Modem Theology 15:2 April 1999
ISSN 0266-7177
WHOSE EUCHARIST?
EUCHARISTIC IDENTITY
AS HISTORICAL SUBJECT
MIRI RUBIN
In the interview for my current job, as a History Tutor at Pembroke College
Oxford, one of the questions posed to me, towards the end, was, "What are
you doing studying the Eucharist?" As the interview had gone rather well
up to then, I decided that this was a friendly question, one which would
allow me to explain an intellectual autobiography, rather than a trick, or
hostile one. I thus unfolded a truncated version of the following story, and
that version must have satisfied my interviewers, a panel of eleven men,
since they elected me unanimously to the post.
The story related to the intellectual aspirations which prevailed and
still prevail in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, my alma mater.1
There the
teaching of history is contained within frames defined by the presence or
absence of Jews: there was the department of Jewish History which covered
all periods and places, and then the department of General History, which
excluded Jews from the history of Europe and the rest of the West. Asian and
African histories were studied in separate departments. It was thus possible
to reach the fifth year of the study of History, in my case 1980, without ever
having come across Jews: I had studied Ottoman history, the Crusades,
medieval trade, Roman citizenship, and the Jews had been absent from
all of these themes and pedagogic programmes. In 1979 I embarked on a
methodological course for MA students the theme of which was "Popular
religion and popular culture in early modern Europe". Here we encountered
the then new and fresh ideas of Keith Thomas, Natalie Davis, Robert
Muchembled, Jean-Claude Schmitt, and were each charged with the task
of writing an extended research essay on a source for the study of popular
religion. Being a medievalist, I chose to look at medieval drama for my
Miri Rubin
Pembroke College, Oxford ΟΧ11DW, UK
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999 Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA
198 Miri Rubin
paper. I dutifully went to the English department, acquainted myself with
the hundreds of brown volumes of EETS, and began to read the plays known
as Corpus Christi drama.
What is the Corpus Christi drama? What indeed is Corpus Christi? These
are questions to which later work, indeed some twelve years later, would
aim to provide some answers. But the beginning of a search for an answer
was my task back then. And it began with an unravelling of the feast
of the Eucharist—Corpus Christi—and then the Eucharist itself. I did so
without the stirring of personal memory or snippets of childhood rhymes,
without smells and sounds that still flow from the many public and private
manifestations of the Eucharist for those who grow up in Europe or the
Americas. As opposed to those who studied Jews alone, and who felt
equivocal about investigating the Christian mysteries too closely, I did not
even feel that: not revulsion, not fascination, just the dutiful curiosity that
well-trained and hard-working historians entertain vis-à-vis their subjects as
a matter of course.
Yet despite the attempt to define two separate historical projects: the
General, scientific, largely German-inspired history of the Department of
General History, or the providential and pious Jewish History, when I began
to do research for my PhD in Cambridge, I found that my chosen theme, hospital
formation and charity in England in the Middle Ages, nonetheless
brought me in touch with Jews again and again: sermons which encouraged
Christians to give to the poor often cited the example of Jews, famed for the
care which they offered to their own: ending with the hortative question
"Have you ever seen a Jew begging in the streets?"2
When I explored the
endowment of hospitals such as St John's Oxford, it became clear that
hospital-founders often benefited from deals struck with Jews who were able
to amass properties pawned and sometimes lost to them, since they could
not undertake land tenure in fee. Jewish businessmen were thus keen to sell
the lands, and enterprising founders of charitable institutions—hospitals
and academic colleges—accumulated the lands needed to found: charitable
creation enabled byJewish legal incapacity. I noted these cases, this confluence,
but engaged little with the realities of life behind them.3
It was in the years of research for Corpus Christi, in the attempt to explore
as a sort of historical ethnographer the practices and meanings which came to
be related to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages, that I came to the closest
and most arresting realisation of the impossibility of excising Jews from the
history of Europe. It was then that I came to appreciate the deadly intimacy
of the relationship between Christians and Jews. Never before had an historical
environment been more telling and rich in such messages than the
terrains of Eucharistie practices: from the meal at the Eucharist's inception, the
Last Supper, to the many ways in which the Jews came to be the central
endorsers and guarantors of the Eucharistie moment of Christian culture
after around 1200. The Eucharist developed out of the discussions of
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
Whose Eucharist? 199
theologians and the reasoning of canonists, the political aspirations of papal
officials, and the pastoral dilemmas raised by bishops and preachers; it
was endorsed by the formulations of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215),
was made of the immediacy of materiality, which was nonetheless always
qualified: the Eucharist as Christ's body was not to be seen like other objects,
nor was its materiality amenable to the changes which operate on other ingested
foods. Periodically, it miraculously revealed its qualities for all to see.
