This Is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England

At war with the French and many Native American groups in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, New England colonists worried about cannibalism. They were fearful at reports of cannibalism among the Huron. They were concerned that the Catholic Eucharist was a cannibalistic ritual. However, English efforts to distinguish themselves from their "cannibal" enemies only serve to raise further questions about food, religion, and the body in early America. This conference paper uses a material culture analysis of English Puritan, French Catholic, and Huron communion vessels to argue that violent imperial conflict troubled the boundaries between spiritual and secular eating, blood and wine, and cannibalism and communion in these three cultures.

Attempting to police these boundaries, early modern Protestants found especially troubling the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, wherein priests transformed wafers and wine into Jesus' actual flesh and blood. Protestants argued that in their own communion ceremonies, they only symbolically consumed Christ. Yet in both Europe and European colonial outposts, Protestants and Catholics alike practiced medicinal cannibalism, ingesting substances derived from the human body for medical purposes, while explicitly comparing corpse medicine to communion. In addition, Early Puritan colonists repurposed secular drinking implements as communion vessels; and using French-made copper kettles, the Huron practiced a ritual called the Feast of the Dead, as well as other forms of ritualized, literal cannibalism. Examining communion vessels and rituals from the French, the Huron, and the English, this cultural history contends that these combatants were willing to kill and die over perceived differences between what were in fact strikingly similar ideas and practices.

See more of: Listening, Tasting, Reading, Touching: Interdisciplinary Histories of American Food
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