THE GROWTH OF THE PASSION-PLAY 307 



Pedlar and youth reply to the Magdalen in 

 German, and we thus have evidence of the strolling 

 scholars directly introducing the native tongue. In 

 the same play Mary, after her conversion by an angel, 

 strips off her gay clothing, upon which her lover 

 and the devil fly from her. She then goes to buy the 

 ointment. Most of the incidents of the Passion are 

 given shortly and in Latin, but it is noteworthy that 

 the lamentations of the Magdalen over her sin, those 

 of the Virgin at the death of her Son, and the final 

 songs of Joseph of Arimathaea and of Pilate are in 

 the vernacular. 



This example must suffice to indicate how the 

 tendency of these vagabond scholars was to secularise 

 the religious play. At the same time their cosmopolitan 

 rovings fully account for the close resemblances in 

 both incidents and words between French and German 

 plays of the most distant districts. The incident of the 

 mercator occurring in plays scattered all over Europe 

 from France to Bohemia 1 is no more accidental than 

 the recurrence in manuscripts from all quarters of 

 the same strolling -scholar Latin songs and hymns. 

 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the strolling 

 scholars are perpetually classed with wandering min- 

 strels, actors, joculatores, jesters, and buffoons. There 

 is still in existence the song of a strolling scholar, 

 one John of Niirnberg, of the fourteenth century, 

 who bemoans in his Vita Vagorum his own hard 

 life. He tells us how he must go about as a medi- 

 cine-man to cure the parson's maid of wrinkles, how 



1 For Bohemia see U, p. 72. 



