Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Signifi cance of Food to Medieval Women

Scholars have recently devoted much attention to the spirituality of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fi fteenth centuries. In studying late medieval spirituality they have concentrated on the ideals of chastity and poverty-that is, on the renunciation, for religious reasons, of sex and family, money and property. It may be, however, that modern scholarship has focused so tenaciously on sex and money because sex and money are such crucial symbols and sources of power in our own culture. Whatever the motives, modern scholars have ignored a religious symbol that had tremendous force in the lives of medieval Christians. They have ignored the religious signifi cance of food. Yet, when we look at what medieval people themselves wrote, we fi nd that they often spoke of gluttony as the major form of lust, of fasting as the most painful renunciation, and of eating as the most basic and literal way of encountering God. Theologians and spiritual directors from the early church to the sixteenth century reminded penitents that sin had entered the world when Eve ate the forbidden fruit and that salvation comes when Christians eat their God in the ritual of the communion table. 3

In the Europe of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, famine was on the increase again, after several centuries of agricultural growth and relative plenty. Vicious stories of food hoarding, of cannibalism, of infanticide, or of ill adolescents left to die when they could no longer do agricultural labor sometimes survive in the sources, suggesting a world in which hunger and even starvation were not

*Originally published 1984

uncommon experiences. The possibility of overeating and of giving away food to the unfortunate was a mark of privilege, of aristocratic or patrician status-a particularly visible form of what we call conspicuous consumption, what medieval people called magnanimity or largesse. Small wonder then that gorging and vomiting, luxuriating in food until food and body were almost synonymous, became in folk literature an image of unbridled sensual pleasure; that magic vessels which forever brim over with food and drink were staples of European folktales; that one of the most common charities enjoined on religious orders was to feed the poor and ill; or that sharing one’s own meager food with a stranger (who might turn out to be an angel, a fairy, or Christ himself) was, in hagiography and folk story alike, a standard indication of heroic or saintly generosity. Small wonder too that voluntary starvation, deliberate and extreme renunciation of food and drink, seemed to medieval people the most basic asceticism, requiring the kind of courage and holy foolishness that marked the saints. 4

Food was not only a fundamental material concern to medieval people; food practices-fasting and feasting-were at the very heart of the Christian tradition. A Christian in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was required by church law to fast on certain days and to receive communion at least once a year. 5 Thus, the behavior that defi ned a Christian was food-related behavior. This point is clearly illustrated in a twelfth-century story of a young man (of the house of Ardres) who returned from the crusades claiming that he had become a Saracen in the East; he was, however, accepted back by his family, and no one paid much attention to his claim until he insisted on eating meat on Friday. The full impact of his apostasy was then brought home, and his family kicked him out. 6

Food was, moreover, a central metaphor and symbol in Christian poetry, devotional literature, and theology because a meal (the eucharist) was the central Christian ritual, the most direct way of encountering God. And we should note that this meal was a frugal repast, not a banquet but simply the two basic foodstuffs of the Mediterranean world: bread and wine. Although older Mediterranean traditions of religious feasting did come, in a peripheral way, into Christianity, indeed lasting right through the Middle Ages in various kinds of carnival, the central religious meal was reception of the two basic supports of human life. Indeed Christians believed it was human life. Already hundreds of years before transubstantiation was defi ned as doctrine, most Christians thought that they quite literally ate Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament. 7 Medieval people themselves knew how strange this all might sound. A fourteenth-century preacher, Johann Tauler, wrote:

Thus food, as practice and as symbol, was crucial in medieval spirituality. But in the period from 1200 to 1500 it was more prominent in the piety of women than in that of men. Although it is diffi cult and risky to make any quantitative arguments about the Middle Ages, so much work has been done on saints’ lives, miracle stories, and vision literature that certain conclusions are possible about the relative popularity of various practices and symbols. Recent work by André Vauchez, Richard Kieckhefer,

