Sacramental Communities in Pre-Reformation England: The Croxton “Play of the Sacrament”

Abstract

Some of the most influential recent histories of the culture of English piety in the late medieval and early modern period have been concerned to stress the uniformity and popular appeal of late medieval Catholicism; for example, Eamon Duffy’s significant work on what he terms “traditional religion” has emphasised that late medieval religion in England was “vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular” (5). But this revisionist school of historiography, although rightly combating a model which portrays late medieval Catholicism as a burden of corruption and a hindrance to self-expression and individual autonomy, has at times been too quick to emphasise the opposite proposition: that there was a universal appeal to late medieval English Christianity. In fact, the answer is not as simple as either interpretation might suggest. Pre-reformation English Christianity is a complex system of public and private meaning and experience; as such, it is not a homogenous system of universal meanings, whether “good” or “bad”.