Increasingly, itbecame something of a touchstone. Ever truthful it distinguished
between the real and the false, ever correct it could delve into intentions
beyond appearances and ritual form. It was a prime marker which people
wore with pride, rejected with passion, and claimed with invention and
even audacity. It alone could tell true claims from delusions: the Eucharist
alone in its many-formed self-fashioning.
It is the century which saw the pastoral dissemination and parochial absorption
of all the dictates and the promises of the Eucharist, the thirteenth
century, which also saw the making of the powerful tale of its abuse in the
hands of Jews. In this narrative were imputed to Jews inventive stratagems
for the acquisition of the host and its desecration and shaming, stratagems
worthy of those keen Eucharistie purveyors, the holy women of the Low
Countries described so lovingly by medieval writers such as Jacques de Vitry
and Thomas of Cantimpré and by contemporaries such as Caroline Bynum
and André Vauchez.4
The questions which Jews were said to have posed to
the Eucharist—"If he is God let him show himself to us"—echoed those
which were attributed to doubting layfolk, weak priests and all manner of
Eucharistie players in the dramas of exempla and inquisition. Yet the narrative
which attached such questions to Jews differed, inasmuch as its end
was violent and finite: the Jew/perpetrator was destroyed, as were his kin
and neighbours and often tens of communities in the neighbourhood of his
town. The Eucharist's most deliberate foe called forth the most excellent
manifestation, and brought forth greater violence than any other doubter or
questioner could elicit. A great intimacy thus developed between the Eucharist
and the Jew: the Jew came to be told through his Eucharistie doubts, and the
Eucharist through the Jew's rejection.
The powerful signification of the Eucharist, that which lent to it the
charisma that bestowed identity and dignity on so many, was located in its
many and rich associations. It was food, it was God, it was small and mundane,
it was lofty and impenetrable. It was white, it was red. It was manmade,
it was made for humanity. Its quality as food brought it home, into
the intimacy of hearth, into spheres of women, and thus, imaginably, of doubt
and error, into the nurture and protection of children. Claudine Fabre-Vassas
has recently unfolded the rich ethnography which related Jews, Christians
and the pig in her The Singular Beast, based on the historically situated
observation of pig-rearing, killing and eating in the south of France.5
She
shows how the intricate processes of bleeding and baking still resonate with
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
200 Miri Rubin
Eucharistie meanings, how pig and child enjoy still a symbolic equivalence
which renders the Jew the enemy of both. Current practices may possess
echoes of the medieval apocryphal treatment of Christ's childhood, wherein
Christ is said to have been shunned by the parents of Jewish children. When
he appeared to seek his playmates their parents hid them in the oven, and
when they opened the oven they found pigs, not children, therein.6
The image of baking similarly linked Jews to the most intimate space of
the female, and even the Marian, body. Images of the female body in the
Middle Ages likened the womb to an oven, to a secret and dark but nurturing
space; they also named Mary the oven of the Eucharist, portraying her
as the baker of the Eucharist. Inasmuch as Jews rejected the Virgin Birth,
they also rejected the hallowed space in which Christ was born, as enemies
of the bread baked therein.7
A famous early medieval tale has presaged the
meaning of these images. The tale of the Jewish Boy ended with the Jewish
father throwing his son, who had come to appreciate Eucharistie truth when
he received communion with Christian school-friends, into an oven, only to
be saved by the Virgin and to convert to Christianity.
The association of the inner, the private, the whole and the unsullied, with
Christianity through the mediation of the image of the Virgin further served
to enhance the difference of those who did not accept the underpinnings of
the whole salvific system, and within it Mary's special niche. Such were not
only Jews but those dualists who abhorred the notion of God's birth of a
woman, like those to whom the words of the Dominican preacher Moneta
of Cremona were directed in the mid-thirteenth-century: "Why do you say
that a pregnant woman is like a devil, when Luke attests that she is full of
the Holy Spirit?"8
It was that fertility of the inner sanctum which was the
essence of femininity, full of secrets and of potential fecundity, which Jews
were accused of defiling and abusing: in the desecration of women and in the
magic allegedly operated on pregnant women in the working of maleficent
abortions.9
The trail which connected femininity with incipient sanctity was
clearly threatened by the maleficium which Jews and Jewish doctors were seen
to work.
The multivalent imaginings which the Eucharist inspired further expressed
in their twists and turns the many possibilities of appropriation which
it offered. In the niceties of their fine theological-philosophical distinctions as
they discussed the fortune of the Eucharist during digestion by the Christian's
body, Franciscan and Dominican theologians found an occasion to mark
their difference from each other.10
Franciscans, who cleaved to the humanity
of Christ, were particularly wedded to the notions of continued corporality
which became one with the body of the recipients. Dominicans insisted
rather on the strict meaning of accidents, so that once the Eucharist no longer
resembled itself, it could no longer pose a serious intellectual theological
dilemma, and was not to be discussed in pastoral exchange. If Franciscans
were willing to dwell at least awhile upon the possibility that something
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
Whose Eucharist? 201
meaningful occurred when a mouse or a cat occasioned to receive the consecrated
host, Dominicans were able to establish their intellectual identities
and priorities by finding primafacie reasons for stopping short of discussing
the problem. Intellectual identities, not only styles, were forged in debates
about the Eucharist. And yet even the friars with their sophisticated, subtle
preaching and single-minded devotion to pastoral and ecclesiastical causes,
could never compete with the simple privilege of the priest in orders, perhaps
that is why so many were ordained in the later medieval centuries. To
St Francis the respect due to the person who handled his Lord in his hand
every day, and upon whom even he, Francis, depended for access to Christ's
Body, was awe-inspiring, possessing a mystique and power which no amount
of preaching and exemplary living could rival.
The image offered by the Eucharist could be widely inclusive or insistently
obscure and exclusive. Think of late medieval images of the mill of the host
or the mystic wine-press, those images for contemplation and decoration of
psalter and bibles of monastic houses of southern Germany. Possessing the
habit of allegorical reading of scripture, and with access to the glosses, one
could, just as art historians can today, unravel the images and their many
layers of meaning, binding the Old and New Testaments through the
promise, and then the fulfilment of a Eucharistie Christian history. Their
images circulated in these exclusive circles, in monastic houses which in the
later Middle Ages also consumed quite avidly a diet of tales and protocols
of a quite gory nature, the confessions of Jews in the course of well-known
trials for ritual-murder such as the famous case of Trent in 1475,11
hostdesecration
such as that of Passau in 1477.12
The details of confessions dragged
out of accused persons with torture, and possessing truth value as vindications
of Eucharistie claims, were copied and re-copied for no administrative
or legal purpose but for the reading and edification, the exemplary and
titillating value, of the transgressive and the dangerous.
