ABSTRACT
The cover of this book shows a stained glass window of Chartres Cathedral from c. 1220–30 depicting the apostle Matthew sitting on the shoulders of the prophet Isaiah. Apostles were frequently featured in this way in medieval art. By placing one on top of the other artists graphically portrayed the service the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were thought to have rendered to the apostles through their prophecies concerning Christ. 1 A fourteenth-century manuscript from Rouen contains a play for 1 January, the day on which the Feast of Fools was traditionally celebrated. On that day ecclesiastical decorum was set aside. The play was called the Procession of Asses or the Procession of the Prophets and took place in the nave of the church before Mass. The text derived from a pseudo-Augustinian sermon against the Jews, Pagans and Arians, which was dramatised in eleventh-century Limoges; it was turned into a play in Laon in the thirteenth century. The play vividly brought to life the idea that the Old Testament prefigured the New by having one costumed actor after another act out the main prophets and deliver their prophecies of Christ. The proceedings were livened up by an actor playing Balaam’s donkey who was stopped in his tracks by an angel telling him not to heed Balak (Numbers 22:21ff). A furnace was lit on stage to re-enact how Nebuchadnezzar threw Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego into a furnace because they refused to worship an idol. The actors praise God from within the furnace and Nebuchadnezzar points to a fourth unscathed man in the furnace representing Christ (Daniel 3:92 in the Vulgate). 2
