The Eucharist and the Pater Noster: Early Drama’s Missing Link?

The Eucharist and the Pater Noster: Early Drama’s Missing Link?

The medieval mind was schematic in nature. From the Great Chain of Being to the orders of angels, medieval thinkers were fond of organizing and classifying the physical and spiritual worlds. One of the schema that has endured in some form to the present day appears in the notion of the Seven Deadly Sins. As Morton Bloomfield observed in 1952, an understanding of the sins might provide a means of understanding the quality and “absolute worth” of the “medieval fabric” (243).

Certainly, the sins appear throughout the literature of the Middle Ages. In sermon, drama, and verse, the sins are seen as the chief weapons of humanity’s three ancient foes, the world, the flesh, and the devil. From the unknown authors of the Celtic penitentials to the more artistically driven Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, the sins appear and reappear until their familiarity almost becomes a source of comfort.

On the other hand, this same ubiquity may lead the critic to attempt some schematizing of his or her own. This may be what Bloomfield does in his work. Although he expressly states that he will not treat the drama in his book (xiii), he adds a rather cryptic paragraph to his discussion of “De Festo Corporis Christi,” a verse-sermon dating from the first half of the 14th century and included in the Vernon and Harley 4196 Manuscripts:

This work, which links together the paternoster,

the deadly sins, and the Eucharist, would bear investigation as a document casting light on the early

drama. The paternoster play was performed on Corpus

Christi day, and this feast is closely bound up with

the history of the drama. [...] It [...] reveals an

intimate conceptual connectio...

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