Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (The New Historicism : Studies in Cultural Poetics, 1)
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Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 248.46
EAN: 9780520063297
ISBN: 0520063295
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 300
Publication Date: 1988-01-07
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
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Summary: Radical new insight into female spirituality
Comment: Caroline Bynum is concerned with the role that food played in medieval spirituality. Holy Feast and Holy Fast argues that food was central, despite the traditional inclination among scholars to place chastity and poverty (renunciation of sex and money) at the core of medieval spirituality. This definition of religious renunciation partly arises because of medieval men's association with wealth, status, and marital dominance, aspects of life they could control and therefore renounce. Bynum instead argues that food was central to women's spiritual life, because it was the aspect of life over which they had control in society. According to Bynum, "human beings can renounce, or deny themselves, only that which they control."
Bynum is concerned mostly with refuting modern interpretation of the behavior of religious medieval women and their food practices. Some psychologists have suggested that the lives of female saints in that period presented the first known cases of anorexia nervosa; feminists on the other hand have argued that their self-inflicted pain and fasting reflected masochism, resulting from repressed feelings about their subservient role in society; others also have claimed that they were acting bizarrely for obscure reasons. What modern interpretations hold in common is that they were affected by illness resulting from practices that came out of control. Bynum makes important points regarding these modern currents to define behavior, trends she calls "secularization" and "medicalization": Firstly, medieval women consciously engaged in extreme food practices for spiritual ends; they were not a byproduct of some uncontrolled disorder. As Bynum points out, "extreme asceticism and literalism of women's spirituality were not, at the deepest level, masochism or dualism but, rather, efforts to give power and to give meaning. Secondly, the proper analysis of such behavior and practices must be put into the cultural context of the times, for which modern concepts are not applicable. In all, Bynum argues that to understand female spirituality of the late Medieval period, it is necessary to scrutinize the theology, the common precepts of Christianity among clergy and laity, and most importantly, the religious significance of food in this period.
Bynum explains that the transition from the Eucharist being a communal experience in the Early Church period, to becoming a sacred object, the incarnation of God and Christ himself, in the late Middle Ages, transformed the attitudes of devotees, laymen, and clergy alike toward food and the sacred. It was during this period of heightened importance of food in religious piety that women seize on the symbol of food to express their spirituality. It was a conscious effort on their part to renounce food, just as men renounced wealth and status to experience God. This new asceticism took the form of fasting and feasting, the idea of rejecting food as a way to take the spiritual food that is God, and taking the body of Christ during the consecration of the host, and feeding the poor. Bynum maintains that ascetic women's practices reflected common beliefs. Such beliefs were that the host itself was God incarnated and the resulting cult of the Eucharist, therefore women served the dual purpose of fasting and becoming food. Cultural preoccupations to fast and other food-related behavior were rooted in theological ideas of serving others. It was a pattern that repeated itself among the documented vita, despites particularities of individual cases that may have prompted the "medicalization" approach of modern analysts. Food was flesh, flesh is suffering, and suffering is fasting. It was imitatio Christi. because Christ had undergone all these conditions. In this context, miracles, fasting, and giving food to the poor were more a result of a deliberate effort by these women practitioners to experience God than the symptoms of a physical or mental disorder.
There were functional purposes for this asceticism as well, according to Bynum. In the worldly sphere, women could control their environment, their sexuality. They could reject an unwanted suitor, or simply to jeopardize family status and reputation by refusing to eat and give away food. On the other hand, it had the religious implication that a direct experience of the divine through fasting bypassed the priestly role of mediation between laity and God. At the time, a woman's refusing to take a host from a priest could seriously question the spiritual legitimacy of that priest in the act of consecration of the host. This was often associated with sexual immorality. Given the realities of the period, Bynum's explanation for the functions of asceticism strengthen the argument of women's voluntary behavior to fast and feast.
Bynum also brings up the intriguing argument that food asceticism by women was a sort of medieval counter-culture to the new, positivistic attitude of the Church toward the body. The clergy and ascetics alike were concerned about heresies that over-emphasized the duality between body and spirit as a cosmic struggle between good and evil. But female spirituality rejected this call for moderation. The core of their belief was that Christ was cloaked in a female body, born out of a woman, and that he had suffered in flesh and blood. It was not only the power of the symbolism that was at stake, which even brought the practitioners and their gender identity closer to God, but more importantly, the imitatio Christi aspect of their spirituality. To give up this asceticism meant to give up their own sense of purpose in the quest to experience God. This rejection of moderation is also key to understand why female ascetics were more likely to have Eucharistic visions and other mystical experiences than their male counterparts.
Bynum does not ignore that male spirituality also emphasized fasting and feast, as was the case of St. Francis of Assisi and Richard Rolle, the men who came closest to express food piety as did their women counterparts of the same age. Their emphasis on food, however unusual and mystical their experiences, were not at the core of their spiritual goals. It was poverty and preaching, practices embraced by the mendicant orders of the day. Most religious experiences dealing with Eucharistic miracles and fasting were more prominent among women. The number of cases proved that women were more closely associated with food than men in defining their spirituality.
