ABSTRACT
AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR, THE VAST MAJORITY OF CHRISTIANS IN THE Middle Ages had an immediate and personal experience of anthropophagy. In swallowing a consecrated wafer that did not merely represent the body of Christ, but was the body of Christ, the medieval believer not only partook of human and divine flesh, but was incorporated into a community of theophagists for whom theophagy was a central and fundamental aspect of the church. The ritual eating of the sacriflced body of the god is a remarkable symbol that gains much of its charge from the juxtaposition of the sacred and the taboo, but the very power of this combination cannot be contained within the ritual itself; once implemented, such a ritual gathers its own meanings and valences that manifest themselves in narrative and practice. For this reason, a number of complex late medieval narratives that explore the possible implications of the eucharist cluster around that sacrament, some of which accept and elaborate upon the possibilities inherent in the mass to the point of a grotesque realism, others of which project such participatory anthropophagy onto communities outside the Christian body, and still others of which reconfigure the cannibalism in the eucharist to arrive at a carefully negotiated and unexceptionable position. In this chapter, I examine some of the ways in which the
and transcends, appears in these manifestations, first in the eucharistic miracles and visions of the literalizing of the host, and secondly in the appearance of narratives of cannibalistic beliefs and rituals about nonChristians. Not only do these narratives overlap, but both function to divide heretic and believer, Christian and infidel, underscoring the importance of communion to a church struggling to defme orthodoxy and to overcome regional and doctrinal variations of belief and ritual in order to establish what Miri Rubin has called a “sacramental world view.”2 Finally, I would like to address the impact of sacramentalism on popular secular narratives, specifically, the eruption of eucharistic symbolism into the profoundly secular space of the fabliaux, marking a negotiation of sexuality, cannibalism, and communion. The richness and density of eucharistic symbolism place the mass in a unique position within late medieval religiosity, as an assurance of salvation, as a means of direct and intimate access to the divine, and as a metaphor for the body of the faithful and for the church itself. More practically, communion functioned to define and reinscribe the authority of the priesthood, to reify church teaching, and to police the increasingly permeable frontier separating orthodoxy and heresy. Remarkably, then, the mass helped maintain clerical hierarchy at the same time as it offered an individual experience of God. Yet the eucharist did not take on such critical importance until the High Middle Ages, with the eleventh century onward being marked by such developments as the coining of the term “transubstantiation,” the declaration of the doctrinal status of transubstantiation at the Fourth Lateran Council, the establishment and rapid growth in popularity of a feast of Corpus Christi, and the trend toward identifying personal religiosity with the suffering humanity of Christ, manifested in the dedication of cults as well as in bodily practices. At the same time, as Maggie Kilgour points out, the church negotiated a slippage of terms that elided distinctions among the three holy “bodies”; originally the historically physical body of Christ had been referred to as “proprium et verum corpus” the body of Christ in the host referred to as “corpus mysticum” and the body of the church and its members referred to as “corpus Christi”At some point during the twelfth century, the increased insistence on the real presence necessitated the use of the term “corpus verum” to refer to the host. “Corpus mysticum” would come to be used to refer to the body of the church, while “corpus Christi” would come to
and identity.
