The Divine Dinner Party: Domestic Imagery and Easter Preaching in Late Medieval England

When Margery Kempe imagines each member of the Trinity sitting within the chamber of her soul on a cushion of an appropriate color, she uses familiar household furnishings to develop a metaphor that helps explain a complex theological concept, while at the same time creating the sense that these ideas are as natural and easy to accept as the objects from which the metaphor is constructed. Similarly, in an Easter sermon preached in 1431, her contemporary Nicholas Philip, a Franciscan friar of the convent in King's Lynn (Margery's hometown), uses household furnishings to prepare his listeners to receive the Eucharist at Easter. The sermon is built on the metaphor of the body as the house to which Christ has been invited for a feast, and, like Kempe's Trinity image, this house has furnishings — a carpet, a tapestry, a cushion, a seat cover — and the feast itself involves a variety of dishes along with music and entertaining guests. The sermon develops a multifaceted image that becomes a complete sensory experience, focusing not on the meaning of transubstantiation but on the communicant's proper disposition. While Nicholas Philip's Easter sermon may be unusual in using this imagery to shape an entire sermon, many late medieval Easter sermons preached in England employ such domestic imagery to elucidate for their audiences the significance of the Eucharist, the reception of which, for most of the laity living in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, took place only on Easter. In a process that can be called the domestication of the divine, such metaphors render this annual reception less distant and abstract, making an event with supernatural implications as natural and familiar as a dinner party. However, the rhetorical purpose of this domestication is not primarily to encourage feelings of comfort and easy familiarity with the theological underpinnings of the sacrament, but to promote virtue and responsibility in the recipient both in preparation for and following this event. Nicholas Philip's Easter sermon thus testifies to a homiletic concern of many late medieval English preachers as well as to the artistic license a preacher might take to effect that concern.