Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

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      Figure 3.5. In the second half of the seventeenth century, most ovens in colonial houses in New England were built into the back of the fireplace instead of outside the house. Note the recessed oven in the back of the fireplace. Fireplace, Cooper-Frost-Austin House, Cambridge, Mass. Gift of William Sumner Appleton. (Courtesy of Historic New England)

      Although information on seventeenth-century practice in Bermudian churches is scarcer than for their New England counterparts, surviving church silver suggests that a range of practice also existed on the island. The seventeenth-century vessels that remain in the church in St. George’s today are similar to the ones William and Mary presented to King’s Chapel in Boston in 1694. The Bermudian 1697/8 “King’s Set,” which is engraved with the arms and cypher of William III, contains a chalice with cover, a paten, two flagons, a basin, and a spoon. It is not clear when St. George’s acquired the chalice and cover, hallmarked 1625/6, that are engraved with the Sea Venture striking a rock in full sail, flying the banner of St. George, and with the Rose and Crown on the transom (figure 3.2).¹⁷ The explicitly ecclesiastical chalice and the existence of a cross in depiction of the ship’s pennants may seem to belie any puritan leanings. However, they do not necessarily indicate conformity to the Church of England practices.

      The disputes over the validity of a presbyterian structure—whether there was any spiritual authority between each individual congregation and God—did not have direct bearing on celebrations of the Lord’s Supper or on most ministers’ refusal to use the prescribed Church of England liturgy. In addition to the stated preferences of ministers and the expulsion of many of them from positions in England, the location of the pulpit in many Bermudian churches was similar to its placement in New England meetinghouse architecture. It was across from the main entrance, emphasizing the centrality of preaching.¹⁸ There are also surviving Bermudian vessels more squarely in the puritan vein. In his 1654 will, Roger Wood bequeathed a beaker engraved with his name to Devonshire Church. Already in use when Wood died, the beaker would have blended into any number of New England churches’ collections of silver (figure 3.3 and figure 3.4).¹⁹

      Corn, Cassava, and the “Purest Wheate in Heaven”

      No matter how refined the metal, whether inscribed or not, the purpose of silver communion vessels was to be symbolic “bearers of Christ,” conveyances for the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper.²⁰ Variances in that physical food and drink, what was served at the ritual meal, echoed the variances in how the ritual meal was served. The scope for refinement was especially noticeable in the bread, a food that was a daily part—if not the majority—of the early modern English diet. In a meditation on the Lord’s Supper centered on the idea of Jesus Christ as the “living bread,” the minister Edward Taylor likened Christ to “The Purest Wheate in Heaven.”²¹ In addition to this scriptural basis, Taylor’s association between bread and the specific grain of wheat drew on long-standing precedents in European culture stretching far before the emergence of Christianity to ancient Greece and Rome. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, wheat was very much an aspirational grain tied to socioeconomic status. Only elite Europeans—one plausible estimate is around 4 percent of the population—ate white bread, the most esteemed of all wheaten bread types, but many more wanted to do so. For New English puritans there was also a regional and ethnic factor in this culinary order favoring wheat. Most of them came from the southern lowlands of England and looked down on the unleavened oat cakes favored in Wales, Scotland, and north and west England. By the early seventeenth century, the preference for wheat as the grain of choice meant that even the poor demanded grain rations that were four-fifths wheat.²²

      However, wheat was harder to come by in the Americas than it had become in England. Christ might have been the “Living Bread” made of “the Purest Wheate in Heaven” and the theologian Thomas Aquinas have specified the “proper matter” of the ritual meal to be “wheaten bread,” but inhabitants of and visitors to the Americas had to make most of their earthly bread from other grains and tubers.²³ The most common throughout much of the Americas was maize, or, as the English termed it, “Indian corn.” As wheat figured in Greek origins, maize featured in the origin histories of many indigenous peoples throughout the regions of the Americas where it grew well.²⁴ The most common grain by far in New England was maize, followed by the colonist-introduced rye, barley, and oats. Long after English colonists learned successful cultivation techniques for the environment, wheat remained highly desired yet difficult to obtain because a disease that took hold in the 1660s kept the grain scarce, a scarcity that continued through the end of the eighteenth century. One study of Middlesex County in Massachusetts found that by the end of the 1660s fewer than a quarter of estates included wheat, a precipitous drop from the one-half that had included them at the beginning of the decade.²⁵ Wheat did not do well in Bermuda either; the staple carbohydrate in the subtropical island was the subterranean cassava or manioc root rather than maize. The island’s humid and storm-prone climate meant that, as minister Lewis Hughes pointed out, maize “is subject to blasting, and to the wormes, so is not the Casava.”²⁶

      Puritans celebrated wheat, but they did not see it as a necessary component of the bread for the Lord’s Supper. In contrast to a Jesuit missionary to the Wendats (Hurons) who complained of the mission’s “deprivation СКАЧАТЬ