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The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women.
Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.
Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.
Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
499 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
About the author
Caroline Walker Bynum
20 books83 followersCaroline Walker Bynum is an American medieval scholar and University Professor emerita at Columbia University, as well as Professor emerita of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was the first woman appointed University Professor at Columbia, served as Dean of the School of General Studies, and led both the American Historical Association and the Medieval Academy of America. Her research focuses on how medieval people, particularly women, understood the human body and physicality within spiritual and theological contexts, highlighting female piety and the role of women in late-medieval Europe. She has received numerous honors and taught at Harvard, Washington, Columbia, and Princeton.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
January 18, 2023
Holy Feast and Holy Fast is one of the most life changing books I have read in my life. When I read it first time in early years of university, it made me passionately want to become an researcher like Bynum. Ever since that I have come back to this book and finally got myself my own copy after having this out from uni library several occasions of my university degree. Bynum has done such an immense amount of research in medieval theology, philosophy and culture, and writes about the religious significance of food so fascinatingly. She doesn't fell into the temptation of diagnosing the women as anorexic the way a lot of historians have done (ahem, Rudolph M. Bell) - she states clearly that we can't bring something so contemporary into a culture that didn't acknowledge thinness as something to dream of. It's definitely not the most approachable nonfiction book about the life of medieval women but I would say it is the best one and one you definitely should read if you want to know about fasting and ascetic lives of medieval women mystics and saints. It is definitely worth of your time if you want to understand ascetism and fasting as medieval phenomenon or medieval literature in general.
June 7, 2023
You don't have to be interested in history or in the history of the Catholic Church. Just the interest in the history of Western mysticism or if you are just looking for something offbeat and interesting: This is an interesting book!
A famous modern interpretation of the behavior of religious medieval women is that all the female saints in that period presented the first known cases of anorexia nervosa, and psychologists have more theories like visions of Jesus or Virgin Mary are results of severe anorexia that might have been resulting visual or auditory hallucinations....well I'm not going to argue faith.
Caroline Bynum's book looks at women and food in a whole different way: How these women would have served as role models for Medieval women. Bynum identifies the reasons for this fasting as being, among other things, ways to get closer to God by imitating the lifestyle and suffering of Christ. The reason why especially women fasted was because food and their bodies were the only things women had control over and through that control they could manipulate their surroundings.
However, the confusion of this book was that "The Explanation", was disappointing and caused confusion. She draws parallels between modern eating disorders, and fasting in medieval women, even though stated her reluctance to make this connection in the introduction. So what is she trying to say?
Still, the first part of the book is great. Recommend.
A famous modern interpretation of the behavior of religious medieval women is that all the female saints in that period presented the first known cases of anorexia nervosa, and psychologists have more theories like visions of Jesus or Virgin Mary are results of severe anorexia that might have been resulting visual or auditory hallucinations....well I'm not going to argue faith.
Caroline Bynum's book looks at women and food in a whole different way: How these women would have served as role models for Medieval women. Bynum identifies the reasons for this fasting as being, among other things, ways to get closer to God by imitating the lifestyle and suffering of Christ. The reason why especially women fasted was because food and their bodies were the only things women had control over and through that control they could manipulate their surroundings.
However, the confusion of this book was that "The Explanation", was disappointing and caused confusion. She draws parallels between modern eating disorders, and fasting in medieval women, even though stated her reluctance to make this connection in the introduction. So what is she trying to say?
Still, the first part of the book is great. Recommend.
March 20, 2014
Bynum's close re-reading of her texts, including several I'd read and more I'd never heard of, finds a previously overlooked common theme: Medieval women mystics can feed others; they can become food themselves; and they can eat, provided the food is also God. From there, she builds a multi-part, theoretically and theologically informed interpretation. If the masculine is culture/spirit and the feminine is nature/body, then Christ, in the Incarnation, is ipso facto fully feminine as well as masculine. The salvation of our flesh depends on identification with his feminine aspect. Thus, male and female mystics alike increasingly identified with his suffering—which was gendered for the men (who had to gender-switch to accomplish it) but not for the women. The result is, broadly, a less bifurcated symbolic universe for women. Their practice is not a matter of body- or world-hatred, but of full acceptance of their bodily capability (shades of Foucault on power as productive).
