Ritual drama and dramatic ritual in Spanish sacramental plays : La Margarita Preciosa (1616) between procession and stage

In Spanish early modernity, a theatre genre deeply embedded in Catholic material religion and cult of images rose to popularity and saw an aesthetic proliferation, while iconoclast tendencies in the north-west dominated a fundamental change in media and representation culture. During Corpus Christi celebrations, the so-called auto sacramentales – a form of liturgical drama descending from medieval mummery and morality plays – addressed the staging of the Eucharistic miracle. This essay explores how ritual and theatre, as forms of cultural performance, share a common nucleus that also applies to walking ceremonies with images. Likewise, sacramental drama in its liminality can only be explained with reference to its pragmatic religious context in Eucharistic ritual and processions. A juxtaposition of the poetics of transubstantiation in allegorical performance and the mediation of Eucharistic and image presence in Corpus processions aims to differentiate the varieties of presence in sacramental theatre.