Caroline Walker Bynum

Overview

Caroline Walker Bynum is a historian of medieval Christianity whose work on food, embodiment, and women’s religious practice provides the episode’s main scholarly framework for interpreting Catherine of Siena.

Current Profile

In 356: The Blood-Drinking Bride of Christ, Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast helps explain why Catherine’s fasting cannot be understood through a modern eating-disorder label alone. Food scarcity, women’s work in preparing and distributing food, Eucharistic presence, bodily suffering, and images of Christ’s humanity made eating and refusal religious languages with specific medieval meanings.

Key Characteristics

• Historian used to contextualize medieval women’s food practices.
• Connects embodiment and gender to Christian devotion.
• Supports interpretation without eliminating medical or skeptical questions.
• Reads Catherine’s blood imagery as identification with Christ’s humanity.

Evidence

• Food and gender frame: 356: The Blood-Drinking Bride of Christ cites Holy Feast and Holy Fast when explaining scarcity, domestic food roles, fasting, and Eucharistic meaning.
• Blood interpretation: 356: The Blood-Drinking Bride of Christ attributes to Bynum the reading of Catherine’s craving for blood as identification with Christ’s humanity.

Qualifications

The source note provides a podcast-level summary of selected ideas rather than a full account of Bynum’s scholarship or later debate. The episode’s paraphrases should not be treated as substitutes for her published arguments.

What Changed

• Created a source-bounded profile of the scholarly frame used in the episode.

Relationships

• Catherine of Siena - principal case interpreted through food, body, suffering, and gender.
• Medieval Female Ascetic Authority - concept supported by Bynum’s contextual approach.
• Religious Experience Medicalization Boundary - interpretive boundary her historical framing helps maintain.