The Eucharist's enormous power and promise and the centrality of its
location within a system at once liturgical and pastoral, allowed for such
appropriations, claims and uses to be made around and about it: what is it
about the Eucharist that particularly promoted such incessant creativity? By
being so centrally positioned, by occupying the centre stage of discussion
and emphasis, the Eucharist denuded other symbols and symbolisers of what
Lacan called "a second life", of anything beyond the brute existence, where
nothing is really at stake, and of which nothing lasts.13
The Eucharist's promise
was of that second life of meaning, such as Antigone wished to bestow upon
her brother; it is that capacity to bear meaning, to transcend, that is denied
the Eucharist's perceived enemies.14
Its foes were the enemies of signification,
and thus fell short, were crude, passing and lonely. This qualitative difference
was a crucial one for those who embraced campaigns of moral revival
and invigoration, those who hoped exactly to animate and imbue Christian
European polities with the challenges of renewal and reform. Such voices
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
202 Miri Rubin
were heard repeatedly and strongly between 1350 and 1450 and were ultimately
engaged in the processes of refiguration encompassed within the two
Reformations.
These movements against corruption, loss of direction and decline—
institutional, political, environmental, civic and economic—were mightily
involved in the offering of Eucharistie purity as a rallying cry and discipline
for their adherents.
In these calls for change made by late medieval reformers ranging from
Jean Gerson to Nicholas of Cusa, from Henry of Langenstein to Giovanni
da Capistrano—Eucharistie renewal, remodelling of liturgical practice,
re-drawing of the boundaries between lay-person and priest—coincided
with a resounding call against usury, and often against those rulers whose
needs allowed usury to flourish. The type of moral cleansing envisaged was
often accompanied by various types of expulsions—of Jews, of beggars, of
prostitutes, of Lombards. It is interesting to note the operation of town
councils within these politics of moral hygiene. Overbearing and interventionist
town-councils after the Black Death and in the ensuing decades of
endemic plague, led the way in attempting to provide clean water and clear
air. Theirs was the language of good stewardship, good house-keeping,
that intersected so fruitfully with the language of moral cleansing, as programmes
related to sumptuary legislation and against usury took root. The
triumphant Eucharist offered a symbol for the type of political and moral
order they desired. If usury and begging were the product of ill-value
and the vicissitudes of laziness, of moral turpitude, then the Eucharist was
pristine and clean, unchanging in value, utterly reliable. A sub-section of
tales about the Eucharist associated it with coinage, as it turned miraculously
into coins, or was mistaken for coins. It was after all inscribed like coins and
deep thought could develop about the nature of its perimeter, its edges.
Probably the greatest exponent of the tension between the Eucharist's properties
and the finitude of its geometrical, spherical shape was exploited by
St Bernardino of Sienna, a leading reformer, preacher against usury and
Jews: in his devotional mind the Eucharist became an emblem, an external
sign of great force and coherence, as the Eucharistie host, that sphere came
to burn in the colours of blood and flesh, blood surrounded with the circumference
of flesh, yet still embossed with the anagram of Christ.
The host desecration narrative and populist vindication of anti-usuary
campaigns were clearly intertwined, as the case of Prague in 1389 demonstrates.
There Judenpolitik stood as a contentious issue between clergy and
King, between clergy and the King's men. The synodal statutes of October
1381 railed against usury:
since the sin of usury is a horrible and detestable crime and it occurs
frequently nowadays not only among common folk but also among men
of high status, in many ways both under the guise of profit and through
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
Whose Eucharist? 203
counterfeit, which we report with sorrow, because of the things done by
the same Jews and by other infidels to taunt us, and this creates great
scandal in the hearts of the faithful of God's church.15
One of the bearers of these complaints in eloquent homiletics and devotional
poetry was the Archbishop of Prague, John of Jenstein (c. 1348-1400). In a
Christmas sermon delivered some time in the 1380s, he argued that the
property which they accumulated and the privileges Jews enjoyed favoured
them over clergy; their influence in high places rendered Jews more powerful
than magnates and churchmen.16
The subject of usury immediately followed,
and Jews were accused of pauperising prince and magnate alike, and
then using their riches in the service of Antichrist their Lord.17
Another
vehement critic of the Jews and their protector was the Augustinian abbot
Ludolf of Sagan (d. 1422; abbot from 1394), who saw the king, in a period of
grave lapses in justice, rejected by clergy and people, by nobles, townsmen
and peasants, and accepted by Jews alone.18
Thus the treatment of the Jews
was seen as leading to pride which resulted in offences against Christians
and their Saviour, as expressed in Prague in 1389:
since the Christian people could no longer pretend and bear, in just
revenge of the blasphemy (committed) against the Eucharist ... on the
feast of Easter, moved by zeal, it burnt those very Jews and their houses
by fire.19
The political context and the anti-Jewish discourse are emphasised in
these reports of the city's actions in 1389. Because of the King's absence, the
crowd was drawn by the leadership of John (Gesco); the city elders supervised
the collection of Jewish property, on expectation of a heavy fine. Moreover,
the King placed armed men around the Jewish houses to reclaim them.