Even if the interpretation is a bit overcooked theoretically, the upshot is still an astonishing example of what history can do in the study of religion. I knew this was a study with wide influence—now I see what Amy Hollywood and Sarah Coakley are arguing about—but even decades later, you can see how it got to be a classic, and why its readers tend to nuance rather than dismiss its interpretive work.
Even if the interpretation is a bit overcooked theoretically, the upshot is still an astonishing example of what history can do in the study of religion. I knew this was a study with wide influence—now I see what Amy Hollywood and Sarah Coakley are arguing about—but even decades later, you can see how it got to be a classic, and why its readers tend to nuance rather than dismiss its interpretive work.
June 9, 2025
such an influential work, I think I'm going to buy my own copy of this masterpiece
I just wish she had addressed disability
I just wish she had addressed disability
Read
March 8, 2016While male scholastics were debating in Latin, holy women (and their male advisors) were using vernacular poetry and their own bodies to create an alternative model of saintliness. This book, which broke open the world of medieval religious women to modern audiences, features a great introduction to the roles of medieval women in the Church before focusing more specifically on what made a few standout women particularly holy--and why.
March 13, 2026
Dear CWB, you are all I want to be
May 15, 2026
This set my standard for top-tier academic work. I am blown away by Bynum's thoroughness and meticulous research—I came away convinced that she has read every single document, every fragment of writing, by late medieval women (and men!) and that she could recall any line from them in her sleep. She models epistemic humility and historical charity in how sensitively she listens to the women she studies, resisting modern categories and judgments that flatten, distort, and disrespect their experiences, however foreign and unsettling they may be to us.
This concluding sentence from her introduction summarizes her precise yet generous approach, and I hope to emulate it in my own academic work:
My commitment, vision, and method are historical; I intend to reveal the past in its strangeness as well as its familiarity. My point is to argue that women's behavior and women's writing must be understood in their context of social, economic, and ecclesiastical structures, theological and devotional traditions, very different from our own. If readers leave this book simply condemning the past as peculiar, I shall have failed. But I shall have failed just as profoundly if readers draw direct answers to modern problems from the lives I chronicle.
This book overhauled my perceptions of extreme asceticism and the way medieval Christians understood the body, suffering, and sexuality. I think I heard of the practices of people like St. Catherine of Siena, who essentially starved herself to death, and assumed an ignorant hatred of the body, harmful dualism between body and soul, and ugly consequences of sexism (as if my own world has none of these things). Bynum argues that these conclusions are sloppy and unjustified. Much more is going on in the devotional practices of medieval women. This quote summarizes it well:
To religious women, food was a way of controlling as well as renouncing both self and environment. But it was more. Food was flesh, and flesh was suffering and fertility. In renouncing ordinary food and directing their being toward the food that is Christ, women moved to God not merely by abandoning their flawed physicality but also by becoming the suffering and feeding humanity of the body on the cross, the food on the altar.
Through in-depth case studies and a staggering mass of quotations from letters, hagiographies, and other writings, Bynum shows how food was a uniquely feminine concern in the late medieval era. Women were much more prone to food-related acts of devotion like eucharistic piety and extreme fasting, and they described desire for God as hunger in ways their male counterparts never did.
This is not just because food preparation was the primary area of agency and power for women, however (although Bynum certainly acknowledges that). Instead, she carefully teases out late medieval theology to reveal the equation that body is food is God. Female bodies especially were seen as food-like (they bleed, give milk, nourish life, etc.) and therefore are like God, whose literal physical body nourishes us through the Eucharist and whose suffering body in Christ saved the world. Medieval women manipulated their bodies, therefore, not because their bodies were "gross" or sinful and in need of punishment but because they were uniquely powerful portals to experiencing God, to union with him, avenues of ecstatic, sacred grace. Bynum writes:
"The goal of religious women was thus to realize the opportunity of physicality. They strove not to eradicate body but to merge their own humiliating and painful flesh with that flesh whose agony, espoused by choice, was salvation. Luxuriating in Christ’s physicality, they found there the lifting up—the redemption—of their own."
