Transposed Appetites: Mary of Jerusalem’s Cannibalism in Post-Reformation Narratives

Abstract

This essay examines the intersection of ritual sacrifice, blood libel, and child murder in the story of Mary of Jerusalem, whom Josephus describes as having killed and eaten her own son during the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem. While Reformation accounts of Mary’s cannibalism served, unsurprisingly, as an opportunity for satirical attack on the host, it is striking that pre-Reformation writers also relied on the same Eucharistic association. Juxtaposing medieval and early modern Protestant accounts of Mary’s cannibalism reveals a shared value system that elevates the symbolic or sacramental over the literal or corporeal. Notably, these stories overlap when they commend the religious praxis of the writers by disparaging that of their predecessors as stubbornly carnal: the Jews in the case of the medieval writers, and the Catholics for those interpreting the story after the Reformation. Although there are some key differences—Protestant texts are less implicated in the blood libel literature that dominated medieval Europe—both pre-and post-Reformation narratives confirm the overwhelming appeal of healing flesh, particularly as it pertains to the powerful mediation of Mary’s holy namesake, the Virgin. Linking pre-Reformation accounts of Mary’s cannibalism to their post-Reformation counterparts, this essay illuminates an important aspect of the Protestant reception of medieval theology: specifically, the degree to which both parties were preoccupied with the power of the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary’s part in it, how similarly they sought to expel its resultant anxieties about anthropophagy, and further, how the practical theology of the Eucharist changed in the Protestant world.