Holy Feast and Holy Fast

"This is a wonderful book, and for very different reasons. Like the Braudel, it has a kind of long-run perspective – because the Middle Ages, from Bynum’s point of view, cover several centuries – but it’s much more focused thematically, and whereas Braudel is very little preoccupied with cultural issues and much more focused on material issues, Bynum is highly alert to the symbolic dimensions of the food question. I situate food at the crossroads between the symbolic and the material. I always argue that good economic historians have to be good cultural historians, because to understand economics you have to constantly keep in mind the symbolic, psychological, and cultural aspects of things. In this book, Bynum asks several questions. She asks, first of all, why food was the dominant theme for much of the medieval world – and she points out that medieval Europe in particular suffered from structural penury, from chronic recurrent dearth and repeated famine. Clearly, the issue of food was really a matter of survival for a vast majority of the population. She also looks specifically at the way in which religion intersects with food, and her interest here focuses on Christianity, in which, as you know, Christ is in some sense metaphorically (and, for Catholics physically and actually) incarnated in food: It’s the bread and the wine which are the transsubstantiated body and the blood of Jesus. So she’s dealing here with this whole dimension of a specific kind of sacrality as mediated by food. The third thing Bynum is concerned with is women – and she’s really one of the first, and most powerful, historians of women’s voice, women’s needs, women’s central place, and women’s specificity in the unfolding of history (particularly, again, in this European context). She uses the chronicles of holy lives, saintly texts, and a whole array of religious discourse to try to understand two things. One, how to read these kinds of texts when you’re a historian, and how to try to discern from these texts the relationship between norms that are projected by the church and the actual lived practices of the individuals. And two, how women leveraged food into an extraordinary form of power, in a world in which they were otherwise more or less powerless. The book is fascinating because of the intelligence and the perspicacity of Bynum, and the empathy she feels with the women she writes about. These women we’re talking about are fasting women, they’re women who have certain of the characteristics that, many, many years later, we associate with anorexia – such a terrible problem in our own contemporary world. In this story, there are just endless numbers of women – many of them future saints – who identify what Bynum calls “inedia” (not eating) with a state of holiness in which one can survive simply through fusion with the body of Christ. It’s an eroticised attachment. It’s not overtly sexual, but it certainly touches on sexuality. It involves women who want to nourish Christ with their bodies, but who also want to nourish themselves on the lacerated, broken body of Christ on the cross – it’s what Bynum calls “imitatio Christi”, the imitation of Christ. It’s a very complex, beautifully argued, wonderfully written book that is obviously beyond my means to summarise in a few words – but I think I’ve given you a little bit of the flavour of it. I have not found any society where food in some form or other is not a mediating agency between the sacred and the profane. And that goes from the simplest societies, what we used to call primitive, tribal societies – societies that live in relative isolation and have only been in “contact” for relatively recent periods of time, where pigs or yams or other kinds of food can either play a role directly as embodying spirits and transcendental beings or indirectly as figuring symbolically the sacred or serving as a vector of communication with various divinities. I think this is virtually universal, and it begins with issues of fecundity and fertility. (How can you ensure that you have food? Well, you need to beckon the intervention of God.) It’s true in Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythology, and you can go through all of the great societal origin myths. You can go back to Homer, who talks about civilised people as being “eaters of bread”, while people who don’t eat bread are the “uncivilised”. In today’s religions, obviously, we’ve seen a modernisation – I would say a kind of eclipse of the centrality of food. The host that’s used in Roman Catholic churches is almost unrecognisable as being a form of bread, even if that’s what it’s supposed to be. Since I write a great deal about bread myself, and am an ardent defender of artisanal bread production (particularly in France), I often joke by saying I wish that the Roman Catholic Church had followed the Greek Orthodox Church, which (and this was one of the reasons for the Great Schism) denied the continuities between the Jewish Passover and the Last Supper – and so even today, in communions, uses a fermented bread, the sort of wheat loaf that you can get in any really good bakery. The Roman Catholics, on the other hand, argued that the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and therefore that the bread was unfermented and thus akin to matzo. Because of this, the host as it’s offered today in Catholic churches is a bread that’s manufactured mechanically and industrially of wheat but without any fermentation – and it’s obviously much less attractive, much less interesting to incorporate into one’s body, than a real piece of bread."