Imagine if you will, that you lived some eight centuries ago in what is now the French countryside. You are a parish priest suspected of blackmailing several of your female congregants into having sex with you. You feel secure in your station until one Sunday, when a holy woman appears at mass. The parishioners point and you know that they are whispering about the pious lady who lives on nothing but the Lord’s flesh. You sigh in relief when she chews and swallows the consecrated wafer, and you move on to the next supplicant. Then your heart fills with terror: even before you turn, you realize that she is retching, throwing up blackened, mangled pieces of the host mixed with bile. Your fraud and wicked heart are revealed to the world.
Amazingly enough, there were some women who had this kind of charismatic power during the middle ages in Europe. This is one of the subjects of the book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, which I just got done reading with my professor. This was a time when men wielded tremendous social, political, economic and religious power, and one of the few domains left for women was the realm of food. And women used their relationship to food to empower themselves and transform their environment.
Girls avoided marriage by starving themselves into unhealthy thinness so that they could look uglier to potential suitors and convince their fathers to send them to convents. Some women were rumored to live solely on consecrated wafers. Others starved themselves to imitate the sufferings of Christ. To these women, the host was no mere symbol of Christ; it was literally his flesh, and when they ate it, they took him literally into themselves and he transformed them. Some experienced near sexual ecstasy at the Lord’s table. In the process, they sanctified themselves and made the fleshy, human female recipients necessary to the divine, male priests who stood in for the Lord in administering the supper–neither could achieve holiness without the other.
Women saw themselves not as flesh opposed to spirit, female opposed to male, nurture opposed to authority; they saw themselves as human beings–fully spirit and fully flesh. And they saw all humanity as created in God’s image, as capable of imitatio Christi through body as well as soul. Thus they gloried in the pain, the exudings, the somatic distortions that made their bodies parallel to the consecrated wafer on the altar and the man on the cross. In the blinding light of the ulitmate dichotomy between God and humanity, all other dichotomies faded…For it was human beings as human…whom Christ saved in the Incarnation; it was body as flesh (not as spirit) that God became most graphically on the altar; it was human suffering (not human power) that Christ took on to redeem the world. Religious women in the later Middle Ages saw in their own female bodies not only a symbol of the humanness of both genders but also a symbol of–and a means of approach to–the humanity of God. (p. 296)
It’s very poetic. When I think about God as Suffering with Humanity, I can understand why Christ is a compelling character. At any rate, I wish all of my school texts were like this. Any takeaways for my female Catholic or Mormon friends out there?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Elaine Frei // May 15, 2007 at 7:54 am
When I read what you wrote about women in the Middle Ages starving themselves in order to avoid marriage and the world of men in order to enter the convent (the only place, perhaps, where women could get an education in that time), my first thought was that some women are still starving themselves today…but for the completely opposite reason of trying to make themselves more attractive to men.
I wonder if that says something about our culture today, as the ways and reasons that some women starved themselves in the Middle Ages say something about their culture. On the other hand, perhaps it just means that women are still not empowered enough in our culture today, and that they still feel that the only way they can take control of their own lives is by controlling their food.
Anyway, that is just my first reaction to your post, John. I’ll probably continue thinking about this for awhile. And I might see if I can track down the book you read. It sounds quite interesting.
2 John // May 15, 2007 at 8:01 am
That ironic contrast was one of the most memorable in this book. You hit the common thread, however–the environment may change, but the behavior is tied to the girls’ desire to control some aspect of a life (or a body) that doesn’t seem to be their own.
I’m borrowing my professor’s book, or I’d loan it to you. I did see a used copy on Amazon for $4. It has a lot of anthropology in it, which you would probably enjoy, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.
3 Mark // May 15, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Very interesting post about women. Oh, how times have changed. It is amazing what we are capable of doing, being.
4 Miko // May 15, 2007 at 9:47 pm
I keep running into mentions of this book, which I suppose means I should read it myself…I’ve read a lot about the reclaiming/use of food (seen as a traditionally female sector) towards empowerment. Many (female) medieval mystics subsisted on Hosts given them by angels. Those who could survive this near-starvation became regarded as mystics and became respected. Some of their writings survive today (and, just as today, it ran the gammit from internalized defense of patriarchy to treatises (treatii?) on women’s equality to men). Having been recognized as mystics, they were able to speak and do things otherwise not allowed (like writing!). I wonder, however, how many of them did it deliberately, how many stumbled upon this new-found respect quite by accident while trying to be a “perfect woman”, and how many more perished trying to attain it.
I think the parallels being drawn to today’s eating disorders are astute and would agree wholeheartedly that today’s women are seeking to assert some kind of control over their bodies. In medieval times, though, was it control over their bodies that they sought? Did they fast simply because, as Daughters of Eve they had so much to atone for? Fear of living under the rule of a strange man, likely much older, may hae been much greater than the fear of death. Convents at least allowed one to escape the rapine of the traditional medieval man.
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