_devozioni_ has perhaps led to an exaggerated estimate of the importance of these. Even liturgical dramas are rare in Italy, although there are sufficient thoroughly to establish their existence. The chroniclers, however, mention one or two events which point to another dramatic tradition in Italy than that of the _devozioni_. At Florence itself, in 1306, there was a show of Heaven and Hell upon the Arno, which though merely pantomimic, may have been based on some dramatic representation of the Last Judgement[307]. At Milan, in 1336, was a _Stella_, in which the _Magi_ rode through the streets, and Herod sat by the columns of San Lorenzo[308]. Both of these performances, like those at Padua and Cividale and the _sacre rappresentazioni_ themselves, were out of doors. It is true that the _sacre rappresentazioni_ fell less into big cycles than did the contemporary plays of other countries: but cycles were not unknown[309], and it must be borne in mind that the extreme beauty and elaboration of the Florentine _mise-en-scène_ made a limited scheme, on grounds both of time and expense, almost imperative. With out-of-door plays climatic conditions began to be of importance. Even in sunny France, Christmas is not exactly the season to hang about the market-place looking at an interminable drama. It is not to be denied that Christmas plays continued to be occasionally acted well through the fifteenth century[310], but the number of these, compared with the Passions, is small[311]. Even Easter weather is not invariably genial. Nor, as the cycles lengthened, was the attachment of them to any one of the feasts, whose events they commemorated, a matter of first-rate importance. A tendency set in towards playing them as far as possible in the long warm days of the summer months. The first Whitsuntide performances are those at Cividale in 1298 and 1303; and Whitsuntide became a very favourite date[312]. At Florence the great patronal feast and procession of St. John the Baptist on June 24 was a natural occasion for _sacre rappresentazioni_[313]. Another high day for the cyclical drama from the fourteenth century onwards, notably in England[314] and Spain[315], and to a much less degree in Germany[316] and France[317], was the recently-established feast of Corpus Christi. This, the most materialistic of all the Church’s celebrations, is in honour of the mystery of the transubstantiated sacrament. It originated locally in an alleged revelation to Juliana, a Cistercian religious of Liège. Pope Urban IV designed in 1264 to make it a universal festival, but he died in the same year, and the bull which he had issued remained inoperative until it was confirmed by Clement V at the council of Vienne in 1311. Corpus Christi day was the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. An office was compiled for it by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the leading ceremony was a great procession in which the host, escorted by local