Thanks to my efforts to drop the “quarantine fifteen” (a ketogenic diet and regular exercise have been working rather well), body weight has been much on my mind lately. It’s been in the news, too: COVID-19 is apparently more deadly in those suffering from obesity-related illnesses such as type II diabetes and hypertension. But as anyone who’s struggled with their body size can tell you, this is only more of the usual: dieting is a $72 billion per year business in the United States, and everyone from physicians to perfect strangers is wont to offer unsolicited advice on your appearance. But have social attitudes remained constant over time? What did medieval people, living in a preindustrial time of food scarcity, think about fatness and thinness?
The answer is surprisingly nuanced. As much as we may want to make excess pudginess a “malady of modernity” brought on by an excess of sugar and sedentary lifestyles, there were overweight and, yes, even obese people in the Middle Ages. So, too, was there a difference of opinion on body fat from religious, medical, and aesthetic perspectives. The disagreement is reflected in modern literature on medieval bodies. The French historian Georges Vigarello, in his Les métamorphoses du gras, looks at the Middle Ages as a repository for positive attitudes about fat (quite unlike modern France), which acquired negative connotations as time went on. Christopher Forth, in his Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, shows how fat bodies have always been read in a variety of ways. One author shows a progression from medieval alterity to modern attitudes; for the other, fat is a polyvalent and ambiguous symbol.
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To be sure, fatness could often be seen as ugly, effeminate, stupid, slothful, and sinful, while thinness was associated with holiness and muscular, lean body was considered manly and martial. However, only listening to the medieval fat-shamers is oversimplifying matters: body fat could also be seen as a sign of prosperity, social status, success, and even rulership. Furthermore, it was often men who were often going to great lengths to acquire a svelte body, while what we might consider extra weight today could be seen as beautiful on a woman.
Wedding at Cana by Giotto
Knightly Bodies
First, the negative: While heroes of high medieval romance such as Ogier the Dane are often as heroic as trenchermen as they are fighting against Saracens, medieval Europeans inherited from classical antiquity, and in particular from the Roman writer Vegetius, an idea that military life and overweight are incompatible. To be big was not necessarily to be fat. A member of the knightly class was supposed to be both able to afford exorbitant amounts of food and to exercise enough self-restraint and largesse (generosity) to not eat it all himself. For instance, writers such as the twelfth-century Andreas Capellanus distinguished between the unbeautiful bodies of peasants (particularly male peasants) and those of nobles. Similarly, the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century mystic and writer on chivalry Ramon Llull said that anyone too fat was not fit to become a knight.
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This tendency became particularly pronounced in the fourteenth century, when both literature and men’s fashion reflected the idea of a powerful but athletic build. Knights were supposed to be athletes, and martial fashion reflected this. The titular verdant cavalier in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is broad of chest and slender of waist, and Chaucer’s Sir Thopas with his “sydes smale” (slender waist) goes riding over hill and dale. Surviving clothing from the period, such as the pourpoint of Charles de Blois kept in the Musee Historique des Tissus in Lyon (c. 1360s) is constructed to give the impression of a broad chest and shoulders and a tiny waist. In his Book of Chivalry, written about 1350, Charles de Blois’ elder contemporary Geoffroi de Charny complained of men who didn’t fit into the day’s fashions squeezing themselves into shape like so many mid-career William Shatners:
What is more, it is not enough for them to be as God made them; they are not content with themselves as they are, but they gird themselves up so and so rein themselves in round the middle of the body that they seek to deny the existence of the stomachs which God has given them: they want to pretend that they have not and never has given them: they want to pretend that they have not and never have had one and everyone knows the opposite is true. And one has seen many of those thus constructed who have to take off their armor in a great hurry, for they could no longer bear to wear their equipment; and there are others who have been quickly seized, for they could not do what they should have done because they were handicapped by being this constricted; and many have died inside their armor for the same reason, that they could put up little defense. And even without their armor they are so constructed and strapped up that they cannot undertake anything, for they cannot bend down… nor engage in any other sports requiring strength or agility; indeed, they can hardly sit down…
At the end of the Middle Ages, humanism was a philosophy of moderation in all things, including eating. Castiglione’s courtier is supposed to be a light, limber athlete, and his contemporary Pietro Monte gives advice on how to know who will become fat later in life in his Collectanea, an omnibus of martial knowledge. I’ll say from personal experience that trying to fit into your armor when you’ve put on a few pounds is no fun.
