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3. “Ye are of one Body and members one of another”

The metaphor of the body of Christ organized community life as a diagram for how Christians should live together. Passages throughout the New Testament referred to the church as Christ’s body and Christians as members of that body, while the central ritual revolved around consuming the body and blood of Christ as—depending on one’s theological emphasis—memorialized by or simultaneously present in the bread and wine of a meal that remembered or reenacted Christ’s last supper with his disciples.¹ Body metaphors were ubiquitous and a point of common reference because the universal experience of being embodied grounded the relationship between the physical, human body and collective spiritual and social bodies. Yet that universality contained a nearly infinite multiplicity of individual experiences that made definitions of the body in general, and faithful bodies in particular, nodes of conflict. Exactly how corporate social and spiritual bodies should function and who should belong to them was a matter of much disagreement.

Christians of various kinds applied the terminology of the physical or “natural” body to the community of the faithful in their efforts to confront the difficulty of how to unify disparate parts into a harmonious whole.² In “A Modell of Christian Charity,” an address John Winthrop delivered in 1630 with the hope that it would serve as a guide for the community to be founded in New England, Winthrop detailed how the disparate parts of a body might hold together: “The severall partes of this body . . . before they were united were as disproportionate and as much disordering as soe many contrary quallities or elements,” but after Christ “by his spirit and love knitts all these partes to himselfe and each to other,” they changed in nature. Christ’s love brought bodily changes: the assemblage of parts that formed a disproportionate body became “the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world.”³ In 1704, a group of elderly ministers who had refused to conform to Church of England rituals quoted part of Romans in a book-length letter to younger generations of dissenters: “Ye are of one Body and Members one of another: Wherefore like the Members of the Natural Body, ye must have a mutual Care, and be ready to help and serve each other in Love.”⁴ For Cotton Mather, the different members of the body of Christ had to “study to be Serviceable unto the people of God” who were “The Mystical Body of Christ” or they would be “worse than silver Hands, or wooden Legs, in that Body.” Failing to assist other members of the mystical body, which was more expansive than the local gathering of the godly, would make them of less help than lifeless prosthetics, poor substitutes for the living extremities.⁵ But recognizing that “Natural Body” and even those “wooden Legs” was not so simple as the comparison intimated. Unlike recognizing the limbs of one’s own body, it was not easy to determine who belonged and who did not. Defining the true body of Christ was a tricky business for Protestants dissenting from the Church of England. Draw the outline too close, and one might be succumbing to the sin of thinking that mere human reason was enough to determine whom the Christian God had saved. Expand it too broadly, and one might be eternally damaged by the spiritual corruption and disease spread by the irrepentable sin of others.

It was a complicated matter to determine who was called and united to Christ in the one body of the church, especially in the face of alternate understandings of the workings of spiritual power. English migration to Native homelands and to Bermuda introduced practices of making community that competed for space alongside southern Algonquian, West Central African, Haudenosaunee, indigenous Caribbean, and French configurations, among others. These groups shared the basic human experience of embodiment, but each group—and, indeed, each individual—made particular sense of that experience, making the body and body metaphors a productive vehicle for gaining access to multiple and often competing perspectives.⁶ While the English drew understanding from their physical bodies as much as did anyone else, they operated according to their own particular logics of the body and body-as-community. This chapter examines key ways that those on the puritan spectrum used bodily knowledge to organize their spiritual and political lives and to define the properly faithful body.

Figure 3.1. This early eighteenth-century French engraving of a Baptist celebration of the Lord’s Supper shows the matched vessels used to distribute the wine in a more egalitarian manner. La Cene des Anabaptistes, Jean Frederic Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, illus. Bernard Picart, vol. 4 (Amsterdam, 1736), after p. 208. For a scholarly digitized edition, see http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/picart/.

Figure 3.2. St. George’s Chalice and cover engraved with the Sea Venture striking a rock in full sail, flying the banner of St. George, and with the Rose and Crown on the transom. (Courtesy of St. Peter’s Church, Their Majesties’ Chappell, Bermuda. Photograph by Ann Spurling.)

