Reflections On Abjection, Anorexia, and Medieval Women Mystics

"This Is My Body": Reflections on Abjection, Anorexia, and Medieval Women Mystics
Author(s): Martha J. Reineke

Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp.
245-265
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LVIII/2
"This Is My Body"
Reflections on Abjection, Anorexia, and
Medieval Women Mystics
Martha J. Reineke
In the anguish or the repose or the madness of Love ...

The heart of each devours the other's heart,
One soul assaults the other and invades it completely,
As he who is love itself showed us
When he gave us himself to eat ....
Hadewijch (353)
MARY DOUGLAS, BRYAN TURNER, Julia Kristeva, and Rend

Girard offer instructive insights into the centrality of religion to the
social construction of the human body. Most provocative is the link they
forge between conflicts and self-contradictions that beset a society,
threatening its order, and the inscription-in myth and ritual-of those
conflicts on women's bodies. In this essay, I appeal to these theorists in
order to examine church and society in Europe in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries and, in particular, the women mystics of that age.
Focusing on instances of extreme asceticism among these holy women, I
argue that the bodies of the mystics-fractured by self-imposed starva-
tion-mirrored society at large as it responded to dangers that
threatened it. Indeed, because threats issued against the social body of
late medieval Christendom were registered in highly focused form by the
mystics, power claimed over their bodies was, in turn, a power asserted
in the social sphere to effect social order.
In Part I of this essay, Douglas and Turner's theories provide direc-
tion for a preliminary inquiry into the formation of social order. In Part
II, the women mystics' asceticism-centered around devotion to the
eucharist-forms the focal point for application of Douglas and Turner's
theories to an analysis of the conflicts that beset late medieval Christen-
dom, which we see "writ small" on women's bodies. In Part III, the
Martha J.. Reineke is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Northern
iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614.
245
246 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
psychoanalytic theories of Kristeva and Girard illuminate a hi

text of late medieval life that is glimpsed in the lives of the wome
tics on whose bodies it is inscribed. Shedding light on as
conflict in late medieval Christendom that would otherwise remain
shadowed by silence, their theories underscore the major themes of this
essay.
DRAWING THE LINE SOMEWHERE:

THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL ORDER
That there is meaning at all depends on the human capacity t

boundaries, draw lines, affirm differences and, in so doing, bot
and maintain order. Aside from bricks and stones out of which
fences and walls are constructed, the order we create elsewher
world we owe to the capacity of the human mind to make ment
and walls. Testimonies to our attempts to humanize ourselves by
ing boundaries lie everywhere. We order our days with clocks
endars, our relations with each other by complicated patt
etiquette, and our surroundings by banishing disorder, which
dirt, from our midst.
Underlying this fence-making activity, by which order is dem
from disorder, we find ambiguity. Gray marks the border betw
and white; good cannot clearly be distinguished from evil. Thus
boundaries separating order from disorder lie power and danger
lies there because those parts of existence which are set a
irregular, anomalous, or unnatural-are not simply dismissed. B
order results from restricted selection of acceptable human exp
from among the broad materials for existence, we can always s
tial for regularity in the irregular. Lurking always in the margins o
ordered experience are claims of disorder to pattern and m
(Douglas:94).
But in potential for order lies danger. What if, in erecting fence
fortifying borders, we err and include in our midst eleme
threaten order? Significantly, wherever in pre-modern soc
locate attempts to answer the difficult questions about the bo
between order and disorder and to determine the dangers lurkin
margins, we find religion. While in modern societies medi
inherited this sentry duty, traditionally, religion, more than a
institution, has patrolled the borders that separate order from d
dispensing information, protection, and judgments. Religion ha
that certain persons are our kin and that we must not sleep wit
Reineke: Abjection, Anorexia, and Women Mystics 247
It has determined who should live and how we should die. It has
acknowledged those with legitimate claims to power and has prophesied
against those with no right to power. Interestingly, when religion has
attended to meaning and pattern, chaos and confusion, the human body
has been among its most common reference points. Why the body?
Mary Douglas notes that "the more personal and intimate the source
of ritual symbolism, the more telling its message. The more the symbol
is drawn from a common fund of human experience, the more wide and
certain its reception" (114). Religion, engaged in mental fence building,
has appealed to the human body, rather than to actual doorposts, fence
rows, and stone walls for images of order and meaning because the body
is the most intimate and certain of boundaries. The body, a complex
structure, is an ideal source of symbols for other complex structures. As
the body is circumscribed by lines and patterns, the social structure is
"reproduced in small" on it (115).
Moreover, the body is a paradigmatic reference to danger. While all
social structures are vulnerable at their margins, bodily orifices are espe-
cially invested with the symbolism of power and danger (Douglas:121).
Bodily margins are exposed to disease, assault, and aging. In many cul-
tures, matter that issues from body orifices-spittle, blood, milk, urine,
or feces-attests to that vulnerability. Imbued with symbolism, this
matter marks the threat of pollution.
Douglas' imagery of symbol creation as fence building and of reli-
gion as the institution chiefly responsible in pre-modem societies for
building such fences and for manning the sentry posts that fortify them
is continued and elaborated by Bryan Turner. Turner offers an organic
metaphor for the regulating processes of society. For him, a society is an
organism bounded by an outer membrane. Within the outer membrane
are protective clusters--cellular groupings-that embody the organism's
values, beliefs, and identity and protect it against attack by hostile forces.
These forces-experienced as evil in pre-modem societies and as dis-
ease in modem society-threaten the organism as a whole. The organ-
ism responds through actions concentrated in the protective clusters of
the outer membrane. These actions-rituals in pre-modem societies
and their medicinal alternatives in modem society-fend off the attack
and maintain the internal purity and health of the system (212).
Turner's organic metaphor for societal creation and maintenance is
telling. In his materialist critique, imagery of the social organism must
in some ways be understood literally: a power claimed over a body is a
power asserted in the social sphere; a threat issued against the social
body is a threat registered by a human body. Moreover, the organic
metaphor underscores the fact that power does not seize hu

