Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture

Cambridge University Press, October 1992. Paper Back. New. Miri Rubin's erudite study explores medieval culture through its unifying symbol, the eucharist, inquiring into the ways religious culture created a language by which order, power and private devotion found voice. She writes, ''The drama of the eucharist is the drama of human creativity and of human frailty: its force deriving from the tension inherent in human action, between the capacity to construct meaning-laden symbols, and the consequent imperatives of living by them, adhering to them and maintaining their meanings when they become susceptible to the vagaries and vicissitudes of human interpretation.'' Undertaken initially as a study of the feast of Corpus Christi, Rubin's treatise grew to incorporate not only the utterance (the ritual practice itself) but also the language which gave that utterance meaning, constructing a framework that would ultimately govern a culture. A lecturer in medieval history at Oxford, Rubin begins with a discussion of the Eucharist's design and practice (c. 1000), construing its theological and cultural implications amidst both clergy and laity and demonstrating the conditions under which the feast of Corpus Christi came to be. Her final chapters examine the many readings of the Eucharist as symbol amidst mystic, heretic and layman, concluding that while such systems (and symbols) are ''inescapable inasmuch as we share life with others, we must learn how to negotiate liberating meanings within them.''