Abstract
In 1567, the house of Vitus Jacobaeus published a broadsheet image of the anatomy of Martin Luther (see figure 1).4 The image, which depicts the dissection of Luther’s corpse, the eating of his flesh, and the drinking of his blood, brings together early modern corpse pharmacology and the Reformation debate about the true nature of the Eucharist in a tableau of cannibalism. Such an evocative representation of corporeal associations raises the question that underpins this chapter: is there a discursive overlap between the medical ingestions of corpses and the denial of the Eucharist as corporeal matter that reveals a residual Protestant hunger for the real flesh and blood of Christ? In this anti-Reformation portrait of a public anatomy, Luther’s body, lying like that of an executed criminal on the anatomist’s table, is tortured, dissected, dismembered, and his blood drunk and flesh eaten by his followers—a group that includes other influential Reformers such as Calvin, Zwingli, Viret, Brenz, and Melanchthon. Significantly, although the act of cannibalism is just one of several atrocities the image represents, it dominates and thus controls interpretation of the scene. One of Luther’s legs, still attached to his body, is being eaten, and the long sweep of the raised leg draws the viewer’s eye upwards, to be arrested at the open mouth of the eater chomping down on Luther’s foot.
Hereunto D. Smith first answered, that it was no horrible, nor wicked thing to eat mans flesh, since we usually eate it in Mummy. What, said M. F. not the flesh of a live man?
Daniel Featley, The Grand Sacrilege of the Church of Rome1
The divine flesh, transmitter of abstract, impalpable powers that put the soul into communication with the ineffable, was also widely perceived as a mysterious, superhuman nourishment, a sort of divine marrow that would mete out both health and salvation (the two are indistinguishable in the single, ambiguous term salus). It was seen as a heavenly manna and balsam, a supernatural pharmakon—the “salubrious elixir vitae of His blood.”
Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess”2
But for the Sovereign Remedy of all,
The Only, never-failing Cordial;
There ’tis upon That Shelf: That Composition
Th’Assembly Took, it self, in my Condition.
The Tears of Widows, Orphans Hearts, and Blood
They made their daily Drink, their daily Food:
Behold our Christian Cannibal’s Oblation,
To auspicate their Moloch Reformation.
Roger L’Estrange, The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade3
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Notes
Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 1, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989) 221.
Reproduced here from Walter L. Strauss, The German single-leaf woodcut, 1550–1600, vol. 3 (New York: Hackner Art Books, 1975) 1184. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham also discuss this image for its powerful connection between religion and medicine; however, the focus of their study is quite different from my own. See Medicine and the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1993) 2–3.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 2.
John Donne, Deaths Duell, John Donne Selected Prose, ed. Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) 382.
The doctrine of transubstantiation and its terminology became dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which resolved that, upon the priest’s words, the Eucharistic substance, the bread and wine, would be transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ, but the accidents, the appearance of bread and wine, would remain the same. See Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1909) 1.313. See also,
Preserved Smith, A Short History of Christian Theophagy (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1922) 85;
Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 193.
Quoted in Camporesi, “Consecrated Host,” 221, from P. Clemente Simoncelli, Guida de morabundi (Naples: Tomasi, 1962) 120.
The words are Ignatius’s, quoted in James T. O’Connor, The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 17. For my understanding of the complicated theology of the Catholic Eucharist I draw on O’Connor, Pelikan, and Stone, as well as
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945);
Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1993);
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 156.
Hymen Saye, “Holy Wafers in Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 3 (1935): 165–167.
Thomas Becon, Prayers and Other Pieces, The Parker Society, vol. 19 (Cambridge, 1844) 372.
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971) 52.
Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 82–83. See also Kilgour’s discussion of the Catholics as cannibals, 83–84.
For a discussion of the fluctuations of interest in Paracelsian medicine in England, see P.M. Rattansi, “Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution,” Ambix 11 (1963): 24–32;
Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne, 1965).
Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 9.
See Urdang’s introduction to Pharmacopoeia Londinensis of 1618, 32; also Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne, 1965) 58.
John Webster, Academicarum Examen (London, 1654) 73. Quoted in C. Webster, “English Medical Reformers ofthe Puritan Revolution: A Background to the ‘Society of Chymical Physitians,’” Ambix 14 (1967): 16–41, 18.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 2 (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2002) 588.
See Rubin for a discussion of the early debate on the nature of the Eucharist in terms of substance and accidents, 24–25. Also, for an excellent discussion of the transubstantiation debate, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 196–205.
Myles Coverdale, Writings and Translations of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. Rev. George Pearson, The Parker Society Ser. 10 (Cambridge, 1844) 450.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986) 84–85. Also cited in Kilgour, 265.
Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945) 76. Dix argues that this meal was probably not the Passover supper, but a Jewish religious evening meal that took place twenty-four hours before Passover: probably the formal supper of a chabûrah, a group of close friends, 50. Stephen Greenblatt, also drawing on Dix, makes this point as well, in Gallagher and Greenblatt, 139.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 216.
For a fascinating discussion of language and the Eucharist; of the utterances, signs, and representations that surround the mystery of the Eucharist; and the miracle of transubstantiation; see Louis Marin, Food for Thought, trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Quoted in Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999).