and consciousnesses. Rather, as Foucault has claimed, po
bodies. Institutions embed cultural meanings and political leg
on individual bodies that line the outer membrane of the so
Power relations have an immediate hold on any body loca
"they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out
perform ceremonies, to emit signs" (1977:25).
Symbolic systems that forge relations of power between
body and its individual members vary as do cultural attitude
body orifices and their refuse: menstrual blood may pose a le
for one society, excreta for another. To which bodily margin
attendant refuse a culture will attribute power and danger d
the nature of the social situation that the body is mirror
las:121). Cultural differences notwithstanding, common p
symbolism are detectable.
A. Eating Order: Food and the Social Body

Food imagery often predominates in the symbolic and ritu
that bound a cultural system. In both modem and pre-modem
food links the social body with its individual members. Food
the dynamics of order and disorder: life and death, sin and
health and disease. Douglas detects a particular pattern in bo
associated with external threats to a society: a society's preo
with social exits and entrances often issues in food symbolism
When a society is under attack or threat, that society's conc
matched by fears that the bodies of its members also risk att
interests coalesce around food symbolism. As illustrated by
ethic of Leviticus, ancient Israel's attention to the dangers of
tion mirrored that nation's concern to maintain its borders-g
cal, cultural, religious-against attack.
Turner emphasizes the intimate and graphic connectio
between social order and body order by food symbolism. Seve
ples underscore his claims. The multivalence of two word
regime-links food with social order. A diet refers to both t
tion of individual bodies and the body politic: a political asse
regime refers to both a bodily regimen, usually involving d
government regime (165). The development of table etiquette
middle ages and Renaissance further illustrates Turner's poin
with one's fingers, drinking soup without a spoon, spitting on
placing one's knife on the table, or cleaning one's teeth with i
dishing it at one's neighbor-all common occurrences at the co

table of the middle ages-became unacceptable for all soci
during the Renaissance. An unregulated appetite signified an
lated society. A new cultural order was produced, not only be
populace was offered new images of civilized behavior on
reflect, but also because their bodies were actively engaged: th
tion of Europe did not just think the Renaissance, they swall
(171).
B. Out of Order: Women and the Social Body

Female bodies also predominate in symbolic and ritual clus
cultural system. Religions do not account for order and proscr
der in the world by appeal to generic human bodies. Rather,
often demarcate order from disorder, sin from sanctity, by ap
female body. The female body, site of processes men have
historically as mysterious and potentially dangerous, offe
graphic symbolism of issues of ultimate concern. Women car
tial for order and meaning and for disorder and chaos in their
ies. Menstruation, reproduction, and aging all testify to the
and tragedies of existence. Moreover, because religions choose
not only to distinguish order from disorder, but also to effect
control disorder, the female body often has been religions' s
choice. Because the female body is associated most closely wit
death processes, authority asserted over a female body is powe
over the very forces of creation.
Turner clarifies why women predominate among those be
populate the outer membrane of the social body, bearing the
attacks on the larger social body and appearing as objects of
rituals that protect the integrity of the social body, proscribing d
Women, those humans most likely to be perceived as embo
lack the power to protest against the literal inscription on thei
societal meaning or to distance themselves from the ritual bo
which is enacted on behalf of the social body. But, following
Turner also makes a stronger claim: women are found in
margins because they are precisely those beings the social orga
duces in its development to fill its outer wall. Affirming the
historicity of human embodiment, Turner defines women as th
in history of the system that oppresses them (3-5).
Douglas and Turner's theories, as attentive to the female bo
historical specificity as they are cognizant of structural com
that pervade history to affect women in a variety of contexts, are