One of her most fascinating points was that in the late medieval conception, women mapped onto humanity while men mapped onto God/Christ (following Paul's schema where husbands are representatives of Christ the Bridegroom and wives are representatives of all humanity, his Bride). While this may sound denigrating to women, in a strange twist it actually elevated them because it is humanity, after all, that gets saved. Men had to do some mental gymnastics to align themselves with humanity in order to hope for redemption. They felt the dissonance between imaging Christ archetypally but still being fallen humans in need of saving. But women were already, immediately, in their bodies, the redeemed ones.
I will be mulling over Bynum's discussion of how pain and pleasure were not repelling magnet poles but a woven braid in medieval thought. "In understanding this difference," she writes, "it is helpful to remember how little medieval people could do to mitigate discomfort of any kind. Thus medieval metaphors and symbols express the experiencing of body more than the controlling of it. Sensations and senses that we differentiate from one another tend to be fused in medieval piety, where satiation is described as 'hungry' and discomfort is called 'delicious.' To deny bodily responses toward the world is often, to a medieval writer, to release torrents of bodily energy toward God."
While they may feel uncomfortable or even reprehensible to us, the extreme acts of physical renunciation (and ecstatic devotion for the eucharist) these women practiced were driven by a desire to experience the fullness of God. And while I have enough theological and cultural qualms with these specific acts to give me pause in imitating them exactly, I am convicted and challenged by the devotion and desire these women had burning in their bones, by their confidence that God could meet them in their bodies, that there are greater joys available than physical comfort and satiation. It also reinforced my growing conviction that we Western Christians need to seriously reckon with Christ the crucified, the suffering God.
At one point, Bynum surveys female religious writings related to food and notes how eating and tasting God were common descriptions for encountering him. The following description fills me with both discomfort and longing:
"The mouth (breathing, kissing, spitting, swallowing, and sucking) was a way of uniting with God and serving neighbor. Desire for Christ was felt in mind, soul, and the entrails as insatiable hunger or thirst. Abstinence from ordinary sustenance was not so much a goal in itself as a tribute to the overwhelming sweetness, the exhilarating pain, of the meat and drink that God was."
The overwhelming sweetness, the exhilarating pain, of the meat and drink that God was—what a foreign yet compelling concept.
Overall, be forewarned: This is a footnote-heavy academic book, but it’s worth a skim through sections to understand our spiritual ancestors who challenge us to reconsider the religious significance of our modern ideas of the body, food, and sexuality.
This concluding sentence from her introduction summarizes her precise yet generous approach, and I hope to emulate it in my own academic work:
My commitment, vision, and method are historical; I intend to reveal the past in its strangeness as well as its familiarity. My point is to argue that women's behavior and women's writing must be understood in their context of social, economic, and ecclesiastical structures, theological and devotional traditions, very different from our own. If readers leave this book simply condemning the past as peculiar, I shall have failed. But I shall have failed just as profoundly if readers draw direct answers to modern problems from the lives I chronicle.
This book overhauled my perceptions of extreme asceticism and the way medieval Christians understood the body, suffering, and sexuality. I think I heard of the practices of people like St. Catherine of Siena, who essentially starved herself to death, and assumed an ignorant hatred of the body, harmful dualism between body and soul, and ugly consequences of sexism (as if my own world has none of these things). Bynum argues that these conclusions are sloppy and unjustified. Much more is going on in the devotional practices of medieval women. This quote summarizes it well:
To religious women, food was a way of controlling as well as renouncing both self and environment. But it was more. Food was flesh, and flesh was suffering and fertility. In renouncing ordinary food and directing their being toward the food that is Christ, women moved to God not merely by abandoning their flawed physicality but also by becoming the suffering and feeding humanity of the body on the cross, the food on the altar.
Through in-depth case studies and a staggering mass of quotations from letters, hagiographies, and other writings, Bynum shows how food was a uniquely feminine concern in the late medieval era. Women were much more prone to food-related acts of devotion like eucharistic piety and extreme fasting, and they described desire for God as hunger in ways their male counterparts never did.
