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251 Hyt semes quite [white], and is red Hyt is quike, and seemes dede: Hyt is flesche and semes brede Hyt is on and semes too; Hyt is God body and no more. British Library Royal 17 A.XVI, fol. 27v Eucharist and Image/Sight Early modern theological disputes over the true significance of the Eucharist grew out of the fundamental differences between Catholics and Protestants in their conceptions of human-made signs and their representation of the Divine. The discourses of religious reformation that shaped the English church during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often focused on the physical perception of signs and on the belief that they could, or could not, represent or convey God’s presence to the human observer. Indeed , theologians in England and on the Continent invested considerable effort in the definition or the confutation of the “power and pre-eminent sanctity of the Eucharist.”1 The discrepancy between what one saw and what one was called to believe one saw in the church during the Mass led to the stiffening of two diametrically opposed conceptions of faith: human perception and the meaning of signs. Just as late medieval Catholic believers were called to perceive the divine substance of the Host with the eyes of faith, despite its being hidden beneath the material accident of the Yaakov Mascetti “This Pretious Passeover Feed Upon” Poetic Eucharist and Feminine Vision in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 10 252 Yaakov Mascetti bread, Protestant theologians stressed the discrepancy and irreconcilable difference between the thing seen and what it was supposed to mean.2 An exemplification of the two opposite perspectives on what can be termed spiritual perception is provided by the prayer quoted as the epigraph to this essay, a fifteenth-century text that was used in preReformation England for the doctrinal instruction of the Mass. This prayer presents four paradoxes, all related to the inability to see the truth beyond the apparent. The writer presents an unqualified “it,” namely, the Eucharist , as the thing seen by the believer in the church during Mass: Although it appears to be white, it really is red; it is alive, although it appears to be dead; it is flesh, although it appears to be bread; and ultimately it is one, although it seems to be made up of two. The mid-fifteenth-century distinction between what really is and what appears to the eye is based on a pre-Reformation conception of the “scopic relationship” between the believer and the object of faith.3 Gazing at the host during Mass was part of the Roman Catholic eucharistic faith and liturgy; by virtue of this optic bond the individual believer could be blessed and redeemed.4 Grace came through the fixed gaze on the Host. Yet these four paradoxes point to the fact that what was visible to the eye was not the Christly truth but a misleading appearance, for the “Host did not look like the thing it was.”5 Consequently , the eye had to be educated to see properly, without getting caught in the tempting distinctions of doubt between appearance and truth. The English Reformation brought a significant shift in local conceptions of truth, vision, and the role of representation in liturgy, relocating the emphasis of theological discourses from the visible and material to the verbal and metaphysical.6 As Margaret Aston has argued, discourses of iconoclasm in England and on the Continent addressed with growing emphasis the “role of the arts in the Christian worship,” whereas the “changes in the doctrine of the Eucharist” brought about by Protestant theological works modified the “fate of imagery.”7 The matter of the use of images in religious cult was tainted with the “iniquitous sin of idolatry,” and the iconoclasts were thus determined to “to erase not simply the idols defiling God’s churches but also the idols defiling people’s thoughts.”8 Patrick Collinson , who is more extreme in his historical narrative, sees a clear-cut change in the religious sensibility of English Christendom, a veritable “iconoclastic holocaust” in the local visual culture, only the vessel of truth was not the icon but the biblical text, the sole, “plain, honest, even artless” conveyer of the divine message.9 Between 1580 and the mid-1600s English Protestantism directed “the eye, that potentially idolatrous eye, inward, rejecting realistic religious pictures.”10 Protestant England thus moved [3.133.141.6] Project...

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