FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
few other life choices beyond marriage or the convent. By the time
they entered puberty and reached marriageable age, many girls felt
trapped. In order to gain control over their lives, some began to deny
themselves food. Why they chose food as a form of protest is easy to
explain. Since time immemorial women have been associated with
food. In the form of breast milk women are food, the food that feeds
the next generation. In most medieval families women were also the
ones preparing the food that men ate. In other words, food was the
area over which women had control in their daily lives, and renounc-
ing it gave them a sense of power. In addition, the church, as was
shown earlier, portrayed fasting as a way to purify one’s body, and
women were by their very nature regarded as severely lacking in pu-
rity. In the literature of the time, women are frequently equated with
physicality, lustfulness, materiality, and appetite, and men with spiritu-
ality, rationality, the soul, and the intellect.71 To transcend the impuri-
ties of their physical existence, the Desert Fathers had chosen
asceticism, and many medieval women followed the same path. The
numbers are certainly impressive: of the 261 holy women from 1200
to the end of the twentieth century recognized by the Catholic
Church as either saints, blesseds, venerables, or servants of God, there
are 170 of whom we have detailed records. And of these more than
half showed signs of anorexia.72 To wage war against their flesh they
would sometimes go to extraordinary lengths. Holy anorexics typi-
cally began their lives as happy and obedient children who were spe-
cial in some way, sometimes by being the youngest, or by being the
only surviving child. Initially their parents would support them in
their spiritual quest, but would eventually turn against their daughters
if they rejected the idea of getting married or taking religious vows. To
become more beautiful in the eyes of God, these girls would do things
to their bodies that had the opposite effect, namely to make them ugly
and undesirable in the eyes of society. As one scholar put it: “Reading
the lives of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century women saints greatly ex-
pands one’s knowledge of Latin synonyms for whip, thong, flail,
chain, etc.”73 Practices of self-imposed hardships included cutting
their hair, scourging their faces, wearing coarse rags or hair shirts,
binding the flesh tightly with ropes or chains, rubbing lice into self-
inflicted wounds, walking around with sharp stones in their shoes,
thrusting nettles or driving silver nails into their breasts, denying
themselves sleep, flagellating themselves with chains, adulterating
food and water with ashes or salt, drinking the pus of the sick, eating
spiders, rejecting regular food, and taking nourishment only from the
196
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