P R E M O D E R N H E A LT H , D I S E A S E , A N D D I S A B I L I T Y

Theresa A. Vaughan

Women, Food, and Diet

in the Middle Ages
Balancing the Humours
 Women, Food,
and Diet in the Middle Ages
 Premodern Health, Disease, and Disability

Premodern Health, Disease, and Disability is an interdisciplinary series devoted

to all topics concerning health from all parts of the globe and including all
premodern time periods: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modern.
The series is global, including but not limited to Europe, the Middle East, the
Mediterranean, and Asia. We encourage submissions examining medical care,
such as health practitioners, hospitals and infirmaries, medicines and herbal
remedies, medical theories and texts, care givers and therapies. Other topics
pertinent to the scope of the series include research into premodern disability
studies such as injury, impairment, chronic illness, pain, and all experiences
of bodily and/or mental difference. Studies of diseases and how they were
perceived and treated are also of interest. Furthermore, we are looking for works
on medicinal plants and gardens; ecclesiastical and legal approaches to medical
issues; archaeological and scientific findings concerning premodern health; and
any other studies related to health and health care prior to 1800.

Series Editors
Wendy J. Turner, Augusta University (chair)
Christina Lee, University of Nottingham
Walton O. Schalick III, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Editorial Board
Bianca Frohne, Kiel University and Homo debilis Research Group, University of
Bremen
Aleksandra Pfau, Hendrix University
Kristina Richardson, Queens College
Catherine Rider, University of Exeter
Alicia Spencer-Hall, Queen Mary, University of London
Anne Van Arsdall, Emerita, University of New Mexico
William York, Portland State University
 Women, Food,
and Diet in the Middle Ages
Balancing the Humours

Theresa A. Vaughan

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: “Giving Barley Soup to an Invalid”, Tacuinum Sanitatis, SN2644, folio 44v;
1385-1390

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6298 938 2

e-isbn 978 90 4854 194 2 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789462989382
nur 684

© Theresa A. Vaughan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
For Kieran, my love
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 11

Introduction 13

1 Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers 23

Anthropological approaches 26
Work by medievalists 30
How can we approach medieval sources? 31
Women as healers 33
Women as food producers 36
Nurturing and gender 40
Pushed out of the medical profession, pushed out of the kitchen 42

2 Medieval Theories of Nutrition and Health 47

The Greek tradition 48
Galen of Pergamum 52
Anthimus 60
Medical writers in the medieval Islamic world 61
The medieval west 63

3 The Special Problem of Nutrition and Women’s Health 67

Class, gender, diet, and humoral theory 69
Aristotle 70
The Hippocratic Corpus 71
Soranus of Ephesus 72
Galen of Pergamum 73
The Islamic texts of the Arabic systematists 74
The Trotula 76
Hildegard of Bingen 77
De secretis mulierum 78
Regimina sanitatis and Tacuina sanitatis 80
Michele Savonarola 83
Other writers 84
Non-medical texts and folk beliefs 85
4 Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine 91
The medieval diet 93
Folk medicine 94
Medieval medicine and folk medicine 95
Women and folk medicine 98
Theoretical medicine and folk medicine 99
Efficacy and folk belief 104
Women as healers 106
Magic and belief 107

5 The Trotula and the Works of Hildegard of Bingen 111

From Book on the Conditions of Women 113
From On Treatments for Women 116
Hildegard of Bingen 117
Hildegard on natural philosophy and medicine 118
Dietary recommendations from Causae et Curae 119
Physica 122
Alcohol consumption 123
Hildegard on alcohol 125
Similarities and contrasts in the Trotula and the works of
­Hildegard 127
Were Hildegard and Trota practitioners of folk medicine? 131

6 The Legacy of the Trotula 135

Tacuinum sanitatis 136
Early cookbooks and health guidebooks 140
Religion and the body 144
Medieval gynaecological texts 145
The Sekenesse of Wymmen 145