tive on two further counts. First, they make it possible to a
gendered specificity of power relations without reducing thes
to variations on a long-standing male conspiracy against wom
would affix blame for women's oppression to specific participa
construction of social order. As Foucault has argued, a clear l
pervade power relations-a logic with aims so decipherable
believe not only that it has been invented by someone, but also
available to us like a "game plan"-without that logic actua
self-consciously possessed by anyone. To the contrary, if we be
humans do consciously pursue goals and advance their pos
cannot conclude that prescience characterizes power rela
whole. The play of power relations in a society will involve d
of particular groups-prisoners by guards, students by teache
teurs by experts, and women by men-without the participan
play being wholly in command of their performances. This i
not only for those who dominate, but also for those who are
(Foucault 1978:95; Bordo:73-104).
Second, and more significantly, Turner and Douglas'
account for the prominence of female bodies in conflicts ove
order. Turner, noting the contradictions that plague the social
tion of the female, locates the source of these contradictions
wider society. Citing anorexia nervosa as a key example, Turn
that the anorexic's body is the product of a particular classific
tem of knowledge and power. Rather than see in anorexi
woman's private and misplaced struggle for freedom from an
tective family, Turner perceives that her starvation behavio
determined by culture. Before a young woman ever begins to s
self free, only to find herself constrained by processes that sp
control toward death, she is already caught within the contra
late capitalism. The anorexic's dilemma-she dies to live fr
sible only because her body has already been fractured by
mies-reason and desire, public and private, body and mi
characterize Western culture itself (5, 201-202).
For her part, Douglas forges a link between the rending of
by structural instability and the fear of female sexual pollutio
ing to Douglas, fears of sexual pollution run rampant when a
system is at war with itself. Citing the Lele as an example of s
contradiction which splits a cultural system, Douglas notes th
the Lele, women are the currency of male transactions with e
But because women, unlike other forms of currency, can take
role in the transactions made with their bodies, the Lele are
conflicts. Not coincidently, they have a great fear of female
which Douglas relates to their attempt to treat women simulta
persons and as currency (149-52).
Because Douglas has argued that individual bodies mirro
social bodies, so also does it appear that contradictory expecta
males and females in a society mirror contradictions in the soc
as a whole. The destructive power, which Douglas highlights a
teristic of the former, seems but a contained version of the
potential rooted in the latter. The social order masks a found
der-a contradiction rooted in the depths of a society itself
struggle to maintain the mask of order in the face of underlying i
ity issues in dramatic efforts to control the risk to a society as a w
controlling female pollution. Such efforts address both the dan
attend specific female bodies in conflict with gender-role exp
and a larger threat to societal order that is visible only as refr
individual female bodies.
Douglas and Turner's theories highlight the centrality of th
the play of power in history and religious life and call our att
the link between conflicts that beset a society and the inscri
those conflicts on women's bodies. Appealing to Turner and D
will analyze late medieval Christendom and, in particular, the
mystics of that time.
HOLY WOMEN, HOLY FOOD, AND HOLY ORDER'

Cultural order in Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ries can be seen as dictated by the regulation of the in-take and out-take
of food from human bodies. At one extreme, recorded in folk literature,
were images of magic vessels brimming over with food and drink. Such
tales symbolized unbridled sensual pleasure and, when combined with
imagery of gorging and vomiting, presaged cultural ambivalence associ-
ated with food (Bynum 1985:2). At the other extreme were ascetic
behaviors centered on renunciation of food and drink. Food, in all its
comings and goings, mirrored at a micro-level of the society processes of
order and disorder that were writ large. In a time when famine was on
11n the section that follows, I am profoundly indebted to Caroline Walker Bynum's research on
late medieval holy women. I believe that my constructive position in this essay complements hers.
However, the reader should note that Bynum, as an historian, stands at some distance from the kind
of theoretical reflections that frame my essay on the late medieval mystics.
the increase, as indicated by stories of food hoarding, cannib

infanticide (Bynum 1985:1), those who could enact control of
bodies through regulation of food could control order and resis
disorder in the larger social body as well. Food structured th
dividing rich from poor, and informed its ethic: overeating w
of privilege, and sharing food with the hungry was a primary
benevolence (Bynum 1985:2). Moreover, the cultural ethic, fo
food, was instantiated as a religious ethic: those who luxuriate
paid the penalty for the sin of sensual pleasure; those who r
food obtained salvation (Bynum 1987:45).
Standing guard over the cultural order in the thirteenth a
teenth centuries, policing its margins, was the church. For it
food was the sign that marked the borders of Christendom.
that ate or refused food, so imbued with religious meaning, w
mary vehicle by which-through feast or fast-the tasks of Ch
were carried out. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians wer
by their eating behavior: a Christian was someone who faste
four behaviors required of one who professed to be a Christ
ing yearly communion, fasting on Fridays and in Lent, paying tit
having one's children baptized-the fast was the most regular
visible sign of one's faith or apostasy (Bynum 1987:40).
Food was also at the center of religious ceremonies: in the
Christians ate their God and obtained their salvation (Bynum
Late medieval piety emphasized the individual reception of G
eucharist: one tasted, saw, and met God. The God whom one
tered appeared to humans as broken flesh. Eating that God, on
one with the suffering flesh crucified on the cross (Bynum 19
Although the salvific powers of the eucharist centered on the
who received that suffering flesh, the eucharist also had a c
meaning: when Christians ate God together, it was the c
humankind who were saved (Bynum 1987:62).
Notable among those for whom the eucharist was central
were women who, in saintly asceticism, deliberately abstaine
food but God's food: the eucharist. Significantly, for my ess
food-as practice and as symbol-featured more promin
women's lives than in men's suggests that the church in the t
and fourteenth centuries did mark the boundaries of Christend
women's bodies. In particular, as its ethic valorized food asceti
church made women primary bearers of this sign.
Caroline Walker Bynum's research amply demonstrates th
According to Bynum, although women were only 18 percent
canonized as saints between 1000 and 1700, they comprised 23

