Muir again: “In [medieval] England taking communion was called ‘taking one’s rights,’ which meant asserting one’s membership in the community, and to suffer excommunication . . . would have meant exclusion from both the universal community of believers and the local community of citizens . . . . Although the ideal of social harmony conveyed in the communion rite may not have been achieved very often in the daily give and take of village life, the occasional ritual experience of utopia expressed a model for what society could be.”
The social effects of the eucharist were particularly marked in Italy, where “persons involved in a vendetta made peace, each recieved the Eucharist, celebrating their new collectivity as members of the body of Christ and publicly acknowledging that they put themselves in peril of the ‘vendetta of God’ were they to break the peace, a vendetta that might deprive them of the protection of community in this life as well as of salvation in the next.”
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