Faithful Bodies. Heather Miyano Kopelson

was served at the ritual meal, echoed the variances in how the ritual meal was served. The scope for refinement was especially noticeable in the bread, a food that was a daily part—if not the majority—of the early modern English diet. In a meditation on the Lord’s Supper centered on the idea of Jesus Christ as the “living bread,” the minister Edward Taylor likened Christ to “The Purest Wheate in Heaven.”²¹ In addition to this scriptural basis, Taylor’s association between bread and the specific grain of wheat drew on long-standing precedents in European culture stretching far before the emergence of Christianity to ancient Greece and Rome. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, wheat was very much an aspirational grain tied to socioeconomic status. Only elite Europeans—one plausible estimate is around 4 percent of the population—ate white bread, the most esteemed of all wheaten bread types, but many more wanted to do so. For New English puritans there was also a regional and ethnic factor in this culinary order favoring wheat. Most of them came from the southern lowlands of England and looked down on the unleavened oat cakes favored in Wales, Scotland, and north and west England. By the early seventeenth century, the preference for wheat as the grain of choice meant that even the poor demanded grain rations that were four-fifths wheat.²²

      However, wheat was harder to come by in the Americas than it had become in England. Christ might have been the “Living Bread” made of “the Purest Wheate in Heaven” and the theologian Thomas Aquinas have specified the “proper matter” of the ritual meal to be “wheaten bread,” but inhabitants of and visitors to the Americas had to make most of their earthly bread from other grains and tubers.²³ The most common throughout much of the Americas was maize, or, as the English termed it, “Indian corn.” As wheat figured in Greek origins, maize featured in the origin histories of many indigenous peoples throughout the regions of the Americas where it grew well.²⁴ The most common grain by far in New England was maize, followed by the colonist-introduced rye, barley, and oats. Long after English colonists learned successful cultivation techniques for the environment, wheat remained highly desired yet difficult to obtain because a disease that took hold in the 1660s kept the grain scarce, a scarcity that continued through the end of the eighteenth century. One study of Middlesex County in Massachusetts found that by the end of the 1660s fewer than a quarter of estates included wheat, a precipitous drop from the one-half that had included them at the beginning of the decade.²⁵ Wheat did not do well in Bermuda either; the staple carbohydrate in the subtropical island was the subterranean cassava or manioc root rather than maize. The island’s humid and storm-prone climate meant that, as minister Lewis Hughes pointed out, maize “is subject to blasting, and to the wormes, so is not the Casava.”²⁶

      Puritans celebrated wheat, but they did not see it as a necessary component of the bread for the Lord’s Supper. In contrast to a Jesuit missionary to the Wendats (Hurons) who complained of the mission’s “deprivation of every human assistance”—a deficit that included the wheat that was “absolutely indispensable for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”—or to Spanish clergy and conquistadors accompanying Hernando de Soto into Florida who concluded that since “the Holy Roman Church” decreed “that bread must be of wheat,” they could not “consecrate bread made of corn” even after having lost their precious store of wheat during battle, puritans displayed a more forgiving palate. Not only did they have the advantage of learning from Spanish accounts of colonization and descriptions of the Americas, many of which praised maize and cassava as nutritious and wholesome food, their brand of Christian theology placed less emphasis on the material substance of the bread used in the Lord’s Supper. While they worried about how ingesting these foods that figured so heavily in Native diets would affect their own bodies, they were not more concerned about its consumption during the ritual meal than at other times.²⁷

      Even so discriminating a minister as Samuel Parris, who kept such close boundaries on the ritual that he exacerbated divisions in his Salem Village congregation made famous in studies of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, listed a range of grains—“Corn, barley, Rye, Wheat &c”—that could be made into “corporal bread” for the Lord’s Supper. The substance to be ingested was of little enough import that even whatever “nourishing & usual food, which is of use in the stead of bread” would do when bread itself was not available. This principled lack of interest in exactly what was physically consumed during the ritual meal was a reaction against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in which the substance of the bread and wine became the substance of Christ’s real body and blood during the consecrating prayer. Parris did not extend his inclusive attitude to the “bold Papist” practice of baking special wafers “of Oyle, honey, and I know not what” because, in his view, using such bread distinguishable from its domestic counterpart separated the ritual from its origins as a meal. Since, in Parris’s experience, everyday bread to nourish the physical body was not made with oil or honey, then neither should bread for the Lord’s Supper contain those things.²⁸

      Taking part in the ritual involved bodily sensations that were not quite everyday and were separated from the daily round of activities. Participants in the Lord’s Supper in New England would have marked the ease with which they chewed a bite of wheat bread during the ritual meal compared to the effort it took to break down bread from more commonly available grains. The common mix of corn and rye flour produced a bread with a crust that was sturdy enough to use instead of a spoon for the semi-liquid stews, sauces, and porridges that made up most of the seventeenth-century English diet. This difference in texture reinforced the Lord’s Supper as a special action apart from the daily need to put food in the stomach. Edward Taylor would have had personal experience of the lighter texture and density of bread and pie crust made from wheat flour compared to that made from other grains such as maize, rye, and oats to inform his description of Christ as “Gods White Loafe” of “Heavens Sugar Cake.” Even as Lewis Hughes praised cassava as evidence of God’s goodness to English colonists in Bermuda, wheat remained Hughes’s point of reference: what recommended the cassava flour was that it produced “as fine, white bread as can be made from Wheat.”²⁹ Wheat might not have been theologically essential to the Lord’s Supper, but, like the silver on which it was served, it remained a cultural touchstone that constituted material and spiritual refinement.³⁰ The English practice of using it when available for communion bread reinforced bodily knowledge of the ritual as a time and space set apart from the ordinary and made sacred.

      “As many Grains make but one Loaf of Bread”

      The silver vessels used in puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper helped individuals to create spiritual practice and to access the divine, but as vehicles of conveyance they also direct our attention to the substances they carried. Those substances, particularly the widely produced bread, similarly functioned as a means to attain faith. Although more plentiful than hard metal, wheat bread was scarce enough that in addition to remaining linked to a familiar social hierarchy, it took on the added spiritual significance of refinement. If we expand our understanding of participation in the Lord’s Supper to those who baked the bread, the shape of the possibilities for spiritual practice in ostensibly mundane tasks become visible in a way they were not with a more restricted definition. In the repetitive actions of baking bread, women who were not admitted to the ritual meal or who were not able to attend services because they had nursing infants at home may have found an alternate way to engage the unseen world.

      We do not know the name of the woman who baked the bread for the Lord’s Supper, what she wore, or anything specific about her status. In southern New England, she could have been a hired white servant or unmarried female relative in a lay leader’s household or mistress of that household; an indentured Massachusett, Wampangoag, or Narragansett woman; or possibly one of the several hundred enslaved Africans. In Bermuda, she might have been an enslaved Bermudian of color, a white Bermudian widow, or a hired white servant. Just as Lewis Hughes erased women’s labor in his directions for cassava preparation that he included in his printed celebration of the smiling of divine providence on English colonization of Bermuda, so, too, puritan accounts of the Lord’s Supper—already spare in detail on the physical ritual—failed to consider the individual who had kneaded, shaped, and baked the bread passed around during the sacred meal. Nor did any description of women baking bread appear frequently in other sermons, which were more likely to turn to husbandry