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Abstract
This essay examines Cleanness alongside the Play of the Sacrament, to show how two disparate works can productively be studied together by thinking of genre as a formal leveraging of consonant cognitive and affective states. Specifically, by thinking of genre in this way, the essay argues that these works are “horror” narratives of Host desecration and that they share an interest in how to make their horrific stories participatory for an audience, as well as in how that participation relates to community-level participation in Christian ritual.
Notes
1. This essay is dedicated to Carol Clover.
2. Throughout, I will refer to Andrew and Waldron’s The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet.
3. I refer to the TEAMS edition of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.
4. Carroll’s definition of horror focuses on affect, but implicitly registers cognitive failure as well, by saying that “a sense of mystery” is part of “horror-art” (53).
5. Kristeva suggests something similar of the fundamental action of horror on the human psyche: “When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braids of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object” (1, emphasis in original). Deriving from the Latin horrere, “to bristle,” horror denotes a fearful being-on- guard against a not fully fathomed threat to self or to community. See OED, “horror” etymology.
6. Carroll notes this as key to contemporary horror-art as well: in horror, “the emotive responses of the audience run parallel to the emotions of characters” (52).
7. This drive to export affective and cognitive states to a reader or viewer is not unique to the staging of horror that we will see in these two works: as film scholars have shown, horror relies on empathy for its victims for its efficacy (Clover 7–12).
8. Rubin has shown that this paradox of corporeality and incorporeality engenders a tremendous number of horrific narratives of Jewish/Christian violence over the precise theological status and efficacy of the Eucharist. See Gentile Tales 70–103, 190–95.
9. As Kristeva frames it, the Eucharist is the catharsis of the primal fantasy of merging with a powerful other, that functions by “interiorizing and spiritualizing the abject” (118–19).
10. This is not to say that there was no dissent in how the Eucharist was understood in the Middle Ages; quite the contrary, there are numerous instances of even high-ranking clerics failing to conform to orthodox interpretations of Eucharistic transubstantiation, and, in some cases, then having to recant. In the 11th century, Berengar is directed by Rome to affirm that he believes the bread and wine are truly and literally the body and blood of Christ. See Beckwith, Signifying God 60. For the original recantation, see Ego Berengarius, vol. 150 Patrologiae cursus completes: series Latina, cols. 410D, 411A.
11. Watson notes the poem’s investment in Eucharistic devotion: “The poem’s emphasis on purity … no doubt has a number of reference points [including] legislation concerned with the proper performance and meaning of the Eucharist” (308).
12. MED online, “host(e),” n. 2, 1a, 2a; n. 4, 1a, 1b, 2.
13. As Morse phrases it, “Through the Church, which is his body, and the sacraments of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, Christ invites men to bear God in their bodies so that they, like the Virgin, may become cleaner through his presence” (Pattern 175).
14. Reading sees feasting ritual as the rhetorical and narrative structure of the poem overall. But in her view, “Cleanness is more about ritual in general than it is about a particular ritual: the crux of the poem is its exploration of the power and significance of socially meaningful repeated action, and its connection to expressions of piety” (277).
15. Even its narration of the Abraham story focuses closely on guest/host dynamics. But, in this instance, instead of failing to be a good guest, Abraham succeeds at being a good host, so that the guest/host dynamic flips. Abraham slaughters a calf, cooks it up well, and serves it to God as well as to his other guests. He acts as a generous, kind-hearted, ritualistically observant host. He lays out a clean cloth underneath the feast, and provides butter and unleavened bread for his guests (629–36). God, the poet makes clear, has become the guest at Abraham’s feast. It is this good hosting that confirms God in his decision to enable Abraham and Sarah to conceive a child.
16. Brewer reads several scenes in Cleanness as instantiations of the Pearl-poet’s larger fascination with “feasting,” but he reads that fascination as secular (135–36).
17. As Rubin points out, it was customary to keep Hosts in chests called pyxes for preservation (Corpus Christi 44–45).
18. Twomey also notes that vessels and pearls are central images of the poem and are associated with each other (127–28).
