[Sca-cooks] a Lenten question-

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 06:55 AM 2/12/2005, you wrote:
>>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?

No clue. I haven't heard that one.

>  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.

Mmm, no, I think that these are different trends entirely. There's a lot of 
magical stuff in folklore (wasn't there a huge cauldron with never-ending 
meals in one of the Irish tales?). The folklore stuff lacks the 
mystical/religious component. Would be rather like telling the story of 
Santa Claus while leaving out the gift-giving.

>>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.

There is a small part of the 'food producer' involved, because of ties with 
the Virgin Mary and the gazillions of portraits of her nursing or with a 
breast exposed. And Karma Lochrie was doing some work in the mid-90s on a 
relationship in iconography between depictions of Mary exposing the breast, 
and the pictures of Christ displaying the wound in his side. There were 
some semi-disturbing cross-gender things going on.

However, what I was talking about has the most to do with a trend in female 
expressions of religious fervor in the 14th-15th c, in something we call 
Affective Piety. It is a very personalized thing, centered around a direct 
relationship with heavenly beings without and intermediary. Catherine of 
Siena is a good example of this. And Margery Kempe is a ridiculous example 
(no, I don't care much for Margery). Ecstatic visions are de rigeur and a 
fixation on the Host is usually a central element (mind you, at that time 
one didn't necessarily take communion every time one heard Mass- you were 
cool if you took it infrequently, and once a year was enough by some 
accounts). Extended descriptions of it, especially in comparison to manna 
or to honey come up frequently. And it seems that the holier the woman, the 
more likely that she will insist on eating nothing but the Host. (If that's 
all she's eating, I'm not surprised that she has visions!) The shift from 
female-as-producer to female-as-consumer is interesting, even more so when 
you consider that they considered breast milk to be rather as a sort of 
blood- the relationship between blood and milk makes for some 'slippage' in 
the psychological framework surrounding the issue.

Too much thinking on a Saturday. I need a nap.

'Lainie
___________________________________________________________________________
O it is excellent to have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous To use it 
like a giant--Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II