Volume 34, Number 15 · October 8, 1987
Crash Diets
By Maurice Keen
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
by Caroline Walker Bynum
University of California Press, 444 pp., $29.95
Holy feast, in Professor Bynum's title, means exclusively the Eucharist—the sacrament of Holy Communion—and the attitude of late-medieval religious women to the mass and to the Host especially is the first main theme of her study. In a prefatory section which is a model of lucidity and perception, she reviews the history of the Eucharist and of the shifting emphases on different aspects of the sacrament in Church history. Early Christian writers saw the Eucharist as spiritual refreshment and as a pledge of the Church's unity: they stressed commensality, the gathering of the faithful in the communion of a liturgical repast. Though none doubted Christ's presence at the mass, the question of how he was present in the bread and wine did not raise much discussion.
Review, 3430 words
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