Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England

The Reformation changed forever how the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets traces the literary afterlife of what was one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history. Sophie Read argues that the move from a literal to a figurative understanding of the phrase ''this is my body'' exerted a powerful imaginative pull on successive gen...