ABSTRACT
On Friday 18 July 2008, the city of Sydney was transformed into a stage for a dramatized version of the Stations of the Cross, one of the customary highlights of the celebration of Catholic World Youth Day, an international pilgrimage established by Pope John Paul II and first held in 1986 in Rome. 1 This essay presents a brief account of the Sydney Stations to open up a discussion of Corpus Christi Day performance in medieval York, where, as Pamela King has stated, 'the extra-liturgical processional ceremony [ ... ] of following the Stations of the Cross was evolving into lay worship at the same time as the York Cycle developed'.2 The Stations - and the Corpus Christi festival, with its plays and various other practices and institutions, such as 'the writing of sermons, organisation of processions, formation of fraternities [ ... ] [and] composition of hymns'3 - were among the many expressions of devotion to the humanity of Christ that became popular throughout England from the late thirteenth century onwards.4 Now known collectively as 'affective piety', practices of this kind were particularly appropriate for lay people and, as Eamon Duffy puts it, were 'without any rival the central devotional activity of all seriously minded [medieval] Christians'.5
