[Sca-cooks] a Lenten question-

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Laura C. Minnick:
>>Gotta love that Saint Jerome...
>
>Yeah, not one of my faves either. Jerome and Origen are responsible 
>for most of the dogma condemning women. Stay in your cave and eat 
>weeds, bro.

Many would have it that St. Paul is ultimately responsible for 
condemning women, and that the others just put the stamp on it. And 
with Origen you forgive a lot, because he had the World's Greatest 
Cognomen, barring none, forever and ever, amen ;-).

>On a side not kinda having to do with fasting- I've found it 
>interesting how many pious women and female mystics express their 
>devotion in their diet. Fasting (near starving, if you ask me), 
>rigorously restricting diet, or even living on nothing but the Host. 
>One of the female saints- at the moment it escapes me who- got a 
>magical wafer from God that she ate and it sustained her for some 
>huge amount of time.

Isn't there a German folk tale about an old woman with magical 
spectacles, and a very small lamb chop which, when viewed through the 
magic glasses, appeared huge, to the point where she lived on this 
chop for months? Or something like that? And then, of course, there 
are the various other magical food references in myth and folklore, 
from the tablecloth in the Cave of the North Wind ("Cloth, cloth, lay 
me a fine meal!), to Strega Nona's magic Pasta Pot (I have read this 
story, courtesy of the Tomie de Paola children's book, to a couple of 
dozen kids at SCA events, holding them spellbound for an hour or so 
as the pasta takes over the world!), to the Dagda's Cauldron. I 
assume this is not specifically a function of Christian thought, but 
rather that the Christian fixation is part of something older and 
larger.

>It seems me that a significant part of this female fascination with 
>food is because it is the one thing that a woman had nearly complete 
>control over- that is, to eat or not to eat. She may have no choice 
>in her station in life, who she married, or how many children she 
>had, but she could refuse to eat, and if that was the one thing of 
>her own that she could give to God, that was it. It is also 
>interesting how many of these same women had an incredible devotion 
>to the host- and if you've ever read Catherine Walker Bynum's _Holy 
>Feast and Holy Fast_, you know how weird and twisted that can be.
>
>And as far as I can tell, anorexia and bulimia are not a modern phenomenon...

There's probably some connection between this and the traditional 
female role as the food _producer_ (as in "hlaefdige", Anglo-Saxon 
prototype for our word, "lady", but originally meaning, 
"loaf-kneader"). I agree, though that food is largely considered, on 
a cultural level, the parvenu of the female, along with life itself, 
so the concepts covered in "Holy Fast and Holy Feast" aren't too 
surprising.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04