As did other seventeenth-century peoples, English puritans understood the material and spiritual to be inextricably enmeshed. They too could find possibilities for spiritual meaning in everyday substances such as wheat and activities such as baking bread. The performance of the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper displayed the conflict between hierarchy and equality both in its material and social contexts. The women who prepared the communion bread may not have been permitted to participate in its ritual consumption, and even among those admitted to the meal, customs governing distribution encoded many ranks of social status. Shifts in the relationship between the collectives of the body of Christ and the body politic were embedded in changes in agricultural production, family structures, and imperial law as well as in theological debates and synods of ministers and lay leaders. Puritans turned to their physical or “natural” bodies to guide their understanding of how boundaries between different types of more expansive bodies were meant to function, how parts should relate to the whole, and how to recognize a diseased or polluted body politic or body of Christ. Untangling these multiple meanings of the body of Christ for seventeenth-century English puritans in southern New England and Bermuda highlights the inherent conflict over the proper configuration of the one and the many, and of the balance between hierarchy and equality. They ultimately resolved this conflict by disconnecting the body politic and the body of Christ, even as they defined Indians and Africans as excluded from the former and at best an inferior and contingent part of the latter.

Figure 3.3. John Hull beaker, ca. 1659, 3⅞”. Made for First Church, Boston. (Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Figure 3.4. Roger Wood beaker, bequeathed 1654, Devonshire Christ Church, Bermuda. The floral design links the beaker to its domestic counterparts. (Courtesy of Anglican Christ Church, Bermuda. Photograph by alugophoto.)

“Till all have eaten”

The puritan practice of the Lord’s Supper contained countervailing elements of equality and hierarchy as did the nickómmo and other feastings of the common pot, the ritual events examined in the previous chapter. In the Narragansett nickómmo, elites controlled the redistribution of resources by giving away goods and food. Puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper commemorated and enacted God’s gift of grace to a fraction of humanity. Those who had not made a public declaration of how the divine had touched their souls could not partake. They were dismissed from the service so that their presence might not compromise the constitution of the body of Christ. While not all participants in the Lord’s Supper might be actual recipients of God’s grace, they hoped they were. And among recipients of that gift, there were no degrees of salvation. Members of this invisible church of the saved were equal to one another in salvation.

In the human institution of the visible church, however, rules and customs governing all services expressed many gradations of social status. The practice of assigning seats to members of congregations according to complicated and finely articulated degrees of social rank was a spatial manifestation of the incongruity between the visible and invisible corporate bodies. In its privileging of military rank, age, property, and familial ties but not an individual’s admission to the Lord’s Supper, “seating the congregation” produced a physical expression of the body politic in the organization of the gathered body of Christ. It served as a constant reminder of the tensions between human understandings of the body politic and what was meant to be the divinely infused corporate body. The seats adjacent to the pulpit were the most desirable, reserved for magistrates and other civil dignitaries, while those distant or with views obstructed by columns or stairwells were the least desirable, set aside for English children over the age of thirteen, Natives, Africans, and English servants. Men and women sat separately and men probably predominated; on any given sabbath celebration, many women who lived in the community would have been absent since nursing mothers rarely attended church. Peter Benes has estimated that half of the residents attended an average service.⁷

