The Reformation of Romance

The Eucharist, Disguise, and Foreign Fashion in Early Modern Prose Fiction

Christina Wald

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9783110343342
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change.

Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction.

Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, Robert Greene's Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney's Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne's Steele Glas, John Lyly's Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche's Farewell, Greene's A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller.

1 The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England

1.1 The Eucharist in Early Modern England: Theological Controversies and Liturgical Reform

When Christ shared his last supper with his apostles, he gave them bread and said, as the Latin Bible recounts, ‘hoc est corpus meum,’ ‘this is my body’ (The Geneva Bible Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24). What did he mean by this? That the bread is indeed his body? Or that it in some form signifies his body? If we look at the Hebrew and Greek sources of the Latin Bible, this question becomes even more difficult as here the sentence omits the verb and reads, ‘this my body’ (cf. J. Anderson 20 –22). Due to the intricate history of Bible translations and the eminence of Christ’s utterance in Christian belief, this one Biblical sentence has generated an overwhelming number of theological interpretations which at times have conflicted heavily with one another – in particular during the Reformation, which turned the Eucharist debate, hitherto chiefly a concern of highly educated theologians, into a pressing public concern. Montaigne remarked accordingly in 1580, “How many weighty strifes, and important quarrels, hath the doubt of this one sillable, hoc, brought forth in the world?” (Vol. 2, 237).

According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which had come to prevail since the thirteenth century, when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council silenced critics who defended competing opinions, the celebration of the Eucharist is a repetition of Christ’s original sacrifice. ‘Hoc est corpus meum,’ Christ’s (translated) words which are spoken by the priest, mean that the bread is indeed transformed into Christ’s body. Liturgy here counters sensual experience since the outward appearance of the elements of bread and wine remain unchanged by the priest’s words. Catholic theology has hence developed an elaborate theory which maintains that the ‘accidents’ (the outward appearance of bread and wine) remain unaltered, while their ‘substance’ changes. Invisible to the eye but discernible to true believers, bread and wine transubstantiate. Believers consuming the Eucharist incorporate Christ’s body into their own body; the communion entails the intermingling of identities which Christ envisioned according to John: “Iesus said [...] For my flesh is meat in dede, & my blood is drink in dede. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (The Geneva Bible John 6:53–56). The idea of a real but invisible presence of Christ during communion poses a challenge of faith and imagination to believers. Therefore, altar pieces often tried to illustrate the mysterious action of transubstantiation taking place in front of them: their “images glorified, explicated, and mediated the blank spectacle before them: Christ present as the invisible ‘substance’ of the bread” (Koerner 71). For some believers, such manmade visual support was not enough, they experienced divine visions that supported the truth-claims of the Eucharist. In these visions, the bread was transformed into the body of the infant Jesus or the wounded, crucified adult, and the wine into his real blood. Here, transubstantiation resulted in metamorphosis – or, in theological terms, in ‘transaccidentation.’³⁵ Such Eucharistic miracles were not only envisioned on altar pieces and in legends, but also in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

The proper understanding of the Last Supper became one of the central points of debate during the theological and political quarrels of the sixteenth century. Confronted with the Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545–63) reinforced the dogma of transubstantiation and declared, “If any one denieth, that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ; but saith that He is only therein as in a sign, or in figure, or virtue; let him be anathema” (Thirteenth Session, Canon I; Council and Waterworth 82). The wording of the Council of Trent, which rejects any figural interpretation of Christ’s bodily presence, indicates that Protestant thinkers attacked the Catholic dogma as being a too literal reading of ‘this is my body.’³⁶ They did so to different degrees. Martin Luther held a comparatively moderate position by arguing that a process of consubstantiation takes place, in which the substances of wine and bread coexist with the real presence of Christ’s body and blood ‘in, with and under’ bread and wine.³⁷ He rejected many Catholic sacraments, but kept the Mass (in addition to baptism and confession), nonetheless criticising the idea that sacraments work ex opere operato. For Luther, ‘hoc est corpus meum’ remained an original performative speech act of fiat granted by God’s grace, just like in the Genesis (Shullenberger 27):

if I were to say over all the bread there is, “This is the body of Christ,” nothing would happen, but when we follow his institution and command in the Supper and say, “This is my body,” then it is his body, not because of our speaking or our declarative word, but because of his command in which he has told us so to speak and to do and has attached his own command and deed to our speaking. (Luther 184)

