Holy feast and holy fast the religious significance of food to medieval women 1st Edition by Caroline Walker Bynum 0520063295 9780520063297

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Product details:

ISBN 10: 0520063295

ISBN 13: 9780520063297

Author: Caroline Walker Bynum

In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women.

Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints’ lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women’s religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women’s piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.

Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God’s body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author’s interpretation of women’s piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women’s use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women’s writing and women’s lives.

Table of contents:

Part I: The Background

1 RELIGIOUS WOMEN IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

New Opportunities

Female Spirituality: Diversities and Unity

2 FAST AND FEAST: THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Fasting in Antiquity and the High Middle Ages

A Medieval Change: From Bread of Heaven to the Body Broken

Part II: The Evidence

3 FOOD AS A FEMALE CONCERN: THE COMPLEXITY OF THE EVIDENCE

Quantitative and Fragmentary Evidence for Women’s Concern with Food

Men’s Lives and Writings: A Comparison

4 FOOD IN THE LIVES OF WOMEN SAINTS

The Low Countries

France and Germany

Italy

5 FOOD IN THE WRITINGS OF WOMEN MYSTICS

Hadewijch and Beatrice of Nazareth

Catherine of Siena and Catherine of Genoa

Part III: The Explanation

6 FOOD AS CONTROL OF SELF

Was Women’s Fasting Anorexia Nervosa?

Food as Control of Body: The Ascetic Context and the Question of Dualism

7 FOOD AS CONTROL OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Food and Family

Food Practices and Religious Roles

Food Practices as Rejection of Moderation

8 THE MEANING OF FOOD: FOOD AS PHYSICALITY

Food and Flesh as Pleasure and Pain

The Late Medieval Concern with Physicality

9 WOMAN AS BODY AND AS FOOD

Woman as Symbol of Humanity

Woman’s Body as Food

10 WOMEN’S SYMBOLS

The Meaning of Symbolic Reversal

Men’s Use of Female Symbols

Women’s Symbols as Continuity

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