gift exchange in early english drama: rhetoric and sacrament

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GIFT EXCHANGE IN EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA:

RHETORIC AND SACRAMENT

Matthew J. Miller, A.A., B.A.

An Abstract Presented to the Graduate Faculty ofSaint Louis University in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree ofMaster of Arts (Research)

2012



1

Abstract

Gift exchange is an important but neglected theme in criticism of early English drama. My

thesis develops this theme by addressing two of the most important ritual elements of that drama:

the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the rhetoric of preacher-performers. Understanding these two

key rituals as gift exchange reveals a complex and subtle theology of the gift in early drama, one

which grounds social relations—both between humanity and God and between individual

humans—in a form of ethical reciprocity best thought of as gift exchange. This remains true

whether gift exchange is envisioned (as it variously is) as coexisting with market exchange, or as

disruptive of such exchange. Though various early English plays do not depict gift exchange in

precisely the same way, then, the gift remains a crucial theological category for them all.



GIFT EXCHANGE IN EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA:

RHETORIC AND SACRAMENT

Matthew J. Miller, A.A., B.A.

A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Faculty ofSaint Louis University in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree ofMaster of Arts (Research)

2012



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UMI Number: 1515542



i

© Copyright by

Matthew Miller

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

2012



ii

COMMITTEE IN CHARGE OF CANDIDACY:

Professor Ruth Evans, Ph.D.Chairperson and advisor

Associate Professor Antony Hasler, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Rust, Ph.D.



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Dedication

For Rachel:

“am I cold,

Ungrateful, that for these most manifold

High gifts, I render nothing back at all?

Not so; not cold,—but very poor instead.”

—EBB



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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my outstanding director, Ruth Evans, for all her help and support on this

project. Thanks also to the other members of my committee, Antony Hasler and Jennifer Rust, for

counsel and feedback. I am indebted as well to my other mentors in the English department: Paul

Lynch, Hal Bush, and Nathaniel Rivers.

Many of these ideas have been developed in conversation with my fellow graduate students

in the department, especially the members of the Woode-Walkers. I am grateful to all my

colleagues for their encouragement and intellectual camaraderie.

My friends at McKnight Crossings have been essential support in all my endeavors, and I

can’t thank them enough.

The Millers, Youngs, and Dudreys have been a neverending source of love and sustenance

(both literally and metaphorically), and it’s hard to imagine finishing without their help.

And without Rachel, of course, it's hard to imagine even starting.



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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 2: SACRAMENT ............................................................................................ 4

Gift Exchange and Economic Language ...................................................... 5

Gift Exchange and the York Cycle ............................................................. 10

The Saturated Phenomenon in the Croxton Play ...................................... 23

CHAPTER 3: RHETORIC .............................................................................................. 31

Rhetoric as Gift in the Preaching Tradition ............................................... 33

Gift Rhetoric in Chester ............................................................................ 44

Gift, Rhetoric, Sacrament .......................................................................... 54

CHAPTER 4: CODA ....................................................................................................... 56

Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 59

Vita Auctoris ..................................................................................................................... 65



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Chapter 1: Introduction

Omnis enim res quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur

quomodo habenda est.

Everything which does not give out when given away is not yet possessed in the wayin which it should be possessed, while it is possessed and not given away.—Augustine of Hippo.1

My purpose in this thesis is first of all to explicate the language of the gift in early English

religious drama, particularly as it shapes two concepts which are central to that drama: the

sacrament of the Eucharist, and the rhetoric of preaching. Sacrament and rhetoric are crucial social

contexts for early English drama, for as constitutive elements of the worship of the Christian

church they are also constitutive elements of medieval society—not in any simple formalist

manner, such that the presence of the rituals compelled social peace, but in a much more

complicated and evocative sense. If we cannot say that medieval drama created social peace, we can

at least note that its theology aspired to do so. We cannot posit with Mervyn James that by

pursuing social wholeness drama necessarily created it; however, we can follow Sarah Beckwith in

discerning how the structure and symbolism of sacred ritual informs the same aspects of drama.2

Sacrament and rhetoric, in other words, offer a model for how ritual social engagement is to be

practiced not only inside the church, but also outside of it in other ritual activities such as drama.3

These concepts are thus crucial for an understanding of early English drama; nevertheless, as I will

show, they have been little discussed beyond a few key treatments, and frequently misunderstood.

Drama is a social phenomenon, ritualized and embedded in festive and affective contexts. So

1 Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 13, sec. I.1.2.

2 Mervyn James, "Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town," Past and Present 98 (1983), 4; Sarah Beckwith, Signifying

God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

3 For more on the relationship between rhetoric and the Eucharist as liturgy, see M. Todd Harper, "Ritual and Rhetoric: Two Forms of Memory inthe Early Eucharist," Memphis Theological Seminary Journal 50 (2012), n. pag.



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too rhetoric, and so too gift exchange. It would not be overreaching to say that overweening

commerce (at least as we think of it in the postmodern, capitalist West) and the art of drama are

ill-suited to coexist, for whereas the market privileges self-interest and innovation, drama thrives

upon collaboration and ritual.4 Even prior to theoretical and historical reflection, then, it should be

easy to see that gift exchange operates in a sphere of human action akin to drama: it is communal

and ritual—think of birthdays or Christmas gifts, year after year. Early English drama takes these

qualities to an extreme unlike any contemporary theatre: in community, through its public

performance and amateur production; in ritual, through its yearly recurrence (in the case of the

cycle plays) and its roots in liturgy, especially the communal rite of the Eucharist. Like gift

exchange, then, drama is festive, ritualized, aneconomic in a certain sense. It is for these reasons

among others that Miri Rubin's thesis that the Eucharist provided "an idiom through which life-

worlds . . . came to be articulated"5 has been so productively explored by Beckwith through the

drama. The metaphor of gift unites Eucharist, drama, and rhetoric as modes of ritual engagement

of human beings with God and one another, modes that operate not in the precise legal structures

of market and contract, but in the messy, creative, inexact mode of the gift.

For early English drama, ritual gifts serve as attempts to understand and engage with God,

whose grace provides the ground of all human activity. I thus insist upon reading such plays as the

York cycle, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament , and the Chester cycle as theological texts: as plays

which develop claims about God, and about the central doctrines of the Christian faith. To develop

the theme of the gift, then, is to pursue not just an understanding of the plays' social contexts, but

4 In this claim I am indebted to Lewis Hyde’s analysis of how art is lost when subsumed by commerce in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the

Modern World , 2nd. ed., New York: Vintage, 2007.5 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture , Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 1.



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of their theological claims. John Milbank argues that for Christian theology,

gift is a kind of trancendental [sic ] category in relation to all the topoi of theology,in a similar fashion to "word." Creation and grace are gifts; Incarnation is thesupreme gift; the Fall, evil and violence are the refusal of gift; atonement is the

renewed and hyperbolic gift that is for-giveness; the supreme name of the HolySpirit is donum (according to Augustine); the Church is the community that isgiven to humanity and is constituted through the harmonious blending of diversegifts (according to the apostle Paul).6

Drawing on Augustine in particular, Milbank contends that Christian theology dwells in the realm

of the gift from patristic through medieval and postmodern contexts. Gift exchange thus has

bearing for the development of numerous themes in the theology of early English drama, and my

work here is far from exhaustive. Nonetheless, by developing the theme of gift exchange in two of

early drama's most crucial areas, I hope to suggest how the theological and the social productively

collide and merge in these plays. The ritual of the drama provides a space in which aspiration

(theology) can be brought to bear on social life, and vice versa—and both theology and social life

are understood by the drama as functioning in the realm of gift.

The quote from Augustine with which this introduction begins thus suggests the extent to

which a Christian theology or literature within the tradition of Augustine must rely on the notion

of gift exchange. Just as God gives everything, true possession in the Christian sense depends upon

giving—of the self, of language, of material goods, and of work including the work of dramatic

performance. To the extent, then, that early English drama engages with the theological basis for

its own existence, it conceptualizes itself within the Christian theology of gift exchange.

6 John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, p. ix.



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Chapter 2: Sacrament

There is no reason why it is more correct to say that the gift forces a return than tosay that the gift allows or even liberates a response, and so is the occasion ofcommunion. —David Bentley Hart.1

The Eucharist: God's grace made corporeal and fed to the faithful. Much of medieval drama

is concerned to work out, in a myriad of ways, how to make sense of this bizarre, cannibalistic

ritual.2 Though at the time the plays were being performed scholastic theologians had already been

explicating the niceties of sacramental theology for some time, the drama—particularly, but not

solely, the York Corpus Christi cycle—attempts a narrative approach that is nonetheless subtle and

powerful. When the source of one's doctrine is a collection of scattered and ancient stories, one

way to understand that dogma is to retell those stories, and in the process to give them a shape and

a metaphorical framework more accessible to one's own life. The project of the York cycle, then, is

both exegetical and theological: retelling the stories of the Bible in such a way to make them both

more comprehensible and more laden with ritual meaning. As befitted the feast on which the cycle

was held, the Eucharist became the sacrament which provided the conceptual key to the narrative

as a whole. But the sacrament itself is a mysterious rite.3 The York cycle, then, draws upon the

language of daily life to provide metaphors for understanding the symbolism of Corpus Christi. In

this approach, it is representative of much of the eucharistic drama of the period. I will here

consider the York cycle along with the non-cycle eucharistic miracle play, the Croxton Play of the

Sacrament.

1 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: the Aesthetics of Christian Truth , Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003, p. 263.

2 See Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 276-77.

3 For a discussion of the mysterious properties of medieval eucharistic teaching, see Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: the Eucharist and the Spiritual Artsof the Middle Ages , Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 4-6.



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Gift Exchange and Economic Language

As many scholars have noted, the metaphors used for Corpus Christi are frequently drawn

from economic life: for some scholars, this means work and a theology of labor; for others, it

means commercial language and an economy of redemption. It is strange, however, that gift-

exchange never enters this discussion. Though labor and commerce provide one set of metaphors

for understanding the workings of divine grace, the functions of gift-exchange provide another,

just as rich language. In this chapter, I analyze one manifestation of the gift in the York cycle—

gifts given to God, that is, sacrifices and offerings—in order to show how the economics of the gift

are an integral part of the York cycle's economic metaphors for the sacramental. The pageants

which depict gift exchange are among the most neglected by critics, and yet understanding their

economics will give us a richer and more complex model of the cycle’s spiritual and symbolic

economy. Having explored the manifestation of this economy in the York cycle, I conclude the

chapter by turning to the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a distinctly different genre of play which

nonetheless manifests a remarkably similar sacramental and economic consciousness.

Recent criticism of the economic aspects of medieval eucharistic drama has moved between

two poles: an emphasis on labor, and an emphasis upon commerce. I will take the case of the York

cycle as representative, though this trend is symptomatic of early English drama generally.4 A

number of critics have noted the cycle’s persistent return to images of work, linking this theme

with class struggle. Sarah Beckwith, who has set the terms for much of this conversation in recent

4 For economic readings of medieval drama other than the York cycle, see Theresa Coletti, “ Paupertas Est Donum Dei : Hagiography, Lay Religion,and the Economics of Salvation in the Digby Mary Magdalene,” Speculum 76.2 (2001), pp. 337-78; Roger A. Ladd, “‘My Condicion is MannesSoule to Kill'—Everyman's Mercantile Salvation," Comparative Drama 41.1 (2007), pp. 57-78; John Parker, The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From

Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. The binary I outline with regard to the York cycle can be tracedclearly across this work on other early English drama as well.



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years, devotes a chapter of Signifying God to labor motifs in pageants from the Creation and the

Noah plays to the Crucifixion.5 For Beckwith, although the cycle was created to promote the

honor of York’s wealthiest (mercantile) citizens, the pageants’ focus on work reveals an “artisanal

ideology,” undercutting the authorities’ attempt to unify the social body of York in their own

image.6 Beckwith thus reads the York cycle as manifesting a laboring-class struggle against city

authorities. Though the agendas of both the artisans and the authorities are present, she places

emphasis upon those pageants which demonstrate an “emancipatory critique” leveled against clerics

and town leaders.7 Similarly, Heather Hill-Vásquez sees the cycle as promoting “sacred work”

through the Noah pageants while critiquing commercial and mercantile pursuits.8 Furthermore,

Andreea Boboc reads the cycle as understanding both charity and salvation in terms of work.9 Each

of these critics frames the York cycle in terms of an economic polarity between labor and the

commercial, and each stresses the power of laborers to shape the theology and social power of the

cycle.

Other critics, however, focus on how civic authorities used the York cycle to create a fiction

of civic unity strengthening their economic leadership. Erik Paul Weissengruber argues that

“subordinate groups had to undertake their symbolic struggle” for power on ground dominated by

the city authorities.10 Though Weissengruber acknowledges the presence of class struggle in the

5 Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp.

