelope Reed Doob and Craig Wright, to whom this study is greatly indebted, and to Pamela Sheingorn, Nils Holger Petersen, Susan Boynton, Margrete Syrstad Andås, Mads Dengsø Jessen, Susannah Crowder, Katharine Bouman, and Alejandro L. Madrid for their insightful feedback and comments. The support I have received has been invaluable in shaping this study. Where not indicated, translations are my own.
• [2] This emanates from a 15th-c. sermon by Michel Menot, cited in Chailley 1969: 364; cf. Kirkendale 1984: 78. Wright 2001: 323 n. 64 translates as: “The ring dance is circular. The journey of the devil is circular. Therefore the ring dance is the movement of the devil.” See Estienne 2007: 716.
• [3] Scholarly treatment of the Auxerre ludus abounds: See Doob 1990: esp. 123–122 n. 41 for comprehensive bibliography to that date; also, more recently, Wright 2001: 139–149. For medieval Easter ballgames and games in church, see Kronig 1979; Mehl 1946: 157–158; Davies 1978: 13–19; Davies 1968; and Hayes 1999.
• [4] The complete MS sources for this sequence are found in Blume and Dreves 1886–1922: vol. 54, p. 12. The sequence is a Latin proper chant flourishing from mid-ninth to mid-twelfth century. Affiliated with the alleluia, the sequence punctuated special feasts. In the Liber Hymnorum, Notker “Balbulus” of St. Gall identified his sequences as mnemonic tools, which retexted particularly difficult melodiae longissimae. Crocker et al. 2008; Hiley 1995; For use of the organ in liturgy, see Bowles 1957; Bowles 1962; Bowles 1970; Perrot 1971: esp. 265–275; van Wye 1980, Bicknell 1996; Owen et al. 2008; Van Wye 1980; for a later period, cf. Rokseth 1930: 1–217; Wright 2001: 48; nn. 52, 308.
• [5] See Abbé Jean Lebeuf, Mercure de France, May 1726, pp. 240–241, items 915–916. On the Auxerre ludus, see also Barthélemy 1854.
• [6] Wright 2001: 321 n. 35 cites the following documents pertaining to evolving rulings on the ball specs: Auxerre, Archives départementales de l’Yonne, G. 1798, no folio (15 March 1410); G. 1798, no folio (16 March 1411); G. 1798 fol. 285 (19 April 1412); G. 1798 fol. 285 (23 April 1412). Wright compares this restriction to basketball regulations that bar palming the ball. Wright 2001: 141.
• [7] Abbé Jean Lebeuf, Mercure de France, May 1726, pp. 243–244, items 921–922: “Accepta pilota a proselyto seu tirone Canonico, Decanus, aut alter pro eo olim gestans in capite almutiam ceterique pariter, aptam diei Festo Pascæ Prosam antiphonabat quae incipit Victimæ Paschali laude: tum læva pilotam apprehendens, ad Prosæ decantatæ numerosos sonos tripudium agebat, ceteris manu prehensis choream circa dædalum ducentibus, dum interim per alternas vices pilota singulis aut pluribus choribaudis a Decano sert in speciem tradebatur aut jaciebatur. Lusus erat & organi ad choræ numeros. Prosa ac saltatione finitis chorus post choream ad merendam properabat...” Cf. Dufresne du Cange. 1678, s.v. “Pelota.” Mehl translates “tripudium agebat” as “paces.” N.B. Bracketed words have been substituted for me to emend Mehl’s occasionally imprecise translations. Words in parentheses are the original Latin.
• [8] Compare the reports on “ludus pilae” in church of Johannis Beleth in Douteil 1976: 223; and Durand 1998: IV, 86, 9. Beleth names the practice at Reims “decembrica”, associating the term etymologically with an earlier pagan practice during the month of December.
