| In Christening Women, Men and Monsters, I argue that baptism as it appears in Middle English texts allowed authors and audiences to explore transgressive thoughts, narratives, and bodies as mechanisms for the construction of communal and individual identity. Baptism, though often overlooked by modern critics of medieval texts in favor of the more controversial sacraments of the Eucharist or confession, was a vital ritual that created systematic boundaries between cultures and individuals. But, because baptism was a rite of initiation, it formed a necessarily permeable boundary that could change the very community it produced. I have focused my work on several compilations of vernacular saints' legends, a variety of romances, and references to baptism in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. To situate these texts in their historical and philosophical contexts, I have analyzed them alongside English church decrees, chronicles, and the works of prominent theologians including Thomas Aquinas and John Wyclif. My work draws on the methodologies of Miri Rubin, who has explored social identity through the ritual of the Eucharist. Adding to the work of David Aers and Sarah Beckwith, who explore the uses to which religious symbols could be put in vernacular literature, my study reveals that baptism was a productive religious symbol for authors and translators. Baptism is represented in Middle English texts as an unchanging sacrament that unites all Christians diachronically and synchronically, even as various writers adapted their particular representation to reflect local concerns and anxieties. The tension between baptism's idealized function and the penchant for it to be put in the service of specific arguments leads to a multiplicity of identities available to the medieval Christian. I have found that baptism was sometimes depicted, most often by hagiographic texts, as a means to diversify what constitutes a Christian identity (what I refer to as an "inclusive baptism"). By comparison, baptism was also used, primarily in Middle English romances, to limit that which was acceptable as Christian (an "exclusive baptism"). Literary baptism, used as a means to symbolize identity, reveals that the sacramental foundation of Christian identity was continually being determined. |