42-55.6 Beckwith, Signifying God , p. 53.

7 Beckwith, Signifying God , p. 55.

8 Heather Hill-Vásquez, Sacred Players: the Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama , Washington, DC: Catholic University of

America Press, 2007, pp. 115-16.9 Andreea Boboc, “Lay Performances of Work and Salvation in the York Cycle,” Comparative Drama 43.2 (2009), p. 266.

10 Erik Paul Weissengruber, “The Corpus Christi Procession in Medieval York: a Symbolic Struggle in Public Space,” Theatre Survey 38 (1997), sec.

II.



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cycle, ultimately he claims that the authorities were successful in repressing this dissent.11

Similarly, Christina M. Fitzgerald contends that the Noah section of the cycle supports the

construction of hierarchies privileging the master over the laborer.12 Furthermore, Maren L.

Donley argues that the pageant of the Last Judgment constructs a spiritual world in which the

wealthy possess spiritual as well as economic capital.13 Criticism dealing with the economics of the

York cycle thus focuses on class struggle, and the two groups of critics are divided only by which

class they see as controlling the pageants they read. Both sets of critics, however, devote their

attention to just a few pageants, those which are most explicitly concerned with work or

commerce: the two Noah pageants, The Crucifixion, and The Last Judgment or Doomsday.14 Given

little mention are those pageants which are concerned with gift exchange: Sacrificium Cayme et

Abell , Abraham and Isaac , and The Purification of the Virgin. The economics of the York cycle are

thus analyzed solely in terms of commercial economics, with no reference to other systems of

exchange.

Recent historical work, however, shows that gift exchange has far more import for late-

medieval European culture than has been previously thought.15 An older historical narrative, in

which so-called “primitive” economies gave way to a purely mercantile economy around the

eleventh century, relegating gifts entirely to the private realm, has now been thoroughly

11 Weissengruber, "Corpus Christi Procession," sec. VI.12

Christina M. Fitzgerald, “Manning the Ark in York and Chester.” Exemplaria 15.2 (2003), p. 378.13

Maren L. Donley, Merchant Drama: Trade, Piety, and the Paths to Salvation in English Drama, 1400-1532 , diss., University of Colorado, 2008, p.25.

14 The edition of the York cycle which I will use throughout is The York Plays , vol. 1, ed. Richard Beadle, EETS SS 23, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009. Beadle gives the final pageant the title Doomsday, which practice I will follow.15

See Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000; Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets,

Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages , trans. Pamela E. Selwyn, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002;

and Ilana F. Silber, "Gift-Giving in the Great Traditions: the Case of Donations to Monasteries in the Medieval West," European Journal ofSociology 36.2 (1995), pp. 209-43.



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discredited.16 Although the complex and dominant mercantile system of late capitalism often

makes it hard for us to imagine alternative economic systems, in recent years gift exchange has

been extensively studied as a form of exchange and contract that operates outside the market. The

fundamental principle of gift exchange, as derived from its foundational theorist, the father of

anthropology Marcel Mauss, is reciprocity: “in theory these [gifts and presents] are voluntary, in

reality they are given and received obligatorily.”17 Though a gift may be presented as free of

obligation—as we say, “no strings attached”—it in fact incurs an obligation to reciprocate. Because

that obligation is social rather than legal, however, a gift cements social bonds as commerce

cannot. This concept has come under much scrutiny, most notably from Jacques Derrida, who

argues that as soon as a gift is reciprocated (even acknowledgment that it is a gift), it is no longer

given out of a purely gratuitous motive, and thus devolves into contract.18 The only gift which can

truly be given—the only pure gift—would thus be that which even the giver was ignorant of

having given. As such, the only gifts which can be conceived of as pure, disinterested gifts are

time19 and one’s own death20—but even these gifts are impossible to give, by their very nature.

And yet it is this very impossibility which gives the gift in its true sense its ethical weight, “igniting

a passionate desire for the impossible.”21 The dream of the “pure” gift, given totally without self-

interest or desire for a return, thus forms Derrida’s ethical ideal, though only in contrast with the

cold fact that all gifts inevitably become contracts.

16 For exemplars of the older view, see Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages , trans. Patricia Ranum,

New York: Zone Books, 1988; and Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1978.

17 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, New York and London: Norton, 2000, p. 3.

18 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 13-14.

19 Derrida, Given Time , p. 161.

20 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 42-43.

21 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997,

p. 160.



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Though Derrida’s understanding of the gift has been extensively employed in various

medieval contexts,22 and his notion of the pure gift dominates criticism regarding gifts, I will

propose that in the case of medieval drama a different model is of more use. Reciprocity seems

unavoidable in the York cycle, a fact which I take to be due both to the cycle’s particular historical-

cultural circumstances, and its dramatic and theological concerns. Both the culture of late-medieval

English Catholicism and the theology of the Eucharist tend, in my view, to encourage a view of

gift exchange contrary to Derrida’s ethics. I propose that what John Milbank calls “purified gift-

exchange,” in contrast to Derrida’s “pure gift,” better describes the efficaciousness of the gift as it is

conceived of in the York cycle.23 Milbank’s description of purified gift-exchange proceeds on two

fronts: first, a critique of Derrida’s emphasis upon pure motives; and second, the claim that in a

non-Kantian ethical system, in which the will is not the primary determinant of ethical value, we

need not think of the desire for reciprocity as inherently corrupt. He encapsulates these two

elements of his argument thus:

As regards the Derridean notion that “rewards” to self intrinsic to giving cancel thegift, this seems allied to the questionable Kantian understanding of the goodness ofthe gift as residing in purity of will or motivation. . . . Moreover, one can enjoygiving, not only in the mode of self-congratulation, but also as a kind of ecstasis , orcontinuation of oneself out of oneself. Likewise, the wanting and even thedemanding to receive back (in some fashion) may be a recognition of ineradicableconnection with others and a desire for its furtherance.24

For Milbank, an ethical posture not drawn from Kant’s emphasis on purity of the will allows us to

read gift exchange as at least potentially cleansed of competition—hence “purified gift-exchange”

rather than “pure gift.” Absent a deontological rigor, it is not necessary to read the desire for

22 See Simon Gaunt, "A Martyr to Love: Sacrificial Desire in the Poetry of Bernart de Ventadorn," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3

(2001), pp. 477-506; Britton J. Harwood, "Chaucer and the Gift (If There is Any)," Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006), pp. 26-46; and KyleMahowald, "'It May Nat Be': Chaucer, Derrida, and the Impossibility of the Gift," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010), pp. 129-50.

23 John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic.” Modern Theology 11.1 (1995), p. 131.

24 Milbank, "Can a Gift," p. 132.



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reciprocity as solely self-interested, for it may just as well be about the desire for an interpersonal

and mutual connection only afforded by exchange. In recent years, anthropological research has

also suggested an alternate approach to reciprocity where non-Western or non-modern cultures are

involved: Ilana F. Silber, for example, questions whether the notion of the pure gift might be “the

fruit of a very specific ideological phase in Western developments bent on essentializing the

distinction between interestedness and disinterestedness.”25 For Silber, as for Milbank, gift

exchange within a medieval or Christian context is more complex than allowed for by Derrida.

Rather than dismissing all exchange as a disingenuous contract, then, we should approach gift

exchange in early English drama as a complex phenomenon capable of both agon and altruism.

Gift Exchange and the York Cycle

Though gift-exchange theory is thus a vital field of philosophical discussion, those critics

who work on economic systems in the York cycle seem to view it as a minor concern. Blair W.

Boone gives attention to Sacrificium Cayme et Abell , one of the pageants most concerned with the

influence of the gift. Surprisingly, although Boone discusses a number of topics associated with gift

theory—sacrifice, exchange, spiritual debt—ultimately he argues the pageant is primarily about

“the use and abuse of language.”26 Boone thus neglects to consider the primary economy of the

cycle he examines. Barbara I. Gusick gives some attention to gift-exchange in two articles on The

Entry into Jerusalem; however, Gusick’s treatment of gift-exchange theory uses Derrida exclusively,

and in both articles moves swiftly on to considerations of physical wholeness and the social body.27

25 Ilana F. Silber, “Gift-Giving in the Great Traditions: the Case of Donations to Monasteries in the Medieval West,” European Journal of Sociology

36.2 (1995), p. 239.26

Blaire W. Boone, “The Skill of Cain in the English Mystery Cycles.” Comparative Drama 16.2 (1982), p. 113.27

Barbara I. Gusick, “Christ’s Transformation of Zacchaeus in the York Cycle’s ‘Entry into Jerusalem.’” Fifteenth-Century Studies 30 (2005), p. 70;

and “Groping in the Darkness: the Man Born Blind and Christ’s Ministry in the York Cycle,” New Approaches to European Theater of the Middle Ages: an Ontology, ed. Barbara I. Gusick and Edelgard E. DuBruck, New York: Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 49-50.



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Though Boone and Gusick do more than others to account for the gift, no critic has yet given

sustained attention to a consideration of gift-exchange economics in the York cycle, making use of

up-to-date theoretical and historical work. My reading of gifts in the York cycle will owe more to

Milbank than to Derrida, not because I view the philosophical debate as resolved, but simply

because whereas Derrida’s ethics derive largely from post-Kantian sources (Marx, Levinas,

Kierkegaard), Milbank’s reliance upon the Christian theological tradition in the figures of

Augustine28 and Gregory of Nyssa aligns his viewpoint much more closely with the York cycle and

its theological-cultural tradition.29 The key theological concern of the cycle after all, is the

Eucharist: the sacrament of grace, God’s absolutely altruistic gift—but, I will argue, a gift thought

of by the York cycle within the context of purified gift exchange, not pure gift. Rather than an

idealized form of contract, the cycle’s depiction of Eucharistic sacrifice as a gift offers a picture of

social and divine relations based upon altruistic reciprocity.

I turn first to the pageant Sacrificium Cayme et Abell , the story of a primeval sacrifice and a

primeval murder—in a sense, the first gift and the first theft. The pageant begins with the craft

imagery associated with God throughout the early pageants: the Angel makes repeated reference to

God’s “wirke” (line 26).30 The word “wroughte” or “wrought” appears three times in the opening

speech (4, 13, 14),31 and God’s acts of creation are rehearsed in language that emphasizes its

performance as work. Abel quickly relates this discourse of labor to gift exchange, however,

28 As we will see in the third chapter of this thesis, Augustine holds a particular importance for gift exchange and medieval drama.

29 Elizabeth Harper reaches a similar conclusion regarding late-medieval English notions of the gift in her work on Pearl and other Middle English

religious literature: see Elizabeth Harper, "Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies," Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010), pp. 421-39; and Elizabeth Virginia Keim Harper, Gifts and Economic Exchange in Middle English Religious Writing , diss. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2009.

30 York Plays , p. 35.

31 York Plays , p. 35.



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declaring to God: “Of alle !e gode sen I beganne / Thow shalle it haue, sen !ou it sent” (41-42).32

Abel thus conceives of his goods as a gift from God, requiring the counter-gift of his sacrifice.

Cain, however, rejects such a notion as foolishness, calling his brother “robard jangillande”

[chattering rascal] (47),33 and telling Abel that while he may “daunce in !e devil way,” Cain himself

“wille wyrke euen as I will” (52-53).34 Cain the pragmatist thus rejects the wildness and squander

of Abel’s gift economy in favor of self-directed work. When Abel appeals to his brother to come

with him that they might “[g]yffe God our teynde [tithe] duly !is day” (58),35 Cain uses nakedly

commercial language to dismiss the value of the gift:

Ya, deuell, methynke! !at werke were waste,That he vs gaffe geffe hym agayneTo (f)e.Nowe fekyll frenshippe for to frasteMethynkith !er is in hym, sarteyne.If he be moste in myghte and mayneWhat nede has he? (60-64)36

In Cain’s vocabulary, an offering to God becomes “werke,” the payment of a “(f)e[e].” Furthermore,

he blasphemously characterizes God’s desire for an offering as reneging on a bargain: God is a fickle

friend who wants back what he has given. Cain points out that God has no “nede” of his goods,

implying that the divinity is merely greedy.