7 Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty 155

Cosmetics 156
Beauty and morality 157
Medieval conduct literature 159
Medieval ideas of beauty 164
Obesity 165
The body as symbol 171
8 Religious Conflict and Religious Accommodation 175
The female body in medieval literature 176
Food, sexuality, and religion 183
Consequences of overindulgence 187
Women and fasting 188
Religion and medical recommendations for diet 191

9 Evolving Advice for Women’s Health Through Diet 195

Women’s diet advice in the Early Modern Period 198
The death of humoral theory 201
Consciousness of health, consciousness of fashion 202
Pregnancy and diet in the modern era 204
Are women’s diets consistent across cultures? 207
Conclusion 211

Bibliography 215

Index 233

List of Figures
Figure 2.1 Four humours and their characteristics after Galen 53
Figure 2.2 Four humours and personality types 54
Figure 2.3 Medieval four humours and their characteristics 54
Figure 6.1 Food items and their effects on the body in the
Tacuinum138
Figure 6.2 A selection of early European cookbooks 140
 Acknowledgments

There are a number of people who helped make this book possible. First,
I would like to thank the University of Central Oklahoma for granting me
sabbatical leave for the 2016-2017 school year. Having taken on a heavy
service load for the previous twelve years, my sabbatical allowed me the
chance to rebuild a research program and do some intensive research at
the British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France.
I would like to thank my dean, Catherine Webster, and department
chairperson, Mark Silcox. Both of them not only helped me with logistics,
but were both enthusiastic and encouraging about this project. Fellow
faculty members in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy were
also instrumental: Stephen C. Law, for so many things, not the least of
which was encouraging me to do research in the medieval period in general
and on foodways in particular; members of the departmental research
and writing group, who generously read and commented upon a number
of chapters – thank you Eva Dadlez, Mark Silcox, Joey Williams, Jerry
Green, Reid Weber, Mary Brodnax, and Zach Norwood. Former dean Pam
Washington was always buoyantly enthusiastic about my research projects,
and numerous students stoically listened to me ramble on about medieval
foodways – especially Beth Ussery, James Gregory, Mason Peck, Mason
Werth, and Raven Wahkinney.
For whatever is good in this book, I owe a debt of gratitude to Henry
Glassie, Dick Bauman, Gregory Schrempp, Beverly Stoeltje, Carol Greenhouse,
Michael Herzfeld, and other graduate school professors who had probably
given up on me writing my own book. I am also grateful for those who
fought the battle of graduate school with me long ago, several of whom read
the initial book proposal and offered helpful comments, especially John
Laudun, Jason Baird Jackson, and Liz Locke.
Thanks to fellow members of the American Folklore Society Foodways
Section, especially Diane Tye, Rachelle Saltzman, Mary Magoulick, Kristin
McAndrews, LuAnne Roth, Lucy Long, Janet Gilmore, and Michael Owen
Jones, who have known all along that foodways are a critical area of study.
Inspirational members of the American Folklore Society Women’s Sec-
tion showed me very early in my career that women are a fascinating and
worthwhile area of study – Jo Radner, Rosann Jordan, Kay Turner, and
Amy Skillman all come to mind. And, of course, for Pauline Greenhill, the
world’s most productive folklorist, for graciously shepherding along past
publications. I would also like to thank AUP editors Tyler Cloherty and
12  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

Shannon Cunningham for their support and encouragement, as well as

careful reading and suggestions from reviewers who helped substantially
improve this work. Mistakes and shortcomings are, it goes without saying,
my own.
Finally, I could not have produced anything without the support of my
family: Christopher Vaughan and Kathleen (O’Rourke) Vaughan, my parents,
have always been enthusiastic cheerleaders for whatever I choose to do, not
the least of which was this book. My children, Cian and Sam (Sarah) Mullen,
put up with me being gone for extended periods during my sabbatical and
then had to live with an often-distracted mother. Finally, Kieran Mullen, who
has been my constant companion since 1988: husband, friend, confidante,
proof-reader, fellow academic, and intellectual foil, he has always found
a way to support my scholarly endeavours with energy and grace. It is to
Kieran that I dedicate this book.
 Introduction