However, we can find ambiguity about fatness even in the courtly tradition. Andreas Capellanus has a woman in one of his dialogues criticize a man with fat thighs as being unbeautiful—to which the man responds that fat legs are not incompatible with virtue. By 1456, Antoine de la Salle’s cynical romance Le Petit Jehan de Saintré ends by the titular hero’s beautiful mistress/patroness being seduced by a fat, unchivalrous abbot out of a fabliau. So, too with foreign lands—the fictionalized John of Mandeville tells of how foreigners ate inordinate amounts, and the romancier Rusticello has Marco Polo report on the prodigious appetites of the mighty men of Zanzibar.
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Rulers of Substance
Chief amongst the fighting class were kings and other high nobility, in whom all these qualities were exaggerated. The Carolingians saw prodigious eating (and a laden table) as a sign of rulership—Liutprand of Cremona reported much later that Duke Guido of Spoleto was rejected for the throne of France because he ate too little. (Of course, Liutprand was not necessarily saying this to be complementary of the Franks!) While advice manuals advised rulers to temper their appetites, as the ability to rule self and state were intertwined.
On the counter side, the ability to eat as much as one wished combined with the leisure to be indolent led to some notably large monarchs. We have no shortage of monarchs who were literally the “big men”—and who were criticized for it. Charlemagne himself was noted by his biographer Einhard as having quite a gut; his descendent Charles the Fat got his appellation for his slothfulness in defending France; William the Conqueror’s body could not fit in his sarcophagus; and Louis VI of France’s biographer praised him for going to war despite his enormous girth. At the very end of the Middle Ages, Henry VIII kept eating like the athlete he had been in his younger days after a jousting injury sidelined him in his mid-40s. While Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry makes the most of the ruler’s perhaps 400-pound weight (estimating from the dimensions of his armor) by presenting his girth as power, by the end of his life, he had to be carried around on a litter. Fatness was this attribute of both peasants and kings.
Portly Peasants
There was no shortage of defenses of largeness, or even positive depictions, in the less well-born. Peasants rarely got enough to eat, so positive associations between fat and plenty—“fat” soil, the “fat” of the land, and the pre-Lenten “fat Tuesday” feast—are not surprising. Chaucer’s Franklin’s plentiful and dainty table is a symbol of his prosperity and his desire for upward mobility, and his Miller, who is an expert at defrauding his customers by keeping a finger on the scales, is “full big of brawn and also of bones.”
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Fat clergy are stock figures in tales told by commoners such as French fabliaux, stories about earthly pleasures such as sex and food. Clerics are jolly, plump, and decadent everywhere from the anonymous thirteenth-century La Bourgeoise d’Orléans to Chaucer’s fat monk in the fourteenth century to the postmedieval image of Friar Tuck in the tales of Robin Hood. Their lifestyles were enviable to be sure, but such depictions can be seen as a bit of anticlericism criticizing their prosperity and ease in a time when many did not have enough to eat. Things are not always one or the other: We may admire billionaires’ wealth even as we wish to redistribute it. In the eyes of commoners, friars got fat off the hard work of others—but their largeness was something to aspire to.
Medical Opinions
Medicine and pseudo-medical writings inherited from the Galenic tradition tended to be value-neutral. To be sure, fatness could be associated with moral failing in “popular” manuals. The section on physiognomy that concludes Secretum Secretorum, supposedly written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great but probably composed in Arabic in the tenth century and translated into Latin in the twelfth, has little good to say about people (which is to say men) with “fat” body parts. On the other hand, Forth holds that the physicians’ manuals tended to not see body fat as a problem unless it became excessive to the point of being unhealthy or disfiguring.
