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immanence of Christ’s humanity, in devotional objects such as the crucifix and, especially, in the relic of MUP_McDonald_02_Ch1 29 11/18/03, 16:57 30 Suzanne Conklin Akbari Christ par excellence: that is, the eucharistic host. In this context, it is striking to note the resemblance of the behaviour of the crucifix in the Siege of Melayne to that of the host in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament: like the crucifix in the earlier poem, the eucharist in the drama moves from being victim to tormentor. When the unscrupulous Jew Jonathas stabs the
death that is not somebody’s food, no life that is not somebody’s death … Eating is a sacrament’ (Callenbach 1996: 187). Along the lines of what Thom van Dooren calls ‘killing for conservation’ (2011: 286), here we have eating for conservation. Consuming and rendering is declared necessary in order to rewild. The logic of sacrifice and sacrament 108 Discourses of sustainability is repurposed to make animal numbers grow. In the great American fantasy, eating more is the pathway to more abundance, while death is ever fecund. It is fairly clear already that Callenbach
societies accustomed to forthright, uncensored modes of expression. In today’s literature, cinema, and Internet entertainment, and in our print and electronic journalism, we expect bald, unmodulated frankness. Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t. Unlike our unbuttoned society, Elizabethans knew there were rules against the staging of the sacraments or treating with
charity — that man is more an unbeliever than he who verbally rejects the Master, but does his bidding.6 These are careful formulations, catching both the essentialism of Emersonian symbolism and the enthusiast’s defining disregard for the sacraments. Mardi, however, is a series of enquiries, and so the novel’s account of Emersonian enthusiasm cannot be thought its end point. Pierre, or The Ambiguities, on the other hand, written out of the acute disappointment Melville experienced at the immediate commercial and critical failure of MobyDick, is a self-portrait of the
Nicola McDonald trewe’ (3514) because his holy anthropophagy (Saracen flesh consumed in the service of God) performs the same function as conventional Catholic theophagy. Like the eucharist, it is authorised by Christ as a sign of ‘hys grace and his vertu’ (3067); it replicates the sacrament’s power to restore the communicant to health (the medicinal quality of the Host is a commonplace of eucharistic verse), successfully rendering Richard ‘hool and sounde’ (3118); it forges a corporate Christian identity (‘πer is no fflesch so norysschaunt / Vnto an Ynglyssche Cristen
Amen (1986) he writes of scientists as having become priests, working away in their bookless laboratories, ministrants in that ritual beyond words which is the Last Sacrament of the species. (28) chapter5 28/1/05 1:31 pm Page 130 130 A poetics of environment In ‘Waiting’ from Welsh Airs (1987) he writes: The Book rusts in the empty pulpits above empty pews, but the Word ticks inside remorselessly as the bomb that is timed soon to go off. (48) And in the poem ‘Doves’ from Frieze (1992) he states that doves, too, are explosive. In the porches of the peace
between the two. The importance of sexuality to the novel is pointed out by John Maynard, who refers to the ‘process of emotional and sexual maturation’ that Jane undergoes before returning to and marrying Rochester. 115 Jane Eyre is a strong assertion of female rights and desires, presenting a radical realignment of what constitutes consanguineal and conjugal bonds. Showing the sacrament of marriage
murmurs into Dinshawji’s ear as he awaits the hearse. Under the circumstances, it seems as good as any sacrament. As suggested above, Gustad offers the main example of how misrecognition and the fundamental gap between appearance and reality are key themes in Such a Long Journey. Initially, this relates to his bewildered and resentful dealings with Jimmy which draw him further into the world of double-dealing and intrigue he seeks to avoid. Baffled by his neighbour’s unexplained disappearance, Gustad no longer knows what to believe about him. His absence allows Gustad
, committed to the view that the sacraments approved by the Church were effective by virtue of the words, objects, and actions involved and the office of the priest, had a more complex view on the efficacy of witches’ charms. Jean Bodin and the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum are happy to confirm the real effectiveness of various charms (although, as noted in Chapter 1, Bodin also betrays a degree of scepticism towards verbal charms).16 The play rejects anything which ought to have been regarded by educated Protestants as superstition. The ability of witches to see into
Kalender” in the column “parties accused” for going “agaynst the bodely presence,” “Because the same [John] Edmundes sayde that hee was persuaded by this booke, readynge these woordes: that the Sacrament was made in the remembrance of Christ” (Foxe, Acts, 808).5 These persecuted Protestants, Foxe notes, were not “learned, being simple laborers and artificers, but as it pleased the Lord to worke in them knowledge and vnderstandyng, by readyng a few Englishe bookes, such as they could get in corners” (Foxe, Acts, 809), and they learned about the doctrine of