Puritan ministers expended much ink and time on individual preparation for the Lord’s Supper and on the theology of the sacrament, particularly in terms of the relationship between the bread and wine of the meal and divine action or presence, but their words are not the only basis for investigating puritan theologies of the body.⁸ In puritan inflections of this experientially central ritual, the actions of passing the bread and wine to one another and their corporate consumption were what created sacred space, not any physical transformation in the substances used.⁹ As scholars of material religion have pointed out, puritans’ performance of ritual and their use of material objects reveals that the feeling, sounding, looking, and tasting of physical bodies moving through corporeal space created as well as reflected spiritual knowledge. While the objects were not sacred in and of themselves, the emphasis on performances using them meant that they served as a conduit for devotions and taught puritans how to perceive and interact with the divine.¹⁰ We can use these embodied, object-centered experiences to look over the shoulders of those thousands of English individuals who did not leave much of an individual imprint on the written record in order to discern the many-layered process of place-making and the creation of corporate bodies of the faithful. At the same time that the communion vessels and the bread and wine they served were meant to direct participants to the overwhelming action of divine salvation, they also enacted human-made hierarchy through variations of practice in the distribution and consumption of the meal.

Much of this hierarchy of the table had been inherited from English society prior to the development of a puritan movement. Those with the highest rank ate first and took the best available option. Hosts had to provide food for all, including the poor, but it did not have to be of the same quality. Eating the same food was a mark of at least temporarily sharing the same rank, which is why during the early months of the faltering Jamestown colony yeoman John Smith bristled when Edward Wingfield, a minor noble, refused to eat from the literal “common kettle” of worm-infested grain ingested by the other council members. Another early English colony, Plymouth, attempted to mandate a common kettle among all inhabitants, cultivating and preparing food communally rather than familially. Even though many were dedicated to the idea of establishing a society based on being members of one body, they objected to the erasure of deeply established modes of labor distribution and quickly returned to household-based production.¹¹

While the bread served as part of the Lord’s Supper was the same for all, participants found other ways to express hierarchy. One of the more detailed accounts of the conduct of the meal, while written by someone unsympathetic to puritan practice, corroborates with a prescriptive explanation of church practice by the unmistakably puritan John Cotton. As described by the lawyer Thomas Lechford, whose shift from dissenting to conforming beliefs about the scriptural warrant for bishops kept him barred from the ritual meal in New England, the first step was for those not partaking to leave the meetinghouse. Then “the Ministers and ruling Elders sitting at the Table, the rest” sitting “in their seats, or upon forms,” a type of backless bench, a “Teaching Elder” blessed and consecrated the bread. Depending on the size and configuration of the church, the table at which the minister and deacons sat might have been a relatively small hinged surface attached to the seating for the deacons or the front of the pulpit, or a larger freestanding one that strongly resembled its strictly domestic counterparts. After the prayer, “the ministers deliver the Bread in a Charger to some of the chiefe, and peradventure gives to a few the Bread into their hands, and they deliver the charger from one to another, till all have eaten.” The same process was repeated “in like manner” with the wine: “the cup, till all have dranke, goes from one to another.” John Cotton specified that after the minister partook of the bread and passed it to “all that sit at Table with him,” he remained “sitting in his place at the Table” while the deacons distributed it to the rest of the congregation. Cotton explained that the sitting posture denoted the communicants’ status as “co-sessors with [Christ] at the last Judgement.”¹² A guide to liturgy followed in early Bermuda similarly noted, “The people shall communicate in order, and that sitting, as is most conformable to the first institution,” although it also allowed for standing “as is accustomed in some places.”¹³

The deacon gave bread and wine to those of highest social rank first, an acknowledgment of worldly status underscored by their selection from a variety of cups, beakers, and tankards whose differing types indicated varying levels of rank. These congregations echoed their greater focus on the differentiation of spiritual roles with an emphasis on social standing in this world. Samuel Sewall recorded the “humiliation” of one particular Lord’s Supper in 1724 when “Deacon Checkly Deliver’d the Cup first to Madam Winthrop, and then gave me the tankard.” Scholars have interpreted the emotions that “put [Sewall] to the Blush” as coming both from such a spiritual intimacy with Katherine Brattle Winthrop, a woman who had spurned his courtship, and from the social snub communicated in the humbler form of the tankard. Sewall’s gift of a silver tankard bearing his coat of arms to that church, the Old South Church in Boston, may have indicated that the incident rankled him to his death, but it may also have been Sewall’s reminder to himself and to others to focus on Christ and salvation rather than objects and people of the material world. A more highly valued form—like a vessel made of silver rather than pewter or wood—was not theologically necessary, but it expressed the tastes and practices of spiritual refinement as it aided in the development and acquisition of those very tastes and practices.¹⁴

