Croxton Play of the Sacrament

Despite its bloody and polemical content—or perhaps because of it—the late fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament continues to fascinate and shock. Its central scene dramatizes physical abuse of the Host, the bread believed to become Christ’s body when consecrated during Mass, by non-Christians mocking the doctrine of transubstantiation. However, because this Middle English play depicts these torturers as Syrian Jews who worship the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and because it was composed two centuries after England expelled its Jewish inhabitants in 1290, these figures likely served to reinforce Christian orthodoxy amid anxieties over transubstantiation rather than respond to contemporary Jewish practices. The Host’s miraculous responses to this abuse, including healing a dismembered hand and causing an oven to explode in the shape of the Christ Child, infuse the play with spectacle and reflect its East Anglian theatrical preferences for human, visible, and embodied forms of Christian devotion.