The Host Desecration Project 1: Introduction

I am currently working on a little translation project to be published in a source reader my adviser is putting together. In the course of a paper I was working on a couple of years ago, I learned of an account of a Host desecration in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France. It is the first fully-articulated account of such an event. This is the story in brief:

On Easter day in 1290 a woman, who had pawned her clothes with a Jewish merchant, came to reclaim them. The merchant offered to return them free of charge if she would steal a consecrated Host from a Church. She did this, whereupon the Jew set about the business of tormenting the host in a recreation of the Passion, stabbing it, setting upon it with hammer and nails, and throwing it into a fire. None of this caused the least damage. Indeed, when thrown into the fire, the Host emerged whole and flew about the room. Once recaptured, the merchant threw it into a cauldron of boiling water, which then turned to blood and from which an apparition of the Christ child emerged. The tale continues with the discovery of this perfidy, the subsequent killing of the Jew and the woman, the conversion of his wife and children to Christianity, and the removal of the relics involved in this to various churches.

This story emerged at the end of the 13th century, when the doctrine of transubstantiation was firmly and finally entrenched. Written into church law with the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, it became the only tolerated position on the Eucharist by the end of the thirteenth century, given special impetus by the work of Thomas Aquinas in the 1270s. This meant that, in Catholic doctrine, one was required to believe that beneath the appearances (accidents) of the bread and wine of the sacrament was to be found the true, historical, body of Christ. Each time a Christian took the Eucharist, then, he or she was enaging in theophagy and anthrophagy. A less kind way of putting it would be cannibalism, and I suspect that stories like this one reflect the lingering anxieties felt by theologians about the sacrament on this very matter.

The account I am working on has never been translated- or at least published- in English. I thought it would be fun to write a little about this project and about the process I use for the translation as I struggle to come to grips with Latin, as well as sharing the translation in progress.

Next: Thinking About the Latin.