Another style of distributing the Lord’s Supper that was widespread in New England emphasized connection among the participants rather than giving such a prominent role to leading laity. Instead of deacons approaching each individual with assorted vessels, communicants handed the bread and wine to each other in matching sets. Passing the bread and wine among the participants emphasized the equality of all who sat at the Lord’s Table and the sacrality of their connections with one another. A French engraving of the Lord’s Supper as celebrated by Dutch Baptists—who differed in baptismal but not communion practice—illustrates this style of distribution (figure 3.1). In the engraving, seated communicants pass bread and wine to each other in sets of matching vessels, a visual, perceptual, and experiential emphasis on similarity among participants.¹⁵ These matching sets survive in New England in greater number from the early eighteenth century, primarily among churches that maintained a narrow definition of admission to the ritual meal. With stricter terms of admission came fewer participants and less of a need to distinguish socially among them. Conversely, a more inclusive definition of the body of Christ and who might participate in the Lord’s Supper usually meant the expression of more social hierarchy in its administration.¹⁶

Figure 3.5. In the second half of the seventeenth century, most ovens in colonial houses in New England were built into the back of the fireplace instead of outside the house. Note the recessed oven in the back of the fireplace. Fireplace, Cooper-Frost-Austin House, Cambridge, Mass. Gift of William Sumner Appleton. (Courtesy of Historic New England)

Although information on seventeenth-century practice in Bermudian churches is scarcer than for their New England counterparts, surviving church silver suggests that a range of practice also existed on the island. The seventeenth-century vessels that remain in the church in St. George’s today are similar to the ones William and Mary presented to King’s Chapel in Boston in 1694. The Bermudian 1697/8 “King’s Set,” which is engraved with the arms and cypher of William III, contains a chalice with cover, a paten, two flagons, a basin, and a spoon. It is not clear when St. George’s acquired the chalice and cover, hallmarked 1625/6, that are engraved with the Sea Venture striking a rock in full sail, flying the banner of St. George, and with the Rose and Crown on the transom (figure 3.2).¹⁷ The explicitly ecclesiastical chalice and the existence of a cross in depiction of the ship’s pennants may seem to belie any puritan leanings. However, they do not necessarily indicate conformity to the Church of England practices.

The disputes over the validity of a presbyterian structure—whether there was any spiritual authority between each individual congregation and God—did not have direct bearing on celebrations of the Lord’s Supper or on most ministers’ refusal to use the prescribed Church of England liturgy. In addition to the stated preferences of ministers and the expulsion of many of them from positions in England, the location of the pulpit in many Bermudian churches was similar to its placement in New England meetinghouse architecture. It was across from the main entrance, emphasizing the centrality of preaching.¹⁸ There are also surviving Bermudian vessels more squarely in the puritan vein. In his 1654 will, Roger Wood bequeathed a beaker engraved with his name to Devonshire Church. Already in use when Wood died, the beaker would have blended into any number of New England churches’ collections of silver (figure 3.3 and figure 3.4).¹⁹

Corn, Cassava, and the “Purest Wheate in Heaven”

