This book studies later medieval culture (c. 1150-1500) through its central symbol: the eucharist. From the twelfth century onward the eucharist was designed by the Church as the foremost sacrament. The claim that this ritual brought into presence Christ's own body, and offered it to believers, underpinned the sacramental system and the clerical meditation upon which it depended. The book explores the context in which the sacramental world was created and the cultural processes through which it was disseminated, interpreted and used. With attention to the variety of eucharistic meanings and practices, the book moves from the "design" of the eucharist in the twelfth century to its redesign in the sixteenth--a story of the emergence of a symbol, its use and interpretation and final transformation.

Seeks the origins of later Christian anti-Judaism in Gnosticism and Pauline theology. Describes Gnostic anti-Judaism as directed primarily against the Jewish God and his law, rather than against the Jewish people who are their blind servants. Judaism for the Gnostics is more contemptible than dangerous, since its power is only in this world, to which the Gnostics attached no importance. Suggests that their hostility was aroused by Judaism's claim to equate its God with the higher God of Hellenistic thought. Paul took over much of the Gnostic two-power scheme, including the view of the Jews as blind servants of the Law. Argues that his own anti-Judaism did not go beyond that of the Gnostics. But in seeing the Crucifixion as central to salvation, and in singling out the Jews for a special role in salvation history, he added to the Gnostic two-power theology elements that later took shape as the Christian view of the Jews as Christ-killers and instruments of Satan.