This is not just because food preparation was the primary area of agency and power for women, however (although Bynum certainly acknowledges that). Instead, she carefully teases out late medieval theology to reveal the equation that body is food is God. Female bodies especially were seen as food-like (they bleed, give milk, nourish life, etc.) and therefore are like God, whose literal physical body nourishes us through the Eucharist and whose suffering body in Christ saved the world. Medieval women manipulated their bodies, therefore, not because their bodies were "gross" or sinful and in need of punishment but because they were uniquely powerful portals to experiencing God, to union with him, avenues of ecstatic, sacred grace. Bynum writes:
"The goal of religious women was thus to realize the opportunity of physicality. They strove not to eradicate body but to merge their own humiliating and painful flesh with that flesh whose agony, espoused by choice, was salvation. Luxuriating in Christ’s physicality, they found there the lifting up—the redemption—of their own."
One of her most fascinating points was that in the late medieval conception, women mapped onto humanity while men mapped onto God/Christ (following Paul's schema where husbands are representatives of Christ the Bridegroom and wives are representatives of all humanity, his Bride). While this may sound denigrating to women, in a strange twist it actually elevated them because it is humanity, after all, that gets saved. Men had to do some mental gymnastics to align themselves with humanity in order to hope for redemption. They felt the dissonance between imaging Christ archetypally but still being fallen humans in need of saving. But women were already, immediately, in their bodies, the redeemed ones.
I will be mulling over Bynum's discussion of how pain and pleasure were not repelling magnet poles but a woven braid in medieval thought. "In understanding this difference," she writes, "it is helpful to remember how little medieval people could do to mitigate discomfort of any kind. Thus medieval metaphors and symbols express the experiencing of body more than the controlling of it. Sensations and senses that we differentiate from one another tend to be fused in medieval piety, where satiation is described as 'hungry' and discomfort is called 'delicious.' To deny bodily responses toward the world is often, to a medieval writer, to release torrents of bodily energy toward God."
While they may feel uncomfortable or even reprehensible to us, the extreme acts of physical renunciation (and ecstatic devotion for the eucharist) these women practiced were driven by a desire to experience the fullness of God. And while I have enough theological and cultural qualms with these specific acts to give me pause in imitating them exactly, I am convicted and challenged by the devotion and desire these women had burning in their bones, by their confidence that God could meet them in their bodies, that there are greater joys available than physical comfort and satiation. It also reinforced my growing conviction that we Western Christians need to seriously reckon with Christ the crucified, the suffering God.
At one point, Bynum surveys female religious writings related to food and notes how eating and tasting God were common descriptions for encountering him. The following description fills me with both discomfort and longing:
"The mouth (breathing, kissing, spitting, swallowing, and sucking) was a way of uniting with God and serving neighbor. Desire for Christ was felt in mind, soul, and the entrails as insatiable hunger or thirst. Abstinence from ordinary sustenance was not so much a goal in itself as a tribute to the overwhelming sweetness, the exhilarating pain, of the meat and drink that God was."
The overwhelming sweetness, the exhilarating pain, of the meat and drink that God was—what a foreign yet compelling concept.
Overall, be forewarned: This is a footnote-heavy academic book, but it’s worth a skim through sections to understand our spiritual ancestors who challenge us to reconsider the religious significance of our modern ideas of the body, food, and sexuality.
January 17, 2022
Про відносини середньовічних черниць, аскетниць і світських вірянок з їжею, власним тілом і через них - з Христом (в тому числі як матір'ю-годувальницею). Читання місцями важке не через стиль викладення, а саме через щільність їхнього досвіду, почасти для нас дуже радикального чи навіть зовсім ненормального. Плюс наголос кожна ставила окремо: що для Катерини Сієнської їжа як зречення і знак належності, те для Агнес Бланбекін у видіннях плоть Христа (не вся плоть, а хм... крайня часточка, через це страшно скандальні вони були, коли віднайшли у вісімнадцятому столітті), а Єлизавету Тюрингську, як на наш погляд, а не сучасний, духівник взагалі для експериментів на покору використовував. Втім, цікава книжка не через сенсаційні моменти, а саме загальною картиною і шанобливим дослідженням не самої простої теми.
January 22, 2026
Wow!! There is some weird stuff in here but superbly researched (even knows about Imelda Lambertini!!). Humanizes and understands Medieval saints while pointing out problematic parts, even when slightly snarky it lit a little candle of love for Jesus in my heart.
