[Sca-cooks] Book review:Consuming Passions: Uses of Cannibalism (Broedel)]

Sun May 1 08:11:46 PDT 2005

I'm forwarding this book review from The Medieval Review List...

----- 
Forwarded message from The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu> -----

X-Original-To: jenne at fiedlerfamily.net
From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l at wmich.edu>
Subject: TMR 05.05.03 Price, Consuming Passions: Uses of Cannibalism (Broedel)
To: tmr-l at wmich.edu
Reply-To: tmr-l at wmich.edu
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.2 (2004-11-16) on cavemaus
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-2.3 required=5.0 bayes_score=0.0000 tests=AWL,
	BAYES_00,FB_WORD_SPACING03 autolearn=no version=3.0.2

Price, Merral Llewelyn. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism 
in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Medieval History and 
Culture, v.20. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 164. $74.95 (hb). ISBN 
0-415-96699-X.

   Reviewed by Hans Peter Broedel
        Hamilton College
????????hbroedel at hamilton.edu

To anyone acquainted with the exempla, saints' vitae, travelers' tales, 
or other popular literature of the period, the fascination of late 
medieval and early modern audiences for narratives of cannibalism is 
already plain. Why this should be so, and what these stories may have 
meant, though, are difficult questions, now fortunately addressed in 
Merral Llewelyn Price's book, Consuming Passions. Stated most 
broadly, Price argues that the increasing importance of the Eucharist 
brought about a pervasive anxiety about cannibalism in late medieval 
Christian thought, and that this in turn resulted in sustained 
projections of cannibalistic fantasies onto various "Others." Price 
develops this argument in a series of short, linked essays, which weave 
together a number of the most important strands of recent late medieval 
scholarship--the importance of the body in medieval thought, the 
development of protocolonialist ideologies, and the centrality of 
gender and gender anxiety to conceptions of hierarchy--to illuminate 
the uses of metaphors of cannibalism in a variety of textual contexts.

Price begins with "The Man-Eating Body" (a chapter title which nicely 
foregrounds the author's concern for medieval narratives of 
"corporalization"), an introduction to the topic and summary of some of 
the most culturally important discussions of cannibalism from Classical 
antiquity through the High Middle Ages.  Price's collection of 
cannibals is impressive, and includes those of classical myths, 
travelers' tales, visionary literature, and the European crusades; they 
provide the reader with a clear sense of the complexity and diversity 
of medieval discourses of cannibalism. The chapter concludes with a 
brief discussion of the interpretation of cannibalism, which, like the 
"theoretical bits" in many other scholarly introductions, serves mainly 
to acknowledge politely the influence of well-known theoreticians.  
Nonetheless, both here and throughout the book the sheer number of 
theoretical perspectives introduced is alarming: in the course of the 
author's analysis, she references the works of Lacan, Jung, Klein, 
Bakhtin, Freud, Levi-Straus, Douglas, and Foucault. The result is a 
kind of interpretive patchwork that is not always convincing.

In the second chapter, "Corpus Christi: the Eucharist and Late Medieval 
Cultural Identity" Price explores the centrality of cannibalism ("the 
underlying fantasy of the mass" (26)) to late medieval religious 
practice and consciousness. Drawing upon host miracle narratives and 
upon preachers' exempla particularly, she argues that medieval 
Christians were clearly aware that "Holy Communion was a form of 
participatory and often infanticidal anthropophagy"(30). This 
realization, sometimes repressed, sometimes not, contributed to the 
enormous evocative appeal of the Mass, but also created ambivalences 
and anxieties that some dealt with by projecting a closely parallel but 
much more literal cannibalistic rite onto the Jews. Thus, Price 
suggests that persecution of the Jews, which was so often linked with 
tales of both host desecration and ritual cannibalism, was at least in 
part the result of Christian anxieties about the implications of their 
own sacred rituals.