• [9] The Quem quaeritis is a liturgical trope transmitted in manuscript from the 10th century, possibly modifying the Vulgate’s “Quem quaeris?” (i.e. “Whom do you seek?”) of Jesus to Mary Magdalene upon his first appearance after the resurrection as recounted in John 20:15. (Compare John 18: 4–8). The plural form of the question is assigned to the angels speaking to the three Marys at the sepulcher of the risen Christ. The trope was assimilated into the Visitatio sepulchri Easter drama. In the Regularis Concordia (ca. 965 C.E.), a Benedictine customary of the synod of Winchester, St. Ethelwold recorded the use of the Quem quaeritis dialogue in the Eastertide liturgical play. On the Visitatio sepulchri, see Dunbar 2003. On medieval Easter drama, see for ex., Berger 1976; and Sheingorn 1987.
• [10] For a summary of scholarship of the placement of medieval liturgical drama in relation to the historical development of drama, see Pallen 1981; also Reynolds 2000: 128–130; Csapo & Miller, 2007; cf. Dox 2004: 11–70. On the Danielis ludus, see Smoldon & Wulstan. 1976; Ogden & Zijlstra 1996; but cf. Wulstan 1998; also Walther Bulst & Bulst-Thiele 1989.
• [11] Cf. Csapo & Miller 2007: 329-60.
• [12] Bakhtin 1981: 72–74; Flanigan 1990: 42–63.
• [13] Cf. Harris 2007.
• [14] Other ecclesiastical pavement labyrinths in northern France dating from the Middle Ages include those of Arras and Amiens.
• [15] See Prevost 1851–1852; and Vidal 1936.
• [16] The earliest extant computus manuscript to transmit a labyrinth figure dates from ca. 806–822 C.E. See Kern 2000: 131.
• [17] Cf. Ferré 2001; and Wu 1996.
• [18] But Doob calls this the best documented medieval dance practice! Cf. Susan Leigh Foster’s comments on the evanescing historical traces of body and its practices in Foster 1995. The role and participation of the reporter must be appraised as well. As recent scholarship on ritual contends, the observer collaborates in the action, and if not completely so, necessarily jaundices perspective.
• [19] But cf. de Certeau 1984: xiii; and Foster 2002: nn. 5–6. Here bodily articulation is endued with Austinian enunciative property.
• [20] On the ritual function of communal meals as inscribed within liturgy, see, for ex. Rosser 1994; and Venard 1982. But N.B. Rosser 1994: 432: “The formal dinner invites classification as a ‘ritual.’ However, the concept of ritual is less helpful here than it may at first appear, insofar as the term has come regularly to be used to describe events in which is allegedly enacted the resolution of social conflicts. Particularly dangerous is this dissociation, in many descriptions of ritual, between hypothesized spheres of (conscious or unconscious) thought and metaphorical—‘ritual’—action, with an implied subordination of the second to the first. Ritual, in such accounts, is itself devoid of thought. To the extent that ritual has been defined, mythically, as a form of action designed to harmonize fundamental contradictions in society, it might be argued that the very concept contains too many presuppositions to be of real help to the historian...The fraternity feast, on the one hand, was demonstrably not a form of social magic worked to bring about a historically impossible harmony. But nor was it, on the other hand, a mere optimistic symbol of an idealized community.”
• [21] Coincidentally, in the Soissons recension of the Quem quaeritis in BnF MS lat. 8898, two deacons playing the angels at the sepulcher are garbed in amices as well. (Petersen 2007: 337; 357 n. 36).
• [22] Lamentably, I have not discovered anything concrete regarding medieval reception of the left hand and its connotation of evil or the devil as in “sinistra” or the Portuguese “canhudo.” I am not able to track down a passing reference I have found about Ambrose of Milan’s treatment of this subject. Of course, God consigns the “goats” into everlasting torment on his left. Cf. Snyder 1965.
• [23] See Miller 1979.
• [24] Cf. Bradshaw 1993.
• [25] See Overbeck. 1998.
• [26] See Branner 1962: 18.
• [27] On Elisabeth, see Simons & Ziegler 1990.