Abstract
The introduction provides an overview of the research problems and how
they will be approached, focusing particularly on how understanding
women, food, medicine, and diet in the Middle Ages by using anthropo-
logical and folkloristic approaches can add to the understanding of these
issues for non-elite populations. Research questions include: What do
we know about women as food producers, feeders, and nurturers? What
can be said about women as practitioners of folk or traditional medicine?
How does this contrast with the written record of theoretical medicine?
Finally, what were the cultural aspects surrounding women, food, and
health, and how did it determine proper eating, fasting, and body shape?

Keywords: folk medicine, traditional medicine, medieval women, theoreti-

cal medicine

What can we know about women, food, and diet in the Middle Ages? Here,
I cover a number of different interrelated topics having to do with medical
dietary recommendations for women from the theoretical and practical medi-
cal traditions, the basis for those recommendations, and what we can learn
about the folk traditions surrounding women, food and medicine. The book
goes on to explore the themes of women and food more generally in the Middle
Ages, with some parallels drawn with the Early Modern to contemporary issues
involving diet, gendered roles in preparing and eating food, and medical views
of women and food. Thus, this book is not exclusively about the medieval
tradition of theoretical medicine and the role of food in medicine as it pertains
to women. Instead, I seek to situate that tradition within the greater cultural
context of women of all social classes, gendered expectations for women in
gathering, preparing food, and feeding others, and the gaze on the female body
and how it has been understood by the medical world as well as other quarters.
I write this book not as an historian, but rather as someone trained in
both anthropology and folklore in the United States, with the particular

Vaughan, Theresa A., Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours. Am-
sterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2020
doi: 10.5117/9789462989382_intro
14  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

views of culture as a whole and folk culture that that education entails.
Having spent most of my research career on gender and foodways, my
turn to these subjects in the Middle Ages was as a result of establishing
a teaching career in a field somewhat outside of my training: for the last
twenty years I have taught in a department of Humanities and Philosophy,
where I bring perspectives on both Western and non-Western cultures
to students. Many of my departmental colleagues, from whom I have
learned much over the years, are historians, art historians, archaeolo-
gists, classicists, philosophers, and those specializing in interdisciplinary
humanities. My research career has been influenced by their focus on more
conventional subjects in Western Civilization. I combine a curiosity for
material and cultural artefacts with a focus on the subaltern – of those
aspects of cultures and peoples that are part of the common person – of
the folk, if you will.
In doing research on medieval foodways, I was struck by the fact that a
number of the sources I read mentioned how little we know about women
as cooks specif ically, and how little we knew about women and food
in general. The everyday lives of women who tended kitchen gardens,
nursed children, and fed their families were not significant enough to have
been recorded in any direct way. It is assumed, based upon the available
evidence, that women’s roles within the home as cooks and nurturers
are fairly similar among the non-elite of many cultures. But what can we
really know?
Food also formed the basis of the medieval healing system – of the
humoral system as conceived by the Greeks – as a means to correct imbal-
ance and maintain health. How did this pertain to women in particular?
Could an understanding of women and food in the humoral system also
tell us something about the nature of women and of their relationship to
food? Interest in food, gender, and the humoral system led me to a better
understanding of the expectations and restrictions placed on women’s
bodies in the Middle Ages. And, of course, none of this could be completely
understood within its cultural context without some understanding of
religion.
Essentially, what can we learn about women and food in the Middle
Ages? That is my basic research question. I approach it through the lens of
anthropology, but primarily through that of folklore studies. I rely on the
work of historians, literary scholars, and archaeologists for source material
and methods of approaching it. There are no new texts uncovered here;
rather, I try to find a way of looking at existing information to see what
we might be able to divine about women and foodways of all social strata.
Introduc tion 15

To address the questions of women and food in the Middle Ages, this
work explores a number of topics:
1 What do we know about women and food production?
2 What do we know about women as feeders and nurturers?
3 What do we know about women as practitioners of informal/traditional
medicine?
4 How did theoretical medicine view the relationship between food and
health, particularly as it pertained to women?
5 How did food appear in folk beliefs about women and health?
6 What were cultural expectations of women’s bodies – both fed and
abstinent?
7 How did cultural ideas about beauty and body size affect women’s
bodies?

