Guillaume Grumsel and the Poetics of Eucharistic Desire

In this article, I examine a collection of eucharistic elegies entitled Iucundi sacrae synaxeos amores (The Delightful Loves of the Sacred Synaxis, 1659) by the seventeenth-century Neo-Latin poet and Jesuit theologian Guillaume Grumsel (1607–1680). Taking my lead from a series of revealing allusions to Ovid’s Amores, I argue that Grumsel articulates a “poetics of eucharistic desire” according to which the process of poetic meaning-making is itself deeply implicated in the eroticism that characterizes the sacrament of the Eucharist.