ABSTRACT
The division between humans and nonhuman animals was central to medieval European Christianity's professional thought. The dominant element of medieval humanism is its being a zero sum game: the human claim to rationality accompanied a claim that among mortal life, only humans were rational. Practices of violence and domination were key to these claims. The complicated picture is very far removed from popular conceptions about 'medieval brutality' and violence against animals. This chapter argues that Margery Kempe's practises what might be called a 'carnivorous vegetarianism', a practice of avoiding meat that has little to do with kindness to animals, a 'healthy diet', or the ecological motivations of many modern vegetarianisms. Kempe's Book tends to use 'body' to represent whole things: her body as a whole, or her husband's, or Christ's, either hanging on the cross or in the form of the Eucharist.