Though Cain’s remark is clearly an attempt at self-justification above all else, it points to an

underlying problem in his concept of the divinity: he thinks of his possession and God’s as a zero-

sum game. In the face of orthodox Christian theology, which states that all our goods are gifts of

32 York Plays, p. 36.







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God, and places humans as mere stewards, Cain resents God’s desire for sacrifice. Abel, however,

sees that sacrifice is not concerned with a competition of ownership, but with honoring God: “[I]t

wille please hym principall” (67).37 Abel’s understanding of the relationship between God and

humanity is thus defined by gift exchange: rather than an absolute financial benefit, both God and

humans derive relational benefit from the reciprocity of providence and sacrifice. Abel receives all

good things from God, and God derives pleasure from the return gifts of praise and sacrifice, and

their emotional connection is thus reinforced. In contrast, Cain assesses the transaction in

commercial terms and judges it foolish. By rejecting exchange with God for economic reasons,

Cain has failed to grasp the true function of the divine economy: entering into gift exchange with

God does not mean mere squander—instead, it means entering into a fruitful and economic

relationship with God and fellow human beings.38 Abel's gift to God is meant to engender a

constant flow of gifts in which he is both recipient and giver. As such, Caine's recourse to the

commercial economy is a failure to understand the economic workings of grace.39

Ironically, after Cain has killed his brother and thereby cut himself off from reciprocity with

both God and man, the discourse of the gift returns to haunt him. Derrida has noted that a gift

may “be a matter of a good thing or a bad thing,” since one may give either a gift or a blow, life or

death.”40 When Cain refuses to enter into gift exchange with God, the gift turns against him: an

Angel arrives to remonstrate with him for his murder, proclaiming that “God has geffyn !e his


38 For more on medieval treatments of Cain and the ethics of economy and the gift, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: the Middle English

Household Imaginary, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp. xvi-xvii. 39

It is worth noting that for Aquinas "the biblical scene used to exemplify the fusion of eucharist and charity was the story of Cain and Abel, a story

uniting Abel's offering with the sacrifice of his life" (Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 102).40

Derrida, Given Time , p. 12.



14

malisonne” (108).41 Cain’s scorn for the reciprocity of the gift thus provokes God to give again, but

this time the gift is a curse. God’s second gift deprives Cain of the very goods he was so anxious to

hold back from reciprocity before, making him an outcast and a pauper. By refusing to enter into a

gift exchange, Cain alienates his goods from social bonds—and ultimately alienates himself from

his goods as well. His murder of Abel casts Cain out of God's good graces and out of social bonds;

his removal from the economy of those bonds leaves him a wanderer shorn of his economic assets.

The pageant concludes with a final, and yet more ironic, reference to gift exchange: Cain snarls,

“Sethen I am sette !us out of seill, / That curse !at I haue for to feill, / I giffe you !e same” (137-

39).42 Though it is unclear whether this speech is addressed to the audience, the Angel, or God, it

is clear that Cain has finally grasped the reciprocal nature of the gift. He is only too happy to

return (or pass on?) the curse which he has been given. This curse becomes an antitype of the

blessing of the Eucharist, a reciprocal and symbolic gift with perverse rather than beneficent effects.

Try as he might, Cain cannot ultimately absent himself from the gift economy.

Sacrifice and gift exchange take on even more pressing importance in the Abraham and

Isaac pageant. The exchange of gifts between God and humanity becomes more complex,

typologically prefiguring the theological subtleties accompanying the ultimate gift of Christ’s

sacrifice. Abraham’s opening speech operates much like Abel’s, linking his work to God’s bounty:

he prays,

Thou graunte me myght so !at I mowghtOrdan my werkis aftir !i wille.For in !is erthely lyffe, Ar non to God more boune





15

Then is I and my wyffe,For frenshippe we haue foune. (7-12)43

Like Abel, Abraham links his “werkis” explicitly to what God will “graunte” him, describing his

economic actions as having their origin in a divine gift. He also embraces the reciprocity of the gift,

stating himself to be “boune” to God on the basis of these gifts. Finally, he connects this obligation

to “frenshippe” with God. The Middle English Dictionary (MED) offers definitions for

“fr"ndship(e)” which show that it encompasses both an “amicable relationship,” and “[t]he good

will or favor of a superior.” Theological meanings of the term—that is, God’s grace or mercy—are

linked by the MED to the second, more formal of these definitions. I would suggest, however, that

in this instance some semantic overlap may be occurring between the two meanings of the term. A.

K. Reed argues that Abraham and Isaac places a much greater emphasis on emotions and

relationships than has generally been assumed, emphasizing the love expressed between Abraham

and Isaac.44 This relationality is expressed in Abraham’s use of “frenshippe” to describe his

connection with God. A more usual term here might have been “mercy” or “blessedness”—terms

which are certainly in the vocabulary of this pageant and the cycle, and which represent the

traditional theological understanding of the relationship between Abraham and God—but

“frenshippe” emphasizes the relationality which Reed finds in this pageant, and thereby fits closely

with the pageant’s depiction of gift exchange. Abraham’s exchange of gifts with God thus solidifies

not only his ethical standing in a state of grace (God’s good will), but his “amicable” relationship

with God.

As the pageant continues, we see Abraham’s gift-exchange relationship with God


44 A. K. Reed, “‘A Thing Like a Love-Affair’: a Study of the Passion of Obedience in the York Play of Abraham and Isaac,” Christianity and

Literature 29.2 (1980), p. 37.



16

challenged, as he is asked to make a sacrifice which will sever a different loving bond. Critics have

frequently noted the York play’s openly typological linking of Isaac with Christ.45 The York

pageant depicts Isaac as a type of Christ by making him in his early 30s (rather than a child, as the

other mystery plays do) and by having him acquiesce willingly to his sacrifice. Typological

comparisons come to an end, however, before Isaac is actually sacrificed, as God provides a sheep in

Isaac’s stead. Here Isaac becomes a type not of Christ but of humanity, whom God redeems by

sending Christ. This redemption provides a picture of how gift exchange between humans and God

can work well, in opposition to the breakdown in that system caused by Cain. Because Abraham

has been willing to enter into gift exchange with God, when God’s further gift comes it is a

blessing and not a curse. Not only does Abraham receive back his son, he receives a promise that

God will “multiplie” his “seede” (339).46 As the gift circulates, it will grow, not in capital but in

loving bonds. This promise, though, comes with an admonition: “Luk ye hym [that is, God] loue”

(344).47 Though God cannot be out-given, the gift-exchange relationship between God and

Abraham remains reciprocal: Abraham must return his love to God. Abraham has acknowledged

the truth that God’s gifts are given with the expectation of return—though the gift is

immeasurably greater than the return could ever be. Abraham’s faithful entry into God’s gift

economy thus rebukes Cain’s blasphemous commercialization of God’s gifts while typologically

signifying the coming gift of Christ.

Christ is most explicitly described as a gift in The Purification of the Virgin, another pageant

which depicts an offering given to God. The pageant begins with a long explanation of “Moyses

45 See Clifford Davidson's overview in "The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama," Papers on Language and Literature 35.1 (1999), pp. 31-32.





17

lawe” from a priestly figure designated “Prisbeter” (25).48 Over half the priest’s speech is dedicated

to laws of sacrifice, placing the issue of gifts to God squarely before the audience from the

beginning of the pageant. The pageant progresses with speeches from the prophet and prophetess

Simeon and Anna, followed by Mary and Joseph’s discussion of the offering, which they owe by

law, to purify Mary after childbirth. This passage again rehearses laws of sacrifice, including the

proper purification offering of a lamb and two doves. Joseph and Mary, however, cannot afford this

sacrifice. And so Joseph makes this remarkable statement of gift theory:

And yf we haue not both in feer [together],

The lame [lamb], the burd [bird], as ryche men haue,Thynke that vs muste present hereOure babb Jesus, as we voutsaue,Before Godes sight.He is our lame, Mary, kare the not,For riche and power none better soght;Full well thowe hais hym hither broght,This is our offerand right. (254-62)49

In Joseph’s conception, the Christ child becomes the offering, a true gift of which none better can

be found—“riche and power none better soght.” Christ is thus conceived of as a supreme gift,

surpassing the humbler offerings of animal sacrifice, though in their spiritual lineage as a gift to

God. The passage thus prefigures Christ’s redemptive power: already, he is the lamb of God, a

sacrifice for human sin. Moreover, for Joseph God has given Christ in order that he might be given

back, offered in place of the lacking legal sacrifice. God’s redemptive grace, then, is not given

without concern for a return gift, but is enmeshed in gift exchange. The theology of the York cycle

should thus be read as consonant with Milbank’s “purified gift-exchange,” rather than Derrida’s


49 York Plays, pp. 133-34.



18

pure gift.50 As God offers Christ to Joseph and Mary, so they must offer him back: Mary says,

“Jesu my babb I offer hyme / Here with my harte and my good wyll, / Right hartely” (283-85).51

Mary’s offering of Christ is here linked with her decision to give heart and will to God as well.

Joseph too states that “we haue offeryd as we arr hight / Here hartely” (296-98).52 As in Abraham's

case, emotional warmth is again tied to the gift-relationship between humans and God; both Mary

and Joseph emphasize that their offering is made "hartely," a word which according to the MED

can mean both something done with emotional warmth or good cheer, or done with devotion,

spiritually (see MED “hert(e)li(e”). In this instance, the distinction is moot, as I am arguing that

the York play implies a close conceptual link between spiritual giving and relational (cheerful)

giving—see my previous discussion of “frenshippe.” Furthermore, this emotion is conceived of as

the consequence of reciprocal exchange, not a pure gift: Mary and Joseph offer Christ back to God,

including their hearts and souls with him. Christ is thus conceived of not merely as a unilateral gift

from God to humanity, but as an ever-moving gift, accruing relational interest only in his exchange

from one party to another. This is exactly how gift exchange works, according to Mauss: as the gift

circulates between one party and another, it tightens the relational bonds between those

individuals, for as the gift moves among individuals it carries with it some of their “spiritual

essence.”53 Mary and Joseph’s offering of Christ with “harte” and “good wyll” clearly participates in

this economy.

If this passage is important in terms of gift exchange, it is similarly crucial for the

typological structure of the cycle and its Eucharistic theology, with the Child Christ becoming yet

50 Milbank, "Can a Gift," p. 131.



53 Mauss, The Gift, p. 12.



19

another image of the Eucharist. Leah Sinanoglou has drawn a connection between Corpus Christi

plays and the medieval tradition in which the Eucharist becomes not the broken body of the adult

Christ, but the Child Christ, who is then slain on the altar of the church.54 Sinanoglou sees the

clearest instance of this tradition in the Purification pageants, linking them to the Abraham and

Isaac pageants.55 However, this discourse is clearly at work in the Purification as well, with the

child Christ depicted as a eucharistic gift to God. The pageant’s language, depicting the babe

Christ as the lamb offered in place of Joseph and Mary’s sacrifice, lends itself to this interpretation,

in which the rite of purification becomes a typological sign of the Eucharist. At the same time,

Christ is typologically linked to the figures of Isaac and Abel—three figures who offer themselves

willingly to enter into gift exchange with God. Gift-language thus continues to resonate alongside

significations of the Eucharist, linking the theological workings of the sacrament with a fruitful

gift-relationship between God and humanity. Corpus Christi, as the York cycle understands it, is a

gift, but not a unilateral gift—it demands the giving of one’s very self, in a conscious imitation of

the self-giving of Christ. Abel, Isaac and Christ participate in this self-giving directly; Mary and

Joseph participate through their offering of the Christ Child as the Eucharist. Mary and Joseph

thus become types of every Christian, who can participate in self-giving through the sacrament.

From Abel to Isaac to Christ, the typological structure of the York cycle conceives of the

Eucharist once and again as a form of gift exchange between God and humanity. That gift

exchange is essential to the cycle’s theology should hardly surprise us, given that most ancient and

central of Christian doctrines: God’s grace, the consummate gratuity (but, as Milbank argues, a

54 Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: a Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48.3 (1973), p. 491.

55 Sinanoglou, "Christ Child," p. 502.



20

gratuity that includes reciprocity). Grace forms the core of the sacraments, and most particularly

the Eucharist, the sacrament which structures and animates the York cycle. Beckwith argues that

the York Corpus Christi cycle is “sacramental theater,” a genre which in seeking to perform and

create the community functions theologically like the sacraments.56 In her reading, the Eucharist is

thus not only the central symbol of the cycle, but a sacrament the effectiveness of which the cycle

actually seeks to emulate. We can thus understand the gift exchange of the Eucharist as the central

economy of the cycle. Consideration of the sacrifice pageants shows that the Eucharist—if

Beckwith is correct, the key theological concern of the cycle—can best be thought of as a gift. By

understanding the Eucharistic sacrifices of the cycle as purified gift exchange, tied up in beneficent

reciprocity, we can begin to grasp how sacramental drama sought to contextualize Christian ritual

within the language of gift economy, in addition and sometimes tension to its social concern with

the market economy.

Although I am deeply indebted to Beckwith for her notion of sacramental theater, it should

be clear by now that I interpret the social relations of the Eucharist in a different manner.

