Christocentric Piety and the Parish
Christine Peters
The late mediaeval period saw a shift to a more Christocentric focus of piety in English parishes. Most
obviously, as Ashby’s survey shows, there was a general fifteenth-century trend to portray a
Christocentric Last Judgement with wounds and the instruments of the passion, and to position it above
the chancel arch. In this new position, not only did it become the focal point for the congregation, but
it was also juxtaposed with the rood group and with the liminal and supporting role of saints on the
rood screen. These revisions emphasised the mercy of Christ through the sacrifice of the crucifixion,
rather than the threat of hell and damnation. Within this scheme, the role of Mary also changed
significantly. The Soulweighing could still be associated with Marian intervention but was generally
confined to an episode separate from the Last Judgement. There was also a corresponding emphasis on
the Pieta instead of the Madonna and Child. This re-definition of the economy of salvation by
focussing on the passion of an adult Christ and his offer of mercy gave stimulus to two devotional
developments, both of which are linked to Christ’s wounds but which are abstracted from the Passion
narrative: Christ of the Trades and the emblems of the Five Wounds.
These developments were partly as a result of mysticism percolating lay experience, but significantly
this did not result in the replication of the experience of Bynum’s mystics whose relationship with
Christ’s humanity focussed on suffering, abjection and forms of bodily fusion. In the parish, as the
image juxtapositions outlined above indicate, it was transformed to focus on Christ’s offer of mercy
and on the ingratitude (and physical harm) inflicted by sinning mankind upon Christ. Consequently,
this kind of Christocentric parish piety could provide a bridge to Reformation, in relegating the
significance of the cult of saints, and allowing a focus on Christ and his sacrifice for the sake of
mankind, and on the requirement for Christians to combat everyday sin. Moreover, this was a route
available both to ‘orthodox’ catholics and also to those with Lollard affiliations who rejected the
incarnational focus of much late mediaeval parish piety.
These developments in late medieval piety are now fairly well known. The related argument that this
style of Christocentric parish piety can provide a bridge to Reformation has also received support from
Lutton, who has attempted to define a broad economic and devotional constituency for Christocentric
piety, and has received independent corroboration from Wabuda, who approached the question
simultaneously from a clerical angle. One consequence of the studies of Lutton and Wabuda has been
an attempt to shift the focus of the Christocentric piety and the Reformation agenda to the problematic
area of new devotions. As Wabuda sensitively comments, it seems far from clear whether these
devotional fashions may not serve as much to bolster catholic conservatism as to make protestant
evangelicalism palatable.
Consequently, this paper will begin to examine the content of these new devotions and to situate this in
the context of parish religious culture. It will seek to build upon Lutton’s attempt to do this based on
analysis of a (possibly evangelically contaminated) late version of the Jesus anthem and upon
Wabuda’s observation that the Name of Jesus as a verbal abstraction, and a means of building faith can
travel into the Reformation era and ‘paradoxically’ experience a ‘re-flowering’, whilst problems arose
from the attachment to mass and associated suspicions of repetitive prayers as ‘lip labour’.
Related to this are questions about the appeal and constituency of support for the Jesus Mass, and the
Mass of the Five Wounds. Particular case studies suggest chronological development, and possible
early evolutions from Holy Cross devotions, other suggest a pronounced clerical-lay split in affiliation
perhaps particularly in urban areas where Corpus Christi was a clerical preserve. As always, local
devotional constituency arguments are complicated by the possibility that the devotional map simply
reflects particular patronage influences. As these comments suggest, contextualising these cults is a
challenging task, not least because they had a potentially strong existence outside the specific, and
potentially quite distinct, context of the endowed mass or gild. Most obviously, parish devotional
interest in the Five Wounds was in origin disassociated from the ritual of the mass, and to an extent
even from prayer in the ocular indulgence, whilst maintaining a strong link with morality and faith.
For all these reasons, this paper is a report on a research project still very much in progress, but
preliminary findings will be offered to these questions, drawing on a range of sources from levation
prayers and other devotional literature to the visual evidence surviving in parish churches.