No matter how refined the metal, whether inscribed or not, the purpose of silver communion vessels was to be symbolic “bearers of Christ,” conveyances for the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper.²⁰ Variances in that physical food and drink, what was served at the ritual meal, echoed the variances in how the ritual meal was served. The scope for refinement was especially noticeable in the bread, a food that was a daily part—if not the majority—of the early modern English diet. In a meditation on the Lord’s Supper centered on the idea of Jesus Christ as the “living bread,” the minister Edward Taylor likened Christ to “The Purest Wheate in Heaven.”²¹ In addition to this scriptural basis, Taylor’s association between bread and the specific grain of wheat drew on long-standing precedents in European culture stretching far before the emergence of Christianity to ancient Greece and Rome. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, wheat was very much an aspirational grain tied to socioeconomic status. Only elite Europeans—one plausible estimate is around 4 percent of the population—ate white bread, the most esteemed of all wheaten bread types, but many more wanted to do so. For New English puritans there was also a regional and ethnic factor in this culinary order favoring wheat. Most of them came from the southern lowlands of England and looked down on the unleavened oat cakes favored in Wales, Scotland, and north and west England. By the early seventeenth century, the preference for wheat as the grain of choice meant that even the poor demanded grain rations that were four-fifths wheat.²²

However, wheat was harder to come by in the Americas than it had become in England. Christ might have been the “Living Bread” made of “the Purest Wheate in Heaven” and the theologian Thomas Aquinas have specified the “proper matter” of the ritual meal to be “wheaten bread,” but inhabitants of and visitors to the Americas had to make most of their earthly bread from other grains and tubers.²³ The most common throughout much of the Americas was maize, or, as the English termed it, “Indian corn.” As wheat figured in Greek origins, maize featured in the origin histories of many indigenous peoples throughout the regions of the Americas where it grew well.²⁴ The most common grain by far in New England was maize, followed by the colonist-introduced rye, barley, and oats. Long after English colonists learned successful cultivation techniques for the environment, wheat remained highly desired yet difficult to obtain because a disease that took hold in the 1660s kept the grain scarce, a scarcity that continued through the end of the eighteenth century. One study of Middlesex County in Massachusetts found that by the end of the 1660s fewer than a quarter of estates included wheat, a precipitous drop from the one-half that had included them at the beginning of the decade.²⁵ Wheat did not do well in Bermuda either; the staple carbohydrate in the subtropical island was the subterranean cassava or manioc root rather than maize. The island’s humid and storm-prone climate meant that, as minister Lewis Hughes pointed out, maize “is subject to blasting, and to the wormes, so is not the Casava.”²⁶

Puritans celebrated wheat, but they did not see it as a necessary component of the bread for the Lord’s Supper. In contrast to a Jesuit missionary to the Wendats (Hurons) who complained of the mission’s “deprivation of every human assistance”—a deficit that included the wheat that was “absolutely indispensable for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”—or to Spanish clergy and conquistadors accompanying Hernando de Soto into Florida who concluded that since “the Holy Roman Church” decreed “that bread must be of wheat,” they could not “consecrate bread made of corn” even after having lost their precious store of wheat during battle, puritans displayed a more forgiving palate. Not only did they have the advantage of learning from Spanish accounts of colonization and descriptions of the Americas, many of which praised maize and cassava as nutritious and wholesome food, their brand of Christian theology placed less emphasis on the material substance of the bread used in the Lord’s Supper. While they worried about how ingesting these foods that figured so heavily in Native diets would affect their own bodies, they were not more concerned about its consumption during the ritual meal than at other times.²⁷

Even so discriminating a minister as Samuel Parris, who kept such close boundaries on the ritual that he exacerbated divisions in his Salem Village congregation made famous in studies of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, listed a range of grains—“Corn, barley, Rye, Wheat &c”—that could be made into “corporal bread” for the Lord’s Supper. The substance to be ingested was of little enough import that even whatever “nourishing & usual food, which is of use in the stead of bread” would do when bread itself was not available. This principled lack of interest in exactly what was physically consumed during the ritual meal was a reaction against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in which the substance of the bread and wine became the substance of Christ’s real body and blood during the consecrating prayer. Parris did not extend his inclusive attitude to the “bold Papist” practice of baking special wafers “of Oyle, honey, and I know not what” because, in his view, using such bread distinguishable from its domestic counterpart separated the ritual from its origins as a meal. Since, in Parris’s experience, everyday bread to nourish the physical body was not made with oil or honey, then neither should bread for the Lord’s Supper contain those things.²⁸

