Catherine, you've barely *touched* your millet gruel or your turnips!

TMF,TML managed to be all serious for once and posted a very cool link to an essay/book review by Hilary Mantel.

Thérèse had been the adored baby of her family, instructed every day by two elder sisters who proceeded her into the Carmelite convent in Lisieux. Gemma had to beg for instruction. If she got high marks in class, a teacher rewarded her by spending an hour explaining some aspect of Christ's passion and death. After one of these sessions, at the age of eight or nine, she fell into a high fever, the first of many such illnesses. Sometimes paralysed, sometimes corpse-like, sometimes bleeding and almost always starving, Gemma, in her ecstasies, talked intimately with Christ and with his mother.

Also related is this essay, The Blood and The Body of Christ: Food as the Signifier of Piety to Female Ascetics of the High Middle Ages:

Vainglory, demonic possession, and mental illness were common diagnoses of abnormal eating practices. Some considered extreme fasting a manifestation of hysteria or delusions...Masculine fear of feminine deception extended beyond false reports of prolonged fasting. Men suspected all aspects of a woman's control over food. They accused women of manipulating them by stealing their food, by poisoning their meals with such things as menstrual blood or semen, or by refusing to eat.

This is all stuff I was pretty obsessed with in college. In fact, these two books featured prominently in my thesis, which is currently under a stack of mid-90s porn in my basement.

Speaking of which, I'm purging (much like Catherine of Siena, you could say) and I've got an assload of stuff to get rid of. No 28-y-o woman needs a collection of ceramic teapots and turrines shaped like vegetables. Or 17 cut-glass bowls. Or THREE Ben Folds Five CDs.

Shut up.