In view of the evidence presented in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, the extracts from hagiographies, testimonies of the saints themselves, and the imagery, some of the most immediate questions are: Was there a corpus of writings that more or less delineated this particular mode of spirituality? In other words, was there a Benedict Rule for women, or a female counterpart of Bernard of Clairvoux's "On Loving God"? The experiences of woman mystics and saints across Western Europe that Bynum describes suggest that there was at least a tacit effort to consciously follow a set of guidelines, based on a reformed theology making food and body the central tenets of the order, to attain spiritual union with God. As we have seen, the identification of food and female, and food with Christ not only gave women a channel through which they could approach God, after renouncing what they controlled in society. Beyond this, and equally consequential, was the evolution of a new form of theology and spirituality that could have seriously challenge the conventional precepts of Christianity at the time. Was this female exceptionalism in receiving God through mystical experience a prelude to the witch hunts of later centuries?
Bynum also often mentions that food practices linked to female symbols had also their root in the pre-Christian world of Europe. The author would have given Holy Feast a whole new dimension to the subject had she taken the step further of tracing female food practices to the pagan era. Were there cultural traits from the Pagan world, still existing in Medieval Europe, that made women inclined to identify their body with food and the suffering Christ? It must have been extremely difficult to internalize the patrilineal Christian theology, even after centuries of conversion, in a world where female and male deities often had similar prominence, and where fertility goddess cults abounded. After all, the mystics described by Bynum lived in an extremely misogynistic society, which reflected in both, the secular and religious spheres. Once they found refuge in religion, they had to deal with the fact that the main deity of their devotion, and his son incarnate, were both male. It would, of course, take an ambitious anthropological work to try to understand the process of female religious adaptation to the body of Christ and identification with his body. However, I believe that a review on the pre-Christian female religious practices regarding food may be helpful to understand the rapid adaptation that connected women spirituality and food with God and Christ.
Bynum's work refutes traditional views on women's behavior in the late Medieval Era. They were consciously trying to unite with God through ascetic practices that bordered on the bizarre to a modern mind, but was full of meaning, as Bynum illustrates. Her argument throughout the book is highly persuasive, organized, and also fully documented with biographies and contemporary writings that reflect the mindset of the period. Often Bynum lets the women themselves speak through their own testimonies, lending their own voice and showing us their depth of spiritual experience, from which we can also discern the religious preoccupations and priorities of their day. Equally helpful are the visual material consisting of more than twenty pages with Medieval imagery showing food and female religious motifs. The poignancy and explicitness of these images also lends credence to the arguments expressed here, and familiarizes the readers with a subject in which symbols and representation of complex theologies could prove sometimes confusing, especially among the non-Catholic readership. Holy Fast and Holy Feast gives us an unorthodox, yet highly elaborate interpretation of female spirituality in the Middle Ages, and also makes a valuable contribution to the history of religion, theology, and asceticism in this crucial period of Western Christianity.
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Summary: Get over it!
Comment: There is a lot of hype surrounding this book. My professors seem to love it, though I do not know why. This book is based on totally fallacious reasoning and was written by a mediocre intellect. Let me explain. Bynum argues that medieval women like Catherine of Siena were not anorexic because anorexics today supposedly starve themselves for the sake of appearance. She does not seem to understand that anorexia is a disease; it is not about appearance not matter what sufferers of the disease my say is their inspiration. Ask any psychiatrist. Historians should realize that diseases exist whether or not people of the past put names to them or understood them. As tuberculosis remains tuberculosis over the years (not counting mutations and such), so do mental illnesses like anorexia. So, it is entirely possible that medieval women suffered from anorexia as easily as women of the present. I, personally, suffer from eating disorders and spent a good part of my life self-mutilating through cutting and burning, etc. I have been put in front of many therapists, so I think I know what I'm talking about when I say that, no matter the trigger, such things are diseases. This means that medieval women had religious piety as the concentration point of their eating problems, not that their affliction was that different from the anorexic of today.
Then, Bynum goes on and on to illustrate how women like Catherine of Siena associated food and Christ's body with the female body. But, we're not supposed to think of causing bodily suffering and the refusal to eat are a rejection of the female body! Why not?! Let's see... If the female body is food, then rejecting food does not symbolize a rejection of the female body? Women were suffering like Christ, right? Well, it was the female side of Christ that suffered. Why was it Christ's female side that had to be mutilated for the world to be saved? Instead of putzing around trying to make a name for yourself, why not answer the question of why the female body must be mutilated and made to suffer in order to gain holiness. She bases this part of her argument on the fact that many priests and religious officials had begun to support women more during the time of Catherine of Siena and others. Whatever. Today, there are all sorts of anti-anorexia influences, and have they stopped the disease? No! At best, they may have made some women and men to seek help for their problems. Besides, the Church still taught that the body of woman was the vehicle through which sin entered the world, no matter what else they may have been saying. And, there are ALWAYS people who resist change and prefer the "old ways" for many reasons, especially because the "old way" is comfortable to them. Also, women's spirituality is not necessarily the same as Church teaching. While the Church definitely influenced spirituality, there is more than enough evidence that individual communities and persons formed their own traditions according to their needs. So, if a woman wants to become holy, what's going to influence her the most? Years of tradition and cultural mores as well as her own conscience, or priests who may or may not have preached some new material (mainly aimed at women who were wives and mothers, not women seeking a religious life).