• [28] See Pulver 1978. In typical medieval fashion, the ring dance and its circularity is also frequently equated with Christ and the divine. Cf., for ex., Alanis de Insulis (ca. 1200.): “Deus circulus est…” in Kirkendale 1984: 78.
• [29] Cf. Anne Walters Robertson 2002: 44 and 248.
• [30] Cf. the critique of Victor Turner’s legacy in Lewis 2008: 52–53; and Jules-Rosette 1994.
• [31] “Liminoid” characterizes those cultures which have marginalized the experience of liminality to mere expression in entertainment.
• [32] See Turner 1967: 93–111. Turner articulated five discrete stages in this process: breech-crisis-redress-reintegration-(schism). Turner’s hermeneutic exposes social struggle, a dramatic conflict where ambivalences, ambiguities, tensions, rivalries are all addressed and redressed. Under this lens, “ritual” is necessarily transformative whereas its binary, “ceremony,” is confirmatory. (Turner 1967: 95) However, cf. the critique of Lewis 2008.
• [33] See Austin 1975. According to Austin, an illocutionary utterance “secures the uptake” by making the interlocutor apprehend the performance of the speech act itself, and elicits consequences (not necessarily those desired). Following David Holdcroft, illocutionary force is utterance invested with the intention to perform a certain illocutionary act. On illocutionary speech acts, see Alston 2000; and Dörge 2006.
• [34] For recent studies treating the relationship of contemporary musical activity to “liminality” see Brown 2007; Hooker 2007; and Maciszewski 2007.
• [35] See Bynum 1984; 105–25; cf. Rollo-Koster 2002: 20–21; Bell 1992:19–54.
• [36] Often attributed to the 11th century cleric Wipo of Burgundy (ca. 950–1050), who served as chaplain and biographer to the German Emperor Conrad II, the tune has also been attributed to Notker Balbulus, Robert II of France, and Adam of St. Victor. 
• [37] Highly germane to this study, Petersen points out the integral nature of events as ordinary as Easter meals. (Petersen 2007: 334–335).
• [38] Texts influencing the shaping of Mary Magdalene’s identity and reception in the Middle Ages include the 25th and 33rd homilies of Gregory the Great and a 10th-century sermon venerating the saint attributed to Odo of Cluny whose authorship has been called into question by Dominique Iogna Prat. Gregory the Great, “Homily 25 (John 20: 11–18),” ed. J. P. Migne, PL 76: 1178; “Homily 33 (Luke 7: 36–50),” PL 76: 1238; Odo of Cluny, In Veneratione sanctae Mariae Magdalenae, PL 133: 713–712; Prat 1992; also de Voragine 1998: I:364; and Saxer 1959: 328; and Aus der Fuenten 1966: 57–62.
• [39] On the Mesoamerican ball games, see also Schroeder 1949.
• [40] See, for ex., Goggin 1940; and Mehl 1948.

Bibliography

• Alston, William P. 2000. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Arlt, Wulf. 1970. Ein Festoffizium des Mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung, 2 vols. Cologne: Arno Volk Verlag.
• Aus der Fuenten, Wiltrud. 1966. Maria Magdalena in der Lyrik des Mittelalters. Dusseldorf: Schwann.
• Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson y Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich. 1981 [1975]. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Baltzer, Rebecca A. 1972. “Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Miniatures and the Date of the Florence Manuscript”. JAMS 25: 1–28.
• Barthélemy, Charles, trans. & ed. 1854. Rational ou manuel des divins offices de Guillaume Durand, évêque de Mende au treizième siècle, ou, Raisons mystiques et historiques de la liturgie catholique. Paris: Louis Vivès.
• Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Berger, Blandine-Dominique. 1976. Le Drame liturgique de Päques du Xe au XIIIe siècles: Liturgie et theater. Paris: Beauchesne.
• Beleth, Johannes. 1976. Summa de Ecclesiaticis Officiis, ed. Herbert Douteil, vols. 41/41a, CCC. Turnhout: Brepols.
