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Feasting not fasting: Men's devotion to the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2013

P.H. Cullum
Affiliation:
University of Huddersfield
P. H. Cullum
Affiliation:
Head of History at the University of Huddersfield
Katherine J. Lewis
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield
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Summary

At the time of writing it is twenty-five years since Caroline Walker Bynum published Holy feast, holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women; it has remained highly influential in the field of lay piety, and a major landmark in the historiography that argues for a distinctive feminine piety in the Middle Ages. But in the absence of an exploration of male devotion, and particularly eucharistic devotion or devotion to the person of Christ, the extent to which that can be deined as a distinctively feminine form of piety, as opposed to a form of piety which was distinctively medieval, will remain unclear. This essay will explore both the historiographical significance of the book and also address evidence of men's (both lay and clerical) devotion to the Eucharist and the body of Christ. One of the areas of medieval masculinity which has received relatively little attention is the nature or extent of specifically masculine forms of piety. While female and feminine piety has received extensive attention over the last thirty years, and there has also been very extensive treatment of the forms of an ungendered lay piety, there has been very little attention to men's experience as men. Very often that piety has been simply normalised or universalised. It may, of course, be that that is appropriate, and that there was no specifically masculine piety in the later Middle Ages, in which case we would also need to consider whether there was a specifically feminine form of piety, but unless we ask the question, we will not discover the answer.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

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