EN MAGER HELGENINDES MAGT: Kvindelig mystik i middelalderen og feministiske genfortolkninger

Abstract

Judith Asher: The Power of a Skinny
 Saint: Fasting Practices of Medieval
 Female Mystics and Feminist Rereadings
 In connection to the current Western ideal of
 a thin and disciplined female body, historical
 252
 evidence has been sought of eating disorders
 among women prior to medical diagnoses of
 anorexia nervosa and bulimia. One of the
 first well-documented instances of such
 food-related body denial in Western history
 is European medieval women saints, who in
 the standard church hagiography have been
 revered for the “miracle” of surviving on a
 negligible intake of food, inedia miraculosa.
 This relatively marginal phenomenon has
 come to receive surprisingly broad attention;
 the “holy anorexics” are now a standard
 reference both in feminist scholarship and in
 popular women’s literature. Contemporary
 feminist interpretations of these saints tend
 to encounter a fundamental ambiguity:
 whether to pronounce the women mystics
 victims of oppression or agents of liberation.
 This article describes the self-imposed
 starvation regime of medieval mystics with
 reference to the idioms of eating and feeding
 that informed their socio-historical context.
 It then goes on to outline the interpretive
 ambiguity current among feminist rereadings
 and propose that this uncertainty
 points to the inherently contradictory nature
 of broad-based social gender definitions.