Ordo Rachelis

The Ordo Rachelis (Play of Rachel), Interfectio Puerorum (Murder of the Children), or Ludus Innocentium (Play of the Innocents) is a medieval dramatic tradition consisting in four plays and based on the Massacre of the Innocents, an event recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, and on the prophecy recorded in the Book of Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not" (31:15, KJV). The prophecy, which Matthew believed to be fulfilled when Herod the Great ordered the slaughter of all boys under two in Bethlehem, looks backwards to Rachel, the matriarch of the Hebrews, and towards her lamentation over the death of her children, the Hebrew children, in the massacre.

The Ordo Rachelis plays were probably performed as part of the liturgy for Innocents Day (28 December).

The first modern critical edition of the Rachel plays was made by Karl Young in 1919. Young believed the plays developed from dramatic kernels in the Epiphany plays of the ninth and tenth centuries into full dramatic treatments of their own in the eleventh and twelfth. The four extensive treatments which Young classified as ordines Rachelis differ considerably. There are the Lamentatio Rachelis from Saint-Martial at Limoges (eleventh century), a lengthy part of an Epiphany play from Laon (twelfth century), a play from Freising (late eleventh century), and another one from Fleury (thirteenth century). Only the last two can be regarded as "separate dramatic unit[s]". In both of them the fuga in Egyptum and the pastores themes have been incorporated, and the Fleury play contains the only extant medieval dramatic representation of the return from Egypt. Chambers has gone so far as to suggest a coalescing of all the Epiphany themes in the Fleury ordo and of a merging of the Rachel and Herod (Herodes) themes in the Freising.

...
Wikipedia