As mentioned in the "Passion of the Jews", the bodies of the Jews were dug
up and burnt, removing evidence and cleansing the city of their "usurious
fats". In the face of the loot offered by the Jewish houses, some claimed that
this should not be touched as it was the product of usurious gain. The rhetoric
of the report on Prague, within the context of clerical complaints which we
have already noted, allows the offence of host desecration to reverberate as
only one instance of a greater evil, that which was preached regularly and
insidiously, Jewish usury.20
It is this anti-usury discourse which structured some of the memories of
the massacre. This peculiar association with usury, which intersected with
the accusation of host desecration, was carried over into another type of
writing, that of the physician and homiletic writer John Lange of Wetzlar
(1365-c. 1427). A scholar of the University of Prague and Doctor of Medicine,
who wrote texts on the management of epidemics, John also composed
didactic and devotional works, the most famous of which is the Dialogus
super Magnificat ("Dialogue on the Magnificat"), a work of 2668 hexameters
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
204 Miri Rubin
dedicated to the Archbishop of Worms.21
John Lange turned the telling of the
events of Prague 1389 into a polemic against King Wenzel and his servants,
especially Minister Sigmund Huber. The King is cast as a supporter of Jews,
while the crowd take just revenge. The King protected his Jews for nefarious
reasons:
O kings, kings! Be shamed for such a crime! The usurious gain on the
capital which is earned by the accursed people, in which you yourselves
are proven to be accursed usurers.
You have done this not on account of them, or because of their virtues,
in which they are experts, nor for reason of justice, which attaches to
them, rather on account of their vile silver and other gifts of gold. You
know that they frequently enact nefarious acts against Christ's faithful,
and you have consumed gifts but have worn down the justice of the law
again and again.22
John Lange is confident of the moral opposition which the case of Prague
demonstrated—between protectors of Christ's body and protectors of Jews.
He accuses the royal councillors of having "sharpened" the king against the
citizens of Prague, thus allowing for the all too real possibility that Christ's
body be abused again.23
***
We see here a local instantiation of the power of the Eucharist to crystallise
fear about value, identity and authentic rule. True piety, that of the people,
was vindicated against a miscreant ruler. The Eucharist was thus inserted
by the power of its unassailable truth into moments of authentication. Its
proximity with coins—in shape, in countervailing the character of usury and
Jewishness, in its emblematic value—recurs interestingly throughout late
medieval culture. Paul Strohm's England's Empty Throne contains breathtaking
pages about late medieval desire to associate Eucharistie error, such
as was preached and practised by Lollards, with counterfeiting, fraud,
treason and particularly that of passing bad coins.24
An elaborate metaphor
developed around the socially disruptive and inherently evil effect of fraudulent
tampering with a country's currency, which received very severe
punishment at the hand of the state; it came to express the error of those
who tampered with the Eucharist and its value. If coinage and currency
was a tangible and communicable token of a real power and majesty,
possessive of intrinsic value validated by its symbolic appearance, the
Eucharist was similarly both itself valuable and representative of powers
and promise extending from it. Yet both were vulnerable: almost anyone
could handle each, and repay that generosity of circulation with abuse—
clipping, deriding, devaluing. These perpetrators were the mis-guided, and
divisive. They could only see immediate profit, short-term gain—usurers,
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
Whose Eucharist? 205
Jews, coin-clippers, fraudsters, Lollards—oblivious to the system of value and
community which their actions eroded. Both deserved swift response action,
exemplary punishment, and the images of both interacted and interpenetrated
in specific political contexts such as late fourteenth-century Prague, early
Lancastrian England, late fifteenth-century Bavaria.
