How does one conclude the study of a cult which became the central symbol of a culture - it is as difficult to explain an ending , as it is the point of departure in the interpretation of evolving and changing ideas and practices .sx Yet we do face at the end of the Middle Ages the two Reformations , whose programmes redesigned the symbolic order with the eucharist at its heart , in very different ways .sx The events of the sixteenth century can satisfactorily be explained only in terms of the dynamics of cultural change :sx they are inconceivable without the existence of deeply divergent attitudes towards virtue , authority and holiness , and differing symbolic constructions of these moods .sx A site where some ( but not only ) divergent concepts were articulated , the eucharist possessed enormous importance ; its correct understanding bespoke a host of attitudes and endowed identities .sx The eucharist , thus , could never be simply reformed ; attempts to do so in the fifteenth century failed to produce sharp and apt new formulations in the language of sacramental religion .sx If the eucharist were to change , it had to be a dramatic change ; it could either be wholly espoused - Christ , miracle , well-being - or negated and rejected .sx And as the world of the sixteenth century came both to realise this necessity and to undertake the new design , the eucharist became identified as a controversial object , a militant emblem of a struggle unto death .sx There were no two ways about it , so when a crisis about its use and meaning emerged , Europe was thrown into turmoil for 150 years over it .sx The eucharist was fought over regionally and nationally , personally as well as communally , and became a touchstone of attitudes towards community , family , virtue - and politics .sx The eucharist's sacramental claims were designed at the beginning of our period in discussions and debates which began in the eleventh century and matured in the twelfth , whose implications were widely disseminated by the thirteenth century , and were subject to wide - ranging creativity and application in the next two centuries .sx The eucharist , it is true , was an important symbol in early Christianity , but it was refigured in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to create a new structure of relations , thus modifying the symbolic order , and the social relations and political claims which could be attached to it .sx In this new order we witness the raising of a fragile , white , wheaten little disc to amazing prominence , and fallible , sometimes ill-lettered , men to the status of mediator between Christians and the supernatural .sx The eucharist emerged as a unifying symbol for a complex world , as a symbol unburdened by local voices and regional associations .sx Its language differed from that associated with pilgrimage sites and the cult of saints ; thus it was one which provided a framework for interaction and communication between disparate interests and identities .sx It linked together identities already locally bound in the emerging quasi-national units which were more closely in touch in the increasingly more cosmopolitan world which the eleventh and twelfth centuries heralded .sx Within the developing parochial net cast over Europe in these centuries the eucharist was reckoned to be equally efficacious in Vienna or Valladolid , viewed or received by woman or man , at cathedral altar or village chancel :sx it mediated grace and supernatural power in rituals independent of contingent boundaries of political variation .sx Thus , it possessed universal meaning .sx Sacramental mediation was not the only metaphor for expressing the world , but it was one which highlighted a stage in the narrative of Christian medieval culture .sx Tensions inherent in the scriptural tales themselves , the versions of the synoptic gospels and in the Pauline epistles , were resolved in the eucharist in the creation of a symbol which bound the essential narratives of incarnation , crucifixion , and the legacy of redemption .sx It was this-worldly in emphasising that channels of regeneration and salvation were available and attainable , renewable and never exhaustible .sx It possessed little of the eschatological pull which informed the cultural worlds of late antiquity , or of the early modern era , but was geared towards the present , was fulfilled here and now , offering powerful and tangible rewards to the living in the present , as well as to their relatives , the dead .sx The eucharist provided an axis around which worlds revolved ; in it were bound order and hierarchy , inducements towards conformity and promises of reward in health , prosperity , tranquillity .sx Our task has been to trace and interpret the workings of this world of meaning , its construction and use by some and by others , its implications , threats and promises .sx So in the orthodox teaching , in vernacular preaching , in story and tale , in magic as in civic ceremonial , the eucharist was used and reused , determined and applied .sx Those who possessed power and authority could articulate the symbol through their own positions most forcefully .sx They did so by inducing moods , designing rituals , commissioning works of art , in drama , by exerting authority and charisma , and thus influencing directions in eucharistic readings , creating hegemonic symbolic idioms around themselves .sx The power exercised in the networks of social relations is always realised through symbolic formations which tend to attach themselves to the holy .sx A variety of local and universal , individual and collective , lay and sacerdotal claims came to reside in the eucharist ; and they were sometimes fleeting and private and at other times public , sometimes bespeaking a single perception , and other times densely inscribed in ways which overdetermined the symbol .sx It thus became linked to partly compatible , but also varying and vying claims which militated against the smooth , lofty , universal , equally shared and accessible pristine nature which had made it so powerful at the outset .sx This gave it the power to encompass divergent notions about authority , the supernatural , virtue and legitimacy .sx In its use , however , it was interpreted through a process which entailed the filling up of gaps and spaces for evasion and ambiguity ; we have here the aging of a symbol .sx This overdetermination was again a subject of concern and attention for those who wished to claim a single articulatory position within the language of religion .sx We witness in the later Middle Ages attempts to recapture , redesign , reclaim its lost symbolic