caroline walker bynum holy feast and holy fast

The anorectic also may become emaciated, jaundiced, or hypothermic. Further physical symptoms include abdominal pain, constipation, cold intolerance, and either lethargy or excess energy.

In some cases, they repeatedly chew and spit out food without swallowing it. According to the DSM-IV, the diagnostic manual for psychology and psychiatry, anorectics may lose weight through the reduction of their total food intake, resulting in a restricted diet with only a few foods, through increased and excessive exercise, and through purging. However, the anorectic rarely, if ever, undergoes a complete loss of appetite. Though generally associated with believing oneself to be over weight, a distorted body image could also refer to a fear of being gluttonous and belief that heeding bodily signals of hunger is a sign of weakness or sin. Most common in females, anorexia nervosa is characterized by extreme loss of weight, refusal to gain weight, and distorted body image. By comparing modern-day diagnostics with the case of Catherine of Siena, a saint who starved herself to death in the Middle Ages, the classification of “holy anorexia” describes accurately both the physical and psychological symptoms of anorexia as it applies to female Medieval ascetics as well as the religious motivations and phenomena that accompanied these women’s self-deprivation.Īnorexia nervosa, a relatively new diagnosis, refers to severe weight loss and refusal to eat caused by psychological disturbance. However, the motives for anorexia nervosa vary even today, but the physical symptoms and psychological phenomena provide the common denominator between cases. Furthermore, they argue that anorexia nervosa has only emerged in the modern day and is defined by cultural values. Many people believe that the religious motives of the Medieval ascetics negate these women’s classification as anorexic and that the self-starvation that occurred during that age is a completely different phenomenon.

However, debates circulate as to whether it is legitimate to diagnose this group with a modern psychological and physical disorder. These women have collectively been given the name the holy anorectics because they starved themselves for prolonged periods of time for penitential reasons and because many of them were made saints on account of their unusual behavior and self-denial. As a form of asceticism and with the purpose of purifying themselves and their world from sin, such fasting women believed that through self-denial and even self-torture, they could achieve perfect unity with God, and that giving in to their human needs was indeed selfish, greedy, and gluttonous. In the Medieval period in Europe, a large number of religious women, many of them monastics, engaged in extreme fasting and deprivation.

Caroline walker bynum holy feast and holy fast