Taking part in the ritual involved bodily sensations that were not quite everyday and were separated from the daily round of activities. Participants in the Lord’s Supper in New England would have marked the ease with which they chewed a bite of wheat bread during the ritual meal compared to the effort it took to break down bread from more commonly available grains. The common mix of corn and rye flour produced a bread with a crust that was sturdy enough to use instead of a spoon for the semi-liquid stews, sauces, and porridges that made up most of the seventeenth-century English diet. This difference in texture reinforced the Lord’s Supper as a special action apart from the daily need to put food in the stomach. Edward Taylor would have had personal experience of the lighter texture and density of bread and pie crust made from wheat flour compared to that made from other grains such as maize, rye, and oats to inform his description of Christ as “Gods White Loafe” of “Heavens Sugar Cake.” Even as Lewis Hughes praised cassava as evidence of God’s goodness to English colonists in Bermuda, wheat remained Hughes’s point of reference: what recommended the cassava flour was that it produced “as fine, white bread as can be made from Wheat.”²⁹ Wheat might not have been theologically essential to the Lord’s Supper, but, like the silver on which it was served, it remained a cultural touchstone that constituted material and spiritual refinement.³⁰ The English practice of using it when available for communion bread reinforced bodily knowledge of the ritual as a time and space set apart from the ordinary and made sacred.

“As many Grains make but one Loaf of Bread”

The silver vessels used in puritan performances of the Lord’s Supper helped individuals to create spiritual practice and to access the divine, but as vehicles of conveyance they also direct our attention to the substances they carried. Those substances, particularly the widely produced bread, similarly functioned as a means to attain faith. Although more plentiful than hard metal, wheat bread was scarce enough that in addition to remaining linked to a familiar social hierarchy, it took on the added spiritual significance of refinement. If we expand our understanding of participation in the Lord’s Supper to those who baked the bread, the shape of the possibilities for spiritual practice in ostensibly mundane tasks become visible in a way they were not with a more restricted definition. In the repetitive actions of baking bread, women who were not admitted to the ritual meal or who were not able to attend services because they had nursing infants at home may have found an alternate way to engage the unseen world.

We do not know the name of the woman who baked the bread for the Lord’s Supper, what she wore, or anything specific about her status. In southern New England, she could have been a hired white servant or unmarried female relative in a lay leader’s household or mistress of that household; an indentured Massachusett, Wampangoag, or Narragansett woman; or possibly one of the several hundred enslaved Africans. In Bermuda, she might have been an enslaved Bermudian of color, a white Bermudian widow, or a hired white servant. Just as Lewis Hughes erased women’s labor in his directions for cassava preparation that he included in his printed celebration of the smiling of divine providence on English colonization of Bermuda, so, too, puritan accounts of the Lord’s Supper—already spare in detail on the physical ritual—failed to consider the individual who had kneaded, shaped, and baked the bread passed around during the sacred meal. Nor did any description of women baking bread appear frequently in other sermons, which were more likely to turn to husbandry and its association with the imperialist mission of “improving” and thus taking possession of the land with English agricultural techniques.³¹ Contemplating her perspective offers a means to explore more fully the idealized interactions between human and divine as well as the opportunities for spiritual practice in everyday activity.

While ministers were fully aware of their embodiment as physical beings, they were not the ones responsible for procuring the bread and wine.³² Instead, that task fell to deacons, lay leaders recognized by the congregation, whose charge was to “assist and relieve the Pastors, in all the Temporal Affairs of the Church.” In practical terms, that meant that a woman in a deacon’s household was responsible for baking the bread on each occasion when there was to be a ritual meal among the gathered faithful. Whoever baked the bread may or may not have been allowed to eat that bread during the Lord’s Supper—since church practice did not require deacons’ wives to be full church members, it is doubtful the person baking the bread would have been required to hold that status.³³ A similar practice seems to have been followed in Bermuda. Early eighteenth-century Bermudian church accounts indicate that women were paid to wash the linens and scour the silver vessels used in church services. They also list expenditures for bread and wine, which suggests that the bread was not made in the minister’s household.³⁴