“Those who drink rivulets are those who strive for virtues; those who drink streams are those whose compassion grows in memory of the Passion. But highest are those who imitate and fuse with the cross, for they drink Christ himself." 164
“Women saw themselves not as flesh opposed to spirit, female opposed to male, nurture opposed to authority; they saw themselves as human beings-fully spirit and fully flesh. And they saw all humanity as created in God's image, as capable of imitatio Chrisi through body as well as soul. …Men and women might agree that female flesh was more fleshly than male flesh, but such agreement led both sexes to see themselves as in some sense female-human. For it was human beings as human (not as symbol of the divine) whom Christ saved in the Incarnation; it was body as flesh (not as spirit) that God became most graphically on the altar; it was human suffering (not human power) that Christ took on to redeem the world. Religious women in the later Middle Ages saw in their own female bodies not only a symbol of the humanness of both genders but also a symbol of-and a means of approach to—-the humanity of God.” 296
“Perhaps we cannot afford to see body, especially female body, and nourishment merely as threats to human mastery. In-deed, our very tendency to think in terms of control may encourage violence toward female bodies and callousness toward any pain we cannot manage to assuage. Thus we may, more than we realize, need positive symbols for generativity and suffering…Perhaps we should not turn our backs so resolutely as we have recently done either on the possibility that suffering can be fruitful or on food and female body as positive, complex, resonant symbols of love and generosity.” 301
“Those who drink rivulets are those who strive for virtues; those who drink streams are those whose compassion grows in memory of the Passion. But highest are those who imitate and fuse with the cross, for they drink Christ himself." 164
“Women saw themselves not as flesh opposed to spirit, female opposed to male, nurture opposed to authority; they saw themselves as human beings-fully spirit and fully flesh. And they saw all humanity as created in God's image, as capable of imitatio Chrisi through body as well as soul. …Men and women might agree that female flesh was more fleshly than male flesh, but such agreement led both sexes to see themselves as in some sense female-human. For it was human beings as human (not as symbol of the divine) whom Christ saved in the Incarnation; it was body as flesh (not as spirit) that God became most graphically on the altar; it was human suffering (not human power) that Christ took on to redeem the world. Religious women in the later Middle Ages saw in their own female bodies not only a symbol of the humanness of both genders but also a symbol of-and a means of approach to—-the humanity of God.” 296
“Perhaps we cannot afford to see body, especially female body, and nourishment merely as threats to human mastery. In-deed, our very tendency to think in terms of control may encourage violence toward female bodies and callousness toward any pain we cannot manage to assuage. Thus we may, more than we realize, need positive symbols for generativity and suffering…Perhaps we should not turn our backs so resolutely as we have recently done either on the possibility that suffering can be fruitful or on food and female body as positive, complex, resonant symbols of love and generosity.” 301
October 17, 2025
“In their symbols women expanded the suffering, giving self they were ascribed by their culture, becoming ever more wonderfully and horribly the body on the cross. They became that body not as flight from but as continuation of the self. And because that body was also God, they could sum up their love of God in paradox: ‘Hell is the highest name of Love,’ as Hadewijch said, or as Margaret Porete put it, ‘I am the salvation itself of every creature…For I am the sum of all evils.’”
I have so many feelings about this book, mostly the sadness of being done reading it. Walker Bynum illustrates how the intentional starvation of medieval women is not so simply captured by 20th and 21st century psychological paradigms. Whereas in contemporary cultural, the body and its consumption are things to be controlled, eliminated or otherwise dissociated from, medieval women in particular were fixated on embodying the flesh fully, pushing it to its limits of suffering, Imitatio Christi, becoming one with God’s fleshy suffering.
I’m left contemplating how popular portrayals of anorexia leave out the testing of the body via starvation, the satisfaction of successful restriction, the self-flagellation of an anorexic who withholds food with the intent of inflicting pain on oneself. I think the 21st century anorexic has more in common with the female medieval mystic than Walker Bynum accounts for, most likely due to the narrow, abstract, understanding of anorexia as a pursuit of thinness which sanitizes and makes palatable the phenomenological experience of severe restriction—the throbbing hunger pains, bodily weakness, the putrid aftertaste of stomach acid. While Walker Bynum presents the clinical understanding of eating disorders as attempting to control and eliminate the flesh, she seems to suggest in the epilogue that the anorexic, just as the medieval inediac, knows that ironically in pursuit of eliminating the body, the body is at its loudest.
