The Merchant Scene of Biblical Drama: Rehabilitating the Female Input

Abstract This paper examines a ground-breaking innovation to medieval Easter plays: the creation of the extra-biblical merchant scene, in which the Marys purchase spices prior to their Visitatio Sepulchri . The patron of its earliest known representation was the female religious leader Uta von Kirchberg. An illuminated roundel in the Uta Codex she commissioned towards the end of her term as abbess of Niedermünster (1002–25), depicts the Holy women purchasing spices from a spice merchant. Until the twelfth century, this remained the only representation of an Easter merchant scene, visual or textual. The only textual Easter merchant scene predating the thirteenth century is within the twelfth-century Latin/Catalan Ludus Paschalis of Vic Cathedral, near Barcelona, a highly influential Easter text whose transnational impact has been traced in numerous later Easter texts across Europe, including many with merchant scenes. Around 2000, musicologists David Wulstan and Constant Mews suggested the renowned composer and poet Heloise (c. 1090s–1164) as its author. Widely accepted by musicologists, their attribution’s significance for the female impact on the merchant scene is barely acknowledged. Here, I ask: ‘how did women influence the creation, promotion and development of the merchant scene’s visual, textual and performative manifestations?’ By repeatedly reattributing responsibility for decisive input into the development of the merchant scene from anonymous male scribes to identified female religious leaders, my interdisciplinary analysis moves women to the centre of this creative process.