• Bicknell, Stephen. 1996. The History of the English Organ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bigger, Stephen. 2009. “‘Review’ of Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance”. Journal of Beliefs & Values. <http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/565/1/Review_Victor_Turner.pdf>           [Accessed: 19 July 2009].
• Bloch, Maurice. 1974. "Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation. Is Religion an Extreme Form of Authority?" Archives Europèennes de Sociologie 15: 55–81.
• Blume, C. and G.M. Dreves, eds. 1886–1922. Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi. Leipzig: O.R. Reisland [Reprint: New York, Johnson Reprint Corp].
• Bowles, Edmund A. 1957. “Were Musical Instruments Used in the Liturgical Service during the Middle Ages?” Galpin Society Journal 10: 40–56
• _____________ 1962. “The Organ in the Medieval Liturgical Service”. Revue Belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 16(1/4): 13–29.
• _____________ 1970. “A Performance History of the Organ in the Middle Ages”. Diapason 60: 13–14.
• Bradshaw, Paul F. 1993. “Diem baptismo sollemniorem: Initiation and Easter in Christian Antiquity”. In Eύλόγημa: Studies in Honor of Robert Taft, ed. S. J. E. Carr, 41-45. Rome: Analecta
• Liturgica.
• Brand, Benjamin. 2003. “Dance and the Liturgy of Easter in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Monophonic Latin Rounds of the Florence Manuscript”. Paper presented at Kalamazoo, 8 May 2003.
• Branner, Robert. 1962. “The Labyrinth of Reims Cathedral,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 21 (1): 18–25.
• Brenneis, Donald. 1987. “Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an Occasionally Egalitarian Community”. American Ethnologist 14: 236–250.
• Brown, Katherine Butler. 2007. “The Social Liminality of Musicians: Case Studies from Mughal India and Beyond,” Twentieth-Century Music 3(1): 13–49.
• Bulst, Walther & M. L. Bulst-Thiele, ed. 1989. Hilarii Aurelianensis versus et Ludi, Epistolae, Ludus Danielis Belouacensis/ Die Egerton Handschrift. Bemerkungen zur Musik des Daniel-Spiels von Beauvais. Leyden: Brill.
• Bynum, Carolyn Walker. 1984. “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbol: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theories of Liminality”. In Anthropology and the Study of Women, ed. Robert L. Moore & Frank E. Reynolds, 105-125. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion.
• Chailley, Jacques. 1969. “La Danse religieuse au moyen-âge”. In Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen-âge: Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiéval, 357-380. Paris: Vrin.
• Cixous, Hélène. 1981. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle Coutivron, 245–264. New York: Shocken.
• Crocker, Richard, et al. 2008. "Sequence (i)," Grove Music Online; Oxford Music Online. <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/25436> [Accessed: 22 September 2008].
• Csapo, Eric & Margaret Christina Miller, eds. 2007. The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Davidson, Clifford. 2007. Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate.
• ____________ (ed.). 2005. The Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages. Brooklyn: AMS Press.
• ____________ 2003. “Improvisation in Medieval Drama”. In Improvisation in the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Timothy J. McGee, 193–221. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute.
• ____________ 1999. Material Culture & Medieval Drama. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute.
• Davies, J.G. 1968. The Secular Use of Church Buildings. London: Seabury Press.
• ____________ 1978. "Playing Games in Churches," in The Recreational Use of Churches, ed. J. G. Davies. 13-19. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
• De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• De Voragine, Jacobus. 1998. Legenda aurea, ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo.
• Doob, Penelope Reed. 1990. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• ____________ 1985. “The Auxerre Labyrinth Dance”. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, 15–17 February 1985, comp. Christina L. Schlundt, 132–142. Riverside: University of California Press.
• Dörge, Friedrich Christoph. 2006. “Illocutionary Acts–Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It”, Ph.D. diss., Universität Tübingen.
• Douteil, Heriberto, ed.  1976.  Johannis Beleth Summa de Ecclesiasticis Officiis. Turnhout: Brepols.
• Dox, Donalee. 2004. The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Dufresne du Cange, Charles. 1678. Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis. Paris.