of those who died from asceticism and 53 percent of those f
illness was central to their sanctity (1987:76). Moreover, the m
eucharistic visions and miracles were attributed to women: of the
twenty types identified, only two were performed exclusively by men
and those were linked to consecration of the Eucharist, which was a
male prerogative in any case. Eight other types of miracles featured
women primarily, and four were associated exclusively with women's
spirituality (1987:78-79). Women also predominated among those
whose miracles consisted of exuding from their bodies wondrous
fluids-food-that healed others (1987:273).
Bynum's research is augmented by Rudolph Bell, who also docu-
ments the high number of cases of women for whom self-starvation was
central to their asceticism. Bell narrows his focus to the Italian penin-
sula and to those 261 women recognized by the Roman Catholic church
as saints, blesseds, venerables, or servants of God. Excluding 90 women
about whom the historical record remains virtually silent, of the remain-
ing 170, half engaged in severe ascetic practices (x). Using J.P.
Feihgner's criteria for anorexia nervosa,2 Bell demonstrates that for 39
percent of these women, an anorectic pattern is evident (135). The per-
centage is lower among the Franciscans (32 percent of women for whom
Bell has strong documentation; 52 percent for whom he has moderate or
strong documentation) and highest among the Dominicans (56 percent
of the women for whom Bell has strong documentation; 65 percent for
whom he has moderate or strong documentation) (135).
The centrality of food asceticism to women does not rest, however,
with the quantitative evidence. Female hagiography is not entirely relia-
ble in the reconstruction of history. Hagiographers may valorize fasting
that actually did not occur or, in the case of obsessive fasting, may
downplay its features. Partly because women's lives were less diverse
than men's and less open to nuanced treatment on the part of hagiogra-
phers, evidence from those sources needs supplementation (Bynum
2These criteria include: 1) onset prior to age twenty-five; 2) lack of appetite accompanied by loss
of at least 25 percent of original body weight; 3) a distorted, implacable attitude toward eating that
overrides hunger, admonitions, reassurance and threats. This attitude may include denial of illness,
apparent enjoyment of losing weight with overt manifestation that refusing food is a pleasurable
indulgence, and an unusual handling or hoarding of food; 4) no known medical illness that could
account for weight loss; 5) no other known psychiatric disorder; 6) at least two of the following:
amenorrhea, lanugo, bradycardia, periods of overactivity, bulimia, and vomiting (Bell:2-3). As indi-
cated in Part III of this essay, although I use these criteria as descriptive of self-imposed starvation, I
do not accept Bell's psychoanalytic framework of explanation, which is inadequate to the complex-
ity of the phenomenon of women's asceticism.
1987:82-85). Bynum provides such evidence by appealing t

and writings of men.
Food asceticism and eucharistic devotion can be located in t
of men; however, in contrast to the holy women of the late m
for whom references to food and the eucharist constitute the "le
references to food-both human and holy-are not at th
men's lives (1987:94-95). Documenting her case with referen
Rolle, Tauler, and Ruysbroeck, Bynum demonstrates that the
of these men, although characterized by an affective and ly
more typically associated with women than with men, diff
women's on two counts. Unlike the holy women of the day,
do not make hunger the basic synonym for desire of God. N
as do the women mystics, make eating the central metaphor
with Christ's suffering, experiencing mystical union with Ch
ing souls (1987:93, 105-106).
That bodies and body-work are signs that create cultural
serve as harbingers of cultural disorder, that women in the la
age were principal sign carriers in a crucial area, which was
with food symbolism in general and with the eucharist in p
calls into question women's status on the boundaries of Chr
and the multivalence of the signs women lived. That mul
nowhere more dramatically evident than in the endpoint of
asceticism: death from self-imposed starvation. Were wome
from starvation indicative of asceticism run amok or did they
an ambiguity, a tear in the cultural membrane, a structural b
borders of late medieval Christendom, which came to ex
women's bodies but did not originate with them?
I suggest that the medieval women mystics who engaged
imposed starvation, sometimes to the point of death, were
their bodies a contradiction of the larger social body. They
literally, socially, and politically-a structural crisis within t
(Turner:113). The medieval mystics' starvation was a "psycho
fallacy" (Turner:185): living the discourse of medieval soc
found their bodies rent by its contradictions. Moreover, as th
situation signified by their fractured bodies led toward dea
self-starvation, the crisis of the social body as a whole reache
denouement.
The contradictions that the women mystics embodied were shaped

by struggle: a struggle to control the social body against threats to its
unity and to control the individual body against the risk of fracture.
Self-imposed starvation, linked to women's devotional focus on the
eucharist and refusal of all other food, marked the paramet

