title: Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)
author:  Caroline Walker Bynum 
description: "A rich, positive and thoughtful description of the way some medieval women managed to control and develop their own subjectivities and social roles."--"Women's Review of Books
zlib_text: HOLY FEAST AND HOLY FAST
  
  FRONTISPIECE. In this Flemish retable of the Kinship of St. Anne from about
  1500 we find feeding themes associated with Jesus' female relatives. In the
  center Mary presents her child to Anne, who offers him grapes (a eucha-
  ristic symbol), while in the lower left another woman nurses a baby.
  (Anne's left hand and the grapes have been restored.) Worshipers at mass
  would have seen a priest elevating the host just in front of this depiction of
  holy women offering food: both grapes (wine or blood) and Christ himself
  (bread or flesh). Musee du Pare du Cinquantenaire, Brussels. Copyright
  A.C.L., Brussels.
  
  Holy Feast and Holy Fast
  THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE
  OF FOOD TO MEDIEVAL WOMEN
  * CAROLINE WALKER BYNUM *
  University of California Press * 
  BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
  
  University of California Press
  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
  University of California Press, Ltd.
  London, England
  ©1987 by
  The Regents of the University of California
  First paperback printing 