Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Univ. of California Press, 1987).
There are a number of ways to read a book. One important strategy for meaningfully reading is to approach certain books without the expectation of finishing or fully understanding them. Smart people do this all the time. In fact, it’s such a regular practice that shrewd authors anticipate it in their introductions by guiding would-be partial readers toward the most relevant chapters for their interests and reading level. The reason I mention all this before reviewing Caroline Walker Bynum’s marvelous book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, is because books like hers (more than three hundred pages of obscure medieval history) are considered too intimidating by most readers. To be sure, Bynum’s book is for scholars. But you can enjoy it, too, if you appreciate page-turning narrative and have any interest in the history of religion, women, food, sexuality, psychology, medieval Europe, or eccentric saints. It’s a shame more people don’t dig into books like Holy Feast and Holy Fast. I hope some day you will.
Bynum’s book was ground-breaking when first published. I’m not a medieval scholar, and so I cannot tell you if it still is. Her thesis is that the fasting behavior of medieval women saints was both meaningfully spiritual for them and also a meaningful way for them to control an environment mostly hostile to women. Bynum’s conclusions challenge some feminist scholarship, as well as other historiographical perspectives that attempt to explain away mystical spiritual experiences of the past by applying modern notions of religious doubt to the interpretive process. She is a historian who attempts to let medieval women saints “speak for themselves.” As they do, though, Bynum is not about to let them off the hook easily - some of those women might be legitimate targets of skepticism for historians today, even as they were considered too weird by many of their contemporaries. But invalidating their experiences as impossible based on a modern disbelief in the miraculous is problematic. That way of doing history purposely removes the possibility of original discovery from the historian’s task. And that is why many modern historians “surprisingly” find out that people from the past look amazingly like allegedly dysfunctional people of the present. Of course, reading the past through the eyes of my-kind-of present is not only a problem for professionals. The average person on the street mostly judges the past based on a mix of ignorance of the details and speculations about what they think the past was probably like. We’re all familiar with historical thinking of that sort - the kind where we read what we want to hear into the past. And so when a historian like Bynum breaks with selfish and simplistic interpretations, ground-breaking opportunities can arise. Add to her historical method her gift for writing engaging and pleasurable narrative, and you have a book that is both challenging and enjoyable.
For most of you reading my review on this blog, I’ve said enough to keep you away from this book. Who gives a damn about historiography or medieval women saints? [Pause. I’m thinking.] I cannot say I know who “should” care. For some reason I find it fascinating to read about women who claimed to have lived only on the eucharist for years. I think that it is astonishing that church architecture evolved along side developing levels of adoration of the eucharist so that circular window-like wholes were crafted in church walls in order to allow people outside to see and venerate the chest that held the eucharistic elements. And moreover, that there are stories of knights galloping their steeds up to these windows so that the horses “might adore God also, in a kind of equine communion known as the Umritt.” Disturbing as it might sound, I kind of thought it was humorous to learn that some medieval men blamed their sexual impotence on their malicious wives who stymied their sexual prowess by serving husbands bread kneaded with the buttocks of their wives. To be sure, these kinds of details make reading history fascinating and fun. At least for me, though, there is more to history than interest and pleasure.
Caroline Walker Bynum has worked a sort of miracle by writing Holy Feast and Holy Fast. She has done what I once heard Grant Wacker of Duke University describe as the ultimate task of the historian, “To resurrect the dead and let them speak for themselves.” The women Bynum brings back to life in her book are real people. However far removed from our culture today, these women responded to timeless experiences of the human condition. A good historian - and Bynum is an exceptional historian - can tell stories that are believable. But a good historian goes beyond that and weaves the familiar into her narrative. The religious, marital, and social circumstances of medieval women saints - however culturally removed and, frankly, odd - are nevertheless intelligible to modern readers. Why? My own answer to that question goes beyond the bounds of this review. But my feeling is that my ability to relate to a medieval woman who received the stigmata comes from my participation with her and with all persons in the past and present unfolding of our common human story. If we are, as I believe, co-participants in a common story, then I think there is something to learn about that story, and perhaps even my place in it, from the lives all people, including medieval women saints.
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