My personal favorite medical case study of fatness in the Middle Ages is that of the tenth-century King Sancho I of Leon, who was deposed from his throne because his morbid obesity kept him from riding a horse, wielding his sword, bedding his wife, or even walking. Reportedly, he weighed up to 530 pounds and was wont to eat seven meals a day, chiefly composed of rich meat dishes.
Sancho depicted in Liber Genealogiae Regum Hispaniae, from the 15th century
Sancho fled to Navarre, the kingdom ruled by his grandmother, Toda. Desperate for a solution, Toda asked Abd-al-Rahman, the Sultan of Cordova, for aid, and Abd-al-Rahman sent none other than his famed Jewish physician and chief advisor, Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Hasdai, a master diplomat, insisted that Sancho be brought to Cordoba for treatment—where, away from his court, Hasdai was able to sew the king’s lips shut and keep him on a concoction of herbs and opium while also subjecting his shrinking flesh to a vigorous massage.
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The extreme measures worked, Sancho returned to Navarre on horseback and, with the Caliph’s aid, retook his throne in 960. Unfortunately, while the diplomatic alliance between Cordova and the Christian kingdom held for a while, Sancho reneged on the pledge of ten border castles he had made to Abd-al-Rahman after the latter died unexpectedly and war between Christian and Muslim Spain continued.
Women’s Bodies
What about women, and what were Christian attitudes towards fatness? I’ve put these two significant categories last both because women’s bodies are so morally policed in our own society, and because some of our best sources on what medieval women themselves thought—especially explored by Caroline Walker Bynum in her classic Holy Feast and Holy Fast—were religious.
First, plumpness was by no means considered a bad thing in medieval women. Vigarello, in his Metamorphoses of Fat, sees largeness as the sine qua non of female beauty in early medieval romances. The late fourteenth-century Goodman of Paris says that a horse ought to have four qualities also found in comely maidens: a handsome mane, beautiful chest, fine loins, and large buttocks.
On the other hand, Mary, the teenage sister of Henry VIII, was noted by an Italian emissary on her arrival in France to marry King Louis XII as “slight, rather than defective from corpulence.” For women in religious life, though, control over food and extreme fasting—as Bynum explores in Holy Feast and Holy Fast—was a sign of sanctity. So, too, was women’s religious feeling explored in a gendered way by feeding others.
Mary Tudor, Princess of England (1496-1533), second daughter of King Henry VII
Medical discourses on women’s bodies considered mainly the aspects of health and reproduction. The twelfth-century medical handbook known as TheTrotula, for instance, considers the effects of body weight on the age of menopause (35 in moderately fat women), or on choosing a wet nurse (she should be large-breasted and a little fat). For weight loss in both men and women, the author advises hot baths, steam baths, and even buried in sand to induce sweating. The resulting dehydration would, of course, be only a temporary loss of weight, and not a particularly healthy one in the sense we understand it today. Of course, The Trotula also specifies that a woman should also not be too thin, since this would likewise have a deleterious effect on fertility.
Fatness, Thinness, and Holiness
One would think that Christian asceticism would militate against fatness, and indeed, thinness could be holy. Religious fasting was mandatory for all Christians, and penance could include a restricted diet. For instance, the sixth-century Irish Penitential of Finnian has anyone considering murder or fornication abstain from alcohol and meat for a year. A cleric who strikes another is put on bread and water for a year, and actually fornicating earned bread and water for two years.
In the fourteenth century, Dante puts gluttons in the third circle of hell, and Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford’s thinness mirrors his love of books over worldly goods. However, this was not necessarily mirrored by reality: The foremost medieval scholar-saint, Thomas Aquinas, the “dumb ox,” was quite obese and suffered from associated comorbidities such as dropsy (that is, a swelling caused by insufficient lymphatic drainage, or, as it’s called today, edema).