***
The Eucharist offered not only a mystery to engage minds for life-times, a
vocation and badge of difference for priests, the comforting companion for
female religious, the focus for anti-clerical sentiment and religious discontent,
the banner for reformers and populist leaders of crusades against Jews. It has
also offered interesting trails for contemporary scholars in their investigations
and explorations of self and vocation. I have already shared with you some
of my own experiences leading up to my standing here among you. This conference's
organiser, Sarah Beckwith, has combined disciplinary approaches
—theology, social theory, literary theory—to produce Christ's Body.25
For
Sarah Beckwith, the Eucharist crystallises some central dialectics within late
medieval social and cultural organisation: that which values the material—
work, the body—and yet attempts to transcend their prescriptive contours.
She has turned sacramentality into more than an aspect of liturgical practice
and into an epistemological category, which characterises, among others,
displays of power and the very action of drama. Among us is Eamon Duffy,
the author of The Stripping of the Altars, in which tens of pages situate the
mass within a system of traditional religion, in a sensitive rendering of an
ideal type of mass, with an emphasis on aspects of both individual and
collective participation.26
For Duffy the Eucharist enabled vast creativity and
extension from a set of official versions of liturgy and practice into the many
instances of localities and temporalities. David Aers has responded rather
vigorously to Duffy's book, seeing in it an interpretation of late medieval
religion which pays insufficient attention to inequality of access to symbols,
and to the entrenched conformity in social and inter-personal matters which
conventional religion forced upon people. According to Aers, Duffy also fails
to appreciate the currents of anti-clerical and anti-sacramental sentiment
which characterised late medieval communities.27
Although I feel that Aers'
and Duffy's positions and sympathies are probably closer than the surface
exchange might suggest, we have here the Eucharist and sacramentality
used as touchstones, as keys to a whole set of interpretations: for Duffy, to a
world alleviated, enriched and informed by the routines which parishioners
created around and with conventional sacramental religion; for Aers, to a
community expressed through a shared stream of critical engagements with
hegemonic religion, one which fundamentally strives for corrective operation
of justice, perhaps in keeping with a pre-sacramental Christianity, and which
helps bind communities around such creations.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
206 Miri Rubin
The lamented Bob Scribner, who created the social history of the Reformation,
was an adept reader of the lingering sacramentalities of Lutheran
culture and practice. He too used the Eucharist as a window upon the social,
political and communal worlds of sixteenth-century German people.28
Recently Stephen Greenblatt used the Eucharist as cypher for the understanding
of Hamlet and for a number of canonical texts of early modern
England. The Eucharist's dialectics of presence and absence, authority and
power, of faith and betrayal, make it a lingering riddle in a "disenchanted"
world obsessed with Protestant identity and authority and in constant
polemical tension with Catholicism.29
At the same time, Greenblatt has been
writing about his Jewish childhood, just as David Mamet has written about
his memories of childhood Passovers.30
I suggest that there is something
attractive, both pristine and infinitely inscribable, utterly incomprehensible
as a literal entity and thus utterly demanding of other types of interpretation,
to those who have not consumed the Eucharist. I suggest further that while
those aspects of transubstantiation that have always moved some Christians
and many non-Christians to reflection on the cannibalistic, improbable,
unsavoury associations with the notion of ingesting a God who was human,
remain somewhat repellent, it is the breadth of symbolic possibilities, the
simplicity and accessibility of the Eucharist which nonetheless draws to it
scholars who are clearly not Christian, or ambivalent Christians. The Eucharist
today offers scope for the most fervent intellectual interdisciplinarity, it requires
constant association and sharing of associations. Working on it creates
communities and demonstrates those aspects of cultural production which
are meaningful to many of us engaged in the historicist unravelling of religious
cultures.
