Did Female Saints Suffer from Anorexia?

Hilary Mantel, in the Guardian (March 4, 2004):

Anorexia is seen as a modern illness. But is it really so different from the suffering that female saints throughout history have put themselves through.

We are living in a great era of saint-making. Under John Paul II an industrial revolution has overtaken the Vatican. Saints are fast-tracked to the top, and there are beatifications by the bucketload.

Gemma Galgani became a saint in 1940, in the reign of Pius XII. It was a rapid promotion by the standard of those days. After a miserable life, Galgani died of TB in 1903, when she was 25. Her life and writings, say Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni, authors of The Voices of Gemma Galgani, reveal her to be an old-fashioned saint - Italian, passive, repressed, yet given to displays of flamboyant suffering, to public and extreme fasting and self-denial and the exhibition of torn and bleeding flesh.

Her behaviour recalled the gruesome penitential practices of her medieval foremothers, and resembled that of the"hysterics" of her own day, whose case histories promoted the careers of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. But we can't quite consign Galgani to history, to the dustbin of outmoded signs and symptoms, or the waste-tip of an age of faith. When we think of young adults in the west, driven by secular demons of unknown provenance to starve and purge themselves, and to pierce and slash their flesh, we wonder uneasily if she is our sister under the skin.

Rudolph Bell's 1985 book Holy Anorexia, on Italian saints, is especially rewarding for connoisseurs of the spiritually lurid. St Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi lay naked on thorns. Catherine of Siena drank pus from a cancerous sore. One confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue; but even he thought it was going too far when she swallowed the spiders and their webs.

Scourges, chains and hair-shirts were the must-have accessories in these women's lives. St Margaret of Cortona bought herself a razor and was narrowly dissuaded from slicing through her nostrils and upper lip. St Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of a leper. And what St Francesca Romana did, I find I am not able to write down....