conflict. Bodily control through self-starvation was inscrib
contradictory discourses: in one, the body was left behind; in
the experience of the body was intensified.
That the body was left behind in the mystics' self-imposed
is the notion more familiar to contemporary scholars, for w
cism is generally associated with a practical dualism that issu
ous forms of world-rejection. To be sure, misogynistic views
and a dualistic concept of a body opposed to spirit were exp
holy women's asceticism. For these women, to cease to eat w
pline and defeat the body (Bynum 1987:212-13). Fearing tha
would lead them madly into gluttony or lust from which the
no escape, these women embraced an asceticism focused on t
rist. When they ate only the eucharist, only God's body, they
discipline of self that denied to their bodily members any p
starving holy women ceased to menstruate was interpreted
from the bodily curse of Eve which had led women and, thro
all humanity into sin (Bynum 1985:11). Moreover, abstin
food was linked with sexual abstinence, which enhanced the
defied sexual desire (Bynum 1987:214-15).
Miracles associated with holy women of the time undersc
bodily control signified a salvific defeat of the powers of the bod
sinning members at two levels: that of the individual woman
the social body for whom she was a sign. A corpse that fail
and which had belonged to a holy woman who had died from
became a valued relic: a symbol of the ascendance of the spi
tory over the corrupting and corruptible body (Bynum 198
as some pre-literate societies are known to mark their borde
corpses or skulls of sacrificial victims in order to protect t
from invasions, so also did the incorruptible body parts
woman, dispersed as relics in churches-an arm here and a
mark the borders of Christendom (Weinstein and Bell:53). In
the victory of a woman's body over the forces of death and d
relics also symbolized the victory of society over disor
threatened the social body.3
3Rudolph Bell's work holds suggestive possibilities for my efforts to correlate late m
tendom's battle to maintain the integrity of its borders against outside attack with
struggles for ascetic control over their bodies. According to Bell, severe asceticism,
imposed starvation, featured more prominently in the lives of Dominican women th
lives of the Poor Clares (the Franciscans) (132-33). Bell chronicles differences be
groups: the Poor Clares were centered in the Umbria and Marche regions; the D
Even as we confirm the salvific potential-social and in

world-denial through asceticism, we are reminded by Bynu
could be "flight not so much from as into physicality" (1
social text of late medieval Christendom was shaped not o
course of denial, but also by a discourse in which the bod
mately and intensely experienced. Within this discourse,
not an obstacle to salvation; rather, the body was the prim
saving grace. Late medieval theology, emphasizing the cru
Christ, not his resurrection, accorded to Christ's humani
value: God saved the world through physical, human a
evoking the visceral elements of the piety that appropriate
ical belief, Bynum writes that "to eat was to consume, to
become God. And to eat was also to rend and tear God
horribly audacious act. Yet it was only by bleeding, by b
rent, by dying, that God's body redeemed humanity. To
body by eating was therefore to bleed and to save-to l
physicality into suffering and into glory" (1987:251). In pi
cal text was made body text: when one ate God in the euc
incorporated his suffering body. One became the sufferi
saved.
Holy women embraced this theology of imitatio Christi

to conform themselves to Christ was facilitated by widely-
the day. First, medieval theology believed that Christ took
ity from his mother. Aristotelian physiological doctrine s
the mother provided the "stuff of the foetus" and the father
form or animating principle. Galenic interpretation claim
male and female seeds together produced a child. However,
had no human father, on both Aristotelian and Galenic gr
was seen as taking his flesh from Mary (Bynum 1987:265
one received the eucharist, one partook of a body that w
female. Second, because medieval natural philosophers und
clustered in Tuscany or the northeast (Florence and Venice), which were centers
the Papacy. The region was beset by conflict: both the Avignon papacy and, late
Reformation threatened societal order. Dominican women were more likely
against parents who opposed their religious vocations. Their devotion was m
included visions and direct communication with God. Bell roots the differe
Dominicans and Franciscans in a "rich psychological portrait" that reveals an "in
autonomy" among the Dominican women (133). By contrast, I would highlight t
tions of the Dominicans and Franciscans within the social body. The social un
Bell was inscribed on the bodies of Dominican women whose struggle for aut
from bodily and social constraints-detailed in their hagiographies-matched
response of the society to the tensions of the day.
breast milk was transmuted blood, the eucharist was prominen

ciated with mother's milk. Late medieval portraits of a Christ w
humanity with blood that streams from his nipple tell the st
Christ took his humanity from his mother, means that Chri
mother, nourishes humanity from his breast.4
The miracles of holy women confirm their literal embrace o
humanity. Finding redemption in the shared agony of the cr
like Christ, their bodies bore stigmata (Bynum 1987:200, 255-
eating and drinking only the body of Christ, they incorporated
themselves. Having done so, from their breasts or mouths also
healing, saving fluids (Bynum 1987:273-74). In their mystical
these "women ate and became a God who was food and flesh. And in
eating a God whose body was meat and drink, women both transfigured
and became more fully the flesh and the food that their own bodies
were" (Bynum 1987:275). Claiming the redemptive possibilities of their
embodiment, becoming one with Christ's suffering, crucified body, the
holy women effected others' salvation.
The mystics' privileged relation to the eucharist in late medieval
piety-demonstrated most graphically by their miracles-placed them
on the "front line" of late medieval Christendom to do battle against
forces that threatened it. That their suffering on behalf of others
redemption could provide the church with a highly focused response to
outside dangers was facilitated by the church's preoccupation with the
host as a symbol of its mystical body. The host in late medieval Chris-
tendom came to express "an almost frantic sense of wholeness, the invi-
olability, of Christ's body and a tremendous fear of rending and
breaking" (Bynum 1987:63). Miracles of consecrated wafers that oozed
blood or of wafers that turned to stinking flesh and accused those who
had desecrated them underlined a dual threat: just as the host could be
defiled, so also could the society. Indeed, persecutions of the Jews, who
signified a threat on the borders of late medieval Christendom, focused
often on alleged Jewish desecrations of the host (Bynum 1987:64).
Precisely because the host which the holy women consumed signi-
fied both Christ's saving flesh and blood and his church when thes
women united with Christ's body by means of extreme asceticism they
4Parallelism between Christ's wounded breast and a woman's lactating breast, indicated by paint-
ings such as that done by Quirizio for the monastery of St. Clare on the island of Murano, is
underscored by paintings of the Double Intercession. In mirror gestures of each other, Mary and
Christ offer their breasts: just as Mary nurses the hungry so also does Christ (Bynum 1987:270-72
Plates 25-30).
signified both the specific body of Christ, marked by stigmat

