Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This introduction charts the history of eucharistic theology to explain why, in a tradition that extends from Chaucer to Milton, English poets turned to the sacrament as a way of understanding poetic sign-making. It unpacks how the intense debates that surrounded the eucharist in late medieval and early modern Europe relate closely to a range of poetic concerns: how signs relate to what they signify, how words mediate the agency of author and reader, and how poetry embodies meaning. This opening section also challenges a recurring narrative that has read poetic investment in the eucharist as resulting from the Protestant rejection of transubstantiation. Critiquing this secularizing teleology, it provides a richer account of ‘presence’ as a concept within eucharistic theology and explains how the poetic turn to the eucharist reflects a counter-impulse to the processes of ‘excarnation’ that prevailed within late medieval and early modern religious reform movements.