- Late Medieval play
- Only host miracle play to survive in English
- anti-Semitism, sacramental theology, and violence and special effects in the theatre
- farcical comedy laden with slapstick violence
- Written in middle english
- tells the story of a miracle in which a rich Jewish merchant and his companions purchase the consecrated host from a Christian merchant and subject it to a series of tests in order to determine the truth of the Christian claim that Christ is present in it, then are converted
- In each performance of the Eucharist,christ's body is present, infinitely reproducible and real, fully corporeal and multiply so
- the whole of the body inheres in each bite and priestly sip
- Christ's body is the wafer and the whole world
- Christ's body is purely relational, pure space
- transubstantiation as socially normative, a major criterion of orthodoxy and therefore compulsory
- duality and paradox
- Ms. F. E. Barnes wrote: "It is a cosmopolitan product -- this Croxton play -- drawing freely from the history, lore, and literature of the Middle Ages."
- it survives only in a sixteenth-century manuscript
- Some scholars think it came from Bury St Edmunds in the 1480s
- tropes on that most overdetermined cluster in late Medieval England -- Jews and the corpus
- Didatic - teaches that the sacrament is fabby fantastic
- anti-Lollard propaganda
- have long been regarded by critics as referents to Lollards or to doubters more generally, not to Jews
- David Mills play is more of an 'affirmation than explanation'
- Anne Holms 'reflection of fifteenth century Eucharistic piety'
- Declamatory tone of prelude (115 lines)
- hortarory tone of Episcopus (20 lines)
- false healing scene (127 lines)
- narrative development in two nealry indentical (length wise) parts
- the play creates a temporal mode in which the Jews re-enact the Passion in the present, just as the Mass is a re-enactment of the Crucifixion with both existing in a kind of “eternal present,” a temporality central to the Mass and also to related late-medieval English devotional practices
- reates a conception of the Jew as perpetual murderer, guilty not only of crucifying Christ in the historical past, but in the present, and until the Parousia in the future
- jews always plotting against Christ and Christendom
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