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Hi, u/waltjrimmer — you’ve asked some interesting questions here. I’ve had my eye on this for a few weeks now but haven’t found the time to write up a proper answer yet — I hope it’s worth the wait!

 

A little bit of scene-setting first of all. Fasting is, of course, a very common religious practice — especially within the Abrahamic faiths. Ramadan and Passover are familiar to us, but Christian fasting — at least in the modern west — is a bit less common. In the Middle Ages, however, fasting was an integral part of the religious calendar. Easter, Lent, and a whole other variety of Christian religious festivals all had their own particular restrictions on what and how much food people were supposed to consume or avoid. Monasteries and other religious establishments would have had particular rules on what could or could not be eaten as well (some less strict than others — the Rule of St Benedict, for example, noted that ‘we read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess’).

 

The details of all of this aren’t particularly important, but the point is that restricting what food one ate, and when, was a very normal part of religious practice — particularly for monks, nuns, or those associated with them. Fasting was just one of the ascetic or penitential practices which those living a religious life might take part in — others might include sleeping on a bed of planks, wearing rough and unpleasantly itchy clothing, or, at the extreme end, scourging oneself with a flail or wrapping iron chains around one’s body under one’s clothes. Accounts of this sort of behaviour can be very dramatic and quite shocking — but its important not to dismiss it all as senseless and irrational. Let’s look at some more specific examples.

Is it likely that Catherine of Siena's legendary fasting, living on nothing but bread and water for something like 17 years, was real? Or is it believed to be exaggerated in writings about her? … is it likely that they snuck other foods into their diet and just lied about it?

 

Catherine of Siena’s quite a famous example of this kind of ascetic behaviour. Most of what we know about her life comes from a biography written after her death by her papally-appointed spiritual director, a Dominican friar known as Raymond of Capua. So, what does Raymond tell us about Catherine? According to Raymond, Catherine started showing signs of extraordinary spiritual character as a young child:

‘A number of unusual features began to show themselves in her conduct to the astonishment of those who observed them. She would seek out hidden places, and there, in secret, lash her tender body with a little scourge. She no longer played the games of children, but took on the practice of prayer and meditation. Unlike other children she grew daily more silent and reserved. She was unlike other children in this too, that as she grew bigger she took less to eat instead of more. By her example she drew a number of little girls like herself to gather round her, and they used to listen with delight to her pious exhortations, and to imitate what she did in their own little way. They had a certain secret meeting-place in her house, and there they would scourge themselves in company with her, and repeat a number of times, following a plan which she laid down for them, the Our Father and the Hail Mary. All this foreshadowed, as the sequel will show, what was to come in after years’.

 

There’s a lot going on here — and plenty more information to come. According to Raymond, then, Catherine’s fasting first started as a child, along with a whole host of other religiously motivated behaviour. Raymond goes on to tell us that the adolescent Catherine used to sleep on a bed of planks, lock herself in her bedroom and scourge herself until blood dripped down to the floor, and eat less and less. Later in life, her fast intensified: she would chew a few herbs and then spit them into a bowl, or place some small crumbs of bread in her mouth, and eat nothing else. Others begged her to eat more, but she was unable to even when she tried. If she did swallow food, we are told, she experienced such agony that ‘she was compelled, with acute discomfort, to let a fine straw or some other thing be pushed far down her threat to make her vomit’. Eventually, ‘the occasions on which she took food grew gradually rarer, and eventually her fast became literally unbroken, in a way that is without parallel in the present age of the world,’ and she ate nothing at all, save for communion wafers and wine, which kept her miraculously refreshed and alive.

 

What should we make of all of this? You are probably already thinking that some of this behaviour — refusing to eat, eating only very small quantities of plain food, forcing oneself to throw up — sounds quite familiar: it sounds like what we would nowadays diagnose as an Eating Disorder. This interpretation was put forward by a historian named Rudolph Bell in the 1980s in a (very controversial!) book called Holy Anorexia, who looked at the lives of a number of religious women in the middle ages who exhibited similar behaviour, and concluded that were indeed experiencing some kind of eating-disorder related condition. It’s worth noting that historians have detected a certain tendency in the Middle Ages for food to assume a special religious significance for women — the most influential study on this is, again, a book from the 80s called Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum, which kickstarted a whole lot of interest in medieval religious women, who’d been a bit of a neglected topic up until that point. Given that those who are diagnosed with eating disorders in the modern world are overwhelmingly women, the parallels are immediately obvious and quite attractive. Another book — Kroll & Bachrach, The Mystic Mind (2005) — took all of this analysis a step further, and argued that one of the reasons why so many mystics and religious figures fasted and engaged in other ascetic practices was because it helped them reach a kind of heightened psychological state which facilitated spiritual experiences, much like meditation in some other religions, notably Buddhism.

 

I think it’s important, however, to stop for a moment and think about why we might look for this kind of interpretation. I suspect that what’s underlying some of these arguments, even if perhaps only subconsciously, is a desire to rationalise away behaviour that otherwise doesn’t make sense to us. You can see this attitude at work in some of the reviews which Kroll and Bachrach’s book received – one reviewer wrote that:

We all know about those embarrassing saints scattered throughout the Middle Ages, our ancestral crazy aunts in the attic and uncles in the barn… what motivated their weird behaviour? How are we to explain such behaviour, and worse, the admiration of such behaviour, to our curious students?

and concluded that, having read this book, she would ‘for ever after see those embarrassing medieval saints… as people with comprehensible motivations’.

I would suggest that one of the fundamental goals when studying history is to try and understand places and times distant from our own on their own terms, rather than assuming that we, in the West in the 21st century, are the “normal” and everything else is the “other” that must be made to conform to our current understanding of the way the world works. To insist on an explanation for behaviour that makes us uncomfortable, is, to me, an admission of defeat.

 

Having said all of that, we are left with a bit of a quandary. When we are told that a Saint survived for decades without eating, or that they appeared after death to miraculously heal pilgrims to their tombs — events which are, we would conclude, impossible — what are we to think? The 18th century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume had one response to this problem. Even if numerous, reliable people claim to have witnessed a miracle, he asserts that:

I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phaenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature. (1)

Were Raymond and Catherine’s other companions simply mistaken in what they saw? Or, even worse, were they deliberately exaggerating? This is perhaps an even more complicated question than the original one, and has been the subject of intense debate between different historians. Accounts of the lives of saints (often known as hagiographical sources, from the Greek hagio, meaning ‘saintly’ or ‘holy’, and graphein, ‘to write’) are infamously stuffed full of the miraculous and the hard-to-believe. What is more, the miraculous stories are often very similar across the lives of different saints — tropes and topoi abound, and it rapidly becomes very difficult to tell whether the biographer of a saint is writing something because it actually happened, or simply because, having read lots of biographies of other saints, they believe that a saint is supposed to act in a particular way, and therefore distort the story they are writing in order to fit a preconceived saintly ideal. At the most extreme end of this debate some historians have suggested that we simply throw out the whole corpus of hagiographical texts altogether, and treat them entirely as literary rather than historical documents.

(Continued below!)