Corpus Christi

                             Laudus thema specialis,                             

Panus vivus et vitalis

Hodie proponitur.

Quem in sacrae mensa caenae,

Turbae fratrum duodenae

Datum non ambigitur.

Sit laus plena, sit sonora,

Sit jucunda, sit decora

Mentis jubilatio.

Dies enim solemnis agitur,

In quae mensae prima recolitur

Hujus institutio.

From Lauda Sion (sequence for Corpus Christi Mass), written by Thomas Aquinas c. 1264.

Today is Corpus Christi, the feast of Christ's Body and Blood. This feast is not a fixed one but varies with the date of Easter; it is celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday and therefore falls between late May and late June.

During the English Middle Ages this feast was one of the most important on the liturgical calendar, probably because it falls very close to Midsummer, when people are in the mood for festival and celebration. English weather being what it is, this is also most likely why it was the feastday with which the mystery play cycles - performed outdoors and needing sixteen or more hours of daylight - came to be associated. York, Chester and Coventry all had play cycles which were performed every year on, or very close to, the Corpus Christi feast.

Pope Urban IV had established the feast in 1264, but it was first celebrated in England only in the early fourteenth century. When it did arrive, however, the feast seems very quickly to have been incorporated into medieval English religious and even national identity. (Even today the feast is still one of England's traditional Holy Days of Obligation.)

Throughout the Middle Ages, devotion to the body of Christ - both as Eucharist and the human body which suffered on the cross - was intense. This devotion to Christ’s body and the significance which it held as metaphor, symbol and Eucharistic reality in (most of) medieval English society has been well documented by scholars including Miri Rubin, Sarah Beckwith and Tony Corbett. The idea of the body as a metaphor for a unified society goes back to Aristotle, but was enthusiastically adopted by what Beckwith has called “medieval political theorists.”1

This image brings together the two aspects of the Body of Christ that so fascinated the Middle Ages - the Eucharist, consecrated here by the priest at Mass, and the human body of Christ which suffered on the cross. As the priest holds up the Host towards the Crucifix, the two are visually linked, a powerful image which was repeated during every Mass at the Elevation of the Host. At the Elevation, the Lay Folks Mass Book instructs the people to "knelande holde vp both þi handes,/And so þo leuacioun pou be-halde,/for þat is he þat iudas salde,/and sithen was scourged & don on rode"2 - an instruction which explicitly describes the relationship between the Crucifixion and the Host. Image via

The image of the body of Christ was invoked and “presented by the official church of the late Middle Ages as a unifying symbol;”3 Christ Himself was seen as “the bringer of unity.”4 Yet, paradoxically, Christ’s body was at the same time yet a source of conflict and discord, “the arena where social identity was negotiated, where the relationship of self and society, subjectivity and social process found a point of contact and conflict.”5 The metaphor of Christ’s body for the wholeness of society was fractured and splintered by different groups who each sought to claim Christ as their own. The Peasants’ Revolt, for example, “was based around identification with the figura of Christ, seeing in him a poor peasant like them.”6

Throughout the York mystery play cycle, the fracturing of Christ’s body, both metaphorically and literally, happens again and again: the Corpus Christi is the cycle’s overarching concern, holding it together as a united entity, but the different pageants of the various guilds focus on how one particular aspect of it relates to each guild’s own (worldly) identity, interests and concerns. Thus the Mercers’ Doomsday is concerned with buying and selling; in the Bakers’ Last Supper the guild’s commercial product, bread, is linked none-too-subtly with the consecrated bread of the Last Supper and of the Mass; the Pinners’ Crucifixio has the guild members, in their roles as the soldiers nailing Christ to the cross, performing and discussing their own craft, tools and materials. 

Given that the Corpus Christi feast centres on transubstantiation, the most important tenet of Catholic belief and the essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, the feast was (unsurprisingly) attacked during the English Reformation. Under Edward IV the feast was abolished in 1548. The York Corpus Christi plays managed to survive until 1569, albeit with censorship; many of the pageants focusing the Virgin Mary were censored or repressed, and those dealing with explicitly Catholic doctrine were also selectively 'edited.' This happened with the York Last Supper pageant - the manuscript leaf containing the play's central episode is now mysteriously missing! With the page gone, there is of course no way of saying with certainty what it contained. But, given the closeness with which the other pageants in the cycle follow their scriptural and liturgical counterparts, it is highly likely that the missing page, which occurs precisely where we would expect Christ’s performance of the transubstantiation to occur in the sequence of the play, ran along the lines of:

... this is My Body which shall be delivered for you; this do for the commemoration of Me... This chalice is the new testament in My blood; this do ye, as often as you shall drink, for the commemoration of Me. For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink this chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come. Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord

 - which are the words of the Epistle in the Corpus Christi feastday Mass.

Footnotes

1. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), 27.

2. "Kneeling, hold up both thy hands,/And so behold the elevation,/For that is He that Judus sold,/and after was scourged and died on the cross [rood]."

3. Tony Corbett, The Laity, the Church and the Mystery Plays: A Drama of Belonging (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), 199.

4. Ibid., 201.

5. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 22.

6. Corbett, The Laity, the Church, and the Mystery Plays, 198.

This post contains material adapted from Chapter 1.2 of my MA thesis.