Luther’s position on the Eucharist was challenged by the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli (as well as by Andreas Karlstadt and Johannes Oecolampadius), who refuted the Catholic doctrine far more fiercely. Zwingli argued that the Eucharist remembers the Last Supper and Christ’s crucifixion, but does not repeat them: bread and wine are figurative signs which represent Christ’s absent body. For Zwingli, Christ’s words read, ‘hoc significat corpus meum.’ No material change takes place; it is the task of the believers to commemorate Christ’s death. Zwingli’s ally Heinrich Bullinger explained that for Zwingli, ‘represent’ did not mean that Christ’s body is made present again: “sacramental signs [...] signify, and in signifying do represent. [...] But to represent doth not signify (as some dream) to bring, to give, or make that now again corporally present which sometime was taken away; but to resemble it in likeness and by a certain imitation, and to call it back again to mind” (Vol. 5, 327). Thus, in Zwinglian memorialism, “[p]sychological act replaces ontological fact” (Ross 50). Zwingli and his adherents argued that Jesus’s words following the institution in Luke and the Corinthians, ‘this do in remembrance of me’ point to the true meaning of the Eucharist as a ritual of remembrance rather than repetition (cf. also Strier 288). Their criticism went hand in hand with a reformed understanding of the role of sacraments. While Luther understood them as “a word with a promise attached,” they saw them as mere signs: “sacraments are not channels of the Spirit to give grace, for the Spirit needs no channel. At the very best, sacraments are only signs of grace already given” (Spinks 1, 2).

Bridging the gap between Luther and Zwingli, Protestant theology developed a fourth interpretation of ‘this is my body,’ which was promoted by John Calvin (as well as, with some differences, by theologians like Martin Bucer, Philipp Melanchthon, and Heinrich Bullinger).³⁸ In his Institutes of Christian Religion (1536; revised until 1559), Calvin criticises the fixation on “this one thorny question” of how “Christ’s body lie[s] hidden under the bread, or under the form of bread” (1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1405; 4.17. 33). He sums up the state of the Eucharist debate:

Some men, to prove themselves subtle, added to the simplicity of Scripture: that he is ‘really’ and ‘substantially’ present. Still others even went farther: they said he has the same dimensions in which he hung on the cross. Others devised a wondrous transubstantiation. Others said the bread itself was the body. Others, that it was under the bread. Others that only a sign and figure of the body were set forth. [...] How is the body devoured by us? (Institutes, 1536 edition, 104; IV.C.27)

Calvin’s answer to this question was that Christ is present in the Eucharist; bread and wine are “not signa repraesentativa, signs representing something absent, but signa exhibitiva, signs manifesting something present” (Tylenda 31). Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine is, however, ‘true’ rather than ‘real’; it is spiritual rather than physical. Calvin is close to Luther’s position when he posits in his De Coena Domini (1558) that substance and accidents are interconnected: “the inward substance of the sacrament is annexed to the visible signs.” Since “God can neither deceive nor lie, it followeth that he doth in very deed fulfil and perform all that he doth there signify”; “the Lord doth in very deed give the same thing that he doth represent” (Calvin, “Lord’s Supper” 441, 461). Calvin himself characterises his position as metonymic when he argues that Christ’s offer of his body is

a metonymy, a figure of speech [...]. For though the symbol differs in essence from the thing signified (in that the latter is spiritual and heavenly, while the former is still physical and visible), still, because it not only symbolizes the thing that it has been consecrated to represent as a bare and empty token, but also truly exhibits it, why may its name not rightly belong to the thing? (Institutes, 1559 edition, Vol. 2, 1385; 4.17.21)

According to Calvin this metonymic connection is not an inherent quality of the thing itself, but has to be established in an act of faithful reading: Calvin’s position shifts the fusion of sign (the bread) and referent (Christ’s spiritual presence) to the interpreter of the sign. Hence, what all three Protestant positions share is a focus on the believers who perceive and consume the elements of bread and wine: it is through their faith that bread and wine come to entail Christ’s real (Luther), true (Calvin), or figurative presence (Zwingli) – an emancipation of the believer which was reinforced by having the Mass read aloud in the vernacular rather than in (often mumbled) Latin and by administering bread and wine to the laity, too. In this shift from elements to believers, from the signs to their interpretation, lies not only the theological, but also the epistemic and, as I will argue, poetic innovation of the Reformed position.