• Durand, Guillaume. 1998. Rationale divinorum officiorum. Turnhout: Brepols.
• Estienne, Henri. 2007. L’Introduction au traité de la conformité des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ou, Traité préparatif á l’Apologie par Hérodote. Paris: Librairie Droz.
• Fassler, Margot. 1992. “The Feast of Fools and Danielis Ludus: Popular Tradition in a Medieval Cathedral Play”. In Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly, 65–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ferré, Robert. 2001. Origin, Symbolism, and Design of the Chartres Labyrinth. St. Louis: One Way Press.
• Flanigan, C. Clifford. 1990. “Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval Biblical Drama”. In Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Foster, Susan Leigh. 1995. “An Introduction to Moving Bodies”. In Choreographing History, ed. Foster, 3–21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• ___________ 2002. “Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity,” SubStance 31(2/3): 125–146.
• Goggin, John M. 1940. “A Ball Game at Santo Domingo,” American Anthropologist 42 (2): 364–366.
• Gougaud, Louis. 1914. “La Danse dans les églises”. Revue d’histoire écclésiastique 15(1): 5–22; 229–245.
• Harris, Max. 2007. “A Reassessment of the Feast of Fools: A Rough and Holy Liturgy”. Société Internationale pour l’étude du Théâtre Médiéval. <http://sitm 2007.vjf.cnrs.fr/pdf/s4 harris.pdf> [Accessed: 30 September 2008].
• Hayes, Dawn Marie. 2003. Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100–1389: Interpreting the Case of Chartres Cathedral. London: Routledge.
• ___________ 1999. “Mundane Uses of Sacred Places in the Central and Middle Ages, with a Focus on Chartres Cathedral”. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 30 (2) <http://repositories.cdlib.org/cmrs/comitatus/vol30/iss1/ art2> [Accessed: 29 August 2008].
• Hayward, Jane 1971. “Sacred Vestments as They Developed in the Middle Ages”. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, new ser., 29(7): 299–309.
• Hiley, David. 1995. “Sequences,” in Western Plainchant: A Handbook, 172–188. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hooker, Lynn. 2007. “Controlling the Liminal Power of Performance: Hungarian Scholars and Romanian Musicians in the Hungarian Folk Revival,” Twentieth-Century Music 3(1): 51–72.
• Houston, Mary G. 1996. Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries. New York: Courier Dover Publications.
• Huizinga, Johan. 1971. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.Boston: Beacon Press.
• Irigaray, Luce. 1981. “This Sex Which Is Not One”. In New French Feminisms, trans. Claudia Reeder, ed. Elaine Marks & Isabelle de Courtivron, 99-108. New York: Schocken Books.
• Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1994. “Decentering Ethnography: Victor Turner's Vision of Anthropology,” Journal of Religion in Africa 24(2): 160–181.
• Kern, Hermann. 2000. Through the Labyrinth. Designs and Meanings over 5,000 Years, ed. Robert Ferré, trans. Abigail Clay. Munich: Prestel.
• Kirkendale, Warren. 1984. “Circulatio-Tradition, Maria lactans, and Josquin as Musical Orator”. Acta Musicologica 56: 69–92.
• Krönig, Wolfgang. 1979. “Osterfreude und liturgisches Spiel”. In Quatember Viertelsjahrhefte für Erheuerung und Einheit der Kirche 43: 115–116.
• Lewis, J. Lowell. 2008. “Toward a Unified Theory of Cultural Performance,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St. John, 41-58. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Ludlow, Morwenna. 2000. Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Maciszewski, Amelia. 2007. “Texts, Tunes, and Talking Heads: Discourses about Socially Marginal North Indian Musicians,” Twentieth-Century Music 3(1): 121–144.
• Mehl, Erwin. 1972. “Der Ausweg aus dem Labyrinth”. In Volkskunde: Fakten und Analysen, ed. Klaus Beitl, 402–418. Vienna: Selbstverlag des Vereines fur Volkskunde.
• ____________ 1948. “Baseball in the Stone Age”. Western Folklore 7(2): 145–161.