Beckwith rightly insists on the communal nature of both church and theater, and on the Eucharist

as the sacrament which creates, in medieval thought, "the social and political polity . . . the body of

Christ."57 By enacting this sacramental culture in visceral form through the body of an actor,

Beckwith argues, the plays open up an "emancipatory critique" of the polity based on "the necessity

of labor."58 The sacrament is thus inserted fully within the realm of the commercial economy—

though it may function as a critique of certain elements of that economy, it operates within it

56 Beckwith, Signifying God , p. xv.





21

nonetheless. Beckwith here rightly breaks down our conventional post-Enlightenment division

between art and craft, insisting on the necessary relationship between the creative possibilities of

the drama and the pragmatism of labor: "we might celebrate the fig leaf, first art object, not so

much as a deficiency, but as the very sign of human making."59 It is certainly true that the artistic

devaluation of economy—art for art's sake, that Victorian mantra—would be grossly anachronistic

if applied to medieval works, especially civic works such as the Corpus Christi cycle. However, in

reminding us not to divorce these realms, Beckwith perhaps identifies them too closely. The York

cycle is hardly aneconomic, but that is not to say that it is commercial. If we recognize gift

exchange as an economy, the creative tension between economy and Eucharist becomes more clear

without dissolving altogether.

Beckwith's linking of work and sacrament suggests that the commerce and labor represent

the whole of the York cycle's economy, an argument which my analysis of gift exchange should

already suggest to be problematic. Both the commercial economy and the gift economy are

operative in the York cycle, with neither exhausting the possibilities of the other. This can be seen

even in the cycle's centerpiece of sacramental imagery, the most central pageant to Beckwith's

argument, the Crucifixio Christi . Beckwith famously points out how the pageant, in raising Christ,

imitates the elevation of the host in Mass, a reading which in my understanding of her argument

cements her treatment of the cycle as sacramental.60 Furthermore, she rightly describes the actions

of the soldiers as "work—endlessly laborious, jobbing, divorcing the means of their act from the

meaning of it."61 For Beckwith, the implication of embedding the Eucharist within this workaday






22

context is to imply that resurrection, too, will be "disseminated" among the audience rather than

controlled by priestly authority.62 The Eucharist is thus placed fully within the economy of labor,

in a move subversive of priestly authority. To assume that this is the only economy operating in the

pageant, however, is to neglect a sophisticated eucharistic theology that operates alongside the

pageant's social critique.

Beckwith's analysis makes Christ's body into a commodity, handed around within the

"work" of the soldiers and thus appropriated from the "work" of the priests. In contrast, I read the

eucharistic body of Christ in the pageant as explicitly placed within the realm of a gift. The

language of the soldiers is dominated by labor—forms of the verb "werke," for example, appear

fourteen times. In contrast, Christ's two speeches foreground notions of gift exchange: in his first

speech, he describes himself as "obblisshe[d]," begs God for a "fauore" for the soldiers, "So !at !er

saules be saffe / In welthe withouten ende" (53, 56, 58-59).63 Christ thus places himself as the

mediator of a transcendent gift relationship between God and the soldiers, the free gift of eternal

wealth, in counterpoint to the soldier's workaday economics. In his second speech, Christ makes

this contrast yet more stark, dismissing the value of the soldiers' work and begging his Father that

it be considered within the divine gift economy: "What !ei wirke, wotte !ai noght; / Therfore, my

fadir, I craue, / Latte neuer !er synnes be sought, / But see !er saules to saue" (260-64).64 The

Eucharist thus is envisioned as wiping away the sins of every person's "wirke." Rather than falling

in continuity with the labor-commerce economy in which the soldiers act, then, Christ's body as

Eucharist functions in the alternate economy of the divine gift, operating outside the workaday



64 York Plays, pp. 339-40.



23

world inhabited by the soldiers. This is not to say that the relationship between the market

economy and the gift economy in the cycle is one of thoroughgoing alterity or opposition. The

strong emphasis on reciprocity I have explicated throughout the cycle demonstrates one way in

which the market and the gift economy are seen to operate in close proximity to one another

here—not without tension, but also not in outright antagonism. In pageants such as the Crucifixio

Christi or Sacrificium Caim et Abell , as I have shown, the gift challenges the logic of a pernicious

market; yet the Noah pageants concern themselves solely with a virtuous market, as the Abraham

and Purification pageants do with a virtuous gift exchange. The York cycle thus reveals the gift

economy as constantly existing alongside and above the market economy, an influence of the divine

in the figure of the Eucharist that does not destroy the market, but that may supersede it.65

The Saturated Phenomenon in the Croxton Play

The York cycle is not alone in its obsession with sacramentality, nor in its interpretation of

the Eucharist through the metaphor of the gift. Like the York cycle, the Croxton Play of the

Sacrament takes the Eucharist as its central subject; like the Crucifixion pageant, it depicts the

appropriation of the sacrament by a commercial economy, and the ultimate rebuke of that economy

by the sacrament. Yet the Croxton play introduces an element of radical discontinuity between gift

exchange and commerce, a sense of the gift as disruptive beyond what York implies. Some of this

discontinuity no doubt has to do with the Croxton play's historical and cultural position: Croxton

is far more acutely aware of Lollard and proto-Reformist discourse than York.66 This proto-

65 For a useful treatment of how gift and market economies coexisted in the late Middle Ages, see David Graver, Debt: the First 5,000 Years , New

York: Melville House, 2011, p. 329.66

See C. J. Gordon, "Bread God, Blood God: Wonderhosts and Early Encounters with Secularization," Genre 44.2 (2011), p. 111; David Lawton,

"Sacrilege and Theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament ," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.2 (2003), p. 300; JamesSimpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 557.



24

Reformist influence leads to subtly different account of social relations, and thus of the gift. Jared

L. Witt provides a useful summation of the Reformist reservations about gift exchange in a

discussion of John Calvin:

Medieval covenant theology affirmed that it was only by virtue of God’s installationof a gracious covenant that human efforts could be rewarded with grace and eternallife. Calvin was convinced that God wouldn’t do any such thing. Picturing God asordaining the laws within which human works are graciously regarded as meritingeternal life would violate the radical character of divine giving that constitutes thevery identity of God.67

With the arrival of the Reformation, divine giving became more and more radically divorced from

the growing market economy. As Beckwith points out in a meditation upon the transformation of

the sacraments by the Eucharist, Reformed theories of grace insisted on the total alterity of divine

and human economies, in which human social relations can only be disrupted by "God's one-sided,

utterly gratuitous, preemptive and prevenient gift of grace."68 God's gifts, in Reformed thought,

thus can only operate disruptively or even destructively on the market of ordinary human relations.

Though the Croxton Play preserves some reciprocity and thus does not partake of the extreme

alterity granted the gift by Calvin and Luther, in presenting the gift of the Eucharist as

fundamentally disruptive to the market economy the play nonetheless radicalizes the gift of the

sacrament as York does not.

Critics approach the Croxton Play, like York, with market-based assumptions about

economics, and thus again neglect the gift. Alexandra Reid-Schwartz has drawn out the economic

aspects of the play, arguing that it depicts “commerce replacing religious modes of thought with

67 Jared L. Witt, "Economies of Exchange: Reciprocity and Pelagianism in Calvin's Theology," Augustinian Studies 33.2 (2002), p. 264.

68 Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness , Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 106.



25

economic ones.”69 For Reid-Schwartz, this substitution reflects not just late-medieval anxieties

about the rise of the mercantile economy, but a general slippage between religion and economics.

By depicting the escape of the host from the commercial economy, she argues, the play seeks to

wrest the Eucharist out of systems of exchange and re-insert it within a religious “purified symbolic

economy.”70 Following the common scholarly binary, Reid-Schwartz consistently treats “economy”

as a commercial notion, despite this tantalizing footnote: “It is interesting how closely the

Eucharist resembles the gift in Mauss's 'archaic' societies.”71 Because she holds to the historical

model that sees gift exchange as giving way to commerce in the early Middle Ages, however, Reid-

Schwartz is unable to see the significance of this resemblance, and does not pursue it beyond the

footnote. Given the cultural vitality which I have demonstrated that gift exchange possessed during

the late medieval period, however, it becomes simple to identify the function of the Eucharist's

resemblance to the gift. Just as in the York Crucifixion Christ's body becomes a gift that rebukes

the commercial economy, so in the Croxton Play the Host ultimately acts as a gift. More than

simply acting as a liturgical medium of grace, however, through miraculous transfiguration the

Host takes on the qualities of the supreme disruptive gift, what Jean-Luc Marion terms the

“saturated phenomenon."

I will not be able here to explore all the implications of Marion's complex treatment of the

gift; however, I wish to briefly outline his discussion of the saturated phenomenon, which I believe

offers us a productive way to read the Croxton Play. For Marion, most phenomena are "poor in

intuition": we lack the perceptive powers to grasp all of what is there, and we inevitably impose

69 Alexandra Reid-Schwartz, “Economies of Salvation: Commerce and the Eucharist in The Profanation of the Host and the Croxton Play of the

Sacrament,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25.1 (1994), p. 10.70

Reid-Schwartz, "Economies of Salvation," p. 14.71

Reid-Schwartz, "Economies of Salvation," p. 19, note 45.



26

concepts upon phenomena which limit our ability to grasp their full nature—we objectify them.72

Although, in accordance with his phenomenological method, Marion categorizes all phenomena as

given, the giving nature of intuition thus limits the given: "What gives is lacking. The very thing

that is lacking is precisely the only thing that can and should give."73 In contrast, the saturated

phenomenon offers us "an excess of intuition, therefore . . . an excess of givenness."74 By giving

more than our intuition can handle, it goes beyond the concepts with which we objectify ordinary

phenomena.75 Four primary characteristics give it this power: it is unforeseeable, without

precedent, unbearable, and without analogy. These characteristics give the saturated phenomenon a

"superabundance of intuitive givenness," an excess which renders it impossible to look upon.76

Confronted by the saturated phenomenon, we no longer look at a "mere object," but we recognize

that we have been confronted by a givenness too great to be perceived (and thus objectified) in the

ordinary way.77 The saturated phenomenon thus operates as a gift which in giving itself demands

so much of our senses that we are overwhelmed.

In the Croxton Play, as Reid-Schwartz and others78 have noted, the Host undergoes a

process of sacrilegious commercialization, as Aristorius and Jonathas make it a token of exchange

between them. Stolen by a Christian merchant, it is offered for sale on the market and purchased

by a group of Jews, depicted with virulent anti-Semitism as sordid figures of commerce.

Furthermore, Jonathas and his compatriots objectify the sacramental bread by submitting it to "a

72 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 199.

73 Marion, Being Given, p. 194.





78 See Sarah Beckwith, "Ritual, Church, and Theatre: Medieval Drama of the Sacramental Body," Culture and History 1350-1600 , ed. David Aers,

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992, pp. 68-72; and Derrick Higginbotham, "Impersonators in the Market: Merchants and thePremodern Nation in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament ," Exemplaria 19.1 (2007), pp. 163-82.



27

prefe" (test), and thereby insisting that its epistemological status is in question (line 362).79 If the

Host's stature as sacrament requires verification, then it cannot be other than an ordinary

phenomenon, poor in intuition—for it would thereby seem to have failed to communicate its

overflowing meaningfulness.80 Furthermore, in their probing’s and delimiting’s of the Host,

Jonathas and company keep their gaze relentlessly upon the wafer, thus treating it as bereft of the

excess which, in the saturated phenomenon, "bedazzles and burns."81

Aristorius and Jonathas commercialize and objectify the Host only in despite of its own

building resistance: it can only be placed on the market through an act of theft; and it then

perturbs its own objectification through a series of increasingly disturbing miracles. Though

Jonathas and his fellows manage to persist in their objectification despite the bleeding of the wafer

and its damaging effects upon their flesh, in its final incarnation it attains the full status of a

saturated phenomenon to overwhelm their attempts at objectification and invade their gaze. As the

image of Christ appears out of the cauldron (to what must have been spectacular theatrical effect),

it causes Jonathas to "trymble and quake" and instantly kneel, begging for mercy (660-65).82 Jesus

appears out of the Host as a "multiple and indescribable excess that annuls all effort at

constitution,"83 a self-giving gift which is unbearable, without precedent or analogy, and could not

have been foreseen by Jonathas or his fellows. That it is unbearable is shown by their immediate

kneeling and submission, their refusal to continue to test the Host. That it is without precedent or

analogy is shown by the change it brings in their behavior: unlike the previous miracles, which

79 The Croxton Play of the Sacrament , ed. Greg Walker, Medieval Drama: an Anthology, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 223.

80 See Marion, Being Given, p. 199.


82 Croxton Play, p. 228.




28

astonish the Jews but do not cause them to turn from their actions, the appearance of the image of

Jesus halts their testing. That it could not have been foreseen is shown by their renewed shock

despite the previous miracles: as the image of Jesus appears, Masphat describes it as a "grete

wondere," and Malchus as a "mervelows case" (633, 636).84 The image of Jesus in the host thus

fulfills all Marion's requirements as a saturated phenomenon, the supreme gift.

