Religion and Food

Abstract

l onging for food has always had different implications for men and women: associated with power and strength for men, it tends to have a worrying proximity to sexual pleasure for women. Showing an interesting parallelism throughout the cinquecento, italian humanists and teachers insisted on forbidding women music and gluttony. Food and music were both considered dangerous stimulants for the female senses, and every woman was encouraged to consider herself as a kind of food to be offered to the only human beings authorized to feel and satisfy desires: men and babies. Women could properly express themselves only inside monastic circles: the most prolific female composer of the seventeenth century was a nun, as was the first woman who wrote down recipes. Elaborate music and food became the means to maintain a lively relationship with the external world. moreover, nuns also escaped male control by using the opposite system of affirming themselves through fasting and mortifying the flesh. In memory of Francesca, who enjoyed cooking and loved music The relationship between food and Christianity has always been problematic and ambivalent, given the complicated dynamics respecting intentionality and the remission of sins. From reading Penitentials-books circulating between the sixth and eleventh centuries where penances were mathematically calculated , which spread after the crisis of public penitence, but before the diffusion of manuals for confessors (Muzzarelli 1994; 2003: 10-11; 2006: 66-7)-we can see that the remission of sins followed simple rules managed by the priest, 1 who assigned a precise number of days of taking only 'bread and water' as a penance. 2 1 Previously, public penitence had instead been managed by the bishop. The new custom arrived on the Continent from Ireland. 2 Bishop Burchard of Worms wrote the last Penitential; the Corrector sive medicus (Patrologia Latina 140, cols. 949-1014), which was the nineteenth book of his Decretum (discussed in Vogel 1974).