The aim of the present study is to make available to the increasing number of scholars working in the field of medieval drama, and to the even larger number of people who attend performances of such plays, a detailed survey and analysis of the surviving corpus of biblical drama from all parts of medieval Christian Europe. The number of plays is very considerable, their variety and quality remarkable and the history of their development and evolution fascinating.

Inevitably in a work conceived on a European scale, the need for translation discourages discussion of the stylistic and linguistic qualities of the plays. Nor, though the book is essentially comparatist in its approach, can it avoid some national divisions, for they are an essential part of the evolution of the genre. Very little secondary literature has been cited since the overall purpose is to encourage and facilitate detailed and comparative critical investigation of the plays, not to provide it.

The origin of the book goes back to the early 1970s when interested members of the Leeds Centre for Medieval Studies met on Wednesdays for a working lunch and hammered out the principles of a catalogue and episode-guide to the medieval religious plays. The catalogue was eventually abandoned (partly because of the work being done by Lancashire, in England, and Lippman, Bergmann and Neumann in Germany) but some of the material gathered was published in The staging of religious drama in Europe in the later Middle Ages, edited by Peter Meredith and John Tailby, in 1983.