ABSTRACT
Late medieval culture was heavily weighted with symbolism: its world was one in which virtually anything could speak of or point to virtually anything else. But, more specifically, it was a world in which events and objects might be expected to speak of God, in such a way that (in the words of one of the greatest scholars of late medieval thought, Johan Huizinga) ‘Nothing is too humble to represent and to glorify the sublime’ (Huizinga 1965:198). Qualities or characteristics in common between things, however apparently trivial, indicated a shared participation in a more profound unity. It is not surprising, then, that the devotional and artistic practice of the late Middle Ages tended to more and more complex levels of elaboration. Writers of the fifteenth century often expressed anxiety that the basic coherence of the Christian liturgical year was being overlaid by the multiplication of new feasts and cults; and, of course, the cult of the saints continued to burgeon, often carrying very significant local and political loyalties or aspirations. Much has recently been made of the importance in the later Middle Ages of the relatively new solemnity of Corpus Christi as a focal point of the year—a celebration of the community's identity and integrity, an occasion for restoring broken or threatened bonds of charity: it would be misleading to say that it overshadowed the historic feasts of Christmas and Easter, which were themselves also elaborated with new liturgical and para-liturgical ceremony at this time, but it is undoubtedly true that the position of Corpus Christi near the summer solstice, at the very end of the cycle of biblical feasts (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost) gave a radically new shape to the calendar. The eucharistic Christ, adored on Corpus Christi, could be clearly seen as the focus of all symbolic action, the point at which the transparency of created reality to God was most authoritatively set forth. The act of God through Jesus Christ, an act continued by Christ's authorized ministers, establishes the identity of two apparently dissimilar things, the eucharistic bread and the flesh of Christ (in the words of a late medieval English poem, the eucharistic host ‘is quick [alive] and seems dead’). In celebrating the eucharistic transformation, the people of the late Middle Ages affirmed their faith in a universe held together by God's creative and redeeming grace, and their trust in the sustaining bonds that held them together as a community within the Body of Christ.
