Aers 2004

Aers, David. Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2004.

"Sanctifying Signs emerges otu of a fascination with the ways in which certain late medieval Christians and their Church addressed the immense resources of Christian tradition." (vii)

can split differences into "heresy" and "orthodoxy"; this "encourage[s] us to take our attention away from the particulars of the processes and texts in which they themselves became constituted" (viii)

The Sacrament of the Altar in the Making of Orthodox Christianity

"the theology of the sacrament will be inseparable from ecclesiology." (3)

presence of Christ's body in the sacrament of the alter brought not only spiritual but material nourishment (3)

"the sacrament of the altar had become the mos tpowerful symbol of the formation and contestation of collective and individual identities in the later Middle Ages" (4)

Bishop Thomas Brinton (d. 389); "between the sign and what the sign discloses there isno gap, only identity, albeit an identity usually hidden from mortals" (4) -- bread really is same body of Christ, just hidden under species of bread so we don't abhor it

"We need to be deceived about what we know we are doing, but we need to acknowledge what we know even as we proclaim our deception." (6) -- paradoxical moves made by "traditional religion"

Roger Dymmok: sacrament as political, binding together the community; Wycliffite belief on consubstantiation would be disastrous for it (8); "fusing discourses of the thoroughly earthly city under the sovereignty of Richard II with theological discourses about the meaning of Christ's words on the food which is his flesh and blood, Dymmok maintains that any interrogation of the Church's current understanding of sacramental signs dissolves the union of the faithful in the mystical body of Christ, the Church, and consequently the order of the earthly city." (9)

body of Christ can become "a powerful thing extractable and manipulable by those who claim to represent the church and 'traditional religion' against 'heretics'" (12)

Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ (1410); anti-Wycliffite; Scripture has become a problem for Christians

The Sacrament of the Altar in Piers Plowman

Langland focuses on sacrament of penance; where is the Eucharist in this poem?

• "If we are to discern the body of Christ in Piers Plowman we will have to follow a complex dialectic of absence and presence, a dialectic which is inseparable from Langalnd's represenation of the mystical body of Christ, the Church." (31)

communion among laity in late medieval England: normally (and mandatorily) only once a year, though gazing devoutly at the body of Christ happened at Mass

Wyclif, focused on consubstantiation over transubstantion; "attention was shifted from the metaphysics of consecration and from the spectatorial focus of the Mass, with the rewards of attendance, to the faithful's reception of Christ, a shift that transformed the role of the priests" (32)