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dwellordream · 3 years ago

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“…To be sure, fatness could often 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.

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.

…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.

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.

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 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.

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.

…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 burying 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.

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 of 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 to day 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 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’s, 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 female as passive and weak and male as active and strong.

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, “Fatness and Thinness in the Middle Ages.”

#ken mondschein #beauty #medieval #history

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