I have so many feelings about this book, mostly the sadness of being done reading it. Walker Bynum illustrates how the intentional starvation of medieval women is not so simply captured by 20th and 21st century psychological paradigms. Whereas in contemporary cultural, the body and its consumption are things to be controlled, eliminated or otherwise dissociated from, medieval women in particular were fixated on embodying the flesh fully, pushing it to its limits of suffering, Imitatio Christi, becoming one with God’s fleshy suffering.
I’m left contemplating how popular portrayals of anorexia leave out the testing of the body via starvation, the satisfaction of successful restriction, the self-flagellation of an anorexic who withholds food with the intent of inflicting pain on oneself. I think the 21st century anorexic has more in common with the female medieval mystic than Walker Bynum accounts for, most likely due to the narrow, abstract, understanding of anorexia as a pursuit of thinness which sanitizes and makes palatable the phenomenological experience of severe restriction—the throbbing hunger pains, bodily weakness, the putrid aftertaste of stomach acid. While Walker Bynum presents the clinical understanding of eating disorders as attempting to control and eliminate the flesh, she seems to suggest in the epilogue that the anorexic, just as the medieval inediac, knows that ironically in pursuit of eliminating the body, the body is at its loudest.
August 18, 2024
Bynum provides an accessible and highly detailed account of medieval gender, food, and bodies. By focusing on female saints and mystics she challenges the binary notions that fasting cannot be understood as simply internalized misogyny or an attempt to escape the body but rather women's relationship to feasting and fasting was a challenge to the possibilities of the body and challenged symbol's of womanhood by addressing their relationship to food through a continuation of their bodies. The most important argument Bynum demonstrates, in my opinion, is that women saw themselves as human beings, connected to God, and their actions reflected this rather than individuals inferior to men and oppressed under their authority. In this way Bynum disrupts the notion of fasting female mystic as self-hating. Excellent read and written in a way that non-medievalists can enjoy.
June 19, 2025
Bold, innovative, and deeply original. Caroline Bynum never misses.
December 4, 2022
Illuminating asf
November 14, 2025
“For it seems likely that women were drawn to identify with Christ’s suffering and feeding flesh because both men and women saw the female body as food and the female nature as fleshly. Both men and women described Christ’s body in its suffering and its generativity as a birthing and lactating mother and may at some almost unconscious level have felt that woman’s suffering was her way of fusing with Christ.”
December 1, 2021
wish i'd read this during medieval term ! super compelling account of christian food practices & changes in emphasis from the early to late medieval period, of the importance of food imagery and food practices, particularly taking communion & fasting, both in the accounts by men of female saints and in female mystics' accounts of their own lives, and of the many functions, actual and symbolic, food performed. also really good (although this is only a brief mention in the epilogue, & def not the Focus) on the modern failures of language around eating disorders, & the discomfort with acknowledging that both food and body, in themselves, not as symbols representing e.g. sexuality or control, are central to our relationships, disordered or otherwise, with eating.
January 12, 2012
I love books where scholars take seriously the words and experiences of women. So of course I was going to swoon over this. Walker Bynum manages to corral a vast amount of fragmentary documentation into something resembling a coherent shape, while making a damn persuasive case that modern understanding of female religious experience and symbols ignores the social and cultural context of those experiences and symbols. I think she understates the extent, depth, and breadth of medieval misogyny, but that does not materially change the point that women managed to make themselves a religious world in which their needs were paramount.
Also, the epilogue, in which Walker Bynum briefly discusses some implications of her study on modern ideas about food, damn near made me cry.
Also, the epilogue, in which Walker Bynum briefly discusses some implications of her study on modern ideas about food, damn near made me cry.
April 19, 2025
Really really interesting read!! The book is split into two parts, with the first half covering a range of medieval instances of female piety, and the second half analysing the motivation behind these acts. Would not recommend to anyone with a sensitive stomach - the first half of the book is almost entirely medieval women coming up with bizarre and often gross forms of piety (shoutout Catherine of Siena’s Jesus foreskin wedding ring), but Bynum's treatment of these women is sympathetic and measured, and she neither medicalises their experiences nor lionises them.
February 27, 2016
Read long ago for an undergraduate class on the history of the body. Excellent.
