The Visitatio Sepulchri in the latin church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

The presentation of the Visitatio Sepulchri scene by the Augustinian canons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre brought it, for the first time, to its original locus. The popular ritual re-enacts the dialogue between the women and the angel/s at the empty tomb, and the annunciation of the resurrection of Christ. The Jerusalem ritual was modelled upon the Western European dramatic ritual, but its presentation in Anastasis in Jerusalem, on Easter morning, was not a straightforward act of relocating Western liturgy into the recently recovered Catholic centre in the east. Based on a study of a liturgical manuscript from the Holy Sepulchre, the paper examines the ways this and other rituals employ the space of the newly built Crusader church, and the ways in which the Frankish liturgy interacts with the composite audience of twelfth-century Jerusalem.