UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Mass Communication: The Eucharist and Authorship in Early Modern England Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rx992qr Author Mead, Christopher Jason Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Mass Communication: The Eucharist and Authorship in Early Modern England By Christopher Jason Mead A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Joanna Picciotto, Chair Professor Jeffrey Knapp Professor Ethan Shagan Spring 2015 Mass Communication: The Eucharist and Authorship in Early Modern England © 2015 by Christopher Jason Mead 1 Abstract Mass Communication: The Eucharist and Authorship in Early Modern England By Christopher Jason Mead Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Joanna Picciotto, Chair This dissertation argues that in the two centuries following the incunabula, one group of authors writing for the press understood the feeling of being “in print” through the language and form of a much older technology, the Eucharist. The Eucharist’s role in distributing Christ to believers over time and space made it an irresistible analogue for the author’s publication through the printing press. The defining characteristics of print—namely, theoretically exact replicability and massively increased distributivity—are the same characteristics celebrated by Christ at the Last Supper when he shared his body. Far from robbing texts of aura, the press transmitted it. Like priests who personate and impart Christ, these writers were able to disseminate typographic versions of their own “real presences” to far‐flung yet virtually gathered readers in an equally amplifying and exposing experience. Revealing the influence of the Eucharist on writers who identified the experience of authorship with the technology of the printing press, I show how mechanization—so often associated with the loss of aura—in fact made a powerful new mode of auratic presence available to writers whose engagement with print production and priestly identities led them to a new conception of what it meant to be a modern Protestant author. For John Foxe, technical and deictic innovations available only in print make the Actes and Monuments into a vessel in which the textual presences of the martyrs and even himself are stored, ready to be witnessed and consumed in the endlessly iterable moment of reading. For Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, the commercial market reveals the tendency of the eucharistic miracle to turn to waste as one’s work is buried under ever‐increasing piles of freshly‐printed books, pamphlets, and “new news.” For John Milton, the vulnerability of publication leads to his consecration as a living textual martyr in the controversial prose—an act of self‐fashioning that shapes our understanding of his protagonists in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. I conclude by examining the eighteenth‐century subsumption of the author’s eucharistic voice into the collective journalistic voice of an entire nation—the beginning of a process that culminates in mass communication in the fully modern sense. i Table of Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................... ii Introduction.................................................................................................................... 1 “Beyng yet alyue”: John Foxe’s Eucharistic Style...........................................................21 “Content to be Pressed”: Robert Burton and the editio princeps hominis..................44 “As in his book alive”: John Milton and the Writing of Martyrdom...........................67 Samson and the Agonies of Form................................................................................77 Epilogue: Periodical Culture and the Stigma of Print.................................................93 Works Cited.................................................................................................................. 95 Appendix..................................................................................................................... 104 ii Acknowledgments I owe a large debt of gratitude to my friends, teachers, and family for their guidance and encouragement over the past several years—I could not have completed this dissertation without them. The support of Oliver Arnold, Maude Emerson, Kevis Goodman, Nicholas Junkerman, Jeffrey Knapp, Laura Kolb, Robert Kotyk, Alexander Licker, Stephanie Moore, Maura Nolan, Ethan Shagan, Jonathan Shelley, Spencer Strub, and Vanessa Warne requires particular mention. Special thanks are due to my adviser, Joanna Picciotto, whose teaching, scholarship, and friendship have been an inspiration throughout. Finally, I am grateful for the longstanding love and support of my parents, Julie and Edward, and my sister and brother, Kelsey and Jeremy. 1 Introduction We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that. [...] The significance of this mass ceremony—Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers—is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 35-36 This dissertation explores a mode of authorship that arose after the incunabula but before the rise of the daily newspaper. I show how one group of authors who wrote for the press experienced their typographical distribution through the readily available grammar provided by the Eucharist—the medium of communication by which Christ made himself materially present to believers scattered over space and time. The defining characteristics of print—namely, fixity and massively increased distributivity—are the same characteristics celebrated by Christ at the Last Supper and emphasized by those who manufactured the host and sought to protect it from desecration and decay. Like the priests who personate and impart Christ, authors were able to disseminate typographic versions of their own “real presences” to far-flung yet virtually gathered readers in an experience that was both enlarging and excoriating. What I call “eucharistic authorship” challenges Walter Benjamin’s account of the destructive effect that mechanical reproduction has on the aura of the work of art and the reader’s experience of authorial presence, offering a striking exception to his famous assertion that even the most perfect reproduction lacks “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (21). Because it aligns the medium of print with that of the wafer, eucharistic authorship differs from other modes of authorship in which the writer’s sacrifice is thematized in Christological terms. It differs, for example, from the experience of the playwright who figures his loss of sovereignty to collaborative performance as a sacrifice.1 As we shall see, 1 Dramatic authors must acknowledge “the formative power of actors and audience on his playwriting” (102). Knapp complicates the secularizing accounts of critics such as C.L. Barber by suggesting that the tragic hero is also often the author himself. Seizing on a key difference between the anonymously authored Corpus Christi plays and those of the Elizabethan stage, Knapp describes how in the last two plays of his Lancasterian cycle, Shakespeare “conceptualized the author as both a king and a martyr—two seemingly disparate identities that Christ made one on the cross” (102). In this reading, the dominance of 2 the author who writes for the press must also embrace a loss of sovereignty, though this loss differs from that of the author who writes for the stage. Like the eucharistic wafer, the printed page is ephemeral, susceptible to desecration, rot, and abuse. The fixity and regularity of print are not only advantages; they also heighten the author’s vulnerability to mistakes and polemical attack. In order to understand how and why authors made what might be seen as an unlikely turn to the Eucharist as they sought to conceptualize their dissemination through the press, we must first reconsider the Eucharist itself. In this introduction, I explore the history of the Eucharist as a medium of communication, rather than as the source of doctrinal debates, highlighting the remarkable similarities between the eucharistic wafer and the printed page. In the following four chapters, I show how authors’ engagement with print production and priestly identities led them to construct