Inside/Outside: South Camden, Prisons, and Early Medieval Communities

Camden New Jersey is the second poorest city in the US, a place bereft of institutional supports and thus presenting certain analogies to early medieval communities. This paper explores several ways my research on early medieval Europe and activism in Camden have reinforced one another. For example, I work with organizations run by a local Catholic church. While most Camden residents are Protestant, the Sacred Heart congregation primarily lives outside the city but comes to the church to combine worship with social ministry. Much of the work centers on food-sharing: meals and groceries distributed to welfare mothers, prostitutes, addicts, and other destitute. Observing how these efforts foster social ties within this community, where family and government structures are weak, and between it and the church, has converged – unexpectedly – with study of early medieval feasting and eucharists. Historians have traditionally assumed that patristic definitions of the eucharist remained normative throughout the medieval period; the sacrament required “ordained” clergy employing “holy” vessels for a defined ritual of bread and wine, typically in buildings designated as churches. Yet just as Sacred Heart and those it feeds attach a “eucharistic” significance to their food-sharing, early medieval writings reveal a highly flexible understanding of what constituted the sacrament’s foods, vessels, personnel, and locations. Groups the clergy labeled pagan, yet apparently identifying themselves as Christian, perceived diverse modes of feasting as eucharistic – ceremonies led by lay women and men, in varied settings, that fed the hungry and reinforced bonds among group members and between them and a Christian heaven. Although activism and scholarship can sometimes converge, the paper will conclude with thoughts about the limits to our ability to unify such endeavors. Ultimately they lead in different directions, and engagement with one impinges on the time and energy available for the other.