Saint Lupus (c. 383 – c. 478) was said to live only on barley bread. St. Gregory of Langres (c. 446-539) ate barley bread, which he hid under wheat bread, and drank water, carefully using a vessel of opaque glass to hide the fact from those around him. (Hiding one's holy actions is a theme found elsewhere as well.) St. Germanus of Paris (c. 496 – 576) not only lived on it, but is said to have ground and sifted the meal himself. Strictly speaking, though, he didn't just eat the bread – he put ashes on it. Only Gregory of Tours mentions St. Monegund (sixth c.) who, he says, also ate only barley bread and only drank a very little wine on feast days, and then with a great deal of water.
Saint
Bruno of Cologne (c. 1030-1101), who founded the Carthusian Order,
only ate (with rare exceptions) bran bread.
For
a secular reader, the first question in reading such accounts is: how
credible are they? After all, hagiographies typically include
accounts of frankly miraculous events (often connected with food).
Plus,
they have an obvious
agenda: to emphasize the sanctity of their subjects. What
is more, the repetition of certain claims makes it likely, at the
least, that a certain “contamination” occurred between stories,
so that what might arguably have been true of one figure is only
imitatively attached to another. (In
certain erudite circles, this has been known as a “meme” – before
colorful graphics with catchy messages took over that term on Facebook.)
At
the same time, these
stories are describing
people of fervent belief, people who, further,
had reason to lead by example, especially in those
early centuries when
Catholicism was not only fighting paganism but Arianism and other
heresies. Extreme
self-mortification was one way to model commitment for the less
certain. Modern
understanding of anorexia and bulimia only makes the image of willful
self-deprivation, driven by
single-minded belief, all
the more credible.
Too,
we must
be careful not to judge an "adequate diet" by familiar
standards. Could someone live on a diet of nothing but bread? Many in
later centuries did exactly that – if not by choice. The bread
historian Steven L. Kaplan writes: "The mass of the population
in eighteenth-century France derived the bulk of its calories from
bread and sundry grain products.... their lives turned on the urgent
need to wrench an adequate bread ration for themselves and their
family each day." Often, he adds
later, a bread soup
"constituted the entire meal”.
In
earlier times then, one did
not have to be a saint to live only on bread; many had no other
option. But, as Ina Lipkowitz points out, even those who did might
not have sought
much more:
Stories were told of saints and hermits who ate so sparingly that they became too weak to stand upright and of noble women who subsisted on barley bread and broth made of nothing but herbs steeped in water. Yet such diets, although certainly an exaggeration of the normal, were not qualitatively different from what would have been eaten on non-fast days. Even now, a Tuscan specialty is the soup known as acqua cotta, which literally means no more than "cooked water". In other words, your average Italian could have sat down to a meal of bread, oil, and vegetables, whether the day was a fast day or not.
In
fact, not all saints, even by hagiographic accounts, went to quite
such extremes. But one constant in most of these stories is the use
of barley bread. It is important to understand that, if for the Gauls
this had been common fare, for someone of Roman culture (which
suffused the
early Church), eating barley bread was the culinary equivalent of
wearing a hair shirt (even without adding ashes). The Romans had fed
barley bread to dogs and used it as punishment rations for soldiers.
Even the poor in early Medieval France often got bread,
albeit dark bread, made
from wheat or maslin (wheat and rye mixed).
Aside
from the inherently humble status of the grain, it also has a
technical inconvenience: it does not rise well. In fact, most modern
recipes for the bread incorporate some wheat flour. One of the few sites to
provide a recipe that does not says:
Because it’s wheat-free, this bread doesn’t contain the amount of gluten that a wheat-based loaf would, so therefore it doesn’t puff up and create a light, airy bread like wheat-based loaves. It’s more a cross between a flat-bread and a cracker, crunchy around the edges.To a modern eater, that may actually sound appetizing. But its charms were largely lost on those for whom "light, airy bread" was less ubiquitous than it is today. Those who could get the latter (including many later monks) certainly preferred it.
For more about the early Middle Ages
Feasting with the Franks
The First French Medieval Food
It
is understandable then if even the holiest figures often added
something to their
bread. St.
Winwaloe (c. 460 –
532)
himself
only ate coarse barley bread (with, yet again, ashes) but in the
Breton community he founded the monks could add to that boiled greens
and roots, or barley-meal mixed
with
greens. On Saturdays and Sundays, meals were, comparatively speaking,
downright luxurious: they were allowed cheese and shell-fish.
