A popular upswell of veneration for St. George by the start of the 15th century led to enactments of his battle with the dragon in towns and villages across Europe. This study, which deploys multiple corpuses of indirect evidence about performance, is the first of this phenomenon.

Sometime between the Third Crusade and the creation of the Legenda aurea, the story of St. George of Cappadocia's gruesome mega-martyrdom was augmented with a new and more compelling episode: dragon fighting. To indulge the taste for this, a pan-European phenomenon of St. George plays arose during the 15th century.

This book argues that, unique among miracle plays, St. George's chivalric dragon-slaying was a beast-fight-but with a difference. Though widely believed in, and occasionally seen in the wild, dragons required particular kinds of staging ingenuity. There is no direct evidence of how this was accomplished, but surveys of 15th-century paintings and sculptures show emphases distinct from earlier images while correlating to plausible performative solutions for the riding style and tackle for the mounted St. George, equestrian skills for the horse and rider, military and combat techniques for engaging the dragon, and the relative dexterity of jousting and hunting techniques on horseback and foot that facilitated an exciting storyline.

But whereas humans and horses have predictable physiologies subject to training and materiality, dragons do not: this is one of the challenging facets for understanding enactments, both for choices made at particular places and times and the scope of change-over-time. Puppetry of various kinds was engaged, but where, how, and why? This book asks questions about scale, manoeuvrability, and ontology, complicated by sensorial effects and pyrotechnics, which posit a unique opportunity to broach how art history of high and low traditions, military history, and the stagecraft of marvels was managed over 25 generations ago.