This volume's editors present four works written in French concerning the so-called quarrel of the abstinent one, that is, the question of how long human beings can live without ingesting food. The four texts are framed by a substantial introduction and a glossary, an appendix, indexes, and several bibliographies on the question of fasting. This question met with renewed interest in 1566 from the best known of the quarrel's four participants, Laurent Joubert, whose treatise Second Paradoxe the editors offer based on one of the last editions of the Erreurs populaires (1601), of which it is a part.

The four medical practitioners are then introduced—Laurent Joubert (1529–83), Israël Harvet (active 1597–1605), François Citois (1572–1652), and Béroalde de Verville (1556–1626)—followed by the reasons for the quarrel, which arose because Harvet thought it worthwhile to answer Joubert in writing, thirty years after the initial publication of the Second Paradoxe. Not long afterward in 1601, Citois was confronted with the case of an adolescent girl who, as he was told, survived an illness in 1599 and had not eaten since. He published his observations in Latin and French, which provoked Harvet to issue a refutation in 1602 that elicited an immediate rebuttal by Citois. This emerging medical quarrel aroused the interest of Béroalde de Verville, who mentions it in Le palais des curieux (1612) and in the better-known Le Moyen de parvenir (1616). The editors present the four texts with a mini-analysis of each, emphasizing what they may have in common and what might strike the contemporary reader as unusual.

Then follows a short survey of the history of fasting that is fruitfully contextualized with the fashionable genre of the ars moriendi and Luigi Cornaro's Trattato della vita sobria (1558) recommending moderation. The editors then discuss the secularization of fasting in the sixteenth century, which caused a proliferation of notable cases across Europe: they mostly featured adolescent girls, a fact that, as the editors plausibly show, produces the dual image of the female human being as medical aberration and of woman as wonder of nature (“prodige de la nature,” 42). This logically leads to remarks on the question of gender. Some notes on editorial practices and which editions were used round out the introduction. The four texts then follow in chronological order, all of them thoroughly footnoted. A glossary of terms used by the four writers, an appendix of texts regarding fasting, and several bibliographies complete the volume.

For this reader, Harvet's dedication to Marie du Fou, Dame de Mareuil, is of particular interest, as it encourages a parallel reading of the author's Discours and Michel de Montaigne's essays, in particular the one on children's education. Moreover, both Joubert and Harvet use the literary genre of the paradox, which the former bases on a syllogism that is then dismantled by Harvet. The overall erudition of all four texts is remarkable and reflects the general public's interest in health issues; only Verville cannot refrain from eroticizing his account, and the editors underline the way he slants his narration of the case.

This volume is suitable for scholars of sixteenth-century literature and of medical texts written in French and Latin. It also speaks to readers of essays, observations, and exempla, as well as to scholars of the medical humanities in general. Moreover, as the editors indicate in their introduction, the volume fills a gap in adding cases from the Renaissance to the medieval anorexic saints discussed in Rudolf M. Bell's Holy Anorexia (1985). The volume potentially would also speak to instructors in the medical humanities who might pair it with Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1997) or with discussions surrounding hunger and society's recurring interest in exploring how long we can survive without food.