St.
Genevieve (c.
419/422 – 502/512)
accompanied
her barley bread with broad beans which had been cooked in a pot for
two or three weeks. If anything strains credibility here, it is the
latter detail, though the fact that a fire might have been kept burning
regularly in colder months means that this would have required little
more than leaving the pot on the fire and adding water from time to
time. More to the point is the question: what do three-week old beans
taste like? (Presumably a bland and slightly burned mush.)
One
thing that makes Genevieve's biography one of the more credible is the fact
that she is said, at fifty, to have modified this menu (though by
bishops'
orders) to one of barley bread, fish and milk. (Such acknowledgment
of a saint's physical needs is rare in these works and
strikes a realistic note.) Since
St. Genevieve also avoided "wine or anything else that could
inebriate", milk was one of her few alternatives. It is
interesting however that the passage implies that she had not (with
any regularity at least) been drinking it before. (Note too that this
is a rare specific mention of drinking milk in the early Middle
Ages.)
St. Clotilde (465-545), who, as the first queen of France supposedly worked for Clovis' conversion, only lived on bread, legumes and water after she gave up her royal life.
Among
the saintly, if not quite a saint, Gregory de Tour writes of a hermit named Hospicius who lived on bread and a few dates, and at Lent used “the roots of certain plants common in Egypt. He
first drank the broth in which they had cooked, and ate them later.”
St.
Radegund (ca.
520–586)
presents a more complex, because better documented, example.
Her biography is
particularly rich and all the more credible for having been written
by her friend
Venantius Fortunatus. It
begins with a very secular, and historical, drama – the destruction
of her homeland
by
the Franks. She was a child – apparently a beautiful child – at
the time and Theuderic and Clothar argued over who would take her as
a prize. Clothar, having won, appears to have raised her to be his
sixth queen (his
Catholicism was no obstacle to his polygamy, which Fortunatus did not find worthy of comment). If this may have seemed
marginally less creepy then than it does
now, the adult Radegund can be forgiven for not being enthusiastic about
the marriage – whatever her religious vocation. Though the unqueenly behavior that maddened her husband is credited to her devout fervor, it is tempting to see in it a stubborn protest as
well.
While she was still forced to play that role, she would "secretly"
eat beans or lentils at royal banquets. Sometimes she would even
(shockingly for a woman of her time) be completely absent from the
table; her irate husband was told only that she was "delayed,
busy about God's affairs."
Ultimately
she escaped the palace and
managed – largely by
force of will – to have bishop Médard make
her a nun. After this
she would still play down her austerities, hiding rye or barley bread
under the "flan” – which at this point was still a flat cake
(flado),
probably a honey cake. This trivial detail tells us that the bread
she hid
was almost certainly itself flat. This in fact would have been the
only bread she (or her servants) could secretly make, using the
hearth. Such foccacius
(“hearth-baked”, focus
meaning "hearth") bread was a standard one for those who
made bread at home and required nothing more than making dough and
putting it under the hot coals. (The hearth itself was then
little more than a fire, set off by bricks, stones or other means
from the rest of the room.)
At
Lent, Radegund would, perhaps in imitation of St. Germanus, grind her
own flour, though in her case to make
special consecrated breads (eulogies) to distribute
to others. For
the first Lent she spent in her cell, she did not even take bread
(except on Sundays)
but “roots
of herbs
or mallow greens without a drop of oil or salt for dressing.”
Though
Radegund was self-mortifying to a point that led Fortunatus and
others to fear for her health, she ate well
compared to other early saints.
Fortunatus says that once she was consecrated, she ate “nothing
but legumes and green vegetables”; it seems likely that she
continued to eat breads of the humbler grains as well. While this was
hardly extravagant, it was certainly a step beyond living on nothing
but bread (and even Radegund does not seem to have added ashes to the
latter). For her drink, writes Fortunatus, “she drank no drink but
honeyed water or perry and would touch no undiluted wine nor any
decoction of mead or fermented beer.”
Again, sweetened water, pear cider and diluted wine are modest enough as drinks, but
something more than St.
Clothilde's (plain) water or St.
Genevieve's (late in Life) milk. St.