Conversely, the extreme thinness of medieval ascetic women indicated a turn away from the pleasures of the flesh—not just, food, but also sex. Since, as medieval people knew, women below a certain body fat percentage often have problems with fertility, abstention from food could mark a woman’s body as not reproductively fit, that is, not that of a wife and mother. In this way, a woman’s fasting could be a way in which she turned away from male control over their bodies. Unlike today, medieval “dieting” (which was, of course, nothing of the sort) was an attempt to be less sexually appealing.
In religious art, saints and other heavenly figures are similarly portrayed as tall and thin—a visual rhetoric carried through today by using tall and thin models to display fashionable clothes, elevating consumption to the level of worship. (Slightly curvier women, who read as more “voluptuous” and “earthy,” are employed as swimwear or lingerie models… though they still tend to be much taller and thinner than the average American woman.) One of the few exceptions to the uniform tallness and thinness of medieval art is the fat wine steward in Giotto’s early fourteenth-century “Wedding at Cana,” whose fatness echoes his stubborn doubts about the miracle. Likewise, Jews were often depicted as fat as symbols of their spiritual sloth.
Portrait of Alessandro del Borro, by Charles Mellin (1597–1649)
By the turn of the sixteenth century, Albrecht Dürer was showing how to portray people of different classes by physiognomy—peasants were stouter—and Martin Luther was joking that his middle-aged girth would provide a feast for the grave-worms. By the seventeenth century, painters such as Peter Paul Rubens or Charles Mellin, in his famous portrait of the hefty Italian general Alessandro dal Borro, were unapologetically portraying body fat. On the other hand, Rubens’ male nudes are rather fit and athletic, underscoring a dichotomy between females as passive and weak and males as active and strong.
Conclusions
As some of us may strive against it, and others may shame it, normal human variations of body weight have a long history. Our bodies naturally want to put on weight, and they want to keep that excess weight on. However, bodies are mediated through the social. Fatness was read in various ways by medieval people—perhaps as unmartial and unmanly for those who had no problem in obtaining food, but for the lower classes, it was something enviable and aspirational. For women, a certain amount of fatness could indicate fertility, just as a lack of it could indicate sanctity and a withdrawal from the world. But, no matter how it was read, polyvalent medieval attitudes about fatness and thinness were not our own.
Ken Mondschein is a history professor at UMass-Mt. Ida College, Anna Maria College, and Boston University, as well as a fencing master and jouster. Click here to visit his website.
By Ken Mondschein
Thanks to my efforts to drop the “quarantine fifteen” (a ketogenic diet and regular exercise have been working rather well), body weight has been much on my mind lately. It’s been in the news, too: COVID-19 is apparently more deadly in those suffering from obesity-related illnesses such as type II diabetes and hypertension. But as anyone who’s struggled with their body size can tell you, this is only more of the usual: dieting is a $72 billion per year business in the United States, and everyone from physicians to perfect strangers is wont to offer unsolicited advice on your appearance. But have social attitudes remained constant over time? What did medieval people, living in a preindustrial time of food scarcity, think about fatness and thinness?
The answer is surprisingly nuanced. As much as we may want to make excess pudginess a “malady of modernity” brought on by an excess of sugar and sedentary lifestyles, there were overweight and, yes, even obese people in the Middle Ages. So, too, was there a difference of opinion on body fat from religious, medical, and aesthetic perspectives. The disagreement is reflected in modern literature on medieval bodies. The French historian Georges Vigarello, in his Les métamorphoses du gras, looks at the Middle Ages as a repository for positive attitudes about fat (quite unlike modern France), which acquired negative connotations as time went on. Christopher Forth, in his Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life, shows how fat bodies have always been read in a variety of ways. One author shows a progression from medieval alterity to modern attitudes; for the other, fat is a polyvalent and ambiguous symbol.
To be sure, fatness could often be seen as ugly, effeminate, stupid, slothful, and sinful, while thinness was associated with holiness and muscular, lean body was considered manly and martial. However, only listening to the medieval fat-shamers is oversimplifying matters: body fat could also be seen as a sign of prosperity, social status, success, and even rulership. Furthermore, it was often men who were often going to great lengths to acquire a svelte body, while what we might consider extra weight today could be seen as beautiful on a woman.
Knightly Bodies
First, the negative: While heroes of high medieval romance such as Ogier the Dane are often as heroic as trenchermen as they are fighting against Saracens, medieval Europeans inherited from classical antiquity, and in particular from the Roman writer Vegetius, an idea that military life and overweight are incompatible. To be big was not necessarily to be fat. A member of the knightly class was supposed to be both able to afford exorbitant amounts of food and to exercise enough self-restraint and largesse (generosity) to not eat it all himself. For instance, writers such as the twelfth-century Andreas Capellanus distinguished between the unbeautiful bodies of peasants (particularly male peasants) and those of nobles. Similarly, the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century mystic and writer on chivalry Ramon Llull said that anyone too fat was not fit to become a knight.
This tendency became particularly pronounced in the fourteenth century, when both literature and men’s fashion reflected the idea of a powerful but athletic build. Knights were supposed to be athletes, and martial fashion reflected this. The titular verdant cavalier in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is broad of chest and slender of waist, and Chaucer’s Sir Thopas with his “sydes smale” (slender waist) goes riding over hill and dale. Surviving clothing from the period, such as the pourpoint of Charles de Blois kept in the Musee Historique des Tissus in Lyon (c. 1360s) is constructed to give the impression of a broad chest and shoulders and a tiny waist. In his Book of Chivalry, written about 1350, Charles de Blois’ elder contemporary Geoffroi de Charny complained of men who didn’t fit into the day’s fashions squeezing themselves into shape like so many mid-career William Shatners:
What is more, it is not enough for them to be as God made them; they are not content with themselves as they are, but they gird themselves up so and so rein themselves in round the middle of the body that they seek to deny the existence of the stomachs which God has given them: they want to pretend that they have not and never has given them: they want to pretend that they have not and never have had one and everyone knows the opposite is true. And one has seen many of those thus constructed who have to take off their armor in a great hurry, for they could no longer bear to wear their equipment; and there are others who have been quickly seized, for they could not do what they should have done because they were handicapped by being this constricted; and many have died inside their armor for the same reason, that they could put up little defense. And even without their armor they are so constructed and strapped up that they cannot undertake anything, for they cannot bend down… nor engage in any other sports requiring strength or agility; indeed, they can hardly sit down…
At the end of the Middle Ages, humanism was a philosophy of moderation in all things, including eating. Castiglione’s courtier is supposed to be a light, limber athlete, and his contemporary Pietro Monte gives advice on how to know who will become fat later in life in his Collectanea, an omnibus of martial knowledge. I’ll say from personal experience that trying to fit into your armor when you’ve put on a few pounds is no fun.
However, we can find ambiguity about fatness even in the courtly tradition. Andreas Capellanus has a woman in one of his dialogues criticize a man with fat thighs as being unbeautiful—to which the man responds that fat legs are not incompatible with virtue. By 1456, Antoine de la Salle’s cynical romance Le Petit Jehan de Saintré ends by the titular hero’s beautiful mistress/patroness being seduced by a fat, unchivalrous abbot out of a fabliau. So, too with foreign lands—the fictionalized John of Mandeville tells of how foreigners ate inordinate amounts, and the romancier Rusticello has Marco Polo report on the prodigious appetites of the mighty men of Zanzibar.
Rulers of Substance
Chief amongst the fighting class were kings and other high nobility, in whom all these qualities were exaggerated. The Carolingians saw prodigious eating (and a laden table) as a sign of rulership—Liutprand of Cremona reported much later that Duke Guido of Spoleto was rejected for the throne of France because he ate too little. (Of course, Liutprand was not necessarily saying this to be complementary of the Franks!) While advice manuals advised rulers to temper their appetites, as the ability to rule self and state were intertwined.
On the counter side, the ability to eat as much as one wished combined with the leisure to be indolent led to some notably large monarchs. We have no shortage of monarchs who were literally the “big men”—and who were criticized for it. Charlemagne himself was noted by his biographer Einhard as having quite a gut; his descendent Charles the Fat got his appellation for his slothfulness in defending France; William the Conqueror’s body could not fit in his sarcophagus; and Louis VI of France’s biographer praised him for going to war despite his enormous girth. At the very end of the Middle Ages, Henry VIII kept eating like the athlete he had been in his younger days after a jousting injury sidelined him in his mid-40s. While Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry makes the most of the ruler’s perhaps 400-pound weight (estimating from the dimensions of his armor) by presenting his girth as power, by the end of his life, he had to be carried around on a litter. Fatness was this attribute of both peasants and kings.
Portly Peasants
There was no shortage of defenses of largeness, or even positive depictions, in the less well-born. Peasants rarely got enough to eat, so positive associations between fat and plenty—“fat” soil, the “fat” of the land, and the pre-Lenten “fat Tuesday” feast—are not surprising. Chaucer’s Franklin’s plentiful and dainty table is a symbol of his prosperity and his desire for upward mobility, and his Miller, who is an expert at defrauding his customers by keeping a finger on the scales, is “full big of brawn and also of bones.”
Fat clergy are stock figures in tales told by commoners such as French fabliaux, stories about earthly pleasures such as sex and food. Clerics are jolly, plump, and decadent everywhere from the anonymous thirteenth-century La Bourgeoise d’Orléans to Chaucer’s fat monk in the fourteenth century to the postmedieval image of Friar Tuck in the tales of Robin Hood. Their lifestyles were enviable to be sure, but such depictions can be seen as a bit of anticlericism criticizing their prosperity and ease in a time when many did not have enough to eat. Things are not always one or the other: We may admire billionaires’ wealth even as we wish to redistribute it. In the eyes of commoners, friars got fat off the hard work of others—but their largeness was something to aspire to.
Medical Opinions
Medicine and pseudo-medical writings inherited from the Galenic tradition tended to be value-neutral. To be sure, fatness could be associated with moral failing in “popular” manuals. The section on physiognomy that concludes Secretum Secretorum, supposedly written by Aristotle for Alexander the Great but probably composed in Arabic in the tenth century and translated into Latin in the twelfth, has little good to say about people (which is to say men) with “fat” body parts. On the other hand, Forth holds that the physicians’ manuals tended to not see body fat as a problem unless it became excessive to the point of being unhealthy or disfiguring.
My personal favorite medical case study of fatness in the Middle Ages is that of the tenth-century King Sancho I of Leon, who was deposed from his throne because his morbid obesity kept him from riding a horse, wielding his sword, bedding his wife, or even walking. Reportedly, he weighed up to 530 pounds and was wont to eat seven meals a day, chiefly composed of rich meat dishes.
Sancho fled to Navarre, the kingdom ruled by his grandmother, Toda. Desperate for a solution, Toda asked Abd-al-Rahman, the Sultan of Cordova, for aid, and Abd-al-Rahman sent none other than his famed Jewish physician and chief advisor, Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Hasdai, a master diplomat, insisted that Sancho be brought to Cordoba for treatment—where, away from his court, Hasdai was able to sew the king’s lips shut and keep him on a concoction of herbs and opium while also subjecting his shrinking flesh to a vigorous massage.
The extreme measures worked, Sancho returned to Navarre on horseback and, with the Caliph’s aid, retook his throne in 960. Unfortunately, while the diplomatic alliance between Cordova and the Christian kingdom held for a while, Sancho reneged on the pledge of ten border castles he had made to Abd-al-Rahman after the latter died unexpectedly and war between Christian and Muslim Spain continued.
Women’s Bodies
What about women, and what were Christian attitudes towards fatness? I’ve put these two significant categories last both because women’s bodies are so morally policed in our own society, and because some of our best sources on what medieval women themselves thought—especially explored by Caroline Walker Bynum in her classic Holy Feast and Holy Fast—were religious.
