Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature by Jennifer Garrison (review)

Medievalists have long struggled to define the relationship between religious beliefs and practices on the one hand, and literature on the other. Earlier attempts to posit medieval Christianity as a relatively uniform key to or background for literary texts, as in Robertsonianism and older versions of historicism, have given way, in the last twenty-five years or so, to approaches that privilege heterogeneity over homogeneity, as in Lollard studies, or that find negotiation and exchange between literature and religion, as in vernacular theology. At the same time, however, these newer approaches have generated their own potentially problematic oppositions—of affect and intellect, or heresy and orthodoxy.

Garrison's study is a welcome addition to this ongoing conversation, offering a thoughtful account of the Eucharist in a number of Middle English texts. For Garrison, the Eucharist is less a site of controversy, as it is when scholars emphasize Lollardy, than a site of convergence for affective and intellectual responses to God. Although her study is informed by Lollard debates, her focus is on orthodox texts, which she shows to have their own contradictions and flexibility, even despite the narrowing and defining of the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages. In her introduction, Garrison approaches this flexibility in terms of two intersecting traditions: the first, which she calls Ambrosian, is more interested in the physicality of the sacrament—i.e., the bread and Jesus's body—and the second, which she calls Augustinian, is more interested in the sacrament as a symbol or figure for Jesus. While historians of the Eucharist, such as Gary Macy and Miri Rubin, do note the diversity of medieval Eucharistic thought, they do not use these particular terms. Garrison's assertion that there is consensus around two distinct approaches with these names is therefore somewhat misleading. Her point about diversity is, nevertheless, well taken.

Given the diversity of thinking on the Eucharist, medieval authors could reimagine the relationship between the bread and Jesus' body, between the material and the symbolic, each time they described this most central aspect of religious practice. In order to explain this authorial process, Garrison offers the term "Eucharistic poetics": authors use the Eucharist for its signifying potential, to portray the dynamic relationship between individuals and Christ where the Eucharist promises union with the divine, and between the individual and the Church where the Eucharist mediates between believers and the divine. While Garrison persuasively demonstrates the way in which Eucharistic language offers resources for authors to think about figuration, poetics may not be the most suitable term for the topics she is exploring. "Poetics" has a distinctly formalist connotation, and as a result privileges the text itself, whereas her study more often explores the texts' designs on their readers. She is less interested in authors' using the formal resources of poetry to think through a point of theology—as is Cristina Cervone in Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love, which Garrison mentions briefly but dismisses as "intellectual"—than she is in references to the Eucharist in a range of writings. A more discourse-oriented approach, in which she tracked terms across kinds of writing, including those that are self-consciously poetic and those that are more utilitarian, would perhaps be more effective than "poetics" for the arguments she is making.

Garrison investigates the "Eucharistic poetics" of seven Middle English texts across six chapters. The strongest chapters concern texts that are clearly and explicitly focused on the Eucharist, and that possess self-awareness about their audience and/or their reasons for writing about this topic: Robert Mannyng's early fourteenth-century penitential handbook, Handlyng Synne (Chapter 1); The Book of Margery Kempe; Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (Chapter 5); and John Lydgate's poetry (Chapter 6). Including Mannyng in this study is particularly praiseworthy. Mannyng is still understudied, although he should...