Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the Mass”—or to Spanish clergy and conquistadors accompanying Hernando de Soto into Florida who concluded that since “the Holy Roman Church” decreed “that bread must be of wheat,” they could not “consecrate bread made of corn” even after having lost their precious store of wheat during battle, puritans displayed a more forgiving palate. Not only did they have the advantage of learning from Spanish accounts of colonization and descriptions of the Americas, many of which praised maize and cassava as nutritious and wholesome food, their brand of Christian theology placed less emphasis on the material substance of the bread used in the Lord’s Supper. While they worried about how ingesting these foods that figured so heavily in Native diets would affect their own bodies, they were not more concerned about its consumption during the ritual meal than at other times.²⁷

      Even so discriminating a minister as Samuel Parris, who kept such close boundaries on the ritual that he exacerbated divisions in his Salem Village congregation made famous in studies of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, listed a range of grains—“Corn, barley, Rye, Wheat &c”—that could be made into “corporal bread” for the Lord’s Supper. The substance to be ingested was of little enough import that even whatever “nourishing & usual food, which is of use in the stead of bread” would do when bread itself was not available. This principled lack of interest in exactly what was physically consumed during the ritual meal was a reaction against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in which the substance of the bread and wine became the substance of Christ’s real body and blood during the consecrating prayer. Parris did not extend his inclusive attitude to the “bold Papist” practice of baking special wafers “of Oyle, honey, and I know not what” because, in his view, using such bread distinguishable from its domestic counterpart separated the ritual from its origins as a meal. Since, in Parris’s experience, everyday bread to nourish the physical body was not made with oil or honey, then neither should bread for the Lord’s Supper contain those things.²⁸

      Taking part in the ritual involved bodily sensations that were not quite everyday and were separated from the daily round of activities. Participants in the Lord’s Supper in New England would have marked the ease with which they chewed a bite of wheat bread during the ritual meal compared to the effort it took to break down bread from more commonly available grains. The common mix of corn and rye flour produced a bread with a crust that was sturdy enough to use instead of a spoon for the semi-liquid stews, sauces, and porridges that made up most of the seventeenth-century English diet. This difference in texture reinforced the Lord’s Supper as a special action apart from the daily need to put food in the stomach. Edward Taylor would have had personal experience of the lighter texture and density of bread and pie crust made from wheat flour compared to that made from other grains such as maize, rye, and oats to inform his description of Christ as “Gods White Loafe” of “Heavens Sugar Cake.” Even as Lewis Hughes praised cassava as evidence of God’s goodness to English colonists in Bermuda, wheat remained Hughes’s point of reference: what recommended the cassava flour was that it produced “as fine, white bread as can be made from Wheat.”²⁹ Wheat might not have been theologically essential to the Lord’s Supper, but, like the silver on which it was served, it remained a cultural touchstone that constituted material and spiritual refinement.³⁰ The English practice of using it when available for communion bread reinforced bodily knowledge of the ritual as a time and space set apart from the ordinary and made sacred.

      “As many Grains make but one Loaf of Bread”

      The silver vessels used in puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper helped individuals to create spiritual practice and to access the divine, but as vehicles of conveyance they also direct our attention to the substances they carried. Those substances, particularly the widely produced bread, similarly functioned as a means to attain faith. Although more plentiful than hard metal, wheat bread was scarce enough that in addition to remaining linked to a familiar social hierarchy, it took on the added spiritual significance of refinement. If we expand our understanding of participation in the Lord’s Supper to those who baked the bread, the shape of the possibilities for spiritual practice in ostensibly mundane tasks become visible in a way they were not with a more restricted definition. In the repetitive actions of baking bread, women who were not admitted to the ritual meal or who were not able to attend services because they had nursing infants at home may have found an alternate way to engage the unseen world.

      We do not know the name of the woman who baked the bread for the Lord’s Supper, what she wore, or anything specific about her status. In southern New England, she could have been a hired white servant or unmarried female relative in a lay leader’s household or mistress of that household; an indentured Massachusett, Wampangoag, or Narragansett woman; or possibly one of the several hundred enslaved Africans. In Bermuda, she might have been an enslaved Bermudian of color, a white Bermudian widow, or a hired white servant. Just as Lewis Hughes erased women’s labor in his directions for cassava preparation that he included in his printed celebration of the smiling of divine providence on English colonization of Bermuda, so, too, puritan accounts of the Lord’s Supper—already spare in detail on the physical ritual—failed to consider the individual who had kneaded, shaped, and baked the bread passed around during the sacred meal. Nor did any description of women baking bread appear frequently in other sermons, which were more likely to turn to husbandry and its association with the imperialist mission of “improving” and thus taking possession of the land with English agricultural techniques.³¹ Contemplating her perspective offers a means to explore more fully the idealized interactions between human and divine as well as the opportunities for spiritual practice in everyday activity.

      While ministers were fully aware of their embodiment as physical beings, they were not the ones responsible for procuring the bread and wine.³² Instead, that task fell to deacons, lay leaders recognized by the congregation, whose charge was to “assist and relieve the Pastors, in all the Temporal Affairs of the Church.” In practical terms, that meant that a woman in a deacon’s household was responsible for baking the bread on each occasion when there was to be a ritual meal among the gathered faithful. Whoever baked the bread may or may not have been allowed to eat that bread during the Lord’s Supper—since church practice did not require deacons’ wives to be full church members, it is doubtful the person baking the bread would have been required to hold that status.³³ A similar practice seems to have been followed in Bermuda. Early eighteenth-century Bermudian church accounts indicate that women were paid to wash the linens and scour the silver vessels used in church services. They also list expenditures for bread and wine, which suggests that the bread was not made in the minister’s household.³⁴

      Baking bread involved a series of labor-intensive steps. In the first thirteen years of Plymouth colony before the first gristmill was built in 1633, the task began with grinding corn in a wood mortar to separate the “Meale” from the “huskes.” In communities with gristmills, the woman would not have had to use a mortar and pestle to get cornmeal, but she might have had to churn butter, make cheese, or spin thread in order to have a way to trade with the miller for grinding her sacks of corn and other grains.³⁵ Whether hand- or stone-ground, the meal still contained larger pieces that, if baked without further processing, would remain hard and result in an unevenly textured bread. The woman would have sifted out the finer meal and set it aside while she boiled the “Course parte . . . till it be thick like batter,” let it cool, then mixed in the finer meal. For everyday bread, the woman might have poured the cornmeal batter as it was into an iron pot and then placed it over a fire to bake.³⁶

      For something as special as the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper, the woman probably mixed in some wheat flour when available, along with some yeast “to make it Rise” and form an airier loaf. Throughout the initial mixing, rounds of kneading, shaping, and as she waited for the bread to proof in its loaf form, she would have maintained a fire in the oven built into the back of her kitchen fireplace, distributing the coals to attain as even a temperature as possible (figure 3.5). Once she determined by the feel of the heat on her hand that the oven had reached the desired temperature, she would have removed the coals and slid in the unbaked loaves. Although СКАЧАТЬ