The Eucharist's plurality of appeal and openness to use—both when a
high price had to be paid for expressing one's ideas about it, and nowadays
in the relative freedom of intellectual inquiry—offers the pristine slate of
representation, total innocence, total power, vulnerability as the potential
victim at the hands even of its most fervent adherents. Its utter inscrutability
has disconcerted Jews then and now; its malleability has challenged projects
of historical ethnographic inquiry; its ability to be regenerated, and endlessly
shared, marks a place in our historical subjectivities that, as these
collected essays doubtless show, has much to reveal to us about the pluralities
of the past as well as those which we inhabit.
NOTES
1 For the development of departmental demarcations see A Rein, "History and Jewish
History, Together or Separate the Definition of Historical Studies at the Hebrew University,
1925-1935", The History of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem Origins and Beginnings [m
Hebrew], eds M Heyd and S Katz (Jerusalem Magnes Press 1997), pp 516-540
2 The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373-1389), ed M A Devlm, Camden
series 85-86 (London, 1954), I, sermon 35, pp 148-149, sermon 44, pp 196-197, II, sermon
90, ρ 411
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
Whose Eucharist? 207
3 Min Rubm, Chanty and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge Cambridge University
Press, 1987), pp 273-275
4 C W Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast the Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
(Berkeley, CA University of California Press, 1987), André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later
Middle Ages (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1997)
5 C Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast Jews, Christians and the Pig, trans C Volk (New York,
NY Columbia University Press, 1997)
6 Min Rubm, Gentile Tales The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven and
London Yale University Press, 1999), pp 24-25
7 M Rubm, Corpus Christi the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge Cambridge
University Press, 1991), ρ 145
8 Moneta de Cremona, Adversus catharos et valdenses libri quinqué, ed Τ A Ricchmi (Rome
Palladi, 1743), col 335b
9 For some of the accusations which might arise around accidents or malpractice see Μ Ρ
Lillich, Rainbow like and Emerald Stained Glass in Lorraine in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries (University Park and London Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991),
pp 78-81,111-112 and pi IV, 4, J Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley,
CA University of California Press, 1994), ρ 84
10 D Burr, Eucharistie Presence and Conversion in Late Thirteenth-Century Franciscan Thought,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74/3 (Philadelphia, PA American
Philosophical Society, 1984)
11 R Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475 Stories of a Ritual Murder (New Haven, CT Yale University
Press, 1992)
12 R Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New
Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1988), pp 50-56, 81-90
13 J Lacan, Le Seminaire VII L'Ethique de la psychanalyse, ed J -A Miller (Paris Seuil, 1986),
pp 285-348, esp pp 337-348, Ρ Guyomard, La Jouissance du tragigue Antigone, Lacan et le
désir de l'analyste (Pans Aubier, 1992)
14 I am grateful to Louise Fradenburg for her lluminating introduction to this discussion
15 "quia tarnen hujusmodi usurarli nephas honendum et detestabile hodie nedum per
populares verum etiam per magni status homines multimodis et quaesitis et fucatis
colonbus, quod dolenter refenmus, frequentatur, propter quod ab ìpsis Iudaeis et alus
inndelibus in impropenum nobis objicitur et fidelium cordibus m Dei ecclesia scandala
gravantur", 16 October 1381, Concilia pragensia, 1353-1413, ed C Hofler (Prague Gerzabek,
1862), ρ 30
16 " Nam bene videtis clerum et Chnstoñdeles cottidie m suis mribus et libertatibus
supplantan et subici multasque íniunas perpeti et magis synagogam quam Christi proñeere
ecclesia et inter principes plus unum posse Judeum quam procerem vel prelatum", in
R E Weltsch, Archbishop John offenstem, 1348-1400 Papahsm, Humanism and Reform in PreHussite
