In yet another way the coming of the vernacular affected the character of the religious drama. It had been cosmopolitan; it was to be national: and from the fourteenth century, in spite of a few lendings and borrowings, and of a certain uniformity in the general lines of development, it really requires separate treatment in each of the European countries[305]. In Italy the divergence from the common type was perhaps most marked of all, although I think that Signor D’Ancona and others have perhaps pushed the doctrine of the independence and isolation of Italian drama to an extreme. They consider that it almost began afresh with the religious stirrings of the Umbrian Flagellants in 1260. The _compagnie_ or associations of _disciplinati_, who were the outcome of this thoroughly folk movement, were wont, as they lashed themselves, to sing hymns of praise, _laudes_, whence they got the secondary name of _laudesi_. The lauds were mostly sung in the chapels of the _compagnie_ after mass and a sermon on Sundays. Several fourteenth-century collections are extant, and contain examples intended for use throughout the circle of the ecclesiastical year. Many of them were dialogued, and appear to have been recited in costume with scenic accessories. The dramatic lauds were specifically known as _devozioni_, and by the end of the fourteenth century were in some cases performed rather elaborately upon a _talamo_ or stage in the nave of a church, with _luoghi deputati_ for the accommodation of the chief actors. According to Signor D’Ancona, the _devozioni_, which were composed by poor folk, were taken direct from the liturgy and owed little more than the initial hint or impulse to the liturgical drama; while at the other end of these developments, they became the source of the out-of-door and splendidly-staged _sacre rappresentazioni_ which originated in Florence in the fifteenth century and thence spread to other Italian cities[306]. On this theory it must be observed that the _devozioni_ have not been shown to be independent of the liturgical drama, and that the derivation of the _sacre rappresentazioni_ from the _devozioni_ is purely conjectural. The _sacre rappresentazioni_ were out of doors and produced by the clergy or laity; the _devozioni_, which have not been traced to Florence, were produced indoors by religious guilds of a very distinct type. The _sacre rappresentazioni_, moreover, included subjects, such as the _profeti_, which are not within the cycle of the _devozioni_, but do belong to the liturgical drama. It is at least a tenable view, that the _devozioni_ were merely a backwater of the drama, and that the _sacre rappresentazioni_ were derived, like the fifteenth-century plays of other countries, from the liturgical drama through the medium of such transitional types as those already noted at Padua, Siena, and Cividale. The fact that the only transitional texts preserved are those of the