Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence by Nerida Newbigin (review)

Making a Play for God is Nerida Newbigin’s life work, gathering together and updating forty years of specialist research and publication on the medieval and early modern religious theatre of Florence. Unsurprisingly, the study is an exhaustive feat of scholarship, but it is also one in which accessibility to an anglophone audience has been scrupulously achieved. The study covers rappresentazione sacre, the generic term for religious plays, including the corpus of sacra rappresentazione, which are specifically Florentine religious plays in octaves introduced and closed by an angel, and also includes those productions described by the term festa, which may refer to a play but equally to a feast day with celebratory and mimetic elements. The owning confraternities do not use the terminology consistently, so the policy in the study is to be inclusive. That inclusivity also covers the nature of surviving evidence, which encompasses texts in manuscript and print as well as those mentioned in name only in financial and other ephemeral accounts.