ABSTRACT
In the desert, anchorites controlled their own fasting. Yet as organized religious communities became established and spread into southern Europe, food practices became strictly codified. An associated development was the transposition of these practices into the weekly, seasonal and annual cycles of wider society. This transformed social, political and economic relationships. But patterns of abstinence would not have taken such deep root in society if they had not been founded on an acceptance of existing cycles and relationships as constituting the reality into which they were incarnated. Max Weber famously argued that, during early modernity, practices previously
located in the monastery were transposed into the private Reformation hearth, and that these practices inadvertently provided an ethic that promoted the development of the capitalist economy. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he dramatically asserted that, at the Reformation, Christian asceticism ‘strode into the market-place of life and slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world’.1
