"I think that at the supper I neither receive flesh nor blood, but bread and wine; which bread when it is broken, and the wine when it is drunken, put me in remembrance how that for my sins the body of Christ was broken, and his blood shed on the cross"
About this Quote
A teenage queen, already marked for execution, turns a doctrinal hair-splitting into a declaration of selfhood. Jane Grey rejects the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation with a calm, almost domestic plainness: not flesh and blood, but bread and wine. The power is in how deliberately un-miraculous her language is. “Broken,” “drunken,” “remembrance” are tactile verbs that keep the supper in the realm of human practice, not clerical magic. In an era when salvation and state loyalty were welded together, that choice was never merely theological.
The intent is defensive but not timid. Grey is staking out a Protestant sacramental theology - communion as memorial rather than transformation - and in doing so, she’s also asserting the right to interpret God without the Church’s mediation. That’s the subtext: private conscience as an authority strong enough to confront bishops, councils, and a monarch. For a royal woman whose political legitimacy was already contested, the move is doubly risky. She speaks as someone trained to argue, not simply to obey.
Context sharpens the edges. Grey’s “nine days” on the throne made her a pawn of Protestant power brokers, but her imprisonment under Mary I forced her to answer for the faith those men used as a banner. The sentence reads like testimony designed for hostile ears: measured, scriptural, impossible to misquote. It also reframes martyrdom. By centering “for my sins,” she refuses to play the innocent victim; she offers a theology where guilt is personal, grace is remembered, and death can be faced without conceding the enemy’s metaphysics.
The intent is defensive but not timid. Grey is staking out a Protestant sacramental theology - communion as memorial rather than transformation - and in doing so, she’s also asserting the right to interpret God without the Church’s mediation. That’s the subtext: private conscience as an authority strong enough to confront bishops, councils, and a monarch. For a royal woman whose political legitimacy was already contested, the move is doubly risky. She speaks as someone trained to argue, not simply to obey.
Context sharpens the edges. Grey’s “nine days” on the throne made her a pawn of Protestant power brokers, but her imprisonment under Mary I forced her to answer for the faith those men used as a banner. The sentence reads like testimony designed for hostile ears: measured, scriptural, impossible to misquote. It also reframes martyrdom. By centering “for my sins,” she refuses to play the innocent victim; she offers a theology where guilt is personal, grace is remembered, and death can be faced without conceding the enemy’s metaphysics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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