A woman, floating on a cloud and draped in a nun’s habit, holds her bleeding heart out towards the sky, where a golden-edged Christ waits readily to receive it. This scene, characteristically cryptic of medieval artwork, was composed in the fifteenth century by Italian painter Giovanni di Paolo. The woman, left clutching the tender bosom which had once contained her heart, is Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century saint said to have physically exchanged her heart with the Son of God. When she confided the details of this macabre encounter with her close friend and eventual hagiographer Raymond of Capuna, he laughed at her, for, even by medieval standards, such a claim was comically outlandish. However, when she later went to receive the Holy Eucharist, the sacrament of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ, thunderous beating could be heard echoing from her chest and an angelically sweet smell began to rise from her skin, explained as Christ’s heart booming with glee within her. ‘My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the Living God,’ Catherine said, ‘They have jumped out, into the Living God.’
Catherine of Siena is one of the most prominent female saints in Roman Catholicism, having been canonised successively as a patron saint of Rome, Italy, and Europe. Her saintly life, although exceptional in her personal achievements and the fantasticality of the holy visions she witnessed, is typical of many female saints with her devotion performed primarily gastronomically, through extreme acts of fasting and feasting. Many medievalists have identified a cult of ‘holy anorexia’ practiced by religious women in the Middle Ages, a radical abstinence by which believers would insist on eating only consecrated Eucharist bread, often to the point of lethal emaciation. Catherine of Siena would die at the age of 33 after being told by Church authorities she must eat and refusing to do so, while Saint Marie of Oignies and Blessed Columba of Rieti died of similar causes around similar ages.
"It was women’s bodies that were most associated with the vice of overindulgence...it was, after all, Eve who had eaten the apple in Eden. "
There were two primary motivations that underlay ‘holy anorexia’. One was because extreme fasting was seen as the pinnacle of selfless charity. Food had a near mythic sanctity in Catherine of Siena’s Europe. Her lifetime dovetailed the Great Famine of 1315-17 and coincided with a transformation of the food in the social imaginary. Gluttony was seen as an arch sin of bodily overindulgence, while the sharing of food with the poor was reasserted as an act of genuinely saintly proportions. The decision not to eat then represented a decision not to indulge in earthly pleasures and redirect hard-to-come-by food to the poor, an act customary of Catherine’s devotion, to the extent that she near drove her own merchant family to poverty through her impulse to give away.
The second motivation in ‘holy anorexia’ was Imitatio Christi, the desire to inflict pain on the body to better understand the pain that Christ suffered on the cross and become closer to Him in doing so. In women, this was primarily expressed through self-starvation, because it was women’s bodies that were most associated with the vice of overindulgence and other evils of the body, and so most in need of extreme discipline. It was, after all, Eve who had eaten the apple in Eden.
The supplementation of self-starvation with a pledge to eat only the bread of the Eucharist was an attempt to become closer to Christ. After having received the heart of Christ in her body, Catherine of Siena would claim to see the body of an infant being held before her when receiving the Eucharist, a materialisation of Christ Himself.. The image may seem macabre, however recurs frequently in medieval iconography. In one painting of the Madonna and Child (c.1535) by German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Virgin Mary holds towards the viewer a ripe bunch of grapes – symbolic of the wine of Eucharist – in one hand, and the infant Jesus in the other, whose plump body ‘also resembles food’ The subtext is grotesque, a mother inviting the viewer to dine of the flesh of her baby son. But within the Christian logic of the Eucharist, in which Christ Himself asserts, ‘unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man […] you do not have life within you,’ this profane act is transformed into the sacred. To a degree, it is the grotesque nature of the act that makes it so holy: in its original Greek, this passage uses not the standard verb connoting eating, phagein, but the verb trogein, which translate more as ‘to gnaw’ or ‘to crunch’. By acknowledging and embracing our debased humanity through the act of feast, we become capable of moving closer to God.
Feasting and fasting, then, hold parallel yet contradictory functions in the medieval theology of food. Eating could be a way to honour God and celebrate the goods with which He had blessed humanity. However, eating could also become an act of greed, particularly at a time when access to food was made a privilege. Fasting then also becomes a way through which to honour God, enacting a refusal to submit to earthly whims and a desire to suffer with Christ as a testament of devotion while ensuring more resources for the poor. This act was particularly important among women like Catherine of Siena, who saw in their bodies the potential for treacherous overindulgence and instead made of their bodies temples, temples that may even contain the very heart of Christ.
Yet there is perhaps a broader significance to all this, too. It is self-evident that medieval Europe was an intensely patriarchal society, in which women were afforded few opportunities for agency. Analysing the hagiographies of a range of female holy anorexics, medievalist Caroline Bynum has argued that self-starvation often became a means for women to regain control of their bodies and reject the authority of patriarchal institutions. Saint Wilgefortis, for example, adopted self-starvation to avoid an unwanted marriage, while in Catherine of Siena’s hagiography, her refusal to eat allowed her to redirect her well-off father’s resources towards charitable means, and resist the will of a patriarchal Church that insisted she eat.
By allowing her body to suffer with and fuse with that of Christ, Catherine constructed a hybrid version of Him as a Son, a lover, and a nourishing Mother. ‘We must do as a little child does who wants milk,’ she wrote in her Letters, ‘We must attach ourselves to the breast of Christ crucified, which is the source of charity, and by means of that flesh we draw milk.’ With this lesson in mind, it is perhaps no coincidence that one of Catherine’s strangest, most erotic, and yet most powerful visions was this: her, suckling tenderly on the holy wound of Christ as if it was a teat, and orgiastically accepting His blood into her body like milk: ‘Drink, daughter from my side,’ Christ said to her, ‘and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight, which for my sake you have denied.’ The holiest meal as reward for her holy fast.