Moreover, as a self-giving gift, the image of Jesus in the Host confronts the Jews' gaze and

plucks them from the commercial economy to immerse them in the economy of grace. Rather

than being looked upon, Jesus gives himself to them: he says, "I shew yow the streytnesse of My

grevaunce, / And all to meve yow to My mercy" (659-60). The revelation of the Host as true Christ

and supreme gift has been not simply for epistemological verification, but to communicate grace

and mercy. The Jews' objectifying gaze has been filled and overfilled by this grace. Where a few

lines ago they were testing and questioning the Host, they are now given over to praise: "Oh Thow

my Lord God and Savyowr, osanna!" (698).85 This praise is clearly the only appropriate response to

the gift of revelation which they have been given, the only way to cope with the saturated

phenomenon before them.86 The gift of mercy is corporeally demonstrated in the healing of

Jonathas' hand, a further gift beyond the revelation of Christ. Jonathas recognizes that this miracle

has plucked him out of the economy of his "ongoodly wyrk" and "put me in Thy myghty mercy"

(708, 712).87 Accordingly, he goes to the priest to confess, receive the Eucharist, and be initiated

into the economy of mercy in which he will live his life. The supreme gift of Jesus' appearance in



86 On the connection drawn by Marion between praise and the gift, see Mike Kraftson-Hogue, "Predication Turning to Praise: Marion and

Augustine on God and Hermeneutics—(Giver, Giving, Gift , Giving," Literature and Theology 14.4 (2000), p. 405.87

Croxton Play, p. 229.



29

the host thus provokes the reciprocity of Jonathas' gratitude and his commitment to the broader

eucharistic community by becoming a Christian. The saturated phenomenon of the Eucharist thus

initiates and perpetuates an exchange of gifts, and thus a relationship, between Jonathas and God.88

In both the Croxton Play and the York cycle, then, the Eucharist appears as a supreme

gift, the exchange which instantiates a continuing amicable relationship between humanity and

God. Whether continuous with the market economy (as in the York play), or disruptive of it, the

gift in either case operates as the fundamental ground of the divine economy and thus of social

relations. Neither a mere commercial exchange nor Derrida's pure gift, the Eucharist forges

reciprocal bonds of love and grace between God and his people: Abel, Abraham, Mary and Joseph,

and ultimately Aristorius and Jonathas. When it is rejected, as by Cain or pre-repentance Jonathas,

it does not cease to give itself—but it becomes a curse (we can thus interpret the Host's adherence

to Jonathas' hand). Whether envisioned as sacrifice or as saturated phenomenon, the Eucharist in

these plays takes on supreme power to disrupt the economy of work and commerce—not with a

rejection of exchange per se , but with exchange based on grace rather than law. Medieval eucharistic

drama can thus be understood as sacramental theater, a drama of grace-filled reciprocity. If we

accept Beckwith's interpretation of the Eucharist as the central symbol of medieval drama—or, for

that matter, Rubin's understanding of the Eucharist as the central symbol of late-medieval society

in Corpus Christi —then this interpretation of the sacrament as gift should prompt us to look more

broadly at how gift exchange constitutes the drama itself.89 After all, if the drama is brought into

being by the Eucharist, and the Eucharist operates as a gift, then the gift itself might be said to

88 Milbank has critiqued Marion's notion of the gift for its lack of reciprocity: see "Can a Gift," 137. Yet if the saturated phenomenon of theEucharist in the Croxton Play does not partake of quite the same reciprocity depicted in the York cycle, it nonetheless becomes reciprocal to the

extent that it demands Jonathas and company become Christians.89

See Rubin, Corpus Christi , p. 348.



30

bring the drama into being. My next chapter will therefore turn to considering the drama itself as

gift, reading its rhetoric as an exchange of linguistic and performative gifts between performers and

audience.



31

Chapter 3: Rhetoric

A gift is a transaction that assumes a particular rhetorical form.

—Valentin Groebner.1

With the relationship between gift exchange and the Eucharist in early English drama now

established, I will turn my attention to the use of language which (as per Groebner in the epithet)

makes the gift possible: rhetoric. By rhetoric I mean the art of persuasion in language,

characterized by adherence to "specific directions, based on an analysis of current practice," thought

to best effect persuasion.2 Though classical thinkers up to Augustine distinguished with more or

less clarity between rhetoric and the arts of what we would now call "literature"—poetry and

drama—in the Middle Ages the boundaries between art and argument were much more fuzzy.

Conceptualizing medieval drama as a form of rhetoric, then, is to acknowledge that what common

contemporary parlance considers separate modes of discourse (reflected even in the growing divide

between "Literature" and "Rhetoric" programs) were not dichotomized in the Middle Ages. If we

can understand the central symbol of early English drama, the Eucharist, as a gift, we should also

consider how to understand the drama itself as a gift. By analyzing how the rhetoric of the drama

presents it as operating within a gift exchange system, I will further my claim that the social

relationships enacted and enabled by the language of the drama are best understood within a

framework of gift exchange. Furthermore, by emphasizing how gift exchange informs the drama's

doctrines of language and reliance upon the rhetorical mode of preaching, I will continue to

develop an understanding of the gift as a theological category for these plays.

1 Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages , trans. Pamela E. Selwyn, Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 1. 2 James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: a History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance, Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1974, p. 3.



32

Jody Enders has done the only really substantial work on medieval drama and rhetoric in

her Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (hereafter ROM ) and The Medieval Theater of

Cruelty (hereafter MTC ). Enders considers the drama primarily in light of the forensic tradition,

rather than the liturgical analyses which had been conventional.3 Enders stresses, however, that her

analysis "does not preempt the liturgy or mimicry as origins of drama, but rather resituates those

ritualized discourses along a single performance continuum."4 By rediscovering the medieval

concept of actio, or delivery, Enders proposes a means by which we can "retrace the rhetorical

channels between oral performance, law, drama, and spectacle."5 In the Middle Ages, Enders

argues, all forms of discourse, including not only rhetoric and drama but the very acts of reading

and writing, were delivered—were oral phenomena which contained a significant element of

performance.6 The very word actio contains "rich connotations of acting, authorship, legal

prosecution, and authority for its actor practitioners."7 Whether literature, forensic rhetoric, or

drama, the practitioner of the language arts was both composer and performer. Enders furthers this

analysis of the forensic tradition in MTC , uncovering in that mode of rhetoric a grammar of

violence that maps easily onto theater:

Actio offered a means by which real bodies with real voices translated the violentimagery of an inventional memory into the speech and action of the courtroom, theclassroom, and the stage. With the profusion of rhetorical lore available in theMiddle Ages, it is thus probable that a learned dramatist . . . may readily have turnedto the violence of rhetoric.8

For Enders, then, the forensic tradition of rhetoric is constituted by a violence which shapes

3 Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 65-68.

4 Enders, ROM, p. 67.


6 Enders, ROM , p. 36.


8 Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 5.



33

medieval drama. She makes no claims, however, regarding the influence of other genres of rhetoric

on the drama. There is clearly room, then, to explore the interconnections between drama and

non-forensic genres of rhetoric. I propose to extend Enders' treatment of actio as a mode of

discourse uniting rhetoric and drama by treating preaching too as a form of actio closely related to

the drama, drawing on a rhetorical tradition which Enders does not discuss: the ars praedicandi .9

Within this tradition of preaching manuals, initiated by Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana, we

can discover a discourse of gift exchange, with implications for our consideration of rhetoric in

early English drama.

Rhetoric as Gift in the Preaching Tradition

In order to develop my reading of the ars praedicandi as a rhetoric of the gift, I will draw on

Mari Lee Mifsud's theory of rhetoric as gift/giving. For Mifsud, all rhetorics contain an economy:

“Rhetoric’s desire to dispose its audience to invest in the object of attention connects rhetoric to

economy.”10 In attempting to persuade the audience to grant their time to the orator, rhetoric thus

takes part in an economics of attention. Mifsud argues that this economy has overwhelmingly been

conceived of as the polis economy, a system incommensurable with the gift: “Polis exchange

operates in and through distance and commodi#cation. Things are distant—by this I mean non-

intimate—from people, and people distant from things.”11 Rhetoric within the polis economy

assumes “a fundamental distance between self and other” and emphasizes the desire to dominate or

control one’s audience.12 For Mifsud, scholars have privileged the polis economy due to the

9 Just as I do not seek to dispute Enders' reading of the forensic tradition, my emphasis on preaching means I am not concerned with the academic

rhetoric included in the trivium, which Rita Copeland explicitly distances from the Augustinian tradition: Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics,and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 158.

10 Mari Lee Mifsud, "On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving," Rhetoric and Philosophy 40.1 (2007), p. 89.

11 Mifsud, "On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving," p. 99.




34

presumption that the rhetorical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero arose amidst the polis; however,

another context for the rise of the tradition can be found in the gift economy depicted by Homer.

By conceiving of rhetoric within this framework, Mifsud proposes a way to think of rhetoric “not

so much as a tool but a gift,” an offering made to the other to create intimacy, rather than simply

to exercise control.13 Mifsud wants to avoid romanticizing such a notion, noting that the gift can

become a burden, but suggests that if we retain the gift’s fundamental alterity from the polis

economy, “we can work with the generative relation of difference between (and within) the two to

create something new.”14 Developing this point, Mifsud contemplates the notion of a hospitable

rhetor, “a producer of possibilities rather than a judge of meaning.”15 Mifsud’s hospitable rhetor is

thus a generative rather than an authoritative figure—drawing on Bataille's theory of the general

economy,16 Mifsud seeks a rhetoric characterized by "the unproductive expenditure of excess

associated with gift cultures."17 A rhetoric made up of excess rather than control is thus a rhetoric

of gift exchange.

The rhetoric of the polis economy, to use Mifsud's terms, is also the forensic rhetoric

described by Enders: drawn from the tradition of elite Greco-Roman statesmanship, it privileges

control and personal distance from (commodification of) the subject and audience. Enders begins

her book with Cicero, and her primary medieval interlocutors are the Pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica

ad Herennium and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Ciceronian Poetria Nova, which was influenced by Horace




16 Though I will make use of Bataille's term "excess," for the purposes of my argument here I am concerned with Mifsud's reading of Bataille and

will follow her understanding of his work.17

Mifsud, "On Rhetoric as Gift/Giving," p. 90.



35

and the Rhetorica ad Herennium.18 Moreover, in both ROM and MTC Enders concerns herself

primarily, if not exclusively, with forensic rhetoric. In this rhetoric of the courts, the orator-lawyer

practices a torturous "heurisis or inventio" upon the evidence or witnesses in order to create a

performance that would persuade a judge.19 Both the material and the audience are thus held at a

distance and manipulated to serve the lawyer's ends: "In the inventional drama of torture, facts and

proofs depend upon interpretation, judgment, and even prejudgment."20 The orator thus holds

power over both evidence and audience. As in Mifsud's polis economy, "distance and

commodification" are prized, along with control.21 Rhetoric, like the instruments of torture, is a

tool for manufacturing the truth the orator wants. The violent forensic rhetoric analyzed by

Enders can thus be understood as operating within Mifsud's polis economy.

The participation of forensic rhetoric in the polis economy has in large part to do with its

relationship to truth and the source from which it extracts that true via the rhetorical canon of

invention. Enders describes forensic rhetoric as a discipline concerned with "real legal ordeals and

concomitantly codified legal practice."22 Rhetorical invention thus operates as the torturous

extraction of truth from real events. By any interpretation, these are not the rhetorical concerns of

the preaching tradition. Instead, as I will argue below, the tradition expounded by the ars

praedicandi seeks to open the preacher up to the revelation of God through the Scriptures, then to

communicate that revelation truthfully to the audience. Authority and the production of truth

thus does not lie in the orator, but in the source: invention is conceived of as the receipt of a gift,

18 See James J. Murphy's introduction to the text in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 30-31.

19 Enders, TOC, p. 29.






36

and delivery as the transmission of that gift to others. The preaching tradition thus operates in a

distinctly different economy than the forensic tradition analyzed by Enders.

To articulate how the preaching tradition operates within a gift economy, I turn first to the

origin of that tradition, Augustine's DDC . Augustine begins with a brief outline of his intended

subjects: hermeneutics and rhetoric, acknowledging that writing about these subjects will be “a

great and arduous task” (I.1.1).23 However, his hope for completion of this task lies in God, though

whose grace he receives his material. Not only that, but in Augustine’s transmission of these ideas

to others God will supply an increase, “So in this act of service I will not only experience no

shortage of material, but rather enjoy an astonishing abundance of it” (I.1.3).24 From the very

beginning of his major work on rhetoric, then, God’s gift-giving supplies the paradigm for inventio.