Many of the medieval manuscripts on health have been identified, and a

number have been studied in some depth. While I do not uncover any new
texts nor suggest any heretofore undiscovered relationships between the
various strands of medical learning, I hope this work adds to the academic
conversation on medical texts by looking specifically at dietary recom-
mendations for women’s health, attempting to uncover both the humoral
and cultural reasoning behind those recommendations. To accomplish this,
I consider advice on diet and health from a number of sources. A brief look
at contemporary cultural concerns about diet and health demonstrates that
those same concerns, though framed differently, are present in medieval
medicine. After all, we are all inheritors in one way or another of the Greek
medical tradition, and Hippocrates’ famous declaration, ‘Let food be thy
medicine, and medicine be thy food’.
However, looking at these texts still leaves us with many questions. Did
medieval people follow this advice? Was it only intended for or followed
by the aristocracy, who by the High Middle Ages could afford to hire aca-
demically trained doctors to prescribe diet and medicine for their health
concerns? Did the advice for women in these guides become part of folk
medicine, or the advice of traditional healers? Did folk medicine influence
the written medical tradition?
Manuscripts here yield only limited evidence. The medieval manuscripts
were written by the learned and literate. The writers themselves, depending
upon the time period in question, came from the upper social strata – either
trained in the ecclesiastical tradition, as clerics, or from the aristocracy and
haute bourgeoisie. Literacy would, of course, eventually expand to other
portions of the population, but the fact remains that we see folk culture
16  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

and traditional learning mainly through the eyes of observers, rather than
actors within that tradition.
The fields of folklore and anthropology have long grappled with un-
derstanding the traditions and practices of non-literate, non-hegemonic
populations. While current trends in folklore and anthropology focus on
the traditional cultures of living people, each field has a strong tradition of
historical study as well, and of grappling with artefacts – be they material,
verbal, or ritual – and expanding outward to understanding their place in
a wider cultural field.
To offer a variety of approaches to this topic, I utilize a number of types
of evidence and analyses. The goal here is to gather evidence from what we
already know and look at it in a new light, to see what new things we can
determine about the questions at hand. This is not to neglect the considerable
work already done on the Middle Ages by historians, historical anthropolo-
gists, archaeologists, and literary scholars: this work would not be possible
without all the groundwork achieved in these fields pertaining to food and
health, as well as the experience of gender. Rather, this book builds on that
earlier work.
In Chapter One, ‘Women as Healers, Women as Food Producers’, we look
broadly at the role of women in many cultures as both the immediate provid-
ers of food, and of basic medical treatment for the family. In many cultures
and time periods, women have been seen as the primary food providers and
healers for the family, especially in non-aristocratic classes. Women’s diets
and food prepared by women carry unique symbolic meanings related to the
role of women in society and in the family. An increasing array of literature
on feminist approaches to foodways have helped to uncover women’s work
in the home and the symbolic and cultural load women carry in nurturing
through food and healing. Some of that literature, I suggest, is particularly
pertinent to the study of women’s diet and health in the Middle Ages.
It can be difficult to truly view women’s role as food providers and family
healers in the medieval world. Long associated with domestic spaces in
the Western world, women were less visible than men as public actors,
and therefore their lives are less accessible to us. To complicate matters,
most written records that come down to us from the medieval period were
written almost exclusively by men. When focusing on medieval food and
cuisine, we are faced with a relative abundance of written records, but
again they are also primarily ecclesiastical and aristocratic. When literacy
is confined to those two groups, it is logical that most written accounts
will be from and about those groups. If we want to look closely at women
and food in the Middle Ages – women as cooks, managers of the domestic
Introduc tion 17

