>Dear friends,
>
>Could anyone of you please tell me which saints are considered today to
>have suffered from anorexia? Do you know in particular whether Saint
>Veronica and Saint Margaret of Cortona were anorexic?
>
>Thank you so much for your reply,
>
>Catherine Muller
Two books that may be of help are Bell's _Holy Anorexia_ and Caroline
Bynum's _Holy Feast, Holy Fast._ The former has not been well received,
the latter has generally been so.
I wonder, though, how valid it is to project anorexia -- which is not only
a medical diagnosis but a cultural construct -- back onto religious
practices of the middle ages. Precisely why medieval women would engage in
such extensive and intensive fasts is not primarily a medical question,
though it is not entirely non-medical either. It is primarily a question
of cultural praxis -- the meaning of gestures and practices that are laden
with meanings and expectations of their own. We need to explore and
understand these practices and the writing about them (these two must not
be conflated) -- as Bynum worked so hard at doing. Throughout the Middle
Ages, illness of various kinds is a central religious practice whose
important has not yet been studied systematically. (Yes, that's
scholar-code for "I'm working on this problem myself.)
Maybe these women were in fact anorexics; but if we choose to make that
diagnosis, we need to compare the cultural construction of illness then
with the cultural construction of illness now, particularly of anorexia,
and come to terms with the differences. Medical diagnoses tend to be
reductive and totalizing explanations; because theyprovide a false sense of
resolution, they abort the inquiry prematurely.
Patrick Nugent.
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Patrick J. Nugent
Department of Religion
Earlham College
Richmond, Indiana 47374 USA
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