Language itself is a gift which we cannot acquire through our own efforts, a fact Augustine stresses

in his prologue while answering his potential critics: those who “congratulate themselves on a

knowledge of the holy scriptures gained without any human guidance . . . . must admit that each

one of us learnt our native language by habitually hearing it spoken” (preface 9-11).25 All learning

and wisdom is a gift from God, whether unmediated inspiration (a “divine gift,” preface 4.726) or

learning gained from a human teacher: “For all truth comes from the one who says, ‘I am the

truth.’ What do we possess that we have not received from another? And if we have received it

from another, why give ourselves airs, as if we had not received it?” (preface 8.1727). Mike

Kraftson-Hogue connects this passage to Augustine’s hermeneutics of charity, as expressed in Book

23 Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995, p. 13. All quotations from DDC will come

from this translation.24

Augustine, DDC , p. 13.25

Augustine, DDC , pp. 5-7.26

Augustine, DDC , p. 5.27

Augustine, DDC , p. 9.



37

One of DDC : “So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them,

but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet

succeeded in understanding them” (I.40.86).28 Augustine thus defines Christian hermeneutics as

above all the practice of building up love. For Kraftson-Hogue, the charity expressed in this

hermeneutics is the interpreter’s gift back to God “in imitation of the initial giving” of God’s loving

grace in language and the word of God.29 The fundamental givenness of language is thus merely

one example of God’s generosity towards humanity, a graciousness which carries implications for

how human beings undertake interpretation and rhetoric no less than any other human activity.

Just before articulating his hermeneutics of charity, while discussing the use and enjoyment

of other people, Augustine articulates the nature of that love which is to flow out of the Christian’s

enjoyment of God in a passage full of gift language:

Of all those who are capable of enjoying God together with us, we love some whomwe are helping, and some who are helping us; some whose help we need and somewhose needs we are meeting; some to whom we give no benefit and some by whom

we do not expect any benefit to be given to us. But it should be our desire that theyall love God together with us, and all the help we give to or receive from them mustbe related to this one end. (I.30.63)30

For Augustine, the greatest “benefit” which we can give to our neighbors is to incite them toward a

greater enjoyment of God. The grace of God thus incites Christians to enter into gift-giving

relationships with their neighbors in order to help them to love God, “who wants himself to be

loved, not in order to gain any reward for himself but to give to those who love him an eternal

28 Augustine, DDC , p. 49.

29 Mike Kraftson-Hogue, “Predication Turning to Praise: Marion and Augustine on God and Hermeneutics—(Giver, Giving, Gift, Giving),”

Literature and Theology 14.4 (2000), p. 409.30

Augustine, DDC , p. 39.



38

reward” (I.30.64).31 In his discussion of use and enjoyment Augustine thus configures the

relationship between God, the Christian and others as taking place on the basis of God’s

fundamental gift, in response to which the Christian seeks to generate an excess of love through

the continued gift of love to others. This discussion of the gift of love, which for Augustine is

merely a necessary description of the way things (res ) work,32 leads inexorably back to his main

topic of interpretation, and he concludes his analysis of giving in love in I.40.86 with his statement

on hermeneutics as building up "this double love of God and neighbor" (I.40.86, p. 49). The

preacher is thus required to continue circulating the divine gift of language to create the excess of

love. Augustine's rhetorician is thus merely a conduit for the excess produced by God and granted

to the congregation.

Augustine finds the origin of Christian rhetorical excess in Scripture, which itself possesses

a rhetoric, and thus the excess of the gift. In Book Three, while discussing the ambiguity put into

Scriptures by the inspired authors, Augustine characterizes it as having eloquence (eloquiis ), one of

the terms used in describing rhetoric in Book Four.33 The eloquent language of Scripture contains

an excess of meaning, more than is necessary, and this excess is a gift: “Could God have built into

the divine eloquence (eloquiis ) a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of

understanding the same words in several ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less

divinely inspired passages?” (III.38.85-39.86).34 For Augustine, then, the multivalent meanings of

Scripture are symptomatic of a bountiful gift, an excessive rhetoric. By building difficulty into the

language of Scripture, God has not only made it a fit source for interpretation and explication, but


32 See Augustine, DDC , p. 15, sec. I.2.6.

33 See Augustine, DDC , p. 229, sec. IV.27.74.

34 Augustine, DDC , pp. 169-71.



39

he has built an excess of meaning into the text as a gift to the interpreter. Augustine describes the

obscurities of Scripture in the same way in Book Four: biblical writers, he claims, wrote with some

obscurity “so that later writers who understood and expounded them correctly might find within

God’s church a further source of grace” (IV.22.62).35 This source of grace is the ability to practice

rhetoric, in interpreting and explaining what may not be clear in Scripture on its own terms, an

ability which is enabled by the prior gift of Scripture itself. This does not mean, of course, that the

preacher should try to imitate the obscurities of Scripture—their grace is “not equal . . . but

subsidiary” to that of the biblical writers—but rather he should try to pass on the grace of meaning

he has received as simply as possible, so that it can be received by his listeners. Those things which

he does not fully understand he should refrain from attempting to explain to a wide audience,

however, though in writing he may grapple with them (IV.23.63).36 The multivalent meanings of

Scripture thus come to resemble the “aneconomic gift of excess meaning” that Mifsud posits may

exist in rhetoric.37 Some aspects of Scripture’s meaning are entered into the gift circle via oratory

or writing, and thus bring the return gift of charity; but other meanings the preacher gleans from

the text may “never at all” be presented to an audience due to their complexity, remaining between

the preacher and God as a wholly aneconomic excess.

By describing language, and in particular the language of Scripture, as fundamentally within

the mode of gift, Augustine presents us with an ideal of Mifsud's "hospitable rhetor": the orator

whose speech is generative rather than commodifying, aimed not at distancing and controlling the

audience, but serving them. To demonstrate how this gift rhetoric transfers to the drama by way of


36 Augustine, DDC , p. 223-24.




40

the ars praedicandi , I will now briefly consider Ranulph Higden's fourteenth century text Ars

componendi sermones , an English example of the ars praedicandi which can be linked to medieval

drama as well as Augustine's gift rhetoric of preaching. Higden's preaching manual explicitly cites

DDC four times, demonstrating a clear knowledge of the text and interpreting it as an authority

for preachers. Moreover, Higden's citations of DDC mirror Augustine's treatment of rhetoric as a

gift, quoting several passages laden with gift exchange which will be discussed below. Higden's Ars ,

then, draws on Augustine to develop a theory of preaching as a rhetoric of gift exchange in a late-

medieval English context.

Though Higden does not discuss Augustine's philosophy of language as a gift, he might be

said to assume it: just as DDC positions the preacher as a conduit of the flow of excess from God

to the congregation, Higden's preacher ultimately seems to serve as a transmitter for the gift of

rhetoric rather than its craftsman. In his discussion of selecting a protheme or antetheme, Higden

uses as an example "the antetheme according to Gregory in his homily for Pentecost (who says):

No one rightly attributes to a human teacher the knowledge which he gains from his mouth.

Unless there be One person to teach within, the tongue labors in vain, and so forth."38 As the "and

so forth," reveals, this is a fairly commonplace piece of medieval theology, following the orthodox

teaching that God is the source of all knowledge; however, when contextualized by the passage that

follows, Higden's choice of this example seems highly significant. He goes on to explore Gregory's

teaching, defining preaching as containing "three active elements, namely: the supreme teacher—

God—instructing from within; the listener—obedient to the words of the teacher; and the

38 Ranulph Higden, Ars Componendi Sermones , trans. Margaret Jennings and Sally A. Wilson, Paris and Leuven: Peeters, 2003, p. 45.



41

instruction itself—useful and beneficent."39 Conspicuous by his absence in this formulation of

rhetoric, of course, is the rhetor himself. "Productive preaching" is thus understood as the

transmission of instruction from God, via the instruction to the audience, with the preacher as

mere mouthpiece. Ultimately, this preaching is founded upon grace: "I do not trust that I can

achieve [these things] of myself, but I receive them from the Lord God . . . . As Sacred Scripture

says, Let the streams of living water, that is, grace, flow ever more in us."40 The flow of grace from

God through Scripture to the audience thus enables the preacher to accomplish his work as a

conduit of that grace. Like Augustine's treatment of grace as excess, then, Higden's treatment of

preaching makes rhetoric fully dependent upon the circulation of a divine gift, rather than upon

the creative powers of the preacher himself.

Higden further grounds his rhetoric in Augustinian excess by emphasizing the multivalent

interpretation of Scripture and the importance of prayer, both of which are associated with grace.

In analyzing the theme of the sermon, Higden cites Augustine's teaching on the "fourfold

meaning" of Scripture, a topic which places excess at the center of preaching.41 Though Higden

does not use the language of gift, the notion of excess is at the core of this hermeneutic, as can be

seen in Augustine's treatment in DDC : “Could God have built into the divine eloquence (eloquiis )

a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of understanding the same words in several

ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less divinely inspired passages?” (III.38.85-

39.86).42 For Augustine, then, the multivalent meanings of Scripture are symptomatic of a

bountiful gift, an excessive rhetoric. By centering his rhetoric on the fourfold interpretation of

39 Higden, Ars , p. 46.



42 Augustine, DDC , p. 169-71.



42

Scripture, then, Higden creates an Augustinian rhetoric which operates in gift exchange on the

most fundamental level. He further engages with Augustine's gift rhetoric in his treatment of the

necessity of prayer, citing the claim in DDC "that the preacher should be a man of prayer before

becoming a man of words, both for himself and for those others whom he has received into his

care, that is, taught."43 As Augustine taught it, prayer orients the preacher in a receiving posture

toward God, so that the primal gift of wisdom can pass into and through him via rhetoric,

initiating the gift-giving to his audience which will build up love.44 God’s gift thus lies outside the

human gift circle not only in its aneconomic excess (the extra meanings which the interpreter

cannot pass on) but in the way that it initiates and underlies all human attempts to pass it on. As

with his previous citation of Augustine dealing with the interpretation of Scripture, Higden follows

his treatment of prayer with an example invoking the theology of grace, discussing it again with

the language of water:

For example, let the theme which is proposed be 'A spring rose out of the earth'

(Gen. 2.6). (Say) immediately after the theme is set forth: (To you), the peace andgrace of Him from whose heart and side flowed a spring for making peace mutuallybetween God and man—hence with us—for in the 'with us' God has involvedhimself with man.45

By following his discussion of prayer with this metaphoric treatment of grace as water, Higden

again reinforces the Augustinian excess which must flow through the preacher to create a gracious

rhetoric. In drawing his treatment of interpretation and of prayer from Augustine, then, Higden

inherits the gift rhetoric for the preacher seen most clearly in DDC .

Augustine and Higden reveal a tradition in rhetoric which differs both from the forensic


44 See Augustine, DDC, p. 235, sec. IV.32.87.




43

tradition articulated by Enders and the polis rhetoric of Mifsud: in the ars praedicandi tradition, we

find the gift rhetoric which Mifsud sketches out but cannot find an example of. What would it

mean, then, for medieval drama to practice a gift rhetoric? In one sense, I have already explored

this question—for if the York cycle is a sacramental drama, and if it understands the Eucharist as

gift, it thereby understands itself as gift too. The York cycle enacts the sacrament as gift, and its

rhetoric is therefore a gift rhetoric, an invitation to the audience to participate in the gift exchange

of the sacrament through the gift of the plays. Rhetoric and sacrament are thus united through the

discourse of gift exchange. But this point can be developed still further, and with reference to a

more explicit practice of rhetoric.

A drama which practices the rhetoric of gift exchange in the tradition of Augustine and

Higden would possess three characteristics: 1) It would conceptualize itself as an overflowing of

God's excessive gift (or grace) of language. As per Augustine's theology of language, a drama of gift

rhetoric would practice inventio as a conduit of grace-filled language rather than as a masterful

shaper of words. 2) It would stress the multivalent nature of Scripture, drawing out the excess of

meaning which Augustine speaks of in the texts of the Bible. Rather than seeking to lock down

interpretation and present one definitive meaning for the text in dramatic form, a drama of gift

rhetoric would explicitly mirror the copiousness of meaning in Scripture. 3) It would pursue a

generative creation of audience dialogue and participation. Rather than commodifying and

distancing the audience and their attention, a drama of gift rhetoric would, by stressing the

interpretive openness of the biblical narratives and the loving nature of its interpretation, free the

audience to participate in rhetoric with the drama, rather than having the rhetoric of the drama

enacted upon them.



44

By thus drawing on the ars praedicandi tradition, a drama would come to share the goals

and practices of Augustinian rhetoric. This is not to say that such a drama would necessarily have

the generative effects described above, any more than a sermon preached out of the best of

intentions must necessarily accomplish its goals. Claire Sponsler's caution to scholars of medieval

drama is well known to rhetoricians: never assume that the audience will respond as expected, or in

a unified way.46 Whether or not we think that a drama or a preacher could be effective in

practicing this rhetoric, however, it is important to take note of its presence. No rhetorical project,

after all, has ever been perfectly enacted. Gift rhetoric is worthy of our notice, then, both for the

ways in which it can demonstrate the relationship between the preaching tradition and the

dramatic tradition, and for its challenge to the polis economy of our usual conception of rhetoric.

