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Holy feast and holy fast: The religious significance of food to medieval women
Book
Reviews
187
Walker Bynum, Ho& Feast and Hob Fast: The Religious Signijcance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987,
Caroline
444 + xvi pp. + 30 plates. This is a rich and important study of late medieval religion characterized by a dazzling display of familiarity with an extensive number of primary texts. Drawing on writings from Italy, France, Germany, England and the Low Countries between 1200 and 1500, Bynum demonstrates the importance of food as a religious symbol for female saints and mystics. As in many other cultures, medieval women were identified with food production as breast feeders and cooks and, as childbearers, with the production of human life. For female mystics in medieval Europe, the tasks of food production and childbearing were merged with each other in the symbol of the eucharist and identified with the body of Christ. Bynum argues that the eucharist was far more important in the religious lives of female mystics than in those of their male counterparts because the women thought of their own bodies as food and associated this food with Christ’s gift of his body to the world. The eucharist sacralized women’s own bodily experiences and thereby identified their humanity with the humanity of God. Thus Bynum questions the conventional interpretation of medieval Christianity as dualistic and life-hating. Women’s religious experiences, she argues, were not attempts to free the spirit from its bodily prison, but rather affirmations of bodily experience. Interestingly, the bodily experiences sacralized through the eucharist by female saints and mystics were elaborately and unremittingly painful. Women meditated on the chewing and tearing of Christ’s body in the eucharist, on his bodily suffering and wounds, and on the redemptive, healing power of his blood and sores. In their own religious devotions, female mystics imitated Christ by inflicting upon their own bodies sufferings analogous to, but even more extreme, than his. They drove nails into their own palms, drank pus from the sores of diseased people, rubbed lice into self-inflicted wounds, and interpreted the cries of female saints beating themselves as beautiful music for God. Most importantly for Bynum, saintly medieval women starved themselves for love of God. Their reputed abilities to live without food or excretion were primary evidence of their sanctity. Bynum resists psychological explanations of this self-starvation, such as the one proposed by Rudolph M. Bell in Ho& Anorexia (1985), on the grounds that such explanations do not allow for cultural difference and that they reduce religious experience to something other than itself, which is inappropriate for a historian to do. In resisting psychological explanations, however, Bynum espouses the bizarre theory that self-starvation and other ritual forms of self-inflicted pain were essentially affirmations of human life, a theory that is similar in certain respects to the mystics’ own understanding of divine suffering. Bynum’s discovery of medieval women’s preoccupation with the humanity of God and their deification of their own painful bodily experiences is certainly insightful and important, but the argument that self-inflicted pain was life-affirming for medieval women is, in its own way, as tortured as the experiences cultivated by female saints. The peculiarity of Bynum’s final argument is the result of two interrelated methodological problems. The first is her tendency to assume that human experience in another culture can be understood in its own terms without being shaped by the historian’s viewpoint. The second problem is the feminist belief, covertly sustained in this book, that women have a different and more positive view of their bodies than
188
Book
Reviews
men and that women’s sense of the relationship between themselves and their world is more continuous than men’s, While medieval women’s self-starvation does point to the advent of a preoccupation with bodily experience that is new in western culture, the argument that this preoccupation was life-affirming is unconvincing because it rests too heavily on the mystics’ own belief in God and his suffering. By bracketing out questions about the social and psychological nature of the medieval God as beyond the historian’s purview, Bynum in effect endorses the sanctity of the pain her subjects suffered. And by insisting that female asceticism expressed the continuity women felt between their bodies and their worlds, while male asceticism amounted to a reversal of their world that gave them only an illusion of power and freedom, Bynum overlooks the attempted reversal of nature implicit in women’s self-starvation as well as the psycho-social nature of their God and theirreligious experience. In sum, this book is an accomplished and in many respects insightful contribution to the history of medieval women’s religious experience, but ironically, the historian’s stand against over-interpreting her material leads to some peculiar feminist conclusions. AMANDA PORTERFIELD Syracuse University
Arvind Sharma (ed.), Women in World Religions. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1987, 302 pp. $34.50 hardback, $10.95 paperback. To anyone who self-consciously and deliberately holds the view that women, though perhaps different from men, are no less human than men, the inadequacies of an androcentric methodology are obvious and compelling. A basic paradigm shift that takes account of the fundamental humanity of women and of the fundamental two-sexed or androgynous character of humanity is mandatory. . . . Only with this corrective will we have accounts of societies and religions in which full information about women is integrated into all discussions. The special chapter or footnote momen and . . . can then disappear. Until then we will need chapters and books, such as this chapter and book, that focus directly on information about women. This quotation from Rita Gross’s article (pp. 38-139) in Women in World Religions ably explains the need for still more books on this subject. However, it is only Gross, and Young in her introduction, who attempt to explore the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the study of women’s experience in the religious traditions, its historical location and meaning. In the early pages Katherine Young explains what she feels to be the ‘special features’ of the book. Among these she lists a phenomenological approach, by women, to women’s religious life (though what this might entail is not made very clear), and an awareness by the contributors of differences in women’s experiences across religions, of the ‘flexibility, ambivalence and alternatives’ for women within the religions, of religious change, and finally of the special characteristics of the religious domain as a subject for historians. Young then goes on to explore the rise of patriarchal religions and the reasons for changes in the role and status of women therein. This leads her to distinguish the place of women in ethnic religions (Judaism, Hinduism and
