Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum

First published: 1987

Type of work: Social criticism

Form and Content

Focusing on the lives of several hundred Christian women in Europe between 1200 and 1500 who were noted for their religious devotion, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women is a groundbreaking exploration of their lives. These women’s religious practices centered on the Eucharist: a rite of communion by which, in partaking of bread and wine, they received into their bodies the body and blood of Christ in all of its redemptive power. According to author Caroline Walker Bynum, in their elaboration of Eucharistic practices these women created distinct forms of spirituality with deep personal meaning and broad cultural influence.

Bynum’s portrait of the lives of medieval holy women, marking a clear departure from previous studies of their lives, has inspired broad reassessments among historians about women of that era. Before Bynum, scholars who studied medieval women focused on their marginalization in society. While Bynum grants that women were subjugated, she argues forcefully that, generating their own distinct spirituality, numbers of women in the late Middle Ages exercised considerable power in relation to families, church authorities, and communities.

Bynum locates women’s power in a piety centered on food: food from their tables that sustained the poor, food from their bodies (milk or other fluids) that healed others, and food of the Eucharist that united them with God. She establishes the variety of religious roles available to medieval women, outlines the significance of food practices to these roles, and demonstrates that, although food was featured in the religious life of all medieval Christians, it figured most prominently and distinctively in the lives of holy women. Refusing standard interpretations of medieval women’s lives, Bynum summons a wealth of evidence to secure her larger claim: Medieval holy women employed resources available to them—especially food—to soar in triumph above the “tidy, moderate, decent, second-rate place” that society had intended for women.

Bynum’s account is notable for its subject—the religious lives of medieval women—and also for its form: gender-sensitive historical analysis. Bynum’s compelling study of medieval life establishes that the previously documented marginalization of women was produced, in part, by modes of inquiry hitherto favored by historians. Because scholars used tools of inquiry that did not permit a sophisticated grasp of gender in medieval society, they overlooked or misconstrued important facets of that society. The lives of holy women were misunderstood, as were the religious practices and social interactions of men and women in the larger society. By contrast, Bynum’s tools of inquiry, fashioned expressly for the exploration of gender, not only bring women into focus but also illuminate a medieval world that is different from the one that scholars had observed previously. Thus, Bynum’s work marks a turning point inn historical research for what she says about women’s lives and for the means that she employs to build her case: a gender-sensitive mode of historical analysis that reshapes not only what is known about medieval women but also what is known in general about the Middle Ages.

Context

Bynum uses gender in Holy Feast and Holy Fast as a basic grid on which to lay out her research findings and deploys food, with all of its mystical and sacred potential, as a unifying theme on that grid. As a result, she brings the lives of late medieval women to visibility in ways that have required historians to recast their presentation of religious and cultural life in the late Middle Ages. Although the increased attention given by historians of the Middle Ages to issues of gender cannot be traced solely to Bynum’s influence, she has played and continues to play a central role in these ongoing developments. That so many new assessments of medieval asceticism and/or the lives of medieval women bear the mark of her influence confirms that Bynum, more than other historians, is responsible for breaking the mold in which previous scholarship about women and the society of late medieval Christendom was produced.

Bynum’s influence on the way in which gender is examined in the fields of history, literature, and the academic study of religion also has exceeded the boundaries of her own specialization in the late Middle Ages. That Holy Feast and Holy Fast has been received so positively in academic circles as a work of exceptional scholarship has energized an entire generation of women scholars who, conducting research on gender in a variety of fields in the wake of Bynum’s intellectual achievements, have found that their efforts are taken more seriously by their colleagues. Because Bynum blazed such a broad trail with this work, the road traveled since by women scholars who study gender has been less rocky: They have consolidated earlier gains in scholarship on gender and have forged ahead in new directions, often using Bynum as a model for their own explorations of gender.

Bibliography

Bell, Rudolph. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Using autobiographies, letters, confessors’ testimonies, and canonization records, Bell examines the lives of more than 250 Italian holy women for signs of anorexia. He argues that these women, like some modern teenagers who engage in self-starvation, fasted as part of a larger struggle for liberation from a patriarchal family and society. Bell’s quantitative data (enhanced by helpful charts) augments Bynum’s research; however, Bynum’s cultural analysis of the significance of food for medieval women is richer and more nuanced than Bell’s, which focuses primarily on the psychology of women’s fasting.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Written before and, in some cases, after Holy Feast and Holy Fast, these essays clarify the major themes of that larger work. Confirming Bynum’s status as a preeminent historian of the late Middle Ages are her reflections on theological debates concerning the resurrection of the body.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. These early essays established Bynum’s profile as an historian. Attentive to lay spirituality, Bynum explores religion in its social context without abandoning the ecclesiastical focus favored previously by historians. Already present are sustained reflections on gender that will distinguish Bynum’s later work.

Catherine of Siena. The Letters of St. Catherine of Siena. Translated by Suzanne Noffke. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1988. The first English translation of the entire corpus of Catherine’s letters and a vital record of a woman whose role in medieval Catholicism was most significant. The centrality of fasting and Eucharistic piety in Catherine’s life and her persistent appeal to metaphors of food and maternal nourishment in her letters establish Catherine as a key figure in Bynum’s work.

Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Translated by Columba Hart. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. In poems, letters, and recorded visions written between 1220 and 1240, this Flemish poet and mystic employs images of hunger and food as principal metaphors in describing her relationship to God. Her prose illuminates and provides compelling support for pivotal claims made by Bynum in Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

Weinstein, Donald, and Rudolph M. Bell. Saints and Society:The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. The major secondary source influencing Bynum’s own book and a groundbreaking contribution to a social history of medieval Christendom. Demonstrates that explorations of the lives of saints illuminate the society in which they lived, even as an examination of that society enhances knowledge of holy men and women in that age.