Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence by Nerida Newbigin

Reviewed by: Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence by Nerida Newbigin Pamela M. King (bio) Nerida Newbigin. Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence. 2 Vols. Toronto: Victoria University Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021. Pp. 1039 + 194 illus. $60. Making a Play for God is Nerida Newbigin's life work, gathering together and updating forty years of specialist research and publication on the medieval and early modern religious theatre of Florence. Unsurprisingly, the study is an exhaustive feat of scholarship, but it is also one in which accessibility to an anglophone audience has been scrupulously achieved. The study covers rappresentazione sacre, the generic term for religious plays, including the corpus of sacra rappresentazione, which are specifically Florentine religious plays in octaves introduced and closed by an angel, and also includes those productions described by the term festa, which may refer to a play but equally to a feast day with celebratory and mimetic elements. The owning confraternities do not use the terminology consistently, so the policy in the study is to be inclusive. That inclusivity also covers the nature of surviving evidence, which encompasses texts in manuscript and print as well as those mentioned in name only in financial and other ephemeral accounts. The Introduction opens: The sacre representazioni of Renaissance Florence were not a single and unchanging phenomenon. Both ephemeral, since they existed only in the moment of their performance, and increasingly permanent, as they were copied for posterity, and printed first for an elite market and then to feed an insatiable appetite for devotional entertainment, they existed in a variety of ways and in various environments. The total corpus consists of over 130 texts, whose status either as performance scripts or literary records after the event is unknown, as in the majority of cases is their authorship. The organization of the study, laid out synoptically in the Introduction, is therefore an invaluable act of hand-holding by a commensurate expert guide. The study proper commences with a chapter on the manuscript evidence of the sacre rappresentazioni. The reader is offered a corrective to the received understanding of this signature genre of Florentine early drama formerly based on printed anthologies. The manuscripts give a very different sense of the scope and scale of a rich corpus which reached its peak in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Manuscript miscellanies were created for various purposes, allowing the plays to survive, but showing few signs of direct contact with performance. It is [End Page 428] also clear that much has been lost, so there is judicious avoidance of speculation about the evolution of form, but an informative discussion of sources. These are identified as being, unsurprisingly, the volgarizzamento, or vernacular interpretations of the Bible and the Legenda Aurea. There is little evidence of authorship apart from Feo Balcari, who systematically oversaw the copying of his works, and an oblique reference to the Pulci family. Here also is one of those passing insights into the rather underplayed distinctiveness of Florentine society in the period, as the relationship with the tradition of ottava rima improvisation is explored. It seems that everyone who was anyone in the Florence of the period was proficient in the tradition. The contents of the various manuscripts discussed cannot be detailed here, but they include plays of the Beheading of John the Baptist, Abraham, a Nativity, an Annunciation including a dispute of virgins, a Raising of Lazarus, one of the miracles of the Virgin, a Judgment of Solomon, a Purification, various cantares, a play of Dives and Pauper, of St Julian, of the martyrdom of St James the Great, and of Ss Peter and Paul. Chapter Two explores 'Plays in Churches'. Again the author warns that scholarship has been slow to correct errors sown in the nineteenth century. The three most famous rappresentazioni were staged by the adult laudesi confraternities, performed in the conventual churches of the Oltrarno from the late fourteenth to mid sixteenth centuries and treated the subjects of the Annunciation, Ascension, and Pentecost. They involved the erection of large mechanical devices built into the church fabric. We are indebted to Giorgio Vasari...

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