In the early seventeenth century in Huy (present-day Belgium), one or more anonymous Carmelite nuns embarked upon a piece of theatrical translation. Using a medieval vernacular playbook which had been copied in Walloon French within their own convent around a hundred years before, in the second half of the fifteenth century, they set about adapting two of the short plays they found in it (which together cover the narrative of the Nativity, Epiphany, Rage of Herod, and Purification of the Virgin) into a single, new French-language play. They, or two of their sisters collaborated to copy this play into a separate manuscript. The Huy convent's medieval playbook is now owned by the Musée Condé at Chantilly (Chantilly, Condé MS 617); however, the early-seventeenth-century play has remained in the convent's archive, alongside their surviving administrative and financial documentation (Liège, Archives d'Etat, Fonds Dames Blanches de Huy [hereafter ‘Fonds DBH’], doc. 386bis). 386bis's play (hereafter the Huy Nativity) translates, reworks, and expands the material comprising the first play in Chantilly 617 and the first part of that manuscript's second play. It thus presents the Nativity, Epiphany, and part of Herod's Rage, omitting the Purification and other non-Biblical episodes found in Chantilly 617's Play Two. (We provide a detailed synopsis of the Huy Nativity as an appendix.) However, the script breaks off unfinished, suggesting that it might well have gone on to include – in another copy, or in performance – further material from Chantilly 617's second play, and/or from elsewhere.

Minor alterations include changes of spelling or grammatical construction, that reflect changes in linguistic and orthographic practice (e.g. les anges du ciel for les angle de ciel); more major revisions include for example, the addition of entirely new characters. Sometimes, however, the script is much more radically revised at a structural level, including, for example, the addition of entirely new characters. One such character is the Sibyl, who does not appear at all in the medieval play, but who is sent for by Herod in the Huy Nativity to confirm his pre-eminence. In an episode which was certainly known as far back as the Middle Ages (it appears in the Golden Legend) the Sibyl experiences a vision of a virgin holding an infant in her arms. In the play, this vision enables her to confirm the birth of Jesus and deny that Herod is all-powerful.