larger body, the Church. For this reason, when the mystics d
onto their bodies the crises of a society wracked by conflict, their
could effect Christendom's salvation and not only their own.
The host that signified social crisis and the women who, i
the host embodied crisis, were linked in a common symbolic
Women were both the first line of defense against outsid
which threatened Christendom, and, in the fragility of thei
ment, those who would succumb first to corruption. Because t
women represented powers and dangers, order and disorder, t
was to be condemned and that, which through salvific transfo
was to be venerated, the battle of the church against external
societal order and unity could be waged on their bodies. Thus
embodied, through the eucharistic drama, the society's struggl
trol and unity, these women had carved on their very flesh all
guities of a society under seige. When, in their devotion
eucharist, they fled from their bodies through self-imposed s
they signified the defeat and destruction of the dangers that
the church. When, in their suffering and at the risk of death
same ascetic practices, they fled to physicality so that th
merged with Christ's, they enacted Christendom's salvation.
If the medieval mystics bore the crises of Christendom on
bodies and were a two-edged weapon with which the church c
power and danger, we must recognize also a further ambiguity
acterized the lives of these women. If the women who ate
eucharist were controlled by Christendom, which marked the
and forced them to emit signs and carry out its tasks, they
control Christendom. They could use their ascetic behaviors to
late parents into acceding to their wishes not to marry
1987:222). Were they to vomit up the host, as some did on
testifying that it had not been consecrated and was yet human fo
could successfully challenge the authority and integrity of the pr
had offered it (Bynum 1987:228). Many were drawn to the ch
authority of the women who suffered and who saved (Bynum
Bynum attends, in particular, to the subversive aspects of
tics' asceticism. Given constraints placed on these holy women
environment, Bynum observes that they maneuvered within t
in order to triumph over them: their asceticism aimed at free
writes that these women "by their very extravagance, audacity
esty .. . rejected the success of the late medieval church, reje
wider, more soaring vision-an institution that made a tidy, m
decent, second-rate place for women and for the laity" (1

French philosopher Luce Irigaray also has written that the
women mystics occupied the only space in Western histor
women spoke and acted free from the shaping, controlling p
patriarchy (191).
Bynum and Irigaray's claims notwithstanding, the ambiguit
mystics' freedom should give us pause. The mystics' soaring vi
not be viewed separately from the compulsive rituals associat
their asceticism or the pain produced by the stigmata, nails, a
that accompanied their dramatic reenactments of Christ's cruc
suggest that such self-inflicted violence, even when interpre
rebellion--cultural, political, and spiritual--of women wh
after freedom, was always already the rebellion of bodies col
the larger culture. Their bodies were not so much free as the
fractured by the conditions of their production within the lar
body of late medieval Christendom.
Caught in a contradiction, the women who embodied the o
discourses of flight from the body and flight to the body em
Christ-likeness, but risked death from their efforts. In death,
ies that bore the sufferings of Christ in sometimes extraordinary
forms ceased to take up space. Crucified in the contradict
embodied, the faith of these holy women joined utter dar
blinding light, total fulfillment and absolute emptiness
1987:296).
Because the mystics' bodies could not, at the end point
imposed starvation, withstand the assaults made on them, be
that end point, the mystics were consumed, rather than free
"psychosemantic fallacy" they embodied, J argue th
emancipatory vision was not encountered as a vista toward w
mystics soared. They failed to gain a foothold on such a spac
dom; rather, the freedom to which they aspired was glimpse
the margins of the social body, at the point of bodily fractu
moment the mystics plummeted into the abyss of being.
CROSSING THE LINE: ABJECTION AND THE ABYS

To approach this abyss, I want to link my theoretical a
inspired by Douglas and Turner, with a Lacanian analysis arti
Kristeva and influenced by Girard. Kristeva and Girard recog
the laws of the unconscious explicated by psychoanalysis are n
solely in the individual psyche, nor are they lived out only i
260 Journal of the American Academy of Rehgion
dramas. Rather, these laws, "writ large," inform the disco

