Holy Feast and Holy Fast

Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women is a historical book by Caroline Walker Bynum about the relationship that medieval women, and particularly holy women, had to the consumption of food. Bynum examines the way food has always played a central role in the religious lives of women, and how that relationship to food led to certain miraculous phenomenon, such as inedia, or living without food for years on end. Through historical accounts of female saints and nuns, Bynum explores how women related food to God, and how that relationship is connected to how women were viewed, and how they viewed themselves.

Bynum argues that food was always a central metaphor in Medieval life, particularly, Medieval Christianity. Food was the primary factor that separated the rich from the poor, and for that reason, food was both a symbol of benevolence and sinfulness. Those who overate were considered gluttonous, and those who shared their food with those in need were considered holy. In this sense, the idea of food permeated medieval life – everyone wanted it, and those who had it were expected to be pious and share.

This idea of eating as holy permeated the church. The Eucharist, or the practice of taking communion, is still a central tenet of Catholicism. By eating the bread and wine of Holy Communion, a practitioner is believed to be performing a miracle; the bread becomes Christ's flesh and the wine his blood. In this way, Catholics ate their holy figures – the truest kind of communion with God was one of consumption, of absorbing the spirit of Christ into one's body.



Women, in particular, had a unique relationship to food. Bynum lists a number of different kinds of miracles that were performed and recorded during this time, many of which would lead to the consecration of saints. Though women made up only 18 percent of consecrated saints during this period, for 50 percent of them, illness was a central cause for their sanctity. The idea of abstaining, or removing oneself from the needs of daily life due to illness, faith, or other causes, was seen as particularly holy when taken on by women. Similarly, women predominantly experienced miracles of the Eucharist, being significantly more likely to report visions while taking the Eucharist.

In this sense, a primary tenet of Bynum's book is the idea that women's piety was tied directly to their bodies, rather than their minds. Unlike male saints, known for intellectual or social pursuits, women were often consecrated for abstinence from food and drink, sexual pleasure, or surviving a horrible physical ailment of accident. Women, Bynum notes, were more frequently reported as experiencing inedia – female saints would refuse to eat anything but the Eucharist, surviving on Christ's flesh alone for years on end.

With these ideas in mind, Bynum takes on the task of examining not only the fact that women were closely tied to food and that their spirituality was tied to their bodies but also what it meant to various groups during this period. She looks at the reasons why women tied ideas of food and flesh both to themselves and to Christ, and at the connections that experiences such as breastfeeding allowed women to have with Christ. She also investigates what it meant to men to look at women and their bodies as food during this period, and how it related to their ideas of sanctity.



Ultimately, Bynum makes an argument that rather than being relegated as objects or something to consume, women in the Middle Ages were given power by their connections to food, in holy and home life. By giving them a closer relationship to God, women experienced a more physical, and thus, less arguable, spiritual power.

Caroline Walker Bynum is a professor of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history at Columbia University in New York City. She has published many scholarly books on Medieval History, including Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion and Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages.