Holy Anorexia

I loved this book; it has a fascinating premise and empathizes with the iron-willed saints it examines. I'm grateful there are authors like Bell, who take on such controversial and daring research.

“Anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer.... [In] genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness.”
—Hilde Bruch
Quoted in Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell

“The only path [for a medieval girl] was from parental domination to submission before a husband. Western culture reproves any deviation from this pattern in ways distinctly unfavorable and psychologically guilt-ridden for women. Spinster-not-bachelor, whore-not-philanderer, prostitute-not-john. Such gender-split words convey images of a deep historical reality, which tolerates or only smirkingly disapproves the same self-expression in men that it condemns in women, especially sexual expression in the refusal to be bound by marital vows.”
—Rudolph M. Bell in Holy Anorexia