312 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



The great mediaeval religious epics written in the verna- 

 cular could hardly fail to influence the translators and 

 adapters of the Latin Church plays. Long before the 

 fourteenth century Latin had ceased to be the chief 

 language for religious lyric and epic. From the eleventh 

 century onwards there is a continuous and increasing 

 production of religious poems in the German tongue ; 

 on the one side we have the lyric hymns to the Virgin, 

 on the other the epic legends of the saints and the lives 

 of Christ and of his Mother. In the thirteenth century 

 the passion for religious epics reached its climax. The 

 same spirit as we have noted in the chronicles and the 

 early history-books, the conception of the world-drama 

 centring round the person of Christ, manifests itself in 

 an endeavour to represent the story of Christ as a 

 great world-epic. Thus one noteworthy poem, laying 

 in its title, The Redemption, 1 - emphasis on the moral 

 solution of the world -problem, 2 takes us from the 

 Creation to the Day of Judgment, and gives an 

 especially dramatic colouring and language to the 

 events of the Passion. 



Another the Passional* in more than 100,000 

 lines describes the birth of the Virgin and that of 

 Christ, then follow the gospel narrative, the lives of 

 the disciples and the apostles, and, finally, of all the 

 saints from Nicholas to Catherine. These two poems 

 alone are an immense storehouse of mediaeval thought 



1 Die Erlosung, edited by K. Bartsch, 1858. 



2 The reader may turn to what has been said as to this point on pp. 256-259. 



3 Das alte Passional, Parts i. and ii., Hahn, 1845, and Das Passional, Part 

 iii., Kopke, 1852. These books are of first-class importance for the student of 

 mediaeval art. 



