R C: M L F B C Nils Holger Petersen T he two main terms in the title of this essay — ‘ritual’ and ‘creation’ — belong to different discourses, and it is not obvious how or to what extent they may be brought into fruitful contact with each other. It is the somewhat more modest purpose of this essay to try to establish some connections between medieval liturgical celebrations and the word ‘creation’ in its theological as well as aesthetic uses. At the outset, I shall briefly offer some clarifications concerning the concepts of ritual, liturgy, and creation. Since the discussion here will only deal with ‘ritual’ in the historical con- text of medieval liturgy, I shall start with a brief discussion of the notions of medieval liturgy and ritual. Medieval liturgy has recently been defined as the ‘ritualized public celebration of the faith of the Church’. Although the concept of liturgy, which was not used during the Middle Ages, is not quite well-defined for the medieval Latin church, its place in modern scholarship is so pervasive as to make it impossible to avoid the term. In any case, the modern scholarly The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. by T. J. Heffernan and E. A. Matter (Kalama- zoo: Medieval Institute Publications, ), pp. –. See C. Clifford Flanigan, Kathleen M. Ashley, and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Liturgy as So- cial Performance: Expanding the Definitions’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, pp. –. See also Nils Holger Petersen, ‘Representation in European Devotional Rituals: The Question of the Origin of Medieval Drama in Medieval Liturgy’, in The Origins of Theatre in Ancient Greece and Beyond: From Ritual to Drama, ed. by Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and