The four most influential positions in the Eucharist debate cover a spectrum ranging from the real, physical presence of Christ in the elements via his spiritual presence to the representation of the absent body – from the Catholic position to Zwingli’s, a gap between the sign and the signified opens and widens. Theological debates over the Eucharist became the central field for early moderns to discuss the nature of representation, as early modern scholars have shown (Sedinger 239; cf. also Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap” 141 and Höfele and Laqué xi-xiii). The Eucharist debate marked the transition of the Catholic, medieval notion of repraesentatio, of making really present, to a modern notion of representation. In this vein, Protestant thinkers insisted on the conventionality of language and ascribed the earlier view to Catholics and all believers in magic. Thus, Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) emphasised that words are transparent, conventional, and inert; they can only have performative power and exert a “miraculous operation” if they are given the “power and grace of God” by God himself. Unlike the papists, Protestants “ought not to take upon [...] [themselves] to conterfet, or resemble him, which with his word created all things. [...] [N]o new substance can be made or created by man. [...] For by the sound of the words nothing commeth, nothing goeth, otherwise than God in nature hath ordained to be done by ordinarie speech, or else by his speciall ordinance” (189). Likewise, the Puritan leader William Perkins argued in A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (published posthumously in 1608): “And that which is only a bare sound, in all reason can have no vertue in it to cause a reall worke, much lesse to produce a wonder”; it does not have “the power of touching the substance” (134–135), including the substance of Christ’s body in the ritual of the Eucharist. In stressing the nudity of the word, Perkins implicitly criticises “any theory of a natural language whereby the word might be seen to correspond to its referent, or, worse, whereby the word might acquire the referent’s power” (T. Greene 29). Such an interest in the performative, creative power of language is poetologically relevant. We will see that both early modern literary theory and the works of prose fiction raise similar questions about the power of language – spells, oracles, verbal revelations, and scenes of intradiegetic storytelling recur in the narratives of the 1570s, 80s, and 90s.

In England, the Reformation led to fast changes in the official theology and liturgy from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. The most widespread pre-Reformation liturgy was the Roman Catholic Sarum Mass, held in Latin. In the Canon, the part of the Mass with Eucharistic prayers of intercession, consecration, and oblation, the crucial prayer asks God that “ut nobis cor

pus et san

guis fiat dilectissimi filii tui domini nostri iesu x

i” – that the bread and wine “be made unto us the body and blood of thy most beloved son, our lord Jesus Christ” (Rosendale 92). Little black crosses printed in the mass book in the words ‘corpus’ and ‘sanguis’ indicated the moments of priestly crossings; beyond this practical direction, they indicated divine intervention and were therefore sometimes understood as a textual reflection of Christ’s Real Presence (and hence derided as idolatrous by more radical Reformers). The actual moment of transubstantiation in the Roman Catholic Mass was thought to take place when the priest repeated the words of institution, “hoc est enim corpus meum,” “this is indeed my body.”³⁹ The priest elevated the host during this ceremony, so that the communicants could see Christ’s body; usually, lay believers physically incorporated the Eucharistic bread only once a year, at Easter (Rosendale 92). The Roman Catholic liturgy and doctrine of transubstantiation were maintained during the early years of Reformation under Henry VIII. In fact, the government issued the Act of the Six Articles in 1539, the first of which demanded that everyone who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation was to be burnt. This remained Henry’s policy toward Eucharistic reforms until his death.

When Henry’s young son Edward ascended the throne, the English Reformation gained momentum. When the Six Articles were repealed, the English Eucharist debate reached a peak in the mid-sixteenth century. Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury and the leading theologian during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, gradually adopted Zwingli’s figurative understanding of the sacraments as the official Anglican position, and reformed the liturgy accordingly. Two Books of Common Prayer were published under Edward, both devised under Cranmer’s auspices and discussed in the House of Lords before publication. The first version of the prayer book from 1549 translated the entire service into the English vernacular and included important changes to the communion: the ministration of both elements to the laity and an interpretation of the communion as a memory of Christ’s sacrifice rather than its ritualistic re-enactment (Rosendale 93–94). Accordingly, a rubric points out that the priest “shall saye or syng plainly and distinctly” the prayer that makes clear that the Eucharistic celebration is a ‘perpetuall memory’ rather than a renewed sacrifice (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 29):

O God heavenly father, which of thy tender mercie, diddest geve thine only sonne Jesu Christ, to suffer death upon the crosse for our redempcion, who made there (by his one oblacion once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifyce, oblacion, and satysfaccyon, for the sinnes of the whole worlde, and did institute, and in his holy Gospell command us, to celebrate a perpetuall memory of that his precious death, untyll his comming again: (30, italics added)

At this point, the Latin Sarum Rite compared Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to the sacrifice of the elements in the Mass. Cranmer deleted this section and had the celebration continue (Cummings, “Introduction” xxx):

Heare us (o merciful father) we besech thee: and with thy holy spirite and worde, vouchsafe to bl

esse and sanc

tifie these thy gyftes, and creatures of bread and wyne, that they maie be unto us the bodye and bloude of thy moste derely beloved sonne Jesus Christe. (Cummings, Book of Common Prayer 30)

The Order of Communion here takes over the medial crosses from the Sarum missals; because of their implication of a performative power of the words to transform the elements, the crosses were dropped in the more radically Protestant prayer book o...

Table of contents

• Title
• Imprint
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Acknowledgements of Rights
• Introduction
• 1 The Eucharist in Disguise: Theology and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England
• 2 Disguise and Identity Transformation in Elizabethan Pastoral Romances
• 3 Foreign Fashion and the Transubstantiation of Englishness
• 4 Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index