19. Morse sees the vessel as the poem’s unifying image (“The Image of the Vessel” 202–16).
20. As David Wallace puts it, “Although each of these Biblical scenes is terrifying enough without embellishment, the Cleanness-poet takes pains to complicate and intensify our experience of terror” (93). See also J. J. Anderson, who notes that “the God of Cleanness is pre-eminently a God of terror” (119).
21. In Beckwith’s phrasing, “As a commodity, the host assumes the nasty fluidity entailed by its susceptibility to barter and exchange” (“Ritual” 69).
22. Lawton notes it is the one surviving English Host miracle play (288). It is also the only extant English play on Jewish host desecration (Nisse 100).
23. Beckwith points out that to talk about the Eucharistic sacrament as theatrical introduces a theological paradox, since the idea that “the central sacrament, the body of Christ in the mass, was theater constituted the very basis of the searching and vituperative polemics of reform” (Signifying God 59, emphasis in original).
24. Beckwith calls this moment “parodic.” (“Ritual” 65).
25. MED online, “were” 5, 1a–1c.
26. In Beckwith’s view, “Jonathas’ desecration, his attempt at puncturing the unity of Christ’s body, and the concomitant unity of Christian society, results only in his own dismemberment” (“Ritual” 75).
27. See also Maltman 151–52.
28. “Before the Reformation, most theatrical representations of violence referred, in some way, to the act of violence at the center of Christianity; all suffering bodies were liable to be subsumed into Christ’s body” (Owens 18).
29. See also Jones 231.
30. Bynum notes that medieval wonder is often intimately linked with horror (Metamorphosis and Identity 58, 98).
31. Lawton suggests that the illegibilities introduced into the poem by the Jews and by their manipulations of the Host manifest a tremendous unease in the Middle Ages around the health of the Christian empire (299).
32. OED s.v., “defend,” II and I.
33. Nisse reads the initial severing of the hand as an “exiling” of hand from body, “signaling the bloody fragmentation of Jewish hermeneutic agency” (117). This reconnecting of the hand, then, symbolizes the absorption of Jews into Christian hermeneutics (120).
34. As Bale points out, the play is set in Aragon, but that does not undercut its relevance as an analogue to contemporary English fantasies of producing a perfected community of the faithful (111). As Nisse puts it, “The Jews … reappear here as exoticized yet familiar tormentors …” (113).
35. As Kruger has argued, the Jewish body in the play “… disintegrates and can only become whole by ceasing to be Jewish” (318).
36. Of course, as Strohm has pointed out, this enacted incorporation of the Jews into the larger community “does not erase or alleviate the play’s prevailing animosity against its Jewish protagonists.” See Strohm, “The Croxton Play of the Sacrament” 43. Lampert has argued that the Jews and their actions in this play are specifically meant to awaken shared cultural memories of violence in the centuries preceding the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England (236–37 and 241–242).
37. Bale argues that the play is “partially a comedy” (111). Similarly, Sofer points out that “… the play seems at times designed to provoke mirth rather than solemnity in the audience … by burlesquing the Mass itself” (44).
38. For a different perspective on the carnivalesque in which it is compatible with these plays, see Biddick 409 and Owens 67–68.
39. Such strengthening was needed throughout the Middle Ages. See Beckwith, Signifying God 60, for instances of recantations of non-Eucharistic beliefs in the eleventh century.
40. In this, the Play of the Sacrament functions in a manner analogous to how Beckwith reads the corpus Christi plays: for her, the corpus Christi plays “are not … simply a meditation on eucharist as community, but an enactment of it … The community constitutes itself as and around the body of Christ.” (“Ritual” 89, 102).
41. As Beckwith puts it, “The work of the play is to convert all its outsiders to insiders, to construct a world so totally incorporated and encompassed by the body of Christ that to be outside is no longer conceivable” (“Ritual” 65).
42. Kelly notes that, “Eucharist is not just about past memory, but about living presence” (28).