Thomas Cranmer, quoted in Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Tra nsfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New York: Octagon Books, 1969) 56.
C.T. Onions, Shakespeare’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916) 55.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 179. Davis notes that bodies were thrown to dogs and body parts were sold as meat (liver and tripe) in various towns. And, in what constitutes an aspect of the medical corpse market, in Lyon in 1572 “an apothecary rendered fat from Protestant corpses and sold it at 3 blancs the pound,” 324, n.
Frank Ardolino, “In Paris? Mass and Well Remembered!”: Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and the English Reaction to the St. Martholomew’s Day Massacre,” Sixteenth Century Journal 21.3 (1990) 402; Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, 4.1.164–169.
Thomas Becon, The Early Works of Thomas Becon, The Parker Society Ser. vol. 10 (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968) 418.
Karen Gordon-Grube, “Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England: ‘Mummy’ and Related Remedies in Edward Taylor’s ‘Dispensatory,’” Early American Literature 28.3 (1993): 207.
Paraphrased in Carolyn Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 41.
See Guibbory for a discussion of Puritan resistance to Roman Catholicism, in Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 35–37.
John Milton, On Christian Doctrine, 1.28, in The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. William Alfred et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) 6.553–554. Also quoted in Kilgour, 84.
See Dix for a discussion of the form of the Eucharist in the Reformation, 615–625. See also Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) for a discussion of the role of the celebrant, 35–85.
Guibbory notes, “With the Protestant Reformation, fear of seduction to the whoredom of idolatry gained new currency as the Church of Rome was identified with the Whore of Babylon,” 166. As Harris argues, since the Reformation, English writers frequently employed the figure of the Whore of Babylon as an image of the Catholic Church, Foreign Bodies, 64. See, for example, Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 5 vols., ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1987).
John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975). Parenthetical referencing will be used for all references to The Faerie Queene and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. All other texts will appear as endnote references.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (London: Penguin, 1987) 5.8.38. All following quotes from this work will be referenced parenthetically in the text.
Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 6.
Jeffrey Knapp, in his excellent discussion of the imperialist mission of the Errour episode, also identifies Errour as a chimera, in “Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene 1,” ELH 54:4 (1987): 805. Frank Lestringant, Cannibal: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 161.
The description of Errour as half-serpent, and her serpent brood, suggests a popular anti-papal iconography of the Antichrist in serpent form. Spenser’s image is similar to a broadside picture of approximately 1624, “The Popes Pyramides,” which depicts a pyramid of entangled, smaller serpents coiled around a large serpent. The smaller serpents wear monks’ tonsures and cardinals’ hats and the words of sin, such as “Cruelty,” “Rebellion,” “Envie.” come from their mouths. Part of the caption describes the picture as “A Pyramis, of Serpents poysonous broode; / (Rome,) here behold, erected is on high / Upon heaven hills, where once thy glory stood / Sad Monument of thy Impietie.” In Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 156.
J. Rhodes, “An Answere to a Romish Rime,” Select Poetry Chiefly Devotional of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, The Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1865).
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 85.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher. Vol. 1. (New York: Zone, 1989) 176 and 185. See also Paster’s use of Bynum in The Body, 107–108.
Richard Crashaw, Sospetto D’Herode. The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, The Stuart Editions, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972). Quoted in
Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 33. See Rambuss for an insightful discussion of the masculine homoerotic implications of poetic representations of feeding from Christ. John Donne, Deaths Duell, in Selected Prose, 392.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 62. The Scythians were thought to have been cannibals as we see in Lear’s words: “The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite ….” in King Lear, 1.1.116–118. Note here also the resemblance between the mother feeding on her executed son’s body and the executed body as a medical ingredient.
D. Douglas Waters, Duessa as Theological Satire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970) 65.
In James P. Myers, Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden: Archon, 1983) 26.
Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 4.
Here I draw on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “trace” as explicated by Spivak: “The structure of the sign is determined by the trace or track of that other which is forever absent,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) xvii.
George Herbert, The Latin Poetry of George Herbert: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986). Quoted in Rambuss, 37.
See Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954);
Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1983);
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);
Eleanor McNees, “John Donne and the Anglican Doctrine of the Eucharist,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 29 (1987): 94–114.
For discussions of Donne’s propensity toward multiple points ofview, see P.M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997) 243–245 and
Charles Monroe Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937).
Donne’s words here are from The Sermons of John Donne, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962) 7:303. Also quoted in Oliver’s discussion of Donne’s habit of offering a “multiplicity of viewpoints” in his writing, 244.
See Allen for discussions of Donne’s poetic debt to Paracelsian medicine. Also Thomas Willard, “Donne’s Anatomy Lesson: Vesalian or Paracelsian?” John Donne Journal 3.1 (1984): 35–61.
Shuger, 191. Shuger draws on the work of Joan Riviere, “Hate, Greed, and Aggression,” in Joan Riviere and Melanie Klein, Love, Hate, and Reparation (New York: Norton, 1964) 8–9.
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© 2011 Louise Noble
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Noble, L. (2011). Divine Matter and the Cannibal Dilemma: The Faerie Queene and Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions . In: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118614_5
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