"Fast, Feast and Flesh"

Paper Summary:

This essay examines Bynum's analysis of the religious significance of food to medieval women as an example of gender history, paying particular attention to the aspects of medieval culture that she analysed in terms of it being a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, customs and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. The paper discusses how Bynum comes from a functionalist perspective, in that she looks at the mechanisms, which ensured the stability of the social system as a whole, as well as a holistic interpretive approach, in that she separates aspects of the past into important and otherwise untouched areas of study.

From the Paper:

"Bynum's work must be seen in relation to the poststructuralist approach that she employs throughout her work and the turn in feminist history towards the poststructuralist framework of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with its focus on the analysis of discourses, of representations and of the construction of social categories. Bynum's approach, like social history's looks at macro-structural forms of analysis such as social and economic structures as determinants of individual behaviour, (paying particular attention to the role of the Church). Her approach is grounded in psychoanalytic understandings of gender identity formation, and in the rejection of constructivist opinion that denied the importance of the body as a point of study, with Bynum seeking to highlight the body's importance for women and to explore its deeper meanings."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Caroline Walker Bynum, Fast, feast and flesh: the religious significance of food to medieval women, Photo
• Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice, (London, 2003)
• Joan Wallach Scott, 'Gender: a useful category of historical analysis', American Historical Review 91, (1986)
• Haralambos and Holborn, Sociology Themes and Perspectives,(eds.), (London, 2004)

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