Prague, Studies in European History 8 (The Hague and Pans Mouton, 1968), ρ 62,
η 89
17 " Ymmo per usunas mauditas prmcipes et magnates adeo depauperantur, ac si cum thesauns
Ulis suum dominum Antichnstum aitare et adiuvare queant", Ibid
18 "Non fuit temproibus lilis qui vie regia justiciam faceret pupilhs et viduis, ymmo nee
barombus, nobihbus et vassahs, quorum pars non modica, querelas emisit, de ìllata sibi
regali violencia Exosus ígitur erat clero et populo, nobihbus, civibus et rustías, solis erat
acceptus ludeis", in "Catalogus abbatum Saganensium", Scriptores rerum silesiacarum I, ed
G A Stenzel (Wroclaw Josef Max, 1835), ρ 214
19 "quia Christiana gens dissimilare et ferre non potuit, m vmdictam blasphemiam ìlhus,
quadam die m sollempmtate paschah zelo mota Judeos ipsos et domus eorum igne
cremavit", Ibid
20 Rubm, Gentile Tales, pp 135-140
21 See entry by E -S Bauer and G Baeder in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters Verfasserlexikon
(Berlin and New York de Gruyter, 1985), cols 584-590, on the Dialogus, cols
585-586
22 "O reges, reges pudeat vos criminis hums'
Usuras capitis, quas gens maledicta lucratur,
m quo vos ipsos maledictos esse probatis usuratores
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
208 Miri Rubin
... Non propter eos, non propter eorum
virtutes, quibus expertes sunt, nee racione
iusticie, qui subdit eos, sed propter eorum
argentum vile vel cetera dona vel aurum
istud feristi. Tu seis, quod facta nephanda
sepius intulerant hii Christi fidelibus, et tu
muñera sumpsisti, sed legis preteristi iusticiam crebro",
E.-S. Bauer, Frömmigkeit, Gelehrsamkeit und Zeitkritik an der Schwelle der grossen Konzilien.
Johannes von Wetzlar und sein Dialogus super Magnificat Quellen und Abhandlungen zur
mittelrheinsichen Kirchegeschichte 39 (Mainz: Selbstverlag der Gesellschaft für mittelrheinische
Kirchengeschichte, 1981), pp. 274-276, lines 2084-2087, 2103-2110.
23 "... Sed consilliarie nequam
qui contra cives Pragenses exacuisti
regem, peniteas nee ultra tarn malefidam
gentem promoveas, ne contra corpus amandum
Christi tale quid accidat amplius, esurientes
quo saciat Dominus", Ibid., p. 280, lines 2177-2182.
24 P. Strohm, England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 128-152.
25 S. Beckwith, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London:
Routledge, 1993).
26 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 91-130.
27 D. Aers, "Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars", Literature
and History third ser. 3 (Autumn, 1994>, pp. 90-105; and the following exchange in Literature
and History third ser. 4 (Spring, 1995), pp. 86-88 (Duffy), p. 89 (Aers).
28 R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London:
Hambledon Press, 1987).
29 This work is yet to be published; he has also written some reminiscences in S. Greenblatt,
"Miracles", The Threepenny Review Vol. 69 ( Spring, 1997), p. 34.
30 D. Mamet, Passover (London: HarperCollins, 1995).
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
ΛΓΙ^,
Copyright and Use:
As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use
according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as
otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the
copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling,
reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a
violation of copyright law.
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission
from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal
typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However,
for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article.
Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific
work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered
by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the
copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available,
or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).
About ATLAS:
The ATLA Serials (ATLAS®) collection contains electronic versions of previously
published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS
collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association
(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American
Theological Library Association.