Fasting Women: Bodily Claims and Narrative Crises in Eighteenth-Century Science

Abstract

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, the British reading public became fascinated with and perplexed by tales of women who claimed not to eat, sometimes not even to drink, for periods ranging from a few months to fifty years. These fasters were uniformly poor, of humble backgrounds, living in relatively isolated rural areas, often Scotland or Wales, and ranged in age from fifteen to seventy. Although several developed a reputation for piety over the course of their fasts, none claimed extraordinary religious power. Their inability to eat appears to have been triggered by physiological "chance": Martha Taylor was beaten across the back with a board by an angry neighbor; another young woman fell from her horse into a river at the moment of her first menstrual period; Janet Macleod was seized by an epileptic fit during which her jaw locked; the most notorious faster of the period, Anne Moore, provided varying reasons for her inability to eat, ranging from swallowing boiling gruel to a revulsion for food brought on by her nursing of a scrofulous patient. All the fasters drew the attention of medical men, local clergy, and magistrates, but two achieved wider fame: Martha Taylor in the 1660s, and Anne Moore in the early 1800s. By 1810, Ann Moore's fame even reached across the Atlantic, where a wax replica of her figure was displayed in a Boston museum to the accompaniment of "music on the organ or grand piano forte." 1