Baking bread involved a series of labor-intensive steps. In the first thirteen years of Plymouth colony before the first gristmill was built in 1633, the task began with grinding corn in a wood mortar to separate the “Meale” from the “huskes.” In communities with gristmills, the woman would not have had to use a mortar and pestle to get cornmeal, but she might have had to churn butter, make cheese, or spin thread in order to have a way to trade with the miller for grinding her sacks of corn and other grains.³⁵ Whether hand- or stone-ground, the meal still contained larger pieces that, if baked without further processing, would remain hard and result in an unevenly textured bread. The woman would have sifted out the finer meal and set it aside while she boiled the “Course parte . . . till it be thick like batter,” let it cool, then mixed in the finer meal. For everyday bread, the woman might have poured the cornmeal batter as it was into an iron pot and then placed it over a fire to bake.³⁶

For something as special as the ritual meal of the Lord’s Supper, the woman probably mixed in some wheat flour when available, along with some yeast “to make it Rise” and form an airier loaf. Throughout the initial mixing, rounds of kneading, shaping, and as she waited for the bread to proof in its loaf form, she would have maintained a fire in the oven built into the back of her kitchen fireplace, distributing the coals to attain as even a temperature as possible (figure 3.5). Once she determined by the feel of the heat on her hand that the oven had reached the desired temperature, she would have removed the coals and slid in the unbaked loaves. Although not all houses had ovens, the woman selected to bake communion bread likely lived in a house with one.³⁷ If she were making the bread from wheat flour, as she sank the heel of her hand into the dough and pushed against its elasticity, she may have seen her own tendency to return to sin in the way the dough slowly shrank back in on itself. The less springy consistency of dough made primarily from other grains could have inspired thoughts of her own obdurate will in the face of divine intention.

Preparing bread from cassava flour as was common in Bermuda involved somewhat different steps. As more fully discussed in chapter 1, the poisonous juice had to be removed to make the tuber edible. The woman baking the bread may have done that work herself before mixing the flour with a little water to make a paste-like dough, then cooking it on a flat griddle or in a pan. Unlike wheat, rye, or barley, cassava contains no gluten and so produces a dense, moist bread with little crumb or crust. The woman would have had to take care to press the paste to keep it together during initial phases of cooking as its lack of elasticity made it prone to breaking.³⁸ Rather than inspiring thoughts of rebounding to sinful behavior, the bread’s tendency to crack during cooking may have directed the woman’s thoughts to the brokenness of the world.

The woman may have felt that her work creating the bread that bound the members of the community together in the ritual meal commemorating the last meal between Christ and his disciples was a conduit to the divine. If she ascribed to the idea that one’s outward actions were a reflection of one’s inward state, the hard labor and discipline required to produce an edible loaf could have provided her a means to access the world of the unseen and have given mundane actions spiritual resonance. As she recalled the strain in her muscles from wielding mortar and pestle or churning milk into butter to barter for access to the gristmill, she may have thought of the pain of sin or the effort of breaking down her self-will to prepare the soul for receiving God’s grace. Even if she herself were not the one performing those tasks, as the mistress she may have seen servants’ or slaves’ work as contributing to the godly industriousness of her household.³⁹

Perhaps she was a full church member who had given an oral testimony of her faith in front of the congregation and so she would be partaking of the bread, receiving it from a neighbor’s hands and passing the dish on to the next person. Or the woman who sweated as she tended the cooking fire—watching until the embers were of the correct and relatively uniform heat to bake the bread before the dough rose too much and collapsed on itself—might not have made a public declaration and detailing of her conversion process and so would not get to eat bread and drink wine at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, although she faithfully attended services when her household duties permitted. And if she were Massachusett, or Wampanoag, or Narragansett, or Nipmuc, and did not ascribe to the Christian pantheon, the action of baking bread for the puritan ritual may have had no more significance for her than any other task she was required to do. Every rebound of a dough with a significant percentage of wheat flour may have reminded the woman of the incursions into her people’s lands, even if the English never exacted tribute payments of wheat from southern Algonquians the way the Spanish exacted them from the Aztecs.⁴⁰ Conversely, working with maize—even in this English-directed product—could have been a reminder of the long-ago gift from Cautantowwit or Kiehtan.