space, food vendors, and as consumers, we are hindered by the availability

of material as well. There is an abundance of evidence for food production
and consumption among the aristocracy, but if we wish to look at women
as cooks, we are thwarted even within the aristocratic class, as the grand
kitchens of the aristocracy were run and staffed almost exclusively by men.
Ecclesiastical writing, aside from records of purchase and consumption by
convents and monasteries, view food through the lens of Christian teachings
on abstinence and avoidance of gluttony, also associating food with sexuality.
Such writing is nearly always prescriptive rather than descriptive.
So, what can we learn about women and food in the Middle Ages, espe-
cially beyond the convent or the manor house?⁠ Positive examples can be
found in, for example, conduct literature; negative examples appear in genres
such as the fabliau. This chapter addresses some of the literature on women
as consumers and producers of food, with implications for understanding
the cultural significance of diet and women’s health in the Middle Ages.
In Chapter Two, ‘Medieval Theories of Nutrition and Health’, the two
threads of Greek medicine are examined for their insights into how the
body uses food and gender differences in the way food was processed, with
emphasis on the Hippocratic tradition as seen in Galen. An understanding of
humoral theory, on which much medieval medicine was based, is necessary
to follow the arguments of later medical writers about how food influences
health, and what food is recommended both for the maintenance of good
health and the treatment of disease. Humoral theory also explains how
diet is often related to disease, and how dietary remedies can help cure
various medical conditions. This chapter also covers some of the trends
and modifications to humoral theory made during the medieval period.
While humoral theory is often complex, this brief overview necessitates
some simplification. An emphasis on the differences in dietary needs by
age, gender, and state of health is explored to better understand why certain
dietary recommendations were made specifically for women’s health. While
most medieval medical authors had access to the same texts or copies of
texts, those texts may have been fragmentary, corrupted, or incomplete.
Changes in medical theory, particularly beginning with the establishment
of medical schools in the 1100s, are also apparent in medical texts. The
arrival of systemized and translated Arabic texts, themselves drawn largely
from the medicine of ancient Greece, also changed the medical landscape.
However, most of the work addressed in this book is ultimately traced back
to the original Greek ideas of diet and health.
In Chapter Three, ‘The Special Problem of Nutrition and Women’s Health’,
we move beyond general humoral theory to those texts which spend at
18  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

least some time talking about health concerns specific to women. Medieval
literature on women’s medicine is relatively scarce; how then do we under-
stand recommendations and practices specific to women? The Trotula was
a foundational text, cited for several hundred years. Women’s health was
mentioned occasionally in other medical texts: I emphasize Hildegard of
Bingen as a female author working within both the theological and medical
traditions. These texts are examined within the context of humoral theory.
While both the Trotula and the works of Hildegard are addressed in much
greater detail in Chapter Five, they’re included here as part of a textual
tradition on women’s health.
A survey of medical texts, and those on natural philosophy focusing on
reproduction and female anatomy, helps to understand how the female
body was viewed from several different vantage points – humoral theory
certainly, but also anatomy and, surprisingly for contemporary readers,
theology. What was it about the nature of the female being that made it
prone to certain illnesses? Here, again, we see Greek ideas wend their way
through the medieval tradition – sometimes strikingly misogynous in
tone. Humoral theory was sometimes used to justify anti-feminist medical
viewpoints. Female bodies were weaker than male bodies; more delicate
and prone to certain illnesses. Pregnancy, a condition unique to women,
was viewed as a natural state, but one in which the body should be treated
as if it were ill. Often, dietary recommendations for the ill or recuperated
are reflected in those recommendations for pregnant women.
Chapter Four, ‘Theoretical Medicine vs. Practical Medicine’, investigates
the problems of separating medicine as written and presumably practiced
by academically trained physicians from more common remedies used
by local healers, midwives, and wise women. A distinction must be made
between the theoretical medicine of academically trained doctors and the
practical medicine of midwives and traditional healers, perhaps better
classified as ‘folk medicine’ or ‘traditional medicine’. Historians have studied
the changing role and status of traditionally trained midwives. In the later
Middle Ages, midwives were partially displaced by academically trained
doctors for both the aristocracy and the bourgeoise. While the extent to
which midwives were supplanted by male doctors may have been overstated,
the rise of medical schools and of academically trained physicians did cause
change in the medical landscape.
The practical medicine of midwives and traditional healers is, of course,
more difficult to document as it was not primarily a written tradition. Some
traces of it may exist in the Trotula. Some may be found in other kinds of
records, folktales, legal proceedings, trials for heresy, herbals and other
Introduc tion 19

