This book reviews the development of confraternities and shows how the procession emerged as a narrative-dramatic mode expressing their ideals and shared mythologies. It analyses the fundamental dramatic characteristics of processions such as the use of banners and the place of spoken action. It shows how the confraternal drama evolved over long time frames, with frequent appeals to tradition, in ways which problematize a number of formalist assumptions about drama and its evolution.

While the range of this processional activity embraces bodies as diverse as religious confraternities, temperance organisations, trade unions, and friendly societies, an analysis of the structures of text, performance, audience and participants common to these activities reveals how festivals and processions turn civic space into a playing space. This study returns the confraternal festival to its place in performance history, considering for the first time these fraternal festivities, ranging from religious processions claiming medieval origins, to masonic ceremonies and Orange processions, to Caranaval as exported to thrive in Brazil, as a distinctive dramatic tradition.