To anyone acquainted with the exempla, saints' vitae, travelers' tales, or other popular literature of the period, the fascination of late medieval and early modern audiences for narratives of cannibalism is already plain. Why this should be so, and what these stories may have meant, though, are difficult questions, now fortunately addressed in Merral Llewelyn Price's book, Consuming Passions. Stated most broadly, Price argues that the increasing importance of the Eucharist brought about a pervasive anxiety about cannibalism in late medieval Christian thought, and that this in turn resulted in sustained projections of cannibalistic fantasies onto various "Others." Price develops this argument in a series of short, linked essays, which weave together a number of the most important strands of recent late medieval scholarship--the importance of the body in medieval thought, the development of protocolonialist ideologies, and the centrality of gender and gender anxiety to conceptions of hierarchy--to illuminate the uses of metaphors of cannibalism in a variety of textual contexts.
Price begins with "The Man-Eating Body" (a chapter title which nicely foregrounds the author's concern for medieval narratives of "corporalization"), an introduction to the topic and summary of some of the most culturally important discussions of cannibalism from Classical antiquity through the High Middle Ages. Price's collection of cannibals is impressive, and includes those of classical myths, travelers' tales, visionary literature, and the European crusades; they provide the reader with a clear sense of the complexity and diversity of medieval discourses of cannibalism. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the interpretation of cannibalism, which, like the "theoretical bits" in many other scholarly introductions, serves mainly to acknowledge politely the influence of well-known theoreticians. Nonetheless, both here and throughout the book the sheer number of theoretical perspectives introduced is alarming: in the course of the author's analysis, she references the works of Lacan, Jung, Klein, Bakhtin, Freud, Levi-Straus, Douglas, and Foucault. The result is a kind of interpretive patchwork that is not always convincing.
In the second chapter, "Corpus Christi: the Eucharist and Late Medieval Cultural Identity" Price explores the centrality of cannibalism ("the underlying fantasy of the mass" (26)) to late medieval religious practice and consciousness. Drawing upon host miracle narratives and upon preachers' exempla particularly, she argues that medieval Christians were clearly aware that "Holy Communion was a form of participatory and often infanticidal anthropophagy"(30). This realization, sometimes repressed, sometimes not, contributed to the enormous evocative appeal of the Mass, but also created ambivalences and anxieties that some dealt with by projecting a closely parallel but much more literal cannibalistic rite onto the Jews. Thus, Price suggests that persecution of the Jews, which was so often linked with tales of both host desecration and ritual cannibalism, was at least in part the result of Christian anxieties about the implications of their own sacred rituals.
In chapter three, "Mass Hysteria: Heresy, Witchcraft, and Host Desecration," Price develops these themes, arguing that heretics were accused of cannibalism in part as a response to the perception that their beliefs threatened the Eucharist. This line of reasoning could lead quite neatly to Walter Stephen's contention that learned late medieval witch beliefs resulted from fears about the reality of transubstantiation; for after all, if infanticidal witches used and consumed human bodies in parody of the Eucharist to effect their demonic magic, it would be absurd to deny the miracle of the Host. [[1]] Price, however, develops an alternative theme, observing that the image of the child-eating witch is the devouring, nightmare inversion of a nursing mother. For Price, the late medieval witch is the "diabolically lactating mother," and becomes, like heretics and the Jews, subject to a wholesale projection of social and cultural anxieties associated with food, feeding, the body, fertility, and the Eucharist (61).
Next, Price traces the evolution and development of a particularly lurid story from Flavius Josephus of the mother who ate her child during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. This tale was popular and widely copied from the eleventh century onwards, and provides Price with a very neat opportunity to elaborate her themes. The woman of the story, a Jew and unnatural mother ironically named "Maria," becomes in medieval texts the demonized mirror image of the Virgin, and the scapegoat for a host of anxieties; the narrative, Price suggests, "comprises a classic(al) subversion myth--a projection of the complicated problems of religious difference, violence, fear, and mortality onto an already marginalized victim" (79). The reader will not find this conclusion unexpected, but Price's preceding analysis is very good: Price works more closely with her sources here than in previous chapters, and the result is a more nuanced, subtle, reading of the texts.
The book ends with chapter five, "Teratographies: Writing the American Colonial Monster," in which Price demonstrates that the claims of early modern explorers and commentators about the man-eaters of the New World were in many respects simply continuations and appropriations of familiar medieval discourses of cannibalism in the service of colonialism. Price writes: "In the New World, the vilification of the Other achieved by accusations of the ultimate inhuman monstrosity--cannibalism--paradoxically depends on both a hyperdelineation and a blurring of categories of gender, under which the indigenous women were represented as voracious and sadistic sexual aggressors and the men as sexually perverse and malformed monsters, each of whom practiced a bestial and bloodthirsty cannibalism deserving only of enslavement and extinction" (84). This is a perfectly apt concluding essay, but it is not quite as original as its predecessors, since over the past twenty years much has been written in this vein already. Here, too, Price's reading of cannibalism metaphors is unnecessarily one-dimensional: not every early modern European interpreted cannibalism the same way; some, indeed, saw New World cannibals in positive or even heroic terms. Especially surprising, Price avoids any mention of Montaigne's famous essay. Nor does Price spend much time considering the differences between Protestant and Catholic interpretations of cannibalism, which is particularly odd given her insistence upon the central importance of the Eucharist to European notions of anthropophagy in general.
This is an entertaining book to read, due primarily to its wealth of stories: Price assiduously collects appropriate tales of man-eating and tells them well. Sometimes, though, one may also find the book frustrating, particularly when the stories leave their historical contexts behind. In her analysis, Price follows motifs, not chronology, and moves rapidly over great chunks of time, treating the period 1100-1600 as an undifferentiated medieval block. The unstated methodological assumption must be that meanings in narratives remain constant, that the "meaning" of a Eucharistic miracle in which the host becomes literal flesh is the same in 1200 as in 1500. Such is, of course, possible, but the premise does not conform well with Price's repeated insistence upon the instability of categories of cannibalism (110).
Despite these limitations, and despite numerous typographical errors (e.g., "Dame" for "Dante" (21)), this remains a valuable contribution to the study of the medieval thought and culture. Consuming Passions is an intelligent attempt to deal with a difficult set of problems. Quite properly in my view, the author does not attempt a full explanation/interpretation of cannibalism metaphors in the Middle Ages, but rather follows a cluster of related ideas as they inform notions of cannibalism in particularly important cultural contexts. Anyone interested in the late medieval persecution of Jews, heretics, or witches, the construction of gender, or thinking about the Eucharist will find this book an accessible and intriguing introduction to related discourses of man-eating.
NOTES:
[[1]] See Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).