ABSTRACT
The Eucharist has been the prime example of how authority artificially imposed significance on matter and material culture was subordinated to or even erased by mythologies that perpetuated and propped up non-material power. For Anglicans as for Catholics, the sacrament of the Eucharist was the centre of gravity of religious community. Eucharistic theology was not itself an elision or co-option of materiality, nor, for Protestants, a cosmetic interruption of the natural objects in its grasp. Greenblatt foregrounds the Eucharist in part because its anxieties cast a shadow on the literature of the period. This seems to be a negative way of acknowledging the primacy of Eucharistic language and its organic connection with poetry. If baptism is the precondition of poetry, the Eucharistic encounter is its recurring condition. Poems communicate with God and with a putative congregational reader using historically laden images and symbols as vessels of meaning and vehicles of presence.