Of course, whoever she was and whatever categories she fell into, she may have contemplated nothing more than the labor extracted from her. The Lord’s Supper was generally celebrated in puritan churches once a month, and she may just have been glad that the ritual did not occur more frequently. Her perspective on the question of admission to the Lord’s Supper could well have been that she was glad it was restricted to a smaller group than those who attended services every week, since fewer participants meant fewer loaves of bread to bake.

Puritan ministers referred to this arduous process in a shorthand meant to illustrate the scriptural concept of many joining together as one. John Cotton emphasized the creation of one body from many that occurred during the communal celebration of the Lord’s Supper with the imagery of “many Grains mak[ing] but one Loaf of Bread.” Lewis Hughes used the same concept in the short catechism that he published along with his celebratory account of Bermuda: “As the Bread is made of many graines, so joyned together, as they all make but one Loafe, . . . so the true beleevers being many, are so united in Christ, as they all make but one Christ.”⁴¹

Other examples make clear that on the few occasions ministers did mention the specific tasks involved in baking bread, the actions were metaphors for the ways that the divine shaped the soul and the essential sufficiency of Christ, rather than an occasion to think about the physical performance of grinding grain, hauling water, chopping wood, building and maintaining a fire, kneading dough and letting it rise, or baking the loaves. Samuel Willard meditated on Christ as the “Living Bread,” which “is not made without Grinding of the grain to dust, and being parched with Water and Fire; and Christ became Food for Souls to live on, by being bruised for our Sins, and scorched in the fire of Gods wrath, and so he is made fit for us to feed upon.” Samuel Parris echoed this construction when he preached, “As Bread is Baked or dried in an Oven by the heat of the fire: So the body of Christ is as it were baked by the fire of the cross, & so prepared for to become food, or bread for our Souls.” For these ministers, the significance lay in the parallels between the processes of baking bread and of creating spiritual food, sustenance for the spiritual bodies of the faithful.⁴² While the woman who completed the tasks necessary to bake bread may also have perceived such links, she would have had a lifetime of physical memory to help her anchor such arduous spiritual work in her fleshly body.

“Sinews and other ligaments”

Ministers might not have had the tactile and muscular memories of grinding corn and kneading bread, but just as for the woman baking bread above or for the Narragansett ritual specialist discussed in chapter 2, their experiences of moving hand, foot, head, and torso helped them comprehend the divine body and its relation to its constituent parts.⁴³ The relation of one body part to another also helped them to articulate their vision of a proper visible church in which members were bound to one another with indissoluble bonds. In this language of physical or “natural” bodies and body parts, puritans struggled to balance an understanding of a hierarchy of importance among those parts against the transformative nature of Christ and the divine gift of salvation.

The parts of the body were all necessary to the whole because they had varying forms and functions, but their contributions were not all of the same significance. In the letter of instruction that opened this chapter, dissenting ministers exhorted their younger coreligionists to “Let every one Design and Aim to be serviceable in his Place and Relation” because “every little Member of our natural Body profits the whole; the Eye is the light of all the Body; the Tongue pleads for the whole, or for any part; the Hand receives and labours as much as for the Foot, or the Head, as for it self.” The phrase “serviceable in his Place and Relation” is important here because it signaled the hierarchy among body parts. While “[e]very part must be useful to the Whole,” some were “little” ones that played a lesser role. The head relied on the other body parts, but its authority was meant to reign supreme.⁴⁴