ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the devotional aspect of medieval drama to link the popular practice of affective piety with the popular theatre of Chester's mystery play cycle, demonstrating how affective piety's central technique of imaginative meditation constitutes a possible avenue for preparing for a role that was open to actors in pre-Reformation Chester. Meditation through 'devout imagination' as recommended by Love allowed the practitioner to transcend mundane real-time-and-place, to cross into a virtual present-in-the-past and to engage with biblical events as they happened. Medieval actors, given their cultural awareness of the practices of affective piety might not have agreed that this was so very 'complicated', but they would certainly have known what was meant by the need to 'recreate something' from the 'imagination' and that to create 'the life of times' as well as of that of the 'past and future' they needed, like Margery Kempe, 'to be carried away with emotion'.