Reviews
187
Walker Bynum, Ho& Feast and Hob Fast: The Religious Signijcance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987,
Caroline
444 + xvi pp. + 30 plates. This is a rich and important study of late medieval religion characterized by a dazzling display of familiarity with an extensive number of primary texts. Drawing on writings from Italy, France, Germany, England and the Low Countries between 1200 and 1500, Bynum demonstrates the importance of food as a religious symbol for female saints and mystics. As in many other cultures, medieval women were identified with food production as breast feeders and cooks and, as childbearers, with the production of human life. For female mystics in medieval Europe, the tasks of food production and childbearing were merged with each other in the symbol of the eucharist and identified with the body of Christ. Bynum argues that the eucharist was far more important in the religious lives of female mystics than in those of their male counterparts because the women thought of their own bodies as food and associated this food with Christ’s gift of his body to the world. The eucharist sacralized women’s own bodily experiences and thereby identified their humanity with the humanity of God. Thus Bynum questions the conventional interpretation of medieval Christianity as dualistic and life-hating. Women’s religious experiences, she argues, were not attempts to free the spirit from its bodily prison, but rather affirmations of bodily experience. Interestingly, the bodily experiences sacralized through the eucharist by female saints and mystics were elaborately and unremittingly painful. Women meditated on the chewing and tearing of Christ’s body in the eucharist, on his bodily suffering and wounds, and on the redemptive, healing power of his blood and sores. In their own religious devotions, female mystics imitated Christ by inflicting upon their own bodies sufferings analogous to, but even more extreme, than his. They drove nails into their own palms, drank pus from the sores of diseased people, rubbed lice into self-inflicted wounds, and interpreted the cries of female saints beating themselves as beautiful music for God. Most importantly for Bynum, saintly medieval women starved themselves for love of God. Their reputed abilities to live without food or excretion were primary evidence of their sanctity. Bynum resists psychological explanations of this self-starvation, such as the one proposed by Rudolph M. Bell in Ho& Anorexia (1985), on the grounds that such explanations do not allow for cultural difference and that they reduce religious experience to something other than itself, which is inappropriate for a historian to do. In resisting psychological explanations, however, Bynum espouses the bizarre theory that self-starvation and other ritual forms of self-inflicted pain were essentially affirmations of human life, a theory that is similar in certain respects to the mystics’ own understanding of divine suffering. Bynum’s discovery of medieval women’s preoccupation with the humanity of God and their deification of their own painful bodily experiences is certainly insightful and important, but the argument that self-inflicted pain was life-affirming for medieval women is, in its own way, as tortured as the experiences cultivated by female saints. The peculiarity of Bynum’s final argument is the result of two interrelated methodological problems. The first is her tendency to assume that human experience in another culture can be understood in its own terms without being shaped by the historian’s viewpoint. The second problem is the feminist belief, covertly sustained in this book, that women have a different and more positive view of their bodies than
188
Book
Reviews
men and that women’s sense of the relationship between themselves and their world is more continuous than men’s, While medieval women’s self-starvation does point to the advent of a preoccupation with bodily experience that is new in western culture, the argument that this preoccupation was life-affirming is unconvincing because it rests too heavily on the mystics’ own belief in God and his suffering. By bracketing out questions about the social and psychological nature of the medieval God as beyond the historian’s purview, Bynum in effect endorses the sanctity of the pain her subjects suffered. And by insisting that female asceticism expressed the continuity women felt between their bodies and their worlds, while male asceticism amounted to a reversal of their world that gave them only an illusion of power and freedom, Bynum overlooks the attempted reversal of nature implicit in women’s self-starvation as well as the psycho-social nature of their God and theirreligious experience. In sum, this book is an accomplished and in many respects insightful contribution to the history of medieval women’s religious experience, but ironically, the historian’s stand against over-interpreting her material leads to some peculiar feminist conclusions. AMANDA PORTERFIELD Syracuse University
Arvind Sharma (ed.), Women in World Religions. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1987, 302 pp. $34.50 hardback, $10.95 paperback. To anyone who self-consciously and deliberately holds the view that women, though perhaps different from men, are no less human than men, the inadequacies of an androcentric methodology are obvious and compelling. A basic paradigm shift that takes account of the fundamental humanity of women and of the fundamental two-sexed or androgynous character of humanity is mandatory. . . . Only with this corrective will we have accounts of societies and religions in which full information about women is integrated into all discussions. The special chapter or footnote momen and . . . can then disappear. Until then we will need chapters and books, such as this chapter and book, that focus directly on information about women. This quotation from Rita Gross’s article (pp. 38-139) in Women in World Religions ably explains the need for still more books on this subject. However, it is only Gross, and Young in her introduction, who attempt to explore the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the study of women’s experience in the religious traditions, its historical location and meaning. In the early pages Katherine Young explains what she feels to be the ‘special features’ of the book. Among these she lists a phenomenological approach, by women, to women’s religious life (though what this might entail is not made very clear), and an awareness by the contributors of differences in women’s experiences across religions, of the ‘flexibility, ambivalence and alternatives’ for women within the religions, of religious change, and finally of the special characteristics of the religious domain as a subject for historians. Young then goes on to explore the rise of patriarchal religions and the reasons for changes in the role and status of women therein. This leads her to distinguish the place of women in ethnic religions (Judaism, Hinduism and