Fast, Feast and Feminism: Teaching Food and Gender in Italian Religious Women’s Writings

Danielle Callegari

doi:10.3390/rel9020056

Abstract

In the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum’s essential studies on the crucial role food played in the lives of medieval religious women, significant attention has been given to the connection between premodern women’s spiritual practices and eating practices. However, the relationship between religious women and food is not limited to body manipulation, inedia or eucharistic frenzy. Indeed, recent critical work has provided accessible translations and critical apparatus necessary for an exploration of food and women’s religiosity that builds on Bynum’s rich foundation and examines the many ways in which women expressed themselves through food, both material and metaphoric. This approach not only allows students to engage with women’s writing through the familiarity and universality of food, but moreover reminds them of the real, living, breathing women behind the texts, thus opening the door to a feminist rereading of texts—not as proto-feminist themselves, but rather in the re-valuing of the substantial contributions of their female authors, who had subtle social awareness, public professional pursuits, and complex and varied relationships with God.

Highlights

In the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum’s essential studies on the crucial role food played in the lives of medieval religious women, significant attention has been given to the connection between premodern women’s spiritual practices and eating practices
From Holy Anorexia to a Feminist Fast. In his seminal study on Italian religious women from the Middle Ages to the present, Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell revealed a common theme in the lives of women on the peninsula across the ages: a desire to eliminate food and purge their bodies entirely from the need to consume
Hunger and eating were so overwhelmingly the focus of life that they took the place of or became the expression of other preoccupations or concerns: “When we look at what medieval people themselves wrote, we find 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” (Bynum 2008, pp. 138–39)

Summary

From Holy Anorexia to a Feminist Fast

In his seminal study on Italian religious women from the Middle Ages to the present, Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell revealed a common theme in the lives of women on the peninsula across the ages: a desire to eliminate food and purge their bodies entirely from the need to consume. The connection between anorexia nervosa and “holy anorexia” has been challenged and troubled, but the relationship between daily interaction with food and its socially constructed values has been given much less attention An examination of the latter is, possible, thanks to the wealth of religious women’s writing that has been made available in new editions and translations in recent decades. Though it has often been in the context of wider studies or work dedicated to other preoccupations, scholars of medieval and early modern Italian religious women have already uncovered and provided much evidence of the rich and varied relationship their subjects had with food. Through these examples it is possible to understand how women exploited their special relationship with food as the primary nourishers and preparers in order to speak to a wider audience—one that included their female peers, who could in turn use food to similar ends

Women Eaters

Women Cooks

Women Nourishers

Conclusions