Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Croxton Play of the Sacrament PB

Croxton Play of the Sacrament PB

Sebastian, John T.

Paperback

Series: Teams Middle English Texts

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesPlays

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1580441815
ISBN13: 9781580441810
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Published: Jan 1 2013
Pages: 138
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.90 Depth: 9.90
Language: English

Despite its bloody and polemical content--or perhaps because of it--the late fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament continues to fascinate and shock. Its central scene dramatizes physical abuse of the Host, the bread believed to become Christ's body when consecrated during Mass, by non-Christians mocking the doctrine of transubstantiation. However, because this Middle English play depicts these torturers as Syrian Jews who worship the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and because it was composed two centuries after England expelled its Jewish inhabitants in 1290, these figures likely served to reinforce Christian orthodoxy amid anxieties over transubstantiation rather than respond to contemporary Jewish practices. The Host's miraculous responses to this abuse, including healing a dismembered hand and causing an oven to explode in the shape of the Christ Child, infuse the play with spectacle and reflect its East Anglian theatrical preferences for human, visible, and embodied forms of Christian devotion.

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