Interpreting the Role of Christ and His Donkey: The Palmesel as Actor in the Processional Theatre of Palm Sunday

Abstract

One of the more popular features of the processional theatre of Palm Sunday in medieval Germany and its neighbours was a life-size, wheeled, wooden image of Christ on a donkey. First recorded in Augsburg in the late tenth century, the palmesel (palm donkey) was at the height of its urban ecclesiastical presence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Although the Protestant Reformation ended the use of the palmesel in much of northern Europe, it remained popular, albeit as an increasingly folk tradition, in southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland until it was suppressed there, too, during the late eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment. The palmesel remains in use in a few communities in the Tyrol, Bavaria, Alsace, and lowland Bolivia. Most surviving palmesels, however, are now housed in museums, or displayed in churches where they were once used. Scholarship on the palmesel has largely come from German-speaking folklorists and, more recently, international art historians. Using examples from Augsburg (c. 970), Zurich (c. 1261-81), Essen (thirteenth-century), Biberach (c. 1530-35), Verona (1690), and San Jose de Chiquitos, Bolivia (2011), I assess the palmesel here less as an art object than as a dramatic participant in the processional theatre of Palm Sunday