Abstract
This chapter builds a bridge between the cathedral’s pagan pre-history and the Reformation. In A Survay of London (1598), John Stow recalls a medieval biannual celebration still occurring through the first half of the sixteenth century involving a ‘buck being brought up to the steps of the high Altar in Paul’s church’. The procession signalled a collaboration between Church and State paradoxically projected onto the body of the divided deer. The enactment of ecclesiastical and temporal power rendered the procession symbolically potent during the restoration of Catholicism under Mary Tudor, while its sacrificial resonances with both the pagan pre-history of the site and with popish and medieval ceremonialism made this a charged occasion for Elizabethan commentators. This chapter explores the Keepers’ processions in the light of the upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century, and examines how socio-political and urban conflicts and cohesions could be enacted through display of the animal body.
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Reid, J.A. (2021). The Beastly Body in St. Paul’s Cathedral: Procession and Politics Under Mary Tudor. In: Altman, S., Buckner, J. (eds) Old St Paul’s and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77267-3_5
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