The Host in the late Middle Ages: superstitions, faith, miracles and magic

The problem of taking and metabolizing Christ had been a major concern in Medieval times. Many intellectuals dedicated their energies to this thorny topic: from Pascasius Radbert’s literal interpretation in the first half of the ninth century, to the “more symbolic and spiritualistic line of thinking” of Ratramnus; from the position of the heretic Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century, to that of Lanfranc of Bec, who was seemingly the first to apply the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident to the Eucharist, concluding that the presence of Christ in the bread and the wine was physical and involved a change of substance - a transubstantiation: a formula that would not be used until the twelfth century, but that would be validated and corroborated at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and later at the Council of Trent. In the meantime, in 1264, Pope Urban IV had added the feast of Corpus Christi to the liturgical calendar (even though it would spread throughout Europe only in the fourteenth century), aimed at celebrating and “calling attention to” the sacrament of the Eucharist.

But let's analyse more in detail what lies behind the concept of theophagy.

Many centuries earlier, Cicero had exclaimed: “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?”. In fact, the whole Roman empire would have been filled with insane people in no more than four hundred years. Insane, and somewhat original.

We may track back some apparently analogous cases like, among the others, the Dionysiac omophagia, that anyway didn’t consist in being in communion with the god, but rather in being possessed by Dionysian frenzy; the Mithraic ritual of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a bull in which Mithras was “present” and, more convincingly, that of giving bread and a cup of water to initiates in the mysteries of Mithras; or the Aztec feast of the Flaying of Men, during which captured warriors were ritually changed into “living images of the gods” and eventually eaten, so that, as Davíd Carrasco suggested, the eaters could incorporate their divine charisma. We might even mention the Hindu equation of food with Brahman.

But, in some sense, the underlying meaning of the Eucharistic rite was seemingly closer to a different and rather ancient concept: that it was possible to absorb someone’s attributes by eating part of their body. This belief appeared in many myths of the past in controversial and various forms, and it is not to be excluded that the idea of the Eucharistic meal was somehow connected with them: we may recall the Jewish tale of the leviathan who wanted to eat the fox’s heart so as to acquire cunning and wisdom; the Old Norse myth of Kvasir, whose blood was a fundamental ingredient (together with honey) for the mead of poetry; in the Völsunga Saga, Guttorm, son of King Gjiuki, becomes fierce and brute after eating a stew of snake and wolf flesh; the Ulstermen who drank milk from the skull of the Irish hero Conall Cernach had their strength restored; not to mention later medieval credences according to which human semen and menstrual blood could be used in potions or mixed into food as love charms.

Such comparisons may sound unjustified or provocative to our ears, but we will soon see that people’s attitude towards the Host in the late Middle Ages could sometimes remind us of the above-mentioned cases, at least on the basis of what we learn from the exempla literature.

Ushered in by Christ, and daily repeated by the early Christians and during all the Middle Ages up to our times, this kind of theophagy was also anthropophagy, in strict sense, since the Messiah was also a man, after all. The fact that the son of God was truly present in the elements of the Eucharist constituted a problem: indeed, for many centuries the Host was adored as a relic, used for the consecration of altars and for many other indecentes et irrationabiles purposes.

The Church had a hard task in teaching the faithful to use the Host appropriately, as food for their soul, and the narrative genre of the exemplum - brief edifying, illustrative stories intended for use in sermons - was indeed aimed at instructing Christians in the practical implications connected with the sacramental wafer. Exempla became increasingly popular in the late Middle Ages and, as they feature numerous details about widespread practices, they are the perfect instance to show that men have long endued food with superior meanings, other than that of nourishment. The case of the Host is absolutely illuminating, in this sense: it was a small piece of unleavened bread that, through the intervention of a priest, turned into the body of Christ; by housing the presence of Christ, it was alive, capable of working wonders, and endowed with its own will; but, for the very same reasons, people believed they could exploit the fragile wafer, soaked with the presence of the son of God, for magic and superstitious purposes. After all, the Eucharistic rite carried Jesus back on Earth on a daily basis, for every member of the community to enjoy His presence and participating of Him: the moment when the Host was being transferred from the hands of the priest to the mouth of the believer was necessarily a very delicate one.

First of all, because someone could decide not to swallow it. . In an English manuscript from the fifteenth century, we find an exemplum telling the story of a fisherman who, on Easter, attended mass and received Communion. But, since he was aware of being in sin, he simply did not dare swallow the Host. Worried about what to do with the sacramental wafer, he thought to give it to one of the animals he was most familiar with: he put it in the mouth of a fish. The fisherman decided to confess only ten years later, still not to late, though, for the glory of God to show itself: indeed, he saw the same fish swimming towards him and carrying his ten-year-old Host. The message is clear: God awaited for the soul of the fisherman to be pure, and rewarded him for not accepting the body of Christ in an unworthy condition.

Here, the fisherman showed himself to be god-fearing, for he managed not to profane the wafer in the slightest, and the Lord was pleased by his attitude. Had someone not demonstrated veneration or the corpus Christi, he or she would have been repaid with a different kind of recompense. In an early fourteenth-century collection of religious tales, a woman who spit out the Host into her hand was afflicted with leprosy, a disease that was commonly associated with sin during the Middle Ages.

