ABSTRACT

It seems that in 1526, in the Dominican monastery at Auxerre, there was an old pox-ridden monk whose age and infirmities had long prevented him from celebrating mass. Determined nevertheless to honor his God on the Feast of Corpus Christi, he participated in the ceremony and partook of the consecrated bread and wine. Shortly thereafter, en route to his cell, he was suddenly taken ill and vomited in front of the chapter room door. When the holy mess was found, it provoked a hue and cry among the brethren, who were troubled as to how to proceed in the prior's absence. They first protected the sacred vomit from the footsteps of the inattentive passer-by and the appetites of the monastery dogs by means of lit candles and the tabernacle, normally reserved for saying masses for the dead, all the while singing hymns and anthems appropriate to the day. Custom and church teaching dictated that one from among them be so brave as to consume the regurgitated Host. No friar finding himself worthy of so great an honor, it was decided that the consecrated egesta should at least be reverently taken up and transported to the church, along with the soil on which it fell, accompanied by the brethren in full expiatory procession. Once inside the church, the elders concluded that it would be preferable to incinerate the hallowed remains together with the affected soil, and to preserve the ashes in a reliquary, rather than to let the body and blood of Our Lord putrefy and decompose any further. l

This anecdote, along with numerous and vociferous interventions on the part of its first-person narrator, Calvinist theologian Pierre Viret, was presented as footnoted commentary in a ferociously satirical 1554 'translation' of a 1520 Roman missal. 2 What is most noteworthy about it, at least for the purposes of the following argument, is that far from being dismissable as anomalous anti-Catholic propagandistic rant, it can be considered representative of a discursive vernacular style cultivated by contemporary Reform proselytizers, many of whom, including and especially Viret, were orators and polemicists of the first water.