Gift Rhetoric in Chester

To explore the place of gift rhetoric in early English drama, I turn to the Chester plays.

Whereas the key liturgical concern of the York plays is the Eucharist, Chester demonstrates a clear

debt to homiletic modes. Furthermore, in Theresa Coletti's reading, Chester demonstrates a

fascination with such themes as "epistemologies of word and image, access to and interpretation of

scripture, [and] revelation of divinity through signs and wonders."47 Not only does Chester

demonstrate a clear use of preaching technique in the language and structure of its pageants, in the

late Banns it ascribes its own origin to Ranulph Higden himself: the cycle is described as "[t]he

devise of one Randall, monke of Chester Abbey."48 One should not make too much of this

connection, but it is suggestive. In her discussion of preaching and early English drama, though

46 Claire Sponsler, "The Culture of the Spectator: Conformity and Resistance to Medieval Performances," Theatre Journal 44.1 (1992), pp. 15-29.

47 Theresa Coletti, "The Chester Cycle in Sixteenth-Century Religious Culture," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007), p. 538.

48 "The Ban(n)es which are Reade Bee-Fore the Beginninge of the Playes of Chester," Medieval Drama: an Anthology, ed. Greg Walker, Oxford:

Blackwell, 2000, p. 201, line 7.



45

Marianne G. Briscoe argues that in all likelihood this attribution is spurious, she nonetheless

concludes that "[i]t is noteworthy . . . that the apologists wanted their playwright to be a monk

with demonstrated competence in preaching."49 Amidst the controversy over religious drama

occasioned by the Reformation, then, the promoters of the Chester cycle sought to headline their

production with a connection to preaching. Although I do not wish to argue that the writers of

the Banns or the cycle must have known Higden's Ars Componendi Sermones , I hope to show that

the influence of the ars praedicandi tradition (of which Higden's text is a wholly representative

example50) on the cycle is profound and deep-seated. That influence extends to the presence within

the cycle of what I have termed the gift rhetoric of the preaching tradition, including all three

rhetorical characteristics of that tradition traced above.

In analyzing the rhetoric of the Chester cycle, I am specifically concerned with those

passages that manifest a clearly "sermonic" quality, rather than the language of the plays as a whole.

All texts possess a rhetoric, of course, as I touch upon above in considering how the York cycle too

might be said to practice a gift rhetoric, and the entirety of the Chester cycle might well be

addressed in this manner. Moreover, Enders ably shows that one of the grounds of the late-

medieval dramatic form lies in rhetoric. However, since the rhetoric I wish to consider derives from

the preaching tradition, and since the explicit practice of that rhetoric frequently appears in the

Chester cycle, it seems reasonable to constrict my discussion here to preaching in the cycle. Briscoe

discusses "instances in the plays where preaching or preaching methods are actually employed to

49 Marianne G. Briscoe, "Preaching and Medieval English Drama," Contexts for Early English Drama, eds. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C.

Coldewey, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 153.50

Higden's text demonstrates a familiarity with both Augustine's foundational treatment of preaching in DDC as well as a variety of earlier artes —

indeed, his Ars is more an exercise in compilation than an original treatise. See Margaret Jennings' treatment of Higden as "a transmitter of fact,of ideals, and of expertise" in the introduction to Higden, Ars, pp. 22-23.



46

carry the dramatic action or to persuade an audience," finding numerous examples in both cycle

and non-cycle plays, though she does not discuss Chester.51 Instances of clear preaching rhetoric

abound in the Chester cycle, however, providing clear opportunities for the presence of a gift

rhetoric.

Augustine's concept of the excessive gift of language appears most clearly in the Chester

plays in the figure of the Expositor, upon whom I will focus my analysis of gift rhetoric.52 Perhaps

the Expositor's most significant rhetorical performance is in the Clothworkers' Play, The Prophets of

Antichrist or The Prophets of Doomsday.53 The play is nothing more than a series of highly dramatic

rhetorical performances, many of which partake of sermonic qualities. One after another, the

prophets present their messages, and then are interpreted at length by the Expositor—a figure of

great significance throughout the Chester cycle, who serves (much like a medieval preacher) as an

interpreter of the scriptural texts presented by the plays. The Chester Expositor can thus be seen to

represent the presence of the ars praedicandi tradition in the cycle through his oratorical address to

the audience and his function as an interpreter of scriptural texts. Augustine bases interpretation of

Scripture upon God’s “provision,” citing the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the Gospel of

Matthew chapter 14. Just as the loaves and fishes multiplied in the hands of Christ, for Augustine

the meaning of Scripture multiplies in the mouth of the interpreter to “an astonishing abundance”

through humble and servant-minded interpretation (I.1.3).54 In the same way, the Expositor

51 Briscoe, "Preaching," p. 157.

52 Though space does not permit me to consider the Chester Purification pageant, it is worth noting that it carries liturgical and rhetoric resonances

much like the parallel pageant from York: see Sally-Beth MacLean, "Marian Devotion in Post-Reformation Chester: Implications of theSmiths' 'Purification' Play," The Middle Ages in the North-West , ed. Tom Scott and Pat Starkey, Oxford: Leopard's Head, 1995, pp. 240-41.

53 Peter W. Travis notes that although the Banns give the pageant the title Prophets of Antichrist , the Harley List calls it Prophets of Doomsday, a title

which he calls "more accurate." Since the pageant is concerned with the broader events of the eschaton rather than the Antichrist himself, Iconcur and will adopt the Harley title. See Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.

228.54

Augustine, DDC, p. 13.



47

expands upon the prophets' visions through the gift of grace. His interpretive strategy is

simultaneously excessive and epistemologically reserved, demonstrating that his speech is

dependent upon grace. He persistently prefaces his claims with the qualifier "may," as in

"understand may I" (line 29),55 "licken [liken] them well maye I" (95),56 "I maye well licken"

(119),57 "understand I maye" (157),58 and so on. His final and longest exposition makes the point

of all this qualification clear:

Nowe, lordinges, what these thinges may bee,I praye you herken all to mee. As expressely in certeyntye

as I have might and grace,I shall expound this ylke thingwhich saynt John sawe thus sleepingethrough helpe of Jesu, heaven kinge,anonneright in this place. (213-20)59

As he begins what will become a lengthy discourse on the fifteen signs of the Apocalypse, the

Expositor nonetheless is compelled to stress that his "certeyntye" is grounded in grace, dependent

upon the "helpe of Jesu." His list of the fifteen signs, too, begins with "I shall declare by Goddes

grace" (262).60 Language and interpretation thus become key figures of excess and grace in this

most sermonic of the Chester plays; the cycle's doctrine of language thus can be clearly understood

as partaking in an Augustinian gift rhetoric.

Furthermore, The Prophets of Doomsday demonstrates the second characteristic of a gift

rhetoric by its insistence on the multivalent interpretation of Scripture. In order that the audience

55 The Chester Mystery Cycle , vol. 1, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS SS 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 397. All quotes

from Chester derive from this edition, and titles adopted for individual pageants are those given by Lumiansky and Mills, with the exception ofthe Prophets of Doomsday, where I follow Travis's preference for Prophets of Doomsday, as discussed above.

56 Chester, p. 399.

57 Chester , p. 400.






48

may "expresselye knowe / these prophettes wordes upon a rowe, / what the[y] doe signifie" (25-

27),61 the Expositor discusses each prophet's message in mini-sermons which include both a

restatement of the prophet's images and an explicit moral. The Expositor's speeches thus contain a

two-fold excess: they repeat language that has just been presented to the audience, and they

supplement that information with an interpretation or moral. Perhaps the clearest example of the

Expositor's multivalent interpretation is his response to the second prophet to speak, Zacharias.

The prophet's message consists of three stanzas (twenty-four lines), describing his vision of "foure

charettes [chariots]" (53)62 drawn by supernatural horses reminiscent of the biblical Apocalypse.

Even within his short speech, Zacharias presents not just the image, but an interpretation of it by

way of an angel who also appears in the vision, claiming that the chariots are "'foure wyndes'"

which "'shall blowe and readye be / before Christe, that prynce which ys of postye. / There ys none

soe fell there feete to flee / nor wynne there wyll from this'" (68, 69-72).63 Although this would

seem to interpret Zacharias's vision well enough as being an image of God's power, the Expositor

immediately follows with a speech "to moralyze aright" (73).64 In a monologue of six and a half

stanzas (fifty-two lines), over twice as long as the text he is interpreting, he not only repeats the

content of Zacharias's vision (a vision, remember, which the audience has heard described to them

only moments before), but adds another layer of interpretation. His detailed explications of the

meanings of each chariot and horse include an allusion to his own role: "the black horses which

went them bye, / by them maye well signifie / preachers of Godes word, truely, / that confessors


62 Chester, p. 398.





49

shalbe" (113-16).65 As each prophet shares his vision in turn, the Expositor draws on the excessive

gift of language to expand upon that vision at length and provide a preacherly interpretation which

complements but does not supersede the prophet's own interpretive claims. The biblical material

upon which the cycle is based is thus treated as the source of multivalent meanings, the abundance

required for a gift rhetoric.

Moreover, the multivalence of Scripture is an important theme for the Chester cycle

beyond The Prophets of Doomsday, providing the cycle with the means to negotiate its place amidst

regional and theological controversy. Furthermore, Paul Whitfield White argues that the cycle

plays may have provided a site of surprising compromise between Catholics and Protestants:

[T]he sources more immediately accessible to historians . . . tend to highlightpoints of confrontation between Protestantism and the existing religious culture,and yet areas of cultural practice characterized by consensus, accommodation,resolution of conflict, or simple contradiction (where, for example, traditionalCatholic and emerging Protestant patterns of belief and practice coexist uneasilyside by side) are often ignored. In terms of the cycle plays, I would argue that thesubject matter of the plays—the stories of the Bible—was one of those points of

consensus.66

In White's treatment of early English drama, then, the Bible provided a means of mediating

religious conflict, an admitted source of diverging interpretations. The Chester cycle in particular

shows traces of interpretive reserve in the face of this excess of meaning. Coletti stresses the

"Chester cycle's openness to alignment with conflicting religious and doctrinal positions," teasing

out how both Catholic and Protestant perspectives appear and are negotiated in the texts of the

plays.67 Coletti sees the cycle's thematic preoccupations with hermeneutics, language and semiotics

65 Chester, p. 400.

66 Paul Whitfield White, "Reforming Mysteries' End: a New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama," Journal of Medieval and

Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999), p. 122.67

Coletti, "Chester Cycle," p. 534.



50

as the means by which it mediates between the rival ideologies of traditionalists and reformers,

Catholics and Protestants, medieval and early modern, in much the way that White describes.68

Similarly, Richard K. Emmerson demonstrates the existence of divergent reactions to the cycle of

even members of a single guild, concluding that "the Chester cycle not only changed over time but

was formulated to do so."69 The cycle's interpretation of the texts and images of scripture was thus

designed to be multivalent, presenting different elements of the scripture's excess of meaning over

time. Robert W. Barrett, too, emphasizes that the plays moved through physical sites marked by a

"heteroglossic discourse" shaped by the diverse groups who possessed an interest in their

production.70 If we contextualize the Expositor's reserve in The Prophets of Doomsday within this

broader ambiguity of the cycle, it is easy to see the value for the cycle of the rhetoric of Scripture's

excess and multiple meanings, and thus the rhetoric of Scripture as the basis of gift rhetoric.

Scripture is articulated as the excessive gift which grounds the cycle's practice of rhetoric

throughout the cycle—as the cycle's source material, it is stressed as an authority which exceeds

the plays' ability to represent it. The Expositor makes this clear in the Cappers' Play, Moses and the

Law; Balaack and Balaam, in which he makes this statement regarding Scripture's excess:

Lordings, mych more mattereis in this storye then yee have hard hereBut the substans, withouwten were [doubt],was played you beforen. (440-43)71

Here, the Expositor describes Scripture as a source of knowledge which exceeds his or the play's

68 Coletti, "Chester Cycle," p. 538-39.

69 Richard K. Emmerson, "Contextualizing Performance: the Reception of the Chester Antichrist ," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1

(1999), p. 9470

Robert W. Barrett, Against All England: Regional Identity and Chester Writing, 1195-1656 , Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009,82. It must be noted that although Barrett rightly uncovers the multivalent nature of the Chester plays, he ultimately stresses the appropriationof the plays and their religious ritual by "the oligarchic ideology of the civic corporation" and thus returns to the labor-commerce dichotomy I

outlined in chapter two, which excludes the gift from critical consideration (Barrett, Against All England , 61).71

Chester , p. 95.



51

ability to represent it. Though they can depict "the substans" of the Old Testament narrative (and

Chester's Old Testament section is much more extensive than York's), the Expositor is careful to

inform his audience that there is "more mattere" to be found in the texts themselves.

