Male body and Catholic piety in early modern Spain

Abstract

Features of embodied female piety adduced from late medieval texts are now established categories of interpretation for religious experience in the early modern period. These include intense Eucharistic devotion in relationship to food culture, extreme food manipulation and exaggerated violence against the physical self. However, evidence from documents by and about early modern religious men indicates that male and female ascetic piety had more in common than not during this period. Strategies of backgrounding or masking those practices when carried out by men made them less visible in comparison to those practised by women, due to gender inflections in religious politics.