This book is focused on the reception history of Thomas Aquinas’ account of Eucharistic sacrifice during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Although the sacrificial character of the Eucharist has been of interest to theologians throughout the Church’s history, during the early sixteenth century renewed attention was given to this subject, in part because of disputes that arose between Reformed and Catholic theologians about the relationship between the Eucharistic liturgy and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Does the Eucharistic presence itself have a sacrificial quality?  Can aspects of the liturgy or dimensions of the moral life be considered a sacrifice, and if so in what way?  

Although itself a product of the Middle Ages, as a received text the Summa is in many ways a creature of the early modern period.  Interpreting the reception of this text therefore requires one to consider not only the Summa in its original environment, but the life of this same text as it was received in new interpretive contexts.  

On the subject of Eucharistic sacrifice specifically, the early modern reception history of the Summa is particularly rich, and underexplored.  In addition to those questions raised by Reformed theologians, during this period the text of the Summa came to be intertwined with a variety of new problems, concerns and contexts.  These include the place of humanist biblical scholarship in the study of theology, the concern for human rights and international law in the Americas, and the relationship between Aquinas’ natural anthropology of sacrifice and pre-Christian accounts of the socio-political context for sacrifice.  

This book begins by first studying the textual structure and contents of Aquinas’ presentation of Eucharistic sacrifice in the Summa theologiae.  Using the text of the Summa as a backdrop, subsequent chapters explore the early modern textuality of the Summa by studying a series of influential theologians such as Cajetan, Vitoria and the Salamanca School, the early Jesuits and John of St. Thomas.