Gift rhetoric is seen most clearly in the Chester cycle as a whole, however, in the

Expositor's generative openness to the audience, the third characteristic of the gift rhetoric

sketched above. In opposition to this argument and the general trend of scholarship, sketched

above, David Mills argues that Chester is made less interpretively open: the "need for directed

interpretation" evinced by the Expositor "denies Chester the openness of other medieval plays. The

text is typically accompanied by commentary from an authority figure and the audience is not free

to choose its own reading of the action. It also has a distancing effect, drawing us back from the

historical action to the contemporary world which we share with the Expositor."72 Two points

need to be addressed here. First, Mills's argument assumes that the Expositor functions as an

"authority figure" whose interpretations circumscribe the audience's ability to interpret the action

of the cycle. This interpretation is problematic both because it assumes, in contravention to

Sponsler's insights, that we can ascribe a single, monolithic reaction to the audience. Moreover,

even if we were able to identify a single audience response, my reading of the Expositor's emphasis

on multivalent interpretation should make clear that there is no reason to assume that response

would be acquiescence to the Expositor's interpretation when other interpretations coexist

alongside his in the very text of the cycle. I side with Coletti, Emmerson and White, then, in

seeing the Chester play as in fact radically open to differing interpretations. Secondly, Mills's claim

about the "distancing effect" of the Expositor's role requires interrogation. The "distancing" Mills

72 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: the City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998, p. 163.



52

finds in the figure of the Expositor seems to be essentially that of Bertolt Brecht's "alienation

effect," a theatrical technique which disabuses the audience of their illusion that what they see on

stage is real. For Mills, the Expositor's rhetoric has the effect of "drawing us back" from

participation in the biblical events of the play, alienating the audience from its action and waking

them up to their presence in the contemporary world. On this, Terry Eagleton's analysis is apt:

"'verisimilitude' between stage and society can be disrupted only if it is posited."73 For alienation to

work, then, the audience and theatre must assume some degree of mimetic immersion in the

dramatic work to begin with—otherwise what would the audience be alienated from? It seems

highly questionable to me whether medieval cycle drama would operate within such assumptions:

given its amateur, local production, its outdoor performances spaces, and its numerous disruptions

of verisimilitude, cycle drama would seem to be alienated from the start. Which is to say: with no

expectation that a play should enchant them with the experience of a wholly other reality, I can see

no reason why the lack of such an illusion should of itself make an audience feel distanced or

alienated.

If Brechtian alienation techniques are not operative in the case of the Chester cycle, then, it

becomes possible to see the Expositor's rhetorical techniques as generative, productive of audience

engagement and participation, and thus in accord with a gift rhetoric. His frequent direct

address—all but two of his speeches begin with some form of the submissive direct address

"Lordinges," and all begin with several lines in the second person—disrupts the boundaries

between audience and actor, not to cause alienation, but to engage the audience more fully in the

action. The Expositor's preaching seeks to engage the audience in a shared understanding of the

73 Terry Eagleton, "Brecht and Rhetoric," New Literary History 16.3 (1985), p. 122.



53

action before them, and the language he uses seeks to establish that common ground rather than

to position himself as an authority. In Abraham, Lot, and Melchysedeck; Abraham and Isaac , though

he refers to "the unlearned standinge herebye" (115),74 it is clear these figures are not intended to

represent the audience he addresses, the "Lordinges" (113).75 In this example as well as several

others, the audience is included in the Expositor's interpretation not just by the reverential

phrasing "Lordinges," but by the speech's subtle transition from second person to third person

singular. Whereas the Expositor begins his speeches by stepping outside the dramatic action and

addressing the audience as "you," by the end of his meditations he will frequently transition to

first-person plural doctrinal meditations like that in the monologue from Abraham, Lot, and

Melchysedeck; Abraham and Isaac quoted above , which reaches its climax with the following

thoughts: "And then altogether shall wee / that worthye kinge in heaven see, / and dwell with him

in great glorye / for ever and ever. Amen" (480-83).76 Though the monologue and the play

conclude with his return to the second-person direct address, this meditation in third person has

grammatically placed the Expositor on parallel ground to his audience, with both united in

salvation together. Similar deictic equivalence of the Expositor and his audience can be seen in

Moses and the Law; Balaack and Balaam (e.g., "we reden," line 4977) and The Prophets of Doomsday

("our bookes," line 30978). The Expositor's speeches thus fulfill the third and final characteristic of

a gift rhetoric by practicing the generative creation of a shared perspective between orator and

audience—not by domination of their perspective by an overriding authority or masterful rhetoric,

74 Chester , p. 62.

75 Chester , p. 62.

76 Chester , p. 78.

77 Chester , p. 81.

78 Chester , p. 95.



54

but by the positioning of the audience and preacher as shared interpreters of the biblical texts.

Gift, Rhetoric, Sacrament

I wish to conclude my discussion of Chester and its gift rhetoric by focusing in on the

Chester Abraham play, for it is here that the discourse of gift rhetoric and the discourse of the

eucharistic sacrifice are drawn together. Though Chester is generally not so concerned with Corpus

Christi as is York (perhaps as one function of its interpretive reserve on points of tension between

traditionalists and reformers), Abraham's sacrifice presents too ready an example of eucharistic

symbolism to be overlooked. The Expositor's first speech in the play explains the typological link

between the sacrifices of the Old Testament and the sacrament of the Eucharist, with a heavy

emphasis on the concepts of signification and sacrament . Though the emphasis in the passage is on

how Abraham and Melchysedeck signify the coming of the Eucharist, in one passage some overlap

appears to occur with how the sacrament itself signifies:

But synce Christe dyed one roode-tree,

in bred and wyne his death remenber wee;and at his laste supper our mandeewas his commandemente.

But for this thinge used should beeafterwardes, as nowe done wee,in signification—as leeve you mee—Melchysedeck did soe. (125-32)79

Though the signification here is still ascribed to the Old Testament narrative rather than the

sacrament, the close association of these phrases bears notice.80 Signification and the Eucharist are

linked by more than casual associations. Both the typological scene played out before the audience

79 Chester , p. 62.

80 It is notable too that the scene the Expositor interprets here is one in which Abraham has given Melchysedeck a "presente" ( Chester , p. 63, line

144) of goods for sacrifice—whereby images of gift exchange are further linked to the Abraham story and the signification of the Eucharist.



55

and the sacrament are actions which, like rhetoric, signify. The Expositor's next speech continues

this conceptual link between sacrament and signification by explicating the typological origins of

baptism; and his final speech concludes the pageant by drawing the rhetoric of the ars praedicandi

back into this collection of ideas. After explaining to his audience how "this significatyon / . . . / . .

. / may torne you to myche good" (460, 463), and emphasizing the God's grace in Christ's sacrifice

(466-67), the Expositor kneels to pray.81 Like Augustine's or Higden's orator, for whom prayer

represents the circulation of divine gift rhetoric from God through the preacher to his audience, as

the Expositor prays in the third person plural his rhetoric assumes that God's divine gift of

language will bring a return on its circulation: "obedyence grante us, O lord, / ever to they moste

holye word" (476-77).82 Kneeling at the end of the Chester cycle's ever-signifying Abraham, the

Expositor represents in himself the unity of rhetoric, gift, and sacrament.

81 Chester , p. 78.

82 Chester , p. 78.



56

Chapter 4: Coda

The gift is not merely the witness or guardian to new life, but the creator. —LewisHyde.1

In my pursuit of a theory of gifts drawn from early English drama, I have ranged over the

sacrifice of Isaac and the sacrifice of Christ, from the gift that coexists with the market economy to

the gift which disrupts that economy, from the reciprocity of the Eucharist to the excess of

rhetoric. Across all these topics my primary goal has been to demonstrate that the concept of the

gift is central to theology of early English drama as the market is not. Despite the rise of the

mercantile class and the Reformation's attack on certain theological modes of the gift, the religious

drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries persistently returns to the theology of the gift. To

the extent that these plays are ritual and theological, they are the domain of the gift. I do not

argue, of course, that all the disparate plays considered here employ the same notion of the gift:

the gift exchange of the York cycle, the saturated phenomenon of the Croxton Play, and the gift

rhetoric of the Chester plays each operates in a distinctly different manner. Nevertheless, what

remains common to them all is simply the conviction that the things of God—the Eucharist,

Scripture and its interpretation—function as gifts. Just as Mauss insists on the gift as a "total social

phenomen[on],"2 and as Georges Bataille reads excess as a vital and ever-present force within his

general economy,3 for early English drama the gift dominates the realms of social and divine

relations.

In its theological preoccupation with the gift, I thus take early English drama to be

1 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World , 2nd. ed., New York: Vintage, 2007, p. 57.

2 Mauss, The Gift , p. 3.

3 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy, vol. 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p.

68.



57

participating in a theological conversation for which Augustine is the primary interlocutor. In

reading Augustine alongside the drama, I do not intend to suggest that I am pursuing a historical

Augustinianism after the manner of D. W. Robertson;4 rather, like David Aers I seek to discover

how Augustine's "endlessly generative" thought can provide us with a vocabulary for engaging with

literature which participates in the Christian theological tradition, broadly conceived.5 Just as early

English drama makes the gift the primary ground of its central liturgical and social symbols, then,

so Augustine makes the gift the ground of all theology. Milbank's contention that the gift

functions as "a kind of trancendental [sic] category"6 for Christian theology is well reflected in

Augustine's discussion of various gifts. Augustine's theology of gift exchange is nascent within his

discussion of various other words, but has been helpfully articulated by several theologians. Paul

Griffiths touches on a number of the elements of theology which Augustine understood as gift:

creation,7 the self,8 speech,9 and baptism.10 Similarly, Adam Kotsko explicates at length

Augustine's thought on the Holy Spirit as a gift in De Trinitate.11 Griffiths provides an excellent

summation of the fundamental giftedness of the universe for Augustine:

Giving what you've received as gift can then only be done as a servant (Latinminister ) or a herald ( praeco): in these roles you pass on the master's goods or the judge's words to others. The goods and the words aren't yours: you didn't makethem and you don't control them. You have them only in the sense that you canpass them on to others.12

Human relations, enacted through charity and the use of language, thus are predicated upon gift

4 See D. W. Robertson, "The Doctrine of Charity in Mediaeval Literary Gardens: a Topical Approach through Symbolism and Allegory," Speculum 26.1 (1951), p. 25.

5 David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009, p.

xi.6 Milbank, Being Pardoned , p. ix.

7 Paul Griffiths, Lying: an Augustinian Theology of Duplicity, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2004, p. 47.

8 Griffiths, Lying , p. 63.



11 Adam Kotsko, "Gift and Communio: the Holy Spirit in Augustine's De Trinitate ," Scottish Journal of Theology 64.1 (2011), pp. 1-12.




58

exchange. These gift-based relations, of course, can be thought of as grounded in the fundamental

and originary gifts of God: God's continuing gifts of creation and the Holy Spirit (to name only

two of the most central gifts Augustine thinks God gives) provide the initiation and the model for

human giving, and thus for all social relations. In this, Augustine’s thought engages with the

comprehensiveness of the gift later uncovered by Mauss and Bataille and applied to theology by

Milbank, though his deployment of this theory of the gift is decidedly his own. Moreover, he

reveals that Christian theology, however it is expressed—whether in a treatise on hermeneutics or a

biblical play—returns again and again to the gift.

As I have shown, early English drama understands the gift in an Augustinian mode as both

the source and the sustenance of its own dramatic practice. The quote from Lewis Hyde with

which I began this coda speaks to the ways in which gifts fulfill a dual function in rituals of

liminality: they may accompany transformation, or they may instigate it. Though the rituals of

early English drama are not precisely the types of liminal rituals that Hyde is concerned with, this

principle clearly applies to them as well. The Eucharist and preaching, in the plays I have analyzed,

serve as gifts which accompany the broader rituals of drama put on during Corpus Christi and

Whitsun; at the same time, speaking theologically, the gifts of the actual rituals initiate the gift of

their representation in the drama. Without the gifts of the liturgy, Eucharist and rhetoric, the gift

of the drama could not exist. Drama therefore serves as a way to keep the initial, God-given gifts of

the Eucharist and the interpretation of Scripture in circulation, according to Hyde's dictum: "The

only essential is this: the gift must always move."13 Ever moving, ever shifting from companion of the

market to its rival, the gift both witnesses and creates the drama.

13 Hyde, The Gift , p. 11.



59

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Vita Auctoris

A native of Milford, Nebraska, Matthew Miller received his A.A. from York College (NE)

in 2007, his B.A. summa cum laude from Oklahoma Christian University in 2009, and anticipates

the completion of his M.A.(R). from Saint Louis University in 2012. He has tutored and taught

for a number of organizations since 2006, and published writing in both popular and scholarly

venues. He has been married to Rachel since 2007, and lives with her in University City, Missouri.

gift exchange in early english drama: rhetoric and sacrament

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