Germanus only took wine at Easter and Christmas, and then diluted it
with vinegar to hide its taste. St. Winwaloe's
monks mainly drank only water, though it was “sometimes
boiled with a small decoction of certain wild herbs” (making
it effectively the kind of infusion later French drinkers would call
a tisane.)
On
the other hand, Radegund's self-deprivation
was all the more striking in that she actively enjoyed providing rich
delicacies to others. Fortunatus himself thanks her and her “sister”
Agnes on several occasions for various delicious foods they have sent
him. In his hagiography, he tells how she fed sick beggars with her
own hands, bringing water and napkins for each. She would even cut up
the food – meat and other delicacies she would never touch herself – and serve it. On
Sundays, she went so far as to provide them a drink of undiluted sweet wine.
For
a food historian, it is also interesting to note what she did not
eat. The fact that she used no salt or oil on her greens shows that
that was exceptional, and
that both were otherwise typically used on salads
(vinegar on the other hand was not included until later). Similarly,
it is noted that St. Germanus
ate “no wheat
bread,
no wine, no vinegar, no oil, nor
pulse,
and never used either
salt or other condiments.”
As minimal as it is, this list of negatives gives us an idea what
people of the time otherwise
considered
standard fare.
(Note that Germanus
rejected vinegar
here when it enhanced the meal; whereas he used it, we
are told just after,
to prevent wine from being pleasurable.)
More
strikingly,
one might think that a nun would have felt comfortable
eating
fish, yet Fortunatus tells us that Radegund
ate “not
fruit nor fish nor eggs.” St.
Winwaloe
did
not explicitly allow fish, which means it was probably forbidden,
strangely, to the same Breton monks who could eat shell-fish once a
week. The
life of St. Germanus does
not mention
it at
all in discussing his food.
In
a rare passage, St. Leutfred (d. 738), having been served fish, says,
“Everything of this sort, Leutfred's clergy does not eat.”
Much
later St.
Bruno explicitly
avoided fish, though he would accept it when it was given as alms.
St.
John of Matha (d.
1213), who founded the Order of the Holy Trinity in 1198, allowed
his monks a much broader range of foods – bread, pulse, herbs,
eggs, oil, milk, cheese, fruit – but they could only eat fish, like
meat, on feast days and then only if donated.
Generally,
fish was not necessarily forbidden – several tales tell of fish
being miraculously provided to saints – but did not have the
special status it later would have. Neither
saints nor those around them yet had any idea of a “fish day”.
If
much of this sounds extreme,
it may have appeared so to people of the time as well. It was one
thing for a saint to observe such limits. But as more communities
were established, similar
rigor was often demanded of a
founder's followers.
Gregory
of Tours tells the story of the hard-edged St. Lupicin of
Lauconne (or
of Jura; end
fourth c. – 480/493) arriving
at one
of the communities he had founded as the meal was being prepared:
There he saw a great preparation of various dishes, like a multitude of fish piled up, and he said in his heart: "it is not good that monks, whose life is solitary, use such unsuitable preparations." And at once he had prepared a large copper cauldron, and when the latter placed on the fire began to heat up, he put together all the prepared foods, the fish with the greens and the pulse, and everything intended for the monks' meals, then he said: "Now let the brothers satisfy themselves with this gruel, because they must not give themselves over to delights which can distract them from their divine occupations."
The
result? Twelve brothers at once left in a huff (iracundia inflammati; "inflamed with ire") and the saint's brother, Romain,
told him, "If it was to cause the dispersal of our brothers,
please Heaven that you had never gone to them!" If
events here ultimately worked out to Lupicin's satisfaction, over
time accounts like those cited earlier would become rarer and the rules
of monasteries more adapted to human frailty. But that is a subject
for another post.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Butler, The lives of the fathers, martyrs, and other principal saints, V2 1866
Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab anno Christi quingentesimo ..., V3 1896
Addis, “Carthusians”, A Catholic Dictionary: Containing Some Account of the Doctrine, Discipline … 1893
“Barley Bread”, The Healthy Eating Site
Kohler, “Étude critique sur le texte de la vie Latine de Sainte-Geneviève de Paris”, Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études, no 48 1881
"Leutfred (Leufroy), St.", Encyclopedia.com
The Life of the Holy Radegund, by Venantius Fortunatus
Saint Gregory (Bishop of Tours), Les livres des miracles et autres opuscules de Georges Florent ..., V4 1862
Saint Gregory (Bishop of Tours), Histoire ecclésiastique des Francs, Issue 7 1837
