Julianne E. Sandberg

Associate Professor of English at Samford University in Birmingham, AL

Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
Available on Amazon

Early Modern Literature and the Bodies of a Reformed Eucharist explains what the eucharist taught early modern writers about their bodies and how it shaped the bodies they wrote about. In sixteenth-century England—rocked as it was by the political and religious changes rippling across Europe in the wake of reformation—there were few debates more heated or lively than that over the eucharist. While the roots of the eucharistic controversy were exegetical, the stakes were material and embodied.To apprehend the nature of Christ’s body—its nature, presence, closeness, and efficacy—was also to understand one’s own. And conversely, to know one’s own body was to know something particular about Christ’s. Thus, these eucharist debates, while rightly categorized as theological arguments with political weight, were also forays into what it meant to have and be a body, the implications of which were felt far beyond the walls of a church and the halls of Oxford. A Reformed eucharist—formed as it was from the matrix of figural interpretation, incarnational theology, and sacramental reading—became a useful framework for poets and playwrights representing the embodied self and negotiating how bodies were read and interpreted. Writers such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Aemilia Lanyer use this eucharistic paradigm to imagine the embodied significance of the sacrament for their own bodies, the bodies of their narrative subjects, and the body of their literary work. Eucharistic theology mattered for early modern writers who are not only deeply committed to the value of reading and the virtues of figuration but who also render these enterprises as closely tied to the body—a mutually constitutive web made possible by a Reformed eucharist.