illuminated manuscripts, and in fragmentary ways in a number of sources.

We know quite a bit about folk medicine in a number of contemporary
cultures – how much of what we know may be applicable to the fragmentary
evidence from the Middle Ages?
Chapter Five, ‘The Trotula and the Works of Hildegard of Bingen’, offers
a more thorough examination of the most common medieval text about
women’s gynaecological and reproductive health, in part with the aim of
trying to understand how these works might be related to folk medicine.
The Trotula, traditionally attributed to a female author, is examined as an
historical document and a possible record of both theoretical and practical
medicine in twelfth century Salerno. The Trotula itself, really three different
texts that explore aspects of women’s health, cosmetics, and beauty, is
in reality only partially written by a woman or her students. However,
its importance as an authoritative text attributed to a woman cannot be
overemphasized. The portion that may have been written by Trota or her
students is, in fact, more practical and less theoretical than the other two
parts. Can this offer us some insight into folk medicine, at least in Salerno
and surrounding regions?
Within the Trotula, dietary recommendations offer us a look into the role
diet was thought to play in women’s health. Some of its recommendations are
analysed within the framework of humoral theory. Is it possible to determine
which dietary recommendations were theoretically determined by humoral
theory, and which may have come from folk medicine? To what extent did
humoral theory reach the understanding of diet among the common people?
It is impossible to know the answers to these questions with certainty, but
literature on folk medicine and traditional healing may help to sort out some
of the text, and provide suggestions for areas of further inquiry.
We also take a look at an author whose recommendations existed outside
of mainstream theoretical medicine. In contrast to the Trotula, Hildegard
of Bingen’s texts addressed medicine and natural philosophy through a
highly idiosyncratic theoretical framework. The two relevant books, among
the many written by Hildegard (or at least attributed to her), are entitled
Physica and what has come to be called Causae et Curae.
Hildegard’s works are not exclusively focused on women’s health and re-
production, but they do address these topics within a theological framework
that treats understanding the body as a microcosm of God’s creation. Here,
they are examined for instructions on women’s health, and particularly
for dietary recommendations specific to women and reproductive health.
How much of Hildegard’s recommendations reflect her knowledge of folk
medicine and traditional healing, and how much are they simply reflective
20  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