innocence .sx This is clear not only from the vehemence of anti-heretical activity , but more interestingly in the redrawing of boundaries of prescribed behaviour .sx Jean Gerson ( 1363-1429 ) criticised the irreverence shown by people to the eucharist in the very proliferation of its celebrations ; he recommended the observance of fewer feasts and reiterated the view that celebration of the sacraments was the role of priests alone , not even of mendicant friars .sx He significantly shifted one of the emphases which had been maintained in pastoral teaching over some 300 years when he underlined human unworthiness to receive the eucharist , even to prepare for its reception , and as he posited these as dependent on God's grace alone , grace which was manifest in the creation of the sacraments , and which merited hope since it alone could effect worthiness .sx Similarly , the German councils of the 1450s decided to allow eucharistic processions only on Corpus Christi and its octave , and to draw the eucharist back into the interior of churches with only infrequent and necessary processional exhibition and transportation .sx At the same time the area around the altar was being reclaimed , divided from the nave by ever thicker and more elaborate rood-screens .sx These were no longer the open structures with thin arches , but now the more opaque wood or stone curtains which by the fifteenth century enclosed the area of consecration and elevation .sx These preoccupations with access to and understanding of the eucharist , the eucharist seen as the essence of stability of social order and of dominant ideology , possessed an urgency which arose from the very centrality of the symbol .sx Within the language of religion with the eucharist at its heart many objections , criticisms and attacks could be tolerated , as long as they were not aimed at that heart .sx Thus Wyclif's trenchant criticism of papal authority , the wealth of the church , the religious orders , imgages and pilgrimages were all tolerated early in his career , until he began to pronounce on the eucharist .sx From 1381 on , with the publication of his Confessio , his views were subjected to ecclesiastical condemnation , the patronage of John of Gaunt was withdrawn , some of his followers were chased out of Oxford , and he retired to his parish of Lutterworth in Leicestershire .sx Similarly , and some 250 years later , the formulations of Galileo's optics , as published in The Assayer in 1623 , were condemned by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith by 1625 because of their implications when applied to the edifice of eucharistic doctrine .sx His corpuscular theory of physics threatened to change the way in which substance and accidents were related , and contradicted the Aristotelian foundations which were so necessary for the maintenance of the eucharist as a mystery of Christ's body with the appearance of bread .sx Galileo's atomistic theory meant that the colour , taste , smell and heat , the accidents , were contained in tiny particles of substance which must remain , in the case of bread and wine , even after the consecration to produce the accidents of bread and wine , and this was obviously anathema .sx It was this which probably convinced the Holy Office that it was necessary to bring Galileo to trial for heresy .sx The desire to multiply prayers , relics and indulgences , which so characterised late medieval religious practice is also evident in late medieval eucharistic practice .sx The claims about the eucharist stressed that whenever it was celebrated , wherever it was consecrated , however it was apprehended , it remained the very same historic suffering body of Christ .sx As such , it differed from other images of sanctity , since it was a source of power itself , one which could not be procured by the laity , nor dispersed in the manner of the cult of relics and holy images .sx The dominant eucharistic idiom was one of unity and exclusivity , and yet in the ways it was perceived there was a pressure towards fragmenting and apportioning it .sx The economy of the holy was none the less applied to the eucharist in the widespread understandings of it which developed in practices , in forms of containment and approach current in the cult of saints' relics .sx Attempts at its multiplication , desire to have tactile contact with it , the increase of frequency of exposition , all exerted pressures which contradicted the dominant trope - that of a powerful unique universal nature .sx The eucharist also came to be associated with sectional interests and identities , with claims to power by groups and institutions .sx We have observed the competition which developed within towns over the processions and drama of the eucharist feast of Corpus Christi .sx The feast was also taken up as a theme for patrician virtue in English towns .sx The hierarchies which the eucharist marked within the public sphere enabled , if not forced , an identification of order and a disposition of power , and in so doing it also suggested the critique of this order .sx Thus , the claims of Lollards and Hussites , as well as the assertions of heretics all over late medieval Europe , presented the eucharist , both in its orthodox formulations of the mass as in its processional and ritual manifestations , as a symbol of political and social privilege .sx When they articulated an alternative it was in terms of a different symbolic ordering of access to God , in refashioning the eucharist and the ritual attached to it .sx This is evident in Lollard claims against the sacerdotal efficacy and transubstantiation , and in the claims of Hussites for Utraquism , which broke down the barriers between priest and laity and expressed a more egalitarian and anti-authoritarian creed .sx The eucharist could never really be reformed ; it could only be wholly accepted or negated outright .sx The more abstract and 'spiritual' interpretations of the practices of religion offered by such as Erasmus in the early sixteenth century were too evasive to provide a true alternative , a language of religion , useful and resonant .sx Attacks on the eucharist were thus attacks on the heart of living faith , ritual practice , ideological bonding , institutional purpose .sx When the Council of Trent confronted all these issues , raised by both Catholic and Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century , it came up with formulations which none the less asserted Real Presence , sacerdotal efficacy , moderate frequency of communion , the cult and veneration of the eucharist , and a powerful affirmation of the feast of Corpus Christi .sx