Donald Weinstein, and Rudolph M. Bell demonstrates that, although women were only about 18 percent of those canonized or revered as saints between 1000 and 1700, they were 30 percent of those in whose lives extreme austerities were a central aspect of holiness and over 50 percent of those in whose lives illness (often brought on by fasting and other penitential practices) was the major factor in reputation for sanctity. 9 In addition, Vauchez has shown that most males who were revered for fasting fi t into one model of sanctity-the hermit saint (usually a layman)—and this was hardly the most popular male model, whereas fasting characterized female saints generally. Between late antiquity and the fi fteenth century there are at least thirty cases of women who were reputed to eat nothing at all except the eucharist, 10 but I have been able to fi nd only one or possibly two male examples of such behavior before the wellpublicized fi fteenth-century case of the hermit Nicholas of Flüe. 11 Moreover, miracles in which food is miraculously multiplied are told at least as frequently of women as of men, and giving away food is so common a theme in the lives of holy women that it is very diffi cult to fi nd a story in which this particular charitable activity does not occur. 12 The story of a woman’s basket of bread for the poor turning into roses when her husband (or father) protests her almsgiving was attached by hagiographers to at least fi ve different women saints. 13

If we look specifi cally at practices connected with Christianity’s holy meal, we fi nd that eucharistic visions and miracles occurred far more frequently to women, particularly certain types of miracles in which the quality of the eucharist as food is underlined. It is far more common, for example, for the wafer to turn into honey or meat in the mouth of a woman. Miracles in which an unconsecrated host is vomited out or in which the recipient can tell by tasting the wafer that the Priest who consecrated it is immoral happen almost exclusively to women. Of fi fty-fi ve people from the later Middle Ages who supposedly received the holy food directly from Christ’s hand in a vision, forty-fi ve are women. In contrast, the only two types of eucharistic miracle that occur primarily to men are miracles that underline not the fact that the wafer is food but the power of the priest. 14 Moreover, when we study medieval miracles, we note that miraculous abstinence and extravagant eucharistic visions tend to occur together and are frequently accompanied by miraculous bodily changes. Such changes are found almost exclusively in women. Miraculous elongation of parts of the body, the appearance on the body of marks imitating the various wounds of Christ (called stigmata), and the exuding of wondrous fl uids (which smell sweet and heal and sometimes are food-for example, manna or milk) are usually female miracles. 15

If we consider a different kind of evidence-the exempla or moral tales that preachers used to educate their audiences, both monastic and lay-we fi nd that, according to Frederic Tubach’s index, only about 10 percent of such stories are about women. But when we look at those stories that treat specifi cally fasting, abstinence, and reception of the eucharist, 30 to 50 percent are about women. 16 The only type of religious literature in which food is more frequently associated with men is the genre of satires on monastic life, in which there is some suggestion that monks are more prone to greed. 17 But this pattern probably refl ects the fact that monasteries for men were in general wealthier than women’s houses and therefore more capable of mounting elaborate banquets and tempting palates with delicacies. 18

Taken together, this evidence demonstrates two things. First, food practices were more central in women’s piety than in men’s. Second, both men and women associated food-especially fasting and the eucharist-with women. There are however, a number of problems with this sort of evidence. In addition to the obvious problems of the paucity of material and of the nature of hagiographical accounts-problems to which scholars since the seventeenth century have devoted much sophisticated discussion-there is the problem inherent in quantifying data. In order to count phenomena the historian must divide them up, put them into categories. Yet the most telling argument for the prominence of food in women’s spirituality is the way in which food motifs interweave in women’s lives and writings until even phenomena not normally thought of as eating, feeding, or fasting seem to become food-related. In other words, food becomes such a pervasive concern that it provides both a literary and a psychological unity to the woman’s way of seeing the world. And this cannot be demonstrated by statistics. Let me therefore tell in some detail one of the many stories from the later Middle Ages in which food becomes a leitmotif of stunning complexity and power. It is the story of Lidwina of the town of Schiedam in the Netherlands, who died in 1433 at the age of 53. 19

Several hagiographical accounts of Lidwina exist, incorporating information provided by her confessors; moreover, the town offi cials of Schiedam, who had her watched for three months, promulgated a testimonial that suggests that Lidwina’s miraculous abstinence attracted more public attention than any other aspect of her life. The document solemnly attests to her complete lack of food and sleep and to the sweet odor given off by the bits of skin she supposedly shed.