627 ELH 80 (2013) 627–659 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press REFORMING THE MYSTICAL BODY: FROM MASS TO MARTYR IN JOHN FOXE’S ACTS AND MONUMENTS BY JENNIFER R. RUST At the beginning of an essay tracing the history of the Eucharist across the late Middle Ages and early modernity, David Aers and Sarah Beckwith lament the fact that the doctrine of “transubstantiation is a picture that has held us captive.” 1 The singular focus on this doctrine, they argue, has had a ramifying effect such that “the liturgical, commu- nitarian practices of the Eucharist” have been “subordinated to the dogmatic construal of the mysterious banquet.” 2 In response to this problem of lost community, Aers and Beckwith invoke the foundational work of Henri de Lubac, whose Corpus Mysticum was among the first modern theological studies to recover the full complexity of the communitarian sense of the sacrament in the early church. 3 De Lubac’s recovery of the twelfth-century transformation in the understanding of the relationship between the sacrament of the Eucharist and the institutional body of the ecclesia, they claim, has been “forgotten by some of those telling stories about relations between the ‘traditional’ Christianity of the Middle Ages and the ‘revolution’ in sixteenth- century Christianity.” 4 Another version of de Lubac’s story of the shifting relations between sacrament and institution has long been available to medievalists and early modernists, most notably in Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic study, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Kantorowicz appropriates de Lubac’s narrative of the changing meaning of the phrase “corpus mysticum” for his own history of political theology. According to Kantorowicz’s account, the corpus mysticum, which originally referred to the sacramental body of Christ, came to refer instead to the church as an institution, and, in a further transfer- ence, to political institutions: it ultimately migrated into the institu- tion of kingship itself. The corpus mysticum became the prototype for the king’s “body politic”—the body that never dies, that survives beyond the mortal body of the king, and that figures the collective, “mystical” life of the nation-state. 5 In retelling de Lubac’s story of the fate of the corpus mysticum in terms of political theology, however, Kantorowicz himself forgets the originally communitarian dimensions