The reason why Bynum wrote this book was to waste all of our time trying to become a big wig in the world of history. Unfortunately, historians, being mediocre intellects most of the time (and I can say that as a professional historian myself) cannot seem to see straight through it. I've noticed that whatever seems to be the new, happening thing in history tends to get this kind of hype no matter what uninspired trash is produced. Bynum wrote this when women's history was a big field, which explains history professors' fascination with the book. The only other reason why I can see that historians might actually buy the arguments in this book is because they are so hung up on historical context that they fail to see that, though context is important, a) people do have some modicum of free will, and b) some things transcend time.
I'll probably get in trouble for writing this, but I really do not care. People will flame any books I will write anyway because I'm trying to take the field in another direction. But I digress.
Don't read this book unless you must. If you have to read this book, be sure to take it with a grain of salt.
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Summary: May I have ashes on that cheesecake, please?
Comment: This is a great read. I don't care if you're interested in history in general, history of the catholic church, history of western mysticism or just looking for something offbeat and interesting: This is a fascinating book! The history of mysticism and western intellectual tradition as it is intertwined with food is certainly there but for the reader seeking just plain bizarre to our modern eyes goings-on, that is in this text as well. In fact, for someone looking for a jump start to their imagination for their own writing, this book is a real bucket of volts. Go read it. Have fun. But, don't try it at home.
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Summary: an excellent study of female hagiography
Comment: This book is truly an exciting text in the field of hagiography studies. It looks at the stories of female vitae and reads the themes behind them with regard to the issues of denial and spirituality. While in the end, Bynum might lean a bit too far towards a feminist self-image reading, nonetheless, for the most part the book is valuable, well-reasoned and shows the potentialities for scholars of ways to approach the large and somewhat heterogeneous corpus of vitae.
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Summary: Very good read but rather long-winded
Comment: Caroline Bynum's book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, examines the importance of food for religious women in the Middle Ages. Although there has been other recent research into the lives of women saints and the way they dealt with food and fasting, for instance by scholars like Weinstein and Bell, as she mentions in the introduction, Bynum promises that in her book she will treat evidence in a different way, most importantly by focusing on the women's point of view. The first two chapters are an introduction to religious women in the Middle Ages and religious food practices of both women and men. Then Bynum turns specifically to women's religious food practices and in the next four chapters she gives a multitude of examples of different women and their different habits or even rituals concerning food. As she says in the introduction, Bynum uses examples from the lives of well known saints, like Elizabeth of Hungary, Lidwina of Schiedam, Columba of Rieti and Catherine of Siena, not because these stories reflect what were normal fasting habits in the Middle Ages, but because their lives are well documented and they would serve as role models for Medieval women. She gives detailed examples of (extreme) food asceticism, cases of inedia, women's devotion of the eucharist and not being able to eat anything but the consecrated host, eucharistic visions, food miracles and some very graphic examples of women eating and drinking the filth of the sick: Several of [Catherine of Siena's] hagiographers report that she twice forced herself to overcome nausea by thrusting her mouth into the putrifying breast of a dying woman or by drinking pus... She told Raymond: "Never in my life have I tasted any food and drink sweeter or more exquisite than this pus." (171-2). Bynum identifies the reasons for this fasting as being, among other things, ways to get closer to God by imitating the lifestyle and suffering of Christ. They would do penance for their sins and suffer to save themselves and other people from Purgatory. The reason why especially women fasted was because food and their own bodies were the only things women had control over and through that control they could manipulate their surroundings. Despite the promising title of the last part of the book: "The Explanation", the first chapter and a good part of the second and third chapters of this section are rather disappointing and cause some confusion. Chapter 6 deals with the parallels between modern eating disorders, like anorexia nervosa, and fasting or inedia in medieval women, even though Bynum states her reluctance to make this connection in the introduction. This reluctance is clearly present throughout the chapter, resulting in a narrative that skips from one subject to another. The second and third chapters of "The Explanation" consist mainly of a repetition of things that were said earlier in the book. However, in the two remaining chapters, Bynum raises some interesting issues of the meaning of the body, women as food and Symbolic Reversal. On the whole, the presentation of the book is excellent and the impressive amount of footnotes that take up more than one hundred pages shows it to be a carefully researched book. Apart from the mentioned 'problem areas' the book makes enjoyable reading and provides the reader with plenty of food for thought and further research.
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