August 23, 2016
So much about breast milk
April 15, 2025
I know I’m a nerd but this was RIVETING. It’s such a comprehensive study not only of food imagery, but of medieval devotion more broadly.
May 12, 2024
This was a very absorbing and interesting book. The introduction and conclusion were both fascinating. The central chapters that are heavily research based are also fascinating but very very dense and difficult to get through despite how interesting they are. I really like how Bynum does not shy away from any of the weirdness of medieval mysticism and yet tries to draw out the meaning within the wild range of symbols at work in the late medieval period. She also doesn't fall into the trap of describing the female experience as a two dimensional tale of woe and victimization. Instead she works hard to discover the sources of meaning and agency for her female subjects.
August 1, 2025
i adored this piece of scholarship, bynum is an incredible researcher and historian and i’m honestly so amazed at the way she was able to piece together her argument. she came into this book with something to prove, firmly piecing together contexts around the role and symbolism of food for medieval women, and pushing back against a two dimensional reading of these that too often was the case. i especially enjoyed myself near the end of the book, it was the perfect wake up call to the fact that i was still holding on to a bit of my own modern perception of what these things mean to me. i feel like i gained so much from this and i cant wait in the future to get into more of her work.
December 11, 2018
loved reading this for my women in the renaissance seminar for art history. disordered eating from women being unable to control their situations and instead turning to fasting because food is the one thing they can control. nurturing and feeding others and punishing themselves for their sins as far back as women saints and martyrs looking to jesus. that jesus is an idol to women more so than mary. the difference between anorexia and holy fasting. feeding men period blood for fidelity. starving themselves to death and only agreeing to eat if they no longer have to serve their partners sexually. so much interesting research into holy women.
June 7, 2023
A true head-trip of women's history, this was one of the more unique medieval historical books I've read. Bynum takes a multifaceted approach to understanding the role of medieval religious women and why food served as the dominate symbol in their lives. Her analysis covers a wide range of subjects including increasing eucharistic devotions, economic changes in urban and rural areas, writings of female mystics and development in thought around the body. All of theses she brings together to argue how food served as the domininant symbol for women's religious experience.
September 25, 2018
A very thorough examination of the role of food in medieval religious life - particularly with regard to women. Caroline Walker Bynum explores how medieval female saints employed fasting as a form of rebellion against societal norms, as well possible links to anorexia nervosa and bulimia. By exploring the beliefs and practices of an era long gone, her book also provides some insights for our own time.
October 26, 2022
This is exactly the kind of oddly specific deep dive into a niche historical context that I’m into.
I loved this book and thought it was super weird and interesting. The medieval period was a wild time and I’m glad we don’t live there anymore.
I’m not thrilled by her takes about eating disorders in the epilogue, especially in light of recent research that has come out about anorexia nervosa. I do wonder if she were to change anything, what would she change?
I loved this book and thought it was super weird and interesting. The medieval period was a wild time and I’m glad we don’t live there anymore.
I’m not thrilled by her takes about eating disorders in the epilogue, especially in light of recent research that has come out about anorexia nervosa. I do wonder if she were to change anything, what would she change?
January 13, 2025
Excellent read, both for the history and the theology. As someone who has long had a vocation against marriage to a man, and as someone who has been working with food (domestically and professionally) my whole life, I felt a lot of resonance with the experiences of medieval women, even though their context was very different from mine. The spirituality of medieval women, and this work of scholarship, is still extremely relevant.
January 9, 2019
I have yet to read anything even remotely disappointing by Caroline Walker Bynum. Her analysis is historically and theologically profound, her writing clear, engaging and imaginative, and her mastery of primary sources enviable. Once again, I am struck by the ability of her work on such a specific aspect of history and culture to speak creatively to our current questions, fears, and longings.
October 20, 2024
“If the flesh was sweet as well as bitter, that was because all our humanness, including our fleshliness, was redeemed in the fact of the Incarnation. If the agony was also ecstasy, it was because our very hunger is union with Christ's limitless suffering, which is also limitless love.”
September 8, 2025
i wish i had properly read this earlier, an absolute joy to read and a reading of medieval mystics that gives them dignity, agency and power in their own perception of self, unlike many essays that simply decry internalized misogyny. CWB is the goat
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