My thesis involves an examination of the dramatic liturgical ritual of the late Anglo-Saxon period and its relationship to other aspects of Christian worship, especially vernacular preaching. One particular ritual, the Visitatio Sepulchri, has received a tremendous amount of attention by critics of early Western drama, who see in it an emergence of the representational mode of drama that characterizes later medieval drama. Because the rest of the Anglo-Saxon liturgy is less 'represen...