Bibliographic record
Abstract
For later medieval England, the Eucharist lay at the center of orthodox piety and was fundamental to heated debates surrounding the relationship between lay believer, ecclesiastical authority, and the divine. This dissertation argues that the Eucharist also inspired a range of Middle English literary texts, texts which use poetic strategies in order to engage their assumed lay audience in key theological debates. Previous literary scholarship on the Eucharist has tended either to focus on the heretical writings of the Lollards or to depict lay eucharistic piety as a wholly affective experience centered on the believer's personal and emotional identification with Christ's crucified body. Both these approaches oversimplify the complexity and diversity of orthodox Middle English writings. In contrast, my study examines writers who press the social, political, and theological implications of the Eucharist while remaining within the boundaries of orthodoxy. Drawing primarily on literature written between 1300, when eucharistic doctrines began to be rigidly codified, and 1409, when Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions effectively banned vernacular theology, I show that Middle English texts often conceive of encounters with the Eucharist as moments in which believers are unable to identify with Christ. I focus on four texts that interrogate the fraught relationship between the lay believer, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and Christ's eucharistic body: Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne, Pearl, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love. These texts use the Eucharist's apparent failure in order to generate theology that not only challenges readers to question their own relationship to the divine, but also affirms orthodox doctrine. I argue that, by insisting on the Eucharist as a mediated experience which reveals one's difference from the divine, Middle English texts affirm the necessity of the mediator between God and humanity: the institutional Church.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".