The Notre Dame Medieval Mystery Cycle

Mystery plays were a popular form of publicly-staged drama in the Middle Ages, involving town guilds and other groups across Europe acting out cycles of Biblical narratives, from Creation to Last Judgement and everything in between. These plays were wonderfully dramatic, deeply contemplative, and at times very funny, with witty dialogue and physical comedy making them entertaining and meaningful to people of all ages and backgrounds.

Ashley Castelino, Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Notre Dame Medieval Institute, brings this medieval tradition to the modern day as Notre Dame stages its own mystery cycle over the course of an afternoon.

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Credits

Ashley Castelino

Dr. Ashley Castelino is the Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Notre Dame Medieval Institute. Holding a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, Castelino researches food, medicine, dogs, and other animals across medieval literature. With the Medieval Institute, he engages students and community members through public events from lectures to the Institute’s famous Medieval Tailgates.

Fresh from helping organize the latest cycle of Oxford Medieval Mystery Plays, Castelino brings his experience to adapt the tradition to Notre Dame’s unique character as a Catholic university with exceptionally diverse talents across the arts.

Ashley Castelino

Notre Dame Medieval Institute

Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, with over fifty faculty fellows from thirteen different departments and an unparalleled library and growing manuscript collection, is one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most prestigious centers for understanding the Middle Ages. The institute’s conferences and lecture series bring the world’s leading scholars to campus, while graduate and undergraduate programs train future medieval scholars and leaders in all walks of life.

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Christina Fitzgerald

Christina M. Fitzgerald is Professor of English at the University of Toledo, Ohio, specializing in medieval literature. As an expert on medieval drama, Professor Fitzgerald is the author of a book on The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (2007), co-editor of The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (2012) with John T. Sebastian, and editor of The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants (2018). She has experience bringing medieval drama to life through classroom projects and as a consultant for the 2025 York Plays in Toronto.

Christina Fitzgerald

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Funding & Support

This is a partner program of the 2027 Notre Dame Arts Biennial, supported with funding from the Notre Dame Arts Initiative.

This project is also made possible with funding from Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute.