Volume 37, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 47–61
Feasts and Gifts of Food in Medieval Europe: Ritualised Constructions of Hierarchy, Identity and Community
Abstract
This
article examines the symbolism of the cup in Old English poetry and Old
French romance. It argues that the dual symbolism of the cup in the
Bible, both the cask of divine wrath and the vessel of mercy, invested
the image with a particular dichotomy that was inherited by its
metaphoric social functions in the literature of the middle ages. In Old
English literature, the cup became a metonym for the contract for lord
and thane, the conviviality and treasure exchange that united the
mead-hall community. But never far beneath the surface is the fact that
this contract requires the thane to die, and this unspoken yet
unavoidable truth is writ large in the contagious imagery and vocabulary
of the cup. In Old French romance, dichotomy crystallises into binary.
The association of the cup of the Last Supper with Joseph of Arimathea,
and the development of the Grail legend, made the service of the cup an
exclusive loyalty, at the expense of social obligation, and its
exigencies are made absolute and immediate. This article offers parallel
readings of the same biblical metaphor in different literary cultures
and a detailed analysis of a symbol that stands simultaneously for the
positive image and its reversal, opposites that are mutually contingent:
the community’s desire for unity and preservation and its concomitant
fear of disintegration and death.
Keywords
- Cup;
- Grail;
- Fellowship;
- Eucharist;
- Round Table;
- Beowulf;
- Queste del Saint Graal;
- Chrétien de Troyes;
- Robert de Boron;
- Joseph of Arimathea
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Joanna Bellis
read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where she attained a
double first. She is now completing her Ph.D. on mimetic language in
accounts of the Hundred Years War. Her interests include medieval and
renaissance language theory, etymology, national identity,
representation and the idea of writing history. She has articles
forthcoming in Leeds Studies in English (2010) and the
proceedings of the 2010 ‘Romance in Medieval Britain’ conference. For
her next project, she hopes to edit John Page’s ‘Siege of Rouen’. She is
co-editor of Marginalia, the journal of the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge.