of her own brand of theology? Do they offer a window into the larger culture
of diet and health in Germany of the 1100s, or are they simply cut from the
cloth of Hildegard’s imagination? There is no doubt that Hildegard’s mind
was sharp and expansive, as she wrote on so many subjects, but she was
also a person of a specific time and culture. It is conceivable that traditional
medicine is found in her recommendations.
In Chapter Six, ‘The Legacy of the Trotula’, we look more closely at the
Trotula’s influence on later texts, and textual traditions that existed apart
from the Trotula and its legacy. An examination of other texts that address
diet and health, particularly women’s health, reveals how interpretation of
the Trotula evolved over time, as understanding of diet and health evolved.
By the fifteenth century, ideas springing from humoral theory were still
present, but as more people became literate, general guides for understanding
of animals, plants, and spices and their properties became popular among
the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie.
Of key interest are the various versions of the Regimen sanatitis produced
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While not specifically focused on
women’s health, they did feature diet, health, and to some extent, cooking.
Platina’s On Right Pleasure and Good Health is another example of an author
building upon both medical theory (as it came to be understood by learned
lay people) and Regimina sanitatis and their careful descriptions of all things
edible to recommend what he considered to be the best medical practices.
These texts are examined for dietary recommendations most pertinent to
women and women’s concerns. Finally, late texts addressing women’s health,
such as Michele Savonarola’s Regimine pregnantium, and pseudo-medical
texts, such as De secretis mulierum, analyze diet and women’s health recom-
mendations through the misogynistic lens of men whose view of women
was particularly problematic.
In Chapter Seven, ‘Women’s Diets and Standards of Beauty’, we look
at not just the recommendations for good health and the amelioration of
gynaecological heath issues, but also how dietary recommendations for
women were connected to standards of beauty. What role did diet play in
expectations for women’s beauty and attractiveness? How did the expecta-
tions for the appearance of a women’s body relate to her weight? Were
obesity’s effects on beauty as well as health similar to current standards?
Evidence suggests that until the later Middle Ages, obesity was not neces-
sarily viewed as an aesthetic problem, but was viewed morally as indicative
of a lack of self-control and indulgence in the sin of gluttony. By the Early
Modern period, it was also of great concern as an impediment to fertility.
How does this manifest (or does it manifest) in the medical texts, both for
Introduc tion 21

women’s health in particular and general recommendations on diet? In this

case, works on the anthropology of the body suggest that what women eat
and how they look are deeply embedded social constructs revealing cultural
attitudes towards gender difference, women’s roles, and worth.
Chapter Eight, ‘Religious Conflict and Religious Accommodation’, ad-
dresses the role played by Church teachings against gluttony and on the
inherently sinful nature of women in dietary recommendations for health.
The Church had much to say about the virtues of fasting and meat avoidance
in the spiritual health of both men and women. The conflict between recom-
mendations for bodily health and spiritual health is examined, highlighting
the sometimes-uneasy compromise between medical and ecclesiastical
dietary recommendations, particularly for women.
The works of Hildegard are especially important in observing one syn-
thesis between the two points of view. In addition, texts such as De secretis
mulierum by Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, first introduced in Chapter Six and
steeped in the anti-feminist tradition, are instructive in showing the extent
to which Church attitudes could be at odds with the more neutral stance
of medical texts. As we have seen, anti-feminist traditions in the area of
women’s health and physiology go all the way back to ancient Greece, but the
concept of sin fed directly into such phenomena as holy anorexia, self-denial,
and endurance of illness as a form of self-mortification.
The final chapter, Chapter Nine, is entitled ‘Evolving Advice for Women’s
Health Through Diet’. It provides a summary overview of how dietary advice
for women changed from Galen through the Early Modern period, and
anticipates some of the changes taking place in dietary recommendations
during the Renaissance and beyond. While this is a long arc of history,
certain trends can be traced. The literature from folklore and anthropology
will also prove useful here. How do cultural attitudes towards diet change?
A summary of the main arguments and findings of the previous chapters
places humoral theory and its dietary implications within the context of
other global dietary theories and practices. What can other cultures in
other contexts tell us about informal learning of foodways, changes in
traditional medicine, modified roles for women, and popular religion as it
relates to food culture?
Ultimately, examining the interrelationship between medicine, health,
nurturing, sexuality, and women’s bodies may lead to new ways of looking
at or understanding women’s lives and bodies in the Middle Ages. Looking at
both the culture of the elite and the non-elite may also inspire new attempts
to understand the traditional, informal culture of diet and medicine alluded
to by some medical and non-medical texts.
22  Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

Cultural attitudes toward health and illness, toward food and cuisine,
toward women and female bodies always inform and underlie texts that
purport to be scientific and medical. Each text is written within a nested
series of cultural assumptions, some clearly evident, others less so. People
who were not part of the literate tradition had as distinct and coherent a cul-
ture as did those of the literate classes; attitudes toward women and health
are also present there, even if we can understand them only imperfectly.