• Miller, James Lester. 1979. “Choreia: Visions of the Cosmic Dance in Western Literature from Plato to Jean de Meun”. Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto.
• Morrison, Tessa. 2003. "The Labyrinthine Path of Pilgrimage". Peregrinations 1(3) <http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol1 3/morrison.pdf> [Accessed: 29 July 2008].
• ____________ 2004. “The Dance of the Angels, the Mysteries of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Architecture of the Gothic Cathedrals”. Analecta Husserliana, Metamorphosis 81: 299–320.
• Muir, Lynette R. 1997. “Playing God in Medieval Europe”. In The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Allan E. Knight, 25–50. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
• Norris, Rebecca Sachs. 2003. “Embodied Culture and the Adoption of New Beliefs”. In The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, ed. Andrew Buckser & Stephen D. Glazier, 171–182. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 
• Ogden, Dunbar H. 2003. The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
• _____________ 2005. "The Visitatio Sepulchri: Public Enactment and Hidden Rite". In The Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, ed. Clifford Davidson, 28–35. Brooklyn: AMS Press.
• Ogden, Dunbar H.  & A. Marcel J. Zijlstra, ed. 1996. The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications).
• Overbeck, T. Jerome. 1998. Ancient Fonts, Modern Lessons. Chicago: Liturgy Training.
• Owen, Barbara et al. 2008. "Organ, §IV: The Classical and Medieval Organ," Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44010pg4> [Accessed: 23 September 2008].
• Pallen, Thomas Albert. 1981. “Para-Dramatic Forms in the Monastic Liturgy of Medieval Europe and Their Place in the Development of European Drama”, Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
• Perrot, Jean. 1971. The Organ from Its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the End of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Norma Deane. London: Oxford University Press.
• Peters, F. E. 1985. “The Procession That Never Was: The Painful Way in Jerusalem”. Drama Review 29(3): 31–41.
• Petersen, Nils Holger. 2007. "Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy". In The Origins of Theatre in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. Eric Csapo & Margaret C. Miller, 329–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Prat, Dominique Iogna. 1992. “La Madeleine du Sermo in Veneratione sanctae Mariae Magdalenae attribué a Odon de Cluny,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 104 (10): 37–67.
• Prevost, F. 1851–1852. “Notice sur le labyrinthe de l’église de Reparatus,” Revue archéologique 8: 566–571.
• Pulver, Max.  1978. "Jesus' Round Dance and Crucifixion according to the Acts of St. John," in The Mysteries, ed. Joseph Campbell, 169-193. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Reynolds, Roger E. 2000. “The Drama of Medieval Liturgical Processions,” Revue de Musicologie 86 (1): 127–142.
• Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. London: Routledge.
• Robertson, Anne Walters. 2002. Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rodgers, Susan & Joanna E. Ziegler. 1999. “Elisabeth of Spalbeek’s Trance Dance of Faith”. In Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late Medieval Spirituality, ed. Mary A. Suydam & Joanna E. Ziegler, 299–355. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Rokseth, Yvonne. 1930. La Musique d’orgue au XVe siècle et au début de XVIe. Paris: Droz.
• Rollo-Koster, Joëlle. 2002. Medieval and Early-Modern Ritual. Leyden: Brill.
• Rosenstiehl, Pierre. 1986–1988. “How the ‘Path of Jerusalem’ in Chartres Separates Birds from Fishes”. In International Congress on M.C. Escher: Art and Science, ed. H.S.M. Coxete et al., 221–230. Amsterdam: New Holland.
• Rosenstiehl, Pierre & Thomas Repensek. 1983. “‘The ‘Dodécadédale,’ or in Praise of Heuristics”, October 26: 17–26.
• Rosser, Gervase. 1994. "Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England," Journal of British Studies 33(4): 430–446.
• Rothenberg, David J. 2004. “Marian Feasts, Seasons, and Songs in Medieval Polyphony: Studies in Musical Symbolism”, Ph.D. Diss., Yale University.
