Christmas and Easter themes represent the greatest number of liturgical plays. Other New Testament themes included the Raising of Lazarus, the Conversion of Saint Paul, and plays about the Blessed Virgin. Highly developed plays about Lazarus are found in the Benediktbeuern Passion Play and in the Fleury playbook. The plays about the Blessed Virgin, destined to attain great popularity in the vernacular miracle plays, followed scriptural or apocryphal texts in the liturgical drama. The four most important feasts celebrated the Presentation, on November 21, the Annunciation, on March 25, the Purification, on February 2, and the Assumption, on August 15. Of these, the drama at Avignon in 1385 for the Presentation is the most ambitious, with twenty-one characters, among them symbols, foreshadowing the later morality plays, and a complete set of rubrics for the stage. The plays for the Assumption are rather limited in scope, and some seem to have been of an indecorous type.

Other than the Ordo prophetarum, Old Testament themes were limited in subject. The most important themes were Isaac and Rebecca, Joseph and his brethren, and Daniel. Liturgical plays of nonscriptural origin were based on legends or miracles of the saints. They did not attain great popularity in the church dramas, but they were to reach enormous proportions in the vernacular plays of the late Middle Ages. The only saint to be widely treated in church plays is Saint Nicholas, about whom there are four known legends in dramatic form.

Church drama represents a gradual development from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and seems fully developed by the fourteenth. It was a drama essentially in Latin, though some texts in the vernacular appear as early as the twelfth century. For the most part, it followed scriptural texts, with some additions from apocrypha and popular characters, such as the spice merchant in the Easter plays or the midwives in the Christmas plays. The actors were principally clerics; hence, costumes were liturgical vestments. Roles for women were not unknown, especially in monasteries of nuns. Although most of the plays are serious and solemn in nature, a certain amount of buffoonery was tolerated. Church dramas were international, with the same type of play appearing in widely separated geographic areas. Some themes are indigenous to a country, such as the Officium stellae to France, but on the whole they extended throughout all of Western Europe and are even known in the East. By the fourteenth century, however, they came to be supplanted by the vernacular drama, for reasons listed below.