Introduction: Learning to Cook, Eat, and Read with Christian Holy Women

Kitchens are humble places. Other than a handful of celebrity chefs, the people who work in the kitchen are underpaid-when they are paid at all. Most kitchen work is monotonous, tedious, even; much of it goes unappreciated. Some of it is dangerous, involving fire and scalding liquids, sharp knives, and the stinging fumes of onions and hot peppers. It is true that, with their changing shape and evolving functions, kitchens have participated in the history of the family, of women, of social classes, and of entire cultures. But women have fought long battles to get out of the kitchen, and what began as a figure of speech, with the kitchen standing for patriarchal oppression, has now become a sad reality: people cook less and less at home, in the west, and it is more and more seldom that families and communities sit down to a meal together.

God is not especially known for spending much time in the kitchen, either. Powerful eaters use dining rooms, kitchens being for those who cook and clean, or for quick, ordinary meals. The Last Supper took place in an upper room, not in the kitchen, and when Jesus did cook, he grilled fish and bread by the beach. Nevertheless it is in the kitchen, aware of God's company, that many women in the tradition of European and American Christianity have spent time-to cook, to eat, to pray, to learn. In their writings, they tell how, in the kitchen, they cut through meanings and starved for knowledge, savored union and, at times, burned with pleasure. The women in God's kitchen evoked in the title of this book are saints, mystics, and holy people who, in the difficult retelling of their encounters with the divine, did not hesitate to use culinary terms and images, to compare spiritual flavors with the sensations on their taste buds, to understand their preparation and ingestion of food as continuous with their spiritual training and sacramental gifts. The divine kitchen their writings in turn evoke is both a literal place-where they make and share what they eat-and a figural location, metaphorical and symbolic: here, they meet their loved ones, and their loved One, thanks to, and not in spite of, their gender and its most traditional activities; here, those very activities-such as, in the pages that follow, making cheese, washing lettuce, skinning fish, cooking lasagna-acquire new meanings, or, just as often, their hidden meanings are finally recognized.

One of the women working in God's metaphorical kitchen was a nun powerful enough that she probably never cooked an actual meal for her community, but not so proud as to shun culinary metaphors: the Benedictine visionary Hildegard of Bingen, who lived and worked in twelfth-century Germany. In one of her letters she tartly wondered, “The voice of life and salvation says: Why will a person chew on a grape and still wish to remain ignorant of the nature of that grape?” How, that is, can we eat and not desire to know more about what it is that we are consuming? How is it possible to choose ignorance over knowledge of that which sustains our very existence?

Of course Hildegard's grape is more than that sugary fruit-green, red, or black, and, in times of envy, sour-so delicious freshly picked and even more delightful when juiced and fermented. Hildegard's biblical grape is a sweet and crispy symbol of the vineyard planted by Noah after the Flood. The first man to plant grapes, and to make wine with them, Noah did not know about the intoxicating effects of their fermented juice: he consumed too much of it, got drunk, and lay around naked (Gen. 9:20-21). Knowledge of the grape is essential if we are to make good use of it, and not make fools of ourselves. Hildegard's grape, furthermore, gives her reader a taste of people's frivolity and their inability, or unwillingness, to seek truth and justice, “life and salvation,” as she puts it. “A person who acts like this,” Hildegard continues, “wants merely to chew and to gratify his own appetite, just as, by nature, he seeks after food.” God's grape, instead, grows from the transformed, clean earth. It is neither green and sour as envy nor bitter and livid as greed; much less is it the color of ignorance. God's grape, for Hildegard, flavors discernment and nourishes wisdom, even as it sweetens pleasure.

Discernment of truth, transformative wisdom, and the sweet pleasure of fruit: the gifts of the grape are precious ones. Rather than read without wondering and chew without learning, readers and eaters wishing to see, to grow, to enjoy, are well advised to heed Hildegard's counsel not to chew and eat just in order to gratify our appetites-but to seek, instead, life and salvation. Nowhere is this teaching more à propos than in the stories of food and holiness related in women's writings. They are stories of deprivation, but they are also stories of pleasure and desire, stories full of discernment and wisdom, stories flavored with memories and seasoned by grace. Told by nuns and wives, heretics and widows, hermits and orphans, these stories will strike the reader, esthetically but hopefully also spiritually, by the subtle connections they evoke, the hidden meanings they reveal, and the pleasure they recount and wish to share-pleasure that is esthetic, alimentary, restorative, and, ultimately, divine.

The prayerful words of God addressed to, and penned by, the fourteenth-century nun and mystic Margaret Ebner speak of processes of concern to all readers intrigued by Hildegard's warning. God tells Margaret, “You are a knower of truth, a perceiver of my sweet grace, a seeker of my divine delight and a lover of my love.” Knowing, perceiving, seeking, and loving are the work of, and rewarded by, truth, grace, delight, and-what else? -love. Sweetness, on the taste buds and in the soul, is a divine consolation, a celestial grace, but it is also a means of contact with the deity, a sensation that travels back and forth from its earthly place of birth to its heavenly home. Sweetness is sticky, and the delight, desire, love, and truth experienced by Margaret must return to God, sticking to the divine like crumbs on the sugary hand of a child. God tells Margaret, “Your sweet delight finds me, your inner desire compels me, your burning love binds me, your pure truth holds me, your fiery love keeps me near.”

Food: it too delights, compels, binds, holds, keeps. It too conveys meanings, encourages connections, and gives pleasure. Food wants to be read much like a story: the increasingly popular genres of recipes and cookbooks, not to mention culinary mysteries and romances, attest to that. Variable as they may be according to history and geography, menus follow rules that are no less precise than those regulating verbal narratives. And the ingredients, the steps, the serving of each dish tell a unique, often a controversial story: flour tortillas in Mexico speak of the European conquest as the sweet-and-sour flavors of Sicilian cuisine tell of the Arabic presence; the use of butter in Northern Italy reflects the climate much like the olive oil of the Center and South speaks of the sun.

So another German nun, Elisabeth of Schönau, a contemporary of Hildegard living almost two centuries before Margaret Ebner, proclaimed that her God the Lord is as sweet as cinnamon during a time-the Middle Ages-when spices were essential to the cuisine of the