In chapter three, "Mass Hysteria: Heresy, Witchcraft, and Host 
Desecration," Price develops these themes, arguing that heretics were 
accused of cannibalism in part as a response to the perception that 
their beliefs threatened the Eucharist. This line of reasoning could 
lead quite neatly to Walter Stephen's contention that learned late 
medieval witch beliefs resulted from fears about the reality of 
transubstantiation; for after all, if infanticidal witches used and 
consumed human bodies in parody of the Eucharist to effect their 
demonic magic, it would be absurd to deny the miracle of the Host. 
[[1]] Price, however, develops an alternative theme, observing that the 
image of the child-eating witch is the devouring, nightmare inversion 
of a nursing mother. For Price, the late medieval witch is the 
"diabolically lactating mother," and becomes, like heretics and the 
Jews, subject to a wholesale projection of social and cultural 
anxieties associated with food, feeding, the body, fertility, and the 
Eucharist (61).

Next, Price traces the evolution and development of a particularly 
lurid story from Flavius Josephus of the mother who ate her child 
during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.  This tale was popular and 
widely copied from the eleventh century onwards, and provides Price 
with a very neat opportunity to elaborate her themes.  The woman of the 
story, a Jew and unnatural mother ironically named "Maria," becomes in 
medieval texts the demonized mirror image of the Virgin, and the 
scapegoat for a host of anxieties; the narrative, Price suggests, 
"comprises a classic(al) subversion myth--a projection of the 
complicated problems of religious difference, violence, fear, and 
mortality onto an already marginalized victim" (79). The reader will 
not find this conclusion unexpected, but Price's preceding analysis is 
very good: Price works more closely with her sources here than in 
previous chapters, and the result is a more nuanced, subtle, reading of 
the texts.

The book ends with chapter five, "Teratographies: Writing the American 
Colonial Monster," in which Price demonstrates that the claims of early 
modern explorers and commentators about the man-eaters of the New World 
were in many respects simply continuations and appropriations of 
familiar medieval discourses of cannibalism in the service of 
colonialism.  Price writes: "In the New World, the vilification of the 
Other achieved by accusations of the ultimate inhuman 
monstrosity--cannibalism--paradoxically depends on both a 
hyperdelineation and a blurring of categories of gender, under which 
the indigenous women were represented as voracious and sadistic sexual 
aggressors and the men as sexually perverse and malformed monsters, 
each of whom practiced a bestial and bloodthirsty cannibalism deserving 
only of enslavement and extinction" (84). This is a perfectly apt 
concluding essay, but it is not quite as original as its predecessors, 
since over the past twenty years much has been written in this vein 
already.  Here, too, Price's reading of cannibalism metaphors is 
unnecessarily one-dimensional: not every early modern European 
interpreted cannibalism the same way; some, indeed, saw New World 
cannibals in positive or even heroic terms. Especially surprising, 
Price avoids any mention of Montaigne's famous essay.  Nor does Price 
spend much time considering the differences between Protestant and 
Catholic interpretations of cannibalism, which is particularly odd 
given her insistence upon the central importance of the Eucharist to 
European notions of anthropophagy in general.

This is an entertaining book to read, due primarily to its wealth of 
stories: Price assiduously collects appropriate tales of man-eating and 
tells them well.  Sometimes, though, one may also find the book 
frustrating, particularly when the stories leave their historical 
contexts behind. In her analysis, Price follows motifs, not chronology, 
and moves rapidly over great chunks of time, treating the period 
1100?1600 as an undifferentiated medieval block.  The unstated 
methodological assumption must be that meanings in narratives remain 
constant, that the "meaning" of a Eucharistic miracle in which the host 
becomes literal flesh is the same in 1200 as in 1500.  Such is, of 
course, possible, but the premise does not conform well with Price's 
repeated insistence upon the instability of categories of cannibalism 
(110).

Despite these limitations, and despite numerous typographical errors 
(e.g., "Dame" for "Dante" (21)), this remains a valuable contribution 
to the study of the medieval thought and culture. Consuming 
Passions is an intelligent attempt to deal with a difficult set of 
problems. Quite properly in my view, the author does not attempt a 
full explanation/interpretation of cannibalism metaphors in the Middle 
Ages, but rather follows a cluster of related ideas as they inform 
notions of cannibalism in particularly important cultural contexts. 
Anyone interested in the late medieval persecution of Jews, heretics, 
or witches, the construction of gender, or thinking about the Eucharist 
will find this book an accessible and intriguing introduction to 
related discourses of man-eating.

NOTES:

[[1]] See Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the 
Crisis of Belief. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on 
imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
			-- Harry S. Truman