Traces the shifting perceptions of matter, sign, and sacrament from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.


The word "token" was ubiquitous during the period of history known as "early modernity" - in theatre and epidemiology, rhetoric and chirography, occultism and meteorology, historiography and heraldry, coinage and biblical hermeneutics, genealogy and social etiquette. But what did it actually mean in English Reformation theology and theatre? Not surprisingly, different things to different people: but this book shows that, despite its broad semantic range, the term took on a peculiarly precise role in Reformation debates about theology. In particular, it explores how complex changes in the meaning of just one word contributed to a uniquely English sacramental identity: token is a keyword of the Church of England's definition of the sacraments.

Beginning with an examination of the Old English poem the Dream of the Rood, and the carvings of the Ruthwell Cross, the author then looks at the vocabulary of "token" in the late medieval Towneley plays, before turning to its signification with coins, and then physical tokens in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well. Throughout, it draws the reader's attention both to points of historical cultural change and to threads of continuity, using the word to trace the shifting perceptions of matter, sign and sacrament from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.