UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that in the two centuries following the incunabula, one group of authors writing for the press understood the feeling of being “in print” through the language and form of a much older technology, the Eucharist. The Eucharist’s role in distributing Christ to believers over time and space made it an irresistible analogue for the author’s publication through the printing press. The defining characteristics of print—namely, theoretically exact replicability and massively increased distributivity—are the same characteristics celebrated by Christ at the Last Supper when he shared his body. Far from robbing texts of aura, the press transmitted it. Like priests who personate and impart Christ, these writers were able to disseminate typographic versions of their own “real presences” to far-flung yet virtually gathered readers in an equally amplifying and exposing experience. Revealing the influence of the Eucharist on writers who identified the experience of authorship with the technology of the printing press, I show how mechanization—so often associated with the loss of aura—in fact made a powerful new mode of auratic presence available to writers whose engagement with print production and priestly identities led them to a new conception of what it meant to be a modern Protestant author. For John Foxe, technical and deictic innovations available only in print make the Actes and Monuments into a vessel in which the textual presences of the martyrs and even himself are stored, ready to be witnessed and consumed in the endlessly iterable moment of reading. For Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy, the commercial market reveals the tendency of the eucharistic miracle to turn to waste as one’s work is buried under ever-increasing piles of freshly-printed books, pamphlets, and “new news.” For John Milton, the vulnerability of publication leads to his consecration as a living textual martyr in the controversial prose—an act of self-fashioning that shapes our understanding of his protagonists in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. I conclude by examining the eighteenth-century subsumption of the author’s eucharistic voice into the collective journalistic voice of an entire nation—the beginning of a process that culminates in mass communication in the fully modern sense.