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| Class Prep |
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- Ascetic Fasting: Notions of the Body
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- Today we will shift more fully from sexual matters to dietary issues. We
have seen that several of our ascetics employed multiple disciplines of the flesh
to cultivate their spiritual life. Consider Mary of Egypt, whom we read about
in our last class. She is pictured below left (yes, that is a woman).
She not only renounced sexual intercourse, but she also lived on a rather meager
diet for those decades in the desert, including that same piece of bread she first
took into the desert. Now we know from our own exposure to and experience of anorexia
nervosa that, when a person stops eating, they lost fat and muscle tissue and
do permanent harm to their organs. For women, the consequences also include the
cessation of menstruation. The body begins to look, and function, less like that
of a woman, and more like that of a man. We know this to be a dangerous condition,
one that jeopardizes a person's health.
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- However, in the ancient world
in general, and in early Christianity in particular, it was commonly thought that
close regulation of one's diet could help one to manage everything from sexual
desire to fertility and could help to cultivate the life of the mind and spirit.
Early Greek and Roman medical treatises discuss the optimum diet in the context
of notions about male and female bodies that we do not share today. Their ideas
clearly illustrate how even scientific notions, like gender roles, are socially
constructed.
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- As you read this text, look for the following:
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- Shaw presents several Greco-Roman philosophers' and
doctors' views of ethics and askesis, or asceticism. For each of the major authors,
know how the two are related.
- For Galen (pictured above), what was the relationship
of diet and sexual desire?
- What were some of the common models of
the woman's body?
- What is Laqueur's notion of the "one-sex body,"
and how is it apparent in ancient medical models of men's and women's bodies?
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- Assigned Readings
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- Secondary: Burden of the Flesh 27-78; online class prep
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- Slides for Lecture
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- Further Reading
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- Dean-Jones, Lesley. Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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- Soranus. Soranus' Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
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- Sources
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- Photographs: "Galen of Pergamum," from Scott Nevin's Memorial [Blog] (24 April 2015), online, https://scottnevinssuicide.wordpress.com/category/galen-of-pergamum/, accessed 8 January 2017.
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- Dumbarton Oaks, "St. Mary of Egypt, 12th-century fresco from
the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa in Asinou, Cyprus," cover illustration
from Alice-Mary Talbot, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in
English Translation (Byzantine Saints' Lives in Translation; Washington, D.C.:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996).
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