It might also happen that someone could not swallow the Host due to force majeure. In that case, not even the clergy were immune from the powers of the sacramental wafer, because God doesn’t care about one’s social status, but rather about one’s soul. In the very popular collection of edifying tales put together by Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180-ca. 1240), the Dialogus miraculorum, we learn of a monk from the Cistercian community of Fumoringens, in Pictavia, who fell gravely ill. The abbot went to visit him on his sickbed to hear his confession, but when he gave him the Host, placing it on his tongue, the monk was simply unable to close his mouth and chew. The abbot immediately took the wafer out of the monk’s mouth, and gave it to another sick brother, who could easily swallow it. After his death, the monk was found guilty of concealing a huge sum of money (five solidi aerei, or shillings), which he was obviously not allowed to own. The abbot then said: “And so that you know that the reason why he could not receive the Lord’s body was not due to his sickness, on that same day he ate a whole chicken”.

Medieval people seemed to be perfectly aware that the sacramental wafer was not a simple piece of bread. However complicated the concept of transubstantiation might have appeared, they were generally conscious that the Host had nothing of earthly, but it actually was a little slice of divinity. Hence the question came naturally: what if. For example, what if someone used it for other purposes rather than the usual communion with God? We have evidence of the belief that the Host could protect vegetable gardens: Caesarius narrates of a woman who spread the Host over her cabbages in order to protect them from caterpillars - she would become paralytic.

In an early fourteenth-century exemplum, a woman from Gascony wanted to exploit the Host as a love charm by retaining it in her mouth. But, as we have seen, the Host can autonomously decide by whom it likes to be eaten, who is worthy of taking it inside his/her body. And here, although the woman was keeping her mouth closed, the wafer miraculously leapt out of it through the cheek and reached the altar - clearly, it didn’t like to be utilized as an amulet or, even worse, as a magic condiment. This is what would have eventually happened in a story told by the French theologian and chronicler Jacques de Vitry (ca. 1165-1240) in his Sermones Vulgares (thus, addressed to people of all social conditions, the clergy and laity), had God not intervened. This time, a woman didn’t swallow the Host with the intention of using it as an ingredient for a magic love recipe which she would then serve to some man; but, inside her mouth, the wafer literally turned into flesh and became one thing with her palate, adhering to it, so that she could not even speak.

This also shows that the unleavened bread of the Christians is alive, is a person, is the Messiah. An English story from the second half of the fourteenth century and set again on Easter time, has a duchess who, similarly to the above-mentioned fisherman, receives Communion while in sin - here, precisely, she is said to be harbouring hatred in her heart. She dares not swallow the Host, either, and has to find a safe place where she may hide it. She goes back home and finds a hollow tree that suits her. The following week, on Low Sunday, her brother-in-law, who is an Archbishop, notices that the tree is full of beautiful blossoms and its branches are bent by the weight of incredibly fragrant fruits; soon, the Duchess confesses the truth, and when they go to search for the Host, they find a bleeding child - Christ himself. In the same manuscript, in 1343 a woman from Holland (Lincolnshire), angry with God for her bad luck at market, decides to not swallow the Host and to take it home, where she locks it in a box together with a toad. But she soon hears a cry come from the box, and she finds a child. After confessing her sin, she receives Communion again, but this time, instead of the Host, a toad slips in her mouth and kills her.

The divine nature of the Host was not perceived by men only. Animals were perfectly able to sense when they were in presence of the Eucharistic bread - even though, clearly, they couldn’t understand the doctrinal implications of transubstantiation. They knew they should not eat it, for example. Another Jew offered the Host to his dog, who bowed down and adored it, instead of having it; in the Speculum laicorum, the Jew becomes a generic heretic and the dog an ass, but the result is the same.

We also know of cats, swines and all other sorts of beasts kneeling before the wafer. A tremendously popular exemplum told by Petrus Venerabilis (abbot of Cluny), Caesarius of

The divine nature of the Host was not perceived by men only. Animals were perfectly able to sense when they were in presence of the Eucharistic bread - even though, clearly, they couldn’t understand the doctrinal implications of transubstantiation. They knew they should not eat it, for example. Another Jew offered the Host to his dog, who bowed down and adored it, instead of having it; in the Speculum laicorum, the Jew becomes a generic heretic and the dog an ass, but the result is the same.

We also know of cats, swines and all other sorts of beasts kneeling before the wafer. A tremendously popular exemplum told by Petrus Venerabilis (abbot of Cluny), Caesarius of Heisterbach, Étienne de Bourbon and many others, has a woman try to cure her sick bees: no matter how well she fed them, they kept falling sick and dying. Searching for a remedy, she was told that if she had put the corpus Domini inside the beehive, the disease would have certainly ceased. She embraced this advice, she went to mass to receive communion and, just like we have read in other exempla, she didn't swallow the wafer. On the contrary, she took it home and placed it in her beehive. And there came the miracle: the bees, Creatorem agnoscentes, recognizing the Creator in that piece of bread, zealously built a grandiose chapel of honeycombs, complete with walls, roof, main door, windows, bell tower and an altar inside of it, on which they put the body of Christ. Some time later, when the woman opened the beehive, she saw the marvelous structure, got frightened, and confessed her guilt to the local priest.

Every time an animal was not appropriately honouring the Host, that was a clear sign of the presence of evil. In an early fifteenth-century exemplum extracted from the Festial of John Mirk, Prior of the Augustinian abbey of Lilleshall in Shropshire, we see an English priest drop the Host in a meadow while he was on his way to give Communion to a dying woman. When he returned to search for it, he found beasts adoring it, but he noticed a horse kneeling on one knee only. He questioned the animal, who said he was actually a devil in disguise.