Customer Reviews

Holy Anorexia

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bell compares modern descriptions of anorexia nervosa with the recorded behavior of some of the best-known Italian female saints from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. He argues that Clare of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and other holy women were not only victims of a disease, but also in a way victims of a medieval Christian culture which allowed young women no other way to experience the disease's effects than as symptoms of religious fervor.

Bell's attitude toward his sources is capricious - sometimes he treats his medieval sources as literal truth, sometimes as distorted, agenda-ridden hagiography. They are, undoubtedly, a bit of both. Nonetheless, it is obvious that these holy women were more likely than their male counterparts to practice ascetic - even bizarre - food rituals in lieu or excess of other ascetic behavior. In this respect, Bell's book necessarily suffers in comparison with Caroline Walker Bynum's _Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women_, for Bynum spends a great more deal of time considering the phenomenon of female fasting in the both its broad medieval and specific Christian contexts. Still, Bell's argument for a connection between the rise of "holy anorexia" and the development of the mendicant orders is an intriguing bit of historical cause and effect.

Bell's methodology suggests that the "bizarre" behavior of women so removed from our own time is actually very familiar. While the argument itself falls flat at times, he does shed new light on an issue which could otherwise too easily be dismissed as spiritual excess.

This book is an excellent historic study of women possesed with piety, most of these women were nuns from the 14-15th century. They expressed a dedication to Christ through an aesthetic lifestyle that included starvation, self-inflicted torture, mystical hallucinations and extreme self-denial. The women who starved to death gained a martyr like status. A facinating book!

Bell compiles some wonderful information about the topic of anorexia among Catholic saints. I have given it five stars simply for the work that went into compiling this informative piece of work. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

This book typifies the problem of our patriarchal society. Not only is it poorly researched, but I find the writing self-indulgent and empty. Bell's understanding (or lack there of) of anorexia is insulting to humanity.