stitutes society itself. For Kristeva and Girard, as well as f
Douglas, the process of becoming human is a process of ac
system of language which determines how one experienc
Such a process makes possible an examination of the "psy
fallacy" the medieval women mystics embodied from a c
Undergirding this base, in my appropriation of Kristeva
insights, are basic tenets of Lacanian analysis. According
theory, the discourse of human experience is shaped by th
Name-of-the-Father. This Law founds a linguistic code th
all experience filters. When Turner and Douglas have s
order is inscribed on human bodies, I contend first, that it
Law, so inscribed, which has shaped the social order. Seco
this mode of analysis to the late medieval age, I ar
"psychosemantic fallacy" the mystics embodied is a fallacy
Father's Law.
Humans are introduced to the Law of the Name-of-the-Father
through a drama of human development. This drama begins as syn-
cretic play marked by the absence of psychic separation between an
infant and its mother. As the child develops, a necessary individuation
transpires. The child experiences the full ambiguity of human behavior:
a nonpeaceful coexistence through which self-awareness is given only as
the child is both divided from the mother and forced to verify itself
through others (Ragland-Sullivan:55-56).
According to Kristeva, this process is fraught with danger. While
accession to the Father's symbolic order and Law-locus of the alien-
ated but nevertheless autonomous adult self-for the most part occurs
successfully, vestiges of the mother-quest remain. The abject, pre-indi-
viduated body of an infant who experienced a fluctuation of boundaries
between mother and self, inside/outside, pleasure/pain, who was fasci-
nated by the mother and feared that its own proper self would sink
irretrievably into her, is not wholly left behind (1982:64). Alimentary
metaphors often mark, like a remnant, this ancient fear that one could
bite and take in the substance of the mother, but that one could also be
bitten (1982:39). Imagery of abjection-blood, excrement, vomit,
milk-which adults mark off with pollution rituals, testifies that the
boundaries between mother and child have never been secured
(1982:70).
I suggest that, when late medieval Christendom worshiped a lactat-
ing Christ and ate Christ's body in the eucharist, it returned to this
archaic drama of abjection. Its struggle for unity and for control was, at
its most basic level, a struggle to secure a body bounded only

cal threat: one was to eat or be eaten. The ambivalence of th
for identity- signified in its most highly focused form by t
alternate embrace and refusal of the body-reenacted, on the
late medieval Christendom, the ambivalence that characteriz
mordial drama of identification with and differentiation from the
mother.
I distinguish my thesis from a classic Freudian analysis of late medi-

eval asceticism that, bypassing its social context, would ascribe to the
mystics a fixation in an oral economy through which they would avoid
phallic claims on them of adult womanhood. A classic Freudian analy-
sis of what Bell has called "holy anorexia" errs both because it reduces
the meaning of the religious language by which the mystics expressed
themselves to that of a modem, bourgeois family drama and because it
understands the mystics' struggle only as a function of individual
neuroses.
Three factors differentiate my approach from

analysis. First, the infant-mother conflict, to w
returned, was a struggle "writ large" in society: the l
shaped society--the Law of the Name-of-the-Father-
to conceal the mother and the origins of desire. Mor
course shapes individual bodies only because it also c
ies, I contend that the oral images to which the
signified, above all, a struggle of an oral economy wit
of late medieval Christendom itself.
Second, far from being a function of individu
"psychosemantic fallacy" the mystics embodied was
foundations of a society structured by the Law. Gen
along cracks of that foundation or, to cite Turner's
fissures of the outer membrane of the social organism
was brought to light by the mystics who resided in
fissures.
What was the contradiction? Kristeva would describe it as a homo-
sexual economy of being (1977:31-32). According to the Father's Law,
and by reversal, creation is self-creation that addresses the ambiguities
and uncertainties of existence by excluding genuine Othemess. Under
the Law we have a strange paternity: impregnation by the Word
(1977:27). The Father's Law thus resolves the struggle for individuation
and identity, but only by concealing the mother. Because the Law
assigns paternity to the symbolic order, in which woman as crea-
tor/mother does not exist, we can say that the linguistic economy of
Western culture is built on the murder of the mother. The m

embodied valorization of a mother Christ subverted that econ
brought to the forefront its contradictions.
Finally, my treatment of religion is not reductionistic. I do
the social text of medieval Christendom nor dismiss the narr
mystic spirituality that constitutes a key theme of that text. R
account makes possible the uncovering of a hidden subtext of
rative, deepening our understanding of the conflicts signifie
extremes of Christian asceticism. Religion, I suggest, is that in
created by the Father's discourse to conceal the origins of soci
murder of the mother: religion's walls of order are built over
Religious discourse offers a sanitized version of the linguistic
how we came to be, detailing the necessary refusal of the moth
triumphal accession to the Father's Law.
My thesis is supported by the work of Rene Girard, who p
origins of religion in the crisis of infant individuation. From
learn that struggle, through which the child acquires a world,
tured as a mimetic crisis (1977:145-49). The world comes to b
child in the play of desire-veneration and rejection, mimesis
ference-until a shocking denouement that sees the differenc
child and its first Other obliterated by their common desire.
nal Other becomes a monstrous double by whom the child is
and from whom the child seeks to distance him or herself (1
65). This mimetic crisis, which has structured the child's acq
the world, is then writ large in society: a linguistic phylogeny
lates a linguistic ontogeny. The mimetic crisis becomes a sacrif
sis through the successful displacement of aggression and gu
sacrificial victim through the exercise of collective violence
26). Religion is precisely the institution that, organized aroun
and its repetition, structures society: its language, kinship sys
terns of exchange and institutions (1987:121).
Blending the insights of Girard with those of Kristeva, I sug
the linguistic code of society, structured around a sacrificial c
murder, is ordered according to the Law of the Name-of-the-F
conceals society's origins by inscribing in language the first
mother-only as an absence. The phallus marks difference and
tion and grants the capacity for speech even as the imagery of
forever bars the mother. Yet the originating terror is never le
behind. Whole conceptual and symbolic systems must be c
bolster a fragile order, behind which the terror of reciproca
continues to lurk.
Reineke: Abjection, Anorexma, and Women Mystics 263
There, glimpsed in the fissures of the sacred, is the abject: a sacred

"oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the
fragility-both threatening and fusional--of the archaic diad . . . on
which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion"
(Kristeva 1982:58). This unnameable Othemess, toward which the
sacred drifts, is the "solid rock ofjouissance" (Kristeva 1982:59).
Thisjouissance is, I claim, a rock of freedom against which the mys-
tics brushed, but to which they could not effectively cling, as they fell
into the abyss of being. The battle they fought on behalf of freedom
rooted injouissance was the most archaic one. The linguistic crisis they
embodied was twofold: under the Law the mother/sacred was barred.
She could be encountered only in repetitions of the original sacrifice that
brought society into being. Yet, because the mystics' bodies were female
bodies-bodies whose unique, creative meaning was denied by the
homosexual economy of the Father's Law-because the mystics, in par-
taking of the eucharist, united with the mother Christ, they became, in
replay of the mimetic and sacrificial crises, both the sacrificers and the
ones sacrificed. The mimetic play of the sacred turned back on itself.
And, as the rock of jouissance necessarily eluded these daughters of the
Law, they fell into the abyss of self-and-mother-murder.
However, unlike the Fathers, they did not have murder in their
hearts. They ate the mother to save her and to save themselves. But
because their bodies had already been colonized by a Father who barred
them forever from thejouissance they sought, the freedom to write them-
selves apart from the linguistic code of his Law escaped them. Only the
terror of abjection remained.
Even so, perhaps in no other time did Western culture come so close
to unveiling the truth of its origins. Perhaps in no other time were the
fractures at the foundations of the phallic economy deeper or the pos-
sibilities for women's subversion of the Law greater than during the late
medieval age. If there is decisive testimony to the uniqueness of this
time--valorized by Bynum and Irigaray-it is located in the following
centuries. The late medieval age, site of the struggle to resurrect the
mother and to retrieve her from the jaws of the Father, ended in the
paroxyms of Reformation violence. The witch craze claimed the lives of
more than 100,000 women (Barstow:7, n.1) and reinstated the Law,
which was inscribed with a vengeance on women's bodies. Thus, if we
are to tell the whole story of the mystics, we must include their sisters-
the witches-in our tale. We must relate how the mystics' stigmata
became devil's marks and how milk from their breasts no longer healed
the sick, but nursed incubi (Bynum 1987:270, 273). To do that is to
raise, with Kristeva, as yet unanswerable questions: "But isn't a woman

the most radical atheist, the most committed anarchist, when she is car-
ried away by what the symbolic order rejects? In the eyes of this society,
such a posture casts her as a victim. But elsewhere?" (Kristeva
1977:41).
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"This Is My Body": Reflections on Abjection, Anorexia, and Medieval Women Mystics

Author(s): Martha J. Reineke

In the anguish or the repose or the madness of Love ...

MARY DOUGLAS, BRYAN TURNER, Julia Kristeva, and Rend

psychoanalytic theories of Kristeva and Girard illuminate a hi

DRAWING THE LINE SOMEWHERE:

That there is meaning at all depends on the human capacity t

metaphor underscores the fact that power does not seize hu

A. Eating Order: Food and the Social Body

dishing it at one's neighbor-all common occurrences at the co

B. Out of Order: Women and the Social Body

that pervade history to affect women in a variety of contexts, are

HOLY WOMEN, HOLY FOOD, AND HOLY ORDER'

the increase, as indicated by stories of food hoarding, cannib

canonized as saints between 1000 and 1700, they comprised 23

1987:82-85). Bynum provides such evidence by appealing t

The contradictions that the women mystics embodied were shaped

eucharist and refusal of all other food, marked the paramet

Even as we confirm the salvific potential-social and in

Holy women embraced this theology of imitatio Christi

breast milk was transmuted blood, the eucharist was prominen

signified both the specific body of Christ, marked by stigmat

decent, second-rate place for women and for the laity" (1

CROSSING THE LINE: ABJECTION AND THE ABYS

dramas. Rather, these laws, "writ large," inform the disco

its most basic level, a struggle to secure a body bounded only

I distinguish my thesis from a classic Freudian analysis of late medi-

Three factors differentiate my approach from

Western culture is built on the murder of the mother. The m

There, glimpsed in the fissures of the sacred, is the abject: a sacred

raise, with Kristeva, as yet unanswerable questions: "But isn't a woman

Barstow, Anne "On Studying Witchcraft as Women's History: A His

Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. Chicago: The University of Chi

Bordo, Susan "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the C

Bynum, Caroline "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Signif

Douglas, Mary Purity and Danger. An Analysis of The Concepts

Foucault, Michel Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Girard, Rene Violence and the Sacred. Trans. by Patrick Gregory. B

Hadewijch The Complete Works. Trans. by Columba Ha

Irigaray, Luce "La Myst&rique." In Speculum of the Other Woman.

Kristeva, Julia About Chinese Women. Trans. by Anita Barrows. New

Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.

Turner, Bryan S. The Body and Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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