Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance

6. Dancing under Friendly Fire (Catalonia)

. Dancing under Friendly Fire () W    Coventry Draper’s Guild paid an anonymous pyrotechnician fourpence for ‘‘setting the worlds on fire.’’ Three worlds, one at each performance , were consumed during the Doomsday play that the guild staged at the close of the city’s Corpus Christi cycle.1 In late medieval Coventry, the world ended not with a whimper but with a spectacular bang. The story of how the festival of Corpus Christi developed into a time when worlds went up in flames is important both to the history of theater and to the understanding of folk theology. Since Corpus Christi grew out of the older patronal saints’ day festivals, the story also links the first two parts of this book. In Part Two, we travel to Corpus Christi festivals in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the quixotic plains of La Mancha, and the high Peruvian Andes. Festive days of saints and virgins are almost as old as the church. Beginning , as early as the second century, with the commemoration of martyrs on the several anniversaries of their deaths and adding, in due course, festivals in honor of the Virgin Mary, popular Christianity had developed by the sixth century a whole array of local saints’ days, wonder-working shrines and relics, and images invested with numinous power.2 Part of the early appeal of the martyrs was their reputed ability to ‘‘reach across the crevasse of uncertainty’’ that opened up before the Christian at death and to extend from the other side a ‘‘human gesture of acceptance.’’3 The feast of Corpus Christi both incorporated and opposed the cult of the saints. First promulgated by the bishop of Liège in  and established as a universal feast by papal decree in , Corpus Christi officially celebrates the belief that the eucharistic bread contains the real presence of Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation, developed over the previous four centuries, had concentrated the scattered channels of sacred power in priestly hands by declaring the bread of the mass to be the holy relic par excellence. Other  +   relics were dismembered parts of holy men and women; the consecrated bread was the body of the living Christ in its entirety. While martyrs might lend a helping hand at death, they could not work alone; the sacrament of the mass was essential to the soul’s salvation. The efficacy of the mass, unlike that of images and relics, depended on the priestly power of consecration. Until the priest spoke the prescribed words, there was nothing in his hands but bread. Afterwards, there was the body of Christ. The benefits of such power were not readily distributed. Although the laity were encouraged to gaze on the elevated wafer at the moment of its consecration, they were allowed to taste it only infrequently (and after the thirteenth century, the wine not at all). The development of the doctrine of transubstantiation has thus been understood by recent scholars as an effort to suppress the familiarity and diffusion of sacred power that characterized the cult of the saints, confining such power instead to a rite presided over by clergy.4 Every saint has his day, Urban IV observed in his papal bull Transiturus (), and all the saints together share a day of ‘‘general commemoration.’’ All the more reason why ‘‘this marvelous sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, which is the glory and crown of all the saints,’’ should have its own surpassing feast day. Henceforth, he decreed, clergy and people everywhere should assemble in church on the second Thursday after Pentecost to celebrate, with particular ‘‘devotion and solemnity,’’ the saving miracle of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist.5 The choice of date may have been a mistake. Falling variously between  May and  June, the early summer festival of Corpus Christi soon moved outdoors into a sphere less easily controlled by clergy. By the early fourteenth century, the solemn mass in church had been eclipsed in importance by a lavish procession through the city streets.The host, as the official source of sacred power, was displayed in an ornate gold or silver monstrance— similar to but larger than a reliquary—beneath a richly embroidered baldachin . The clergy enjoyed nominal authority over the procession, retaining for their highest-ranking member the right to carry the monstrance, but the poles supporting the baldachin were borne by civic dignitaries. Various members of the clergy and the city’s ruling elite flanked the canopied...