Anorexia Mirabilis
Gwyneth Henke In 1395, a woman in the Netherlands, Lidwina, became ill with a horrible fever. Lidwina had been born into a wealthy family and had suffered a series of illnesses as a teenager. When she was fifteen, she slipped on ice and became paralyzed. The fever appeared after this, as well as convulsive vomiting and the putrification of her flesh. She bled from every orifice, and then she stopped eating. Documents record how, in starvation, her body began to shed itself; pieces of bone, skin, and intestines fell away and emitted a sweet scent.1 Lidwina was not alone. When it came to pain, medieval women were experts: stigmata, elongation of the body, hair shirts, thorn girdles, waist cords. One in six women performed selfflagellation—a rate two times that of men. Most cases of self-injury appeared among women. In particular, self-starvation became so widespread that more nuns practiced it than didn’t; from the 13th to the 17th centuries, between 37 and 61 percent of female saints were starving themselves.2 Eventually, a new name developed for them: the fasting saints. Most monastic orders at the time practiced fasts, but tightly controlled: smaller meals, a lack of meat. The fasting nuns rejected 1. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women.” Representations 11 (Summer, 1985): pp. 1-25. 2. Polinska, Wioleta. “Bodies under Siege: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation among Women.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 68, no. 3, 2000, pp. 569–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465890. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.