The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton

The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from the Middle Ages to Milton explains the astonishing centrality of the eucharist to poets with a variety of denominational affiliations, writing on a range of subjects, across an extended period in literary history. Whether they are praying, thinking about politics, lamenting unrequited love, or telling fart jokes, late medieval and early modern English poets return again and again to the eucharist as a way of working out literary problems. Tracing this connection from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, this book shows how controversies surrounding the nature of signification in the sacrament informed understandings of poetry. Connecting medieval to early modern England, it presents a history of 'eucharistic poetics' as it appears in the work of seven key poets: the Pearl-poet, Chaucer, Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton.

Reassessing this range of poetic voices, The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization overturns an oft-repeated argument that early modern poetry's fascination with the eucharist resulted from the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation and its supposedly enchanted worldview. Instead of this tired secularization story, it fleshes out a more capacious conception of eucharistic presence, showing that what interested poets about the eucharist was its insistence that the mechanics of representation are always entangled with the self's relation to the body and to others. The book thus forwards a new historical account of eucharistic poetics, placing this literary phenomenon within a longstanding negotiation between embodiment and disembodiment in Western religious and cultural history.

Shaun Ross, Assistant Teaching Professor, Victoria College, University of Toronto

Shaun Ross is Assistant Teaching Professor at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where he currently serves as coordinator for both the Renaissance Studies and the Literature and Critical Theory programs. At Victoria College, he also supports and promotes undergraduate research across the disciplines.

Introduction: The Presence of the Eucharist in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry
1. Medieval Sacraments: Immanence and Transcendence in The Pearl-poet and Chaucer
2. Southwell's Mass: Sacrament and Self
3. Herbert's Eucharist: Sacrifices of Thanksgiving
4. Donne's Communions
5. Communion in Two Kinds: Milton's Bread and Crashaw's Wine
Conclusion: The Future of Presence