Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (review)

In this fascinating and engaging book, David Aers continues his efforts to make medievalists (among others) rethink their assumptions about the norms of late medieval religion in England. The emphasis of the book is on the inextricability of sacramental theology from politics and ecclesiology and particularly on the sacraments' function as signs, whose use and abuse point to deeper conflicts between orthodox, Wycliffite, and Langlandian approaches to Christian belief and practice. Aers energizes this investigation by making the book both a literary-critical endeavor and a personal exploration of theology, as the introduction explicitly acknowledges; this approach makes the questions he explores insistently present and compelling but also raises certain concerns, to which I will return below.

Aers wants us to attend to the ways in which "words like heresy and orthodoxy . . . can encourage us to take our attention away from the particulars of the processes and texts in which they themselves became constituted" (viii) and thus, of course, to reshape our sense of these terms as reflections of an ongoing cultural negotiation. In particular, he contends that we often accept too easily the "orthodox" version of such topics as the humanity of Christ or the nature of the Eucharist and end up participating in rather than questioning the dominance of that paradigm. Indeed, the word version is central to Aers's project here, as elsewhere, and if one takes away nothing else from the book, the continual reminder that the Middle Ages (specifically, in this case, late medieval England) were an ongoing project for those who lived in them, and should be for those who study them, is tremendously valuable.

The chapters pursue this commitment to processes of constitution by examining the way particular "signs"—from the Eucharist to poverty to homelessness—were used and adapted in various late medieval texts. The first chapter is the foundation for the book as a whole and addresses the formation and shortcomings of the standard, and generally accepted, late medieval conception of transubstantiation. This was the view that in the Eucharist, as Thomas Aquinas put it in a quotation that recurs insistently throughout the book, "the 'whole Christ' was present, 'not only the flesh, but the whole body of Christ, that is, the bones and nerves and all the rest' [non solum caro, sed totum corpus Christi, id est ossa et nervi et alia hujusmodi]" (2). Since, as Aers cogently argues, the sacrament of the altar became deeply linked with the formation of identities and communities, the maintenance of this particular form of belief had serious consequences for those who might differ from the norm. Ultimately, the assertion that the "signifier" of the Eucharist, the bread and wine, is precisely coterminous with its signified, the historical body and blood of Christ as characterized by Thomas (among others), reflects the orthodox insistence that a particular version of earthly Christianity was precisely coterminous with the Church Triumphant, the eternal truth of Christianity, leaving no refuge for those with different understandings of the sacrament of the altar.

The chapter that follows continues to emphasize the contingency of the orthodox notion of the Eucharist, contending that if we see William Langland as an ethical rather than a sacramental poet it is because we are over-influenced by what was still in the process of becoming the orthodox view of the sacrament of the altar. A more complex and historicized sense of the interaction of absence and presence—that is, a Eucharistic theology that does not insist on transubstantiation but allows for a more symbolic and communal reading of the bread and wine—allows us to see Langland as deeply invested in thinking about the sacrament of the altar and the contemporary conversation surrounding it. Here, as at other points, Aers must argue from absence. It may be that the poem's relatively few direct references to the bread and wine, the sacrament of the altar, and so forth reflect a "decision...