• Rowe, Sharon. 2008. “Modern Sports: Liminal Ritual or Liminoid Leisure?” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, ed. Graham St. John, 47-60. New York: Berghahn Books.
• Santarcangeli, Paolo. 1974. Le Livre des labyrinths: Histoire d’un mythe et d’un symbole, trans. Monique Lacau. Paris: Gallimard.
• Saxer, Victor. 1959. Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident des origines à la fin du moyen age. Auxerre, Paris.
• Schechner, Richard. 1971. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.
• _____________ 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• _____________ 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge.
• Schechner, Richard & Willa Appel (eds.). 1990. By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theater and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. “Performance and the Culture Construction of Reality”. American Ethnologist 12: 707–724.
• Schimansky, Dobrila-Donya. 1971. “The Study of Medieval Ecclesiastical Costumes: A Bibliography and Glossary”. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, new ser., 29(7): 313–317.
• Schroeder, A. H. 1949. “Cultural Implications of Ball Courts in Arizona”. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 5(1): 28–36.
• Sheingorn, Pamela. 1987. The Easter Sepulcher in England. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute.
• Simons, Walter & Joanna E. Ziegler. 1990. “Phenomenal Religion in the Thirteenth Century and its Image: Elisabeth of Spalbeek and the Passion Cult,” Studies in Church History 27: 117–26.
• Smoldon, William L. 1972. "The Origins of the Quern quaeritis and the Easter Sepulchre Music Drama, as Demonstrated by Their Musical Settings". In The Medieval Drama, ed. Sandro Sticca, 121–154. Albany: SUNY Press.
• _____________ 1980. The Music of Medieval Church Dramas, ed. Cynthia Bourgeault. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Smoldon, William L. & David Wulstan. 1976. The Play of Daniel: A Mediæval Liturgical Drama. Sutton: Plainsong and Mediæval Music Society.
• Snyder, Susan. 1965. “The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 12: 18–59.
• Söhner, Leo. 1936. Die Orgelbegleitung zum Gregorianischen Gesang. Regensburg: F. Pustet.
• Spector, Stephen. 1997. “Play of the Sacrament”. In The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Allan E. Knight, 189–201. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
• Steil, Carlos Alberto. 2006. “Catholic Charismatic Renewal: A Way into or out of Catholicism? Ethnography of the São José Group, in the City of Porto Alegre, Brazil”. Trans. Amanda Lyons Ottoni Vaz. Religião e Sociedade 24(1): 182–190, 2004. <http://socialsciences. scielo.org/scielo.php?pid=S0100-85872006000100002&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en> [Accessed: 23 August 2008].
• Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Trotzig, Aina. 2000. “L'apparition du Christ ressuscité à Marie Madeleine et le drame liturgique: Étude iconographique”. Revue de Musicologie 86(1): 83–104.
• Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom & Gabriel L. Caffee. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Van Wye, Benjamin. 1980. “Ritual Use of the Organ in France”. JAMS 33(2): 287–325.
• Venard, Marc. 1982. “La Fraternité des banquets”. In Pratiques et discours alimentaires à la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin & Robert Sauzet, 137-145. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
• Vidal. G. 1936. Une témoin d’une date célèbre; La Basilique de chrétienne de Orléansville (324). Algiers: Fontana.
• Wadley, Susan S. 1991. “Why Does Ram Swarup Sing? Song and Speech in the North Indian Epic Dholā”. In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions: women's tales, ed. Arjun Appadurai et al., 201–223. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Walsh, Martin W. 1992. “Eulenspiegel (Episode 13) as a Theater-Historical Document”. Early Drama, Art & Music Review 14: 43–53.
• Wilcox, D. R. 1991. The Mesoamerican Ballgame in the American Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Wright, Craig. 2001. The Maze and the Warrior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Wu, Nancy Yee Sin. 1996. “Wulstan, David. 1998. "Review of The Play of Daniel: Critical Essays by Dunbar H. Ogden,” Notes ser. 2, 54 (3): 682–684.