First, plumpness was by no means considered a bad thing in medieval women. Vigarello, in his Metamorphoses of Fat, sees largeness as the sine qua non of female beauty in early medieval romances. The late fourteenth-century Goodman of Paris says that a horse ought to have four qualities also found in comely maidens: a handsome mane, beautiful chest, fine loins, and large buttocks.
On the other hand, Mary, the teenage sister of Henry VIII, was noted by an Italian emissary on her arrival in France to marry King Louis XII as “slight, rather than defective from corpulence.” For women in religious life, though, control over food and extreme fasting—as Bynum explores in Holy Feast and Holy Fast—was a sign of sanctity. So, too, was women’s religious feeling explored in a gendered way by feeding others.
Medical discourses on women’s bodies considered mainly the aspects of health and reproduction. The twelfth-century medical handbook known as The Trotula, for instance, considers the effects of body weight on the age of menopause (35 in moderately fat women), or on choosing a wet nurse (she should be large-breasted and a little fat). For weight loss in both men and women, the author advises hot baths, steam baths, and even buried in sand to induce sweating. The resulting dehydration would, of course, be only a temporary loss of weight, and not a particularly healthy one in the sense we understand it today. Of course, The Trotula also specifies that a woman should also not be too thin, since this would likewise have a deleterious effect on fertility.
Fatness, Thinness, and Holiness
One would think that Christian asceticism would militate against fatness, and indeed, thinness could be holy. Religious fasting was mandatory for all Christians, and penance could include a restricted diet. For instance, the sixth-century Irish Penitential of Finnian has anyone considering murder or fornication abstain from alcohol and meat for a year. A cleric who strikes another is put on bread and water for a year, and actually fornicating earned bread and water for two years.
In the fourteenth century, Dante puts gluttons in the third circle of hell, and Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford’s thinness mirrors his love of books over worldly goods. However, this was not necessarily mirrored by reality: The foremost medieval scholar-saint, Thomas Aquinas, the “dumb ox,” was quite obese and suffered from associated comorbidities such as dropsy (that is, a swelling caused by insufficient lymphatic drainage, or, as it’s called today, edema).
Conversely, the extreme thinness of medieval ascetic women indicated a turn away from the pleasures of the flesh—not just, food, but also sex. Since, as medieval people knew, women below a certain body fat percentage often have problems with fertility, abstention from food could mark a woman’s body as not reproductively fit, that is, not that of a wife and mother. In this way, a woman’s fasting could be a way in which she turned away from male control over their bodies. Unlike today, medieval “dieting” (which was, of course, nothing of the sort) was an attempt to be less sexually appealing.
In religious art, saints and other heavenly figures are similarly portrayed as tall and thin—a visual rhetoric carried through today by using tall and thin models to display fashionable clothes, elevating consumption to the level of worship. (Slightly curvier women, who read as more “voluptuous” and “earthy,” are employed as swimwear or lingerie models… though they still tend to be much taller and thinner than the average American woman.) One of the few exceptions to the uniform tallness and thinness of medieval art is the fat wine steward in Giotto’s early fourteenth-century “Wedding at Cana,” whose fatness echoes his stubborn doubts about the miracle. Likewise, Jews were often depicted as fat as symbols of their spiritual sloth.
By the turn of the sixteenth century, Albrecht Dürer was showing how to portray people of different classes by physiognomy—peasants were stouter—and Martin Luther was joking that his middle-aged girth would provide a feast for the grave-worms. By the seventeenth century, painters such as Peter Paul Rubens or Charles Mellin, in his famous portrait of the hefty Italian general Alessandro dal Borro, were unapologetically portraying body fat. On the other hand, Rubens’ male nudes are rather fit and athletic, underscoring a dichotomy between females as passive and weak and males as active and strong.
Conclusions
Ken Mondschein is a history professor at UMass-Mt. Ida College, Anna Maria College, and Boston University, as well as a fencing master and jouster. Click here to visit his website.
Click here to read more from Ken
Top Image: King Henry VIII of England, by Hans Holbein
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