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84 ✛ ✛ ✛ Chapter 4 The Meanings of the Eucharist in the Plantation World certain pastoral rites, especially those closely related to times of life-stage transition, seemed necessary to Christians in the British plantation colonies. Early modern people generally felt that couples needed to be married, babies had to be baptized, and the bodies of the dead had to be buried. Yet those seemingly necessary pastoral rites were not the sum total of ritual practice in the plantation colonies. The sacrament of the Eucharist was celebrated there as well, contrary to the historiographical tradition that suggests that Christian practice in these regions consisted of little more than moralizing sermons on the necessity of obedience and the blessedness of the social hierarchy. This ritual consumption of bread and wine in remembrance of the death of Jesus of Nazareth was emphasized by resident clergy and their metropolitan superiors and proved important to laypeople in both their piety and their understanding of the human community. In addition to its real spiritual import, Europeans experienced this ritual meal as one that created interpersonal mutuality and social cohesion, things often in short supply in the plantation colonies . They also knew from long experience that the sacrament could serve a variety of political, indeed hegemonic, purposes. As translated from England to plantation colonies, the Lord’s Supper was a powerful location for the ritual exclusion of most Africans and their descendents from the human community. Re-creating and modifying metropolitan cultural elaborations around the Eucharist was thus essential to establishing the power of the planter regimes of British America. metropolitan precedents and the political meaning of the eucharist The social importance of the Eucharist in medieval and early modern Europe is difficult to overestimate. In England before the Reformation, the Sunday parish Mass was a powerful moment when the parish community gathered in its ranks to wit- Meanings of the Eucharist 85 ness the rites of Christ’s body and blood. By their gifts of wax, holy bread, and communion linens, parishioners drew near week by week to the altar, even though most only received the host once a year. Rituals associated with the Eucharist emphasized the healing of social ruptures, as parishioners passed and kissed the paxbred, consumed holy bread, and walked in procession together. Yet at the same time, these rites heavily emphasized social hierarchy, for parishioners participated according to their place in the local social order. In the great towns, the guilds processed in elaborate Corpus Christi processions, those of highest status nearest the sacrament as it was carried through the streets, drawing people and precincts together, even as others were excluded. Though these rites of precedence could be divisive, as frequently recorded disputes over them show, in the Eucharist medieval English people articulated a desire for an ordered social cohesion, for an organic unity in the local community . Even the dead were drawn into the Eucharistic community, made present in the reading of the bede roll and as the sacrifice of the Mass was offered for the good of their souls.1 After the Reformation, English Protestants’ understanding of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic community both maintained medieval precedents and moved in new directions. The contested and haphazard Reformation of the English church meant that the Eucharist itself became a contested rite. In its prayer book form, the Church of England’s Eucharistic practice was criticized, denounced, and avoided by both recusants and Puritans, on the one hand for departing too far from medieval precedent and on the other for not going far enough. For the better part of a century, the English debated the proper posture for receiving the Eucharist (kneeling or sitting), the best sort of bread to use (wafers or loaf ), and the position and construction of the communion table or altar. The extended argument over these epiphenomena was undergirded by disagreements on the Eucharist as a means of grace, the nature of the sacramental presence and power in it, and the necessity of restricting communion to the gathered saints. Those disagreements contributed mightily to the onset of a civil war that thoroughly disrupted the Eucharistic practice of the Church of England and of dissenters . After the Restoration, it is clear that in most places the Eucharist was celebrated at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday (Pentecost), and sometimes at Michaelmas. In a few places, particularly at the cathedrals and in London, monthly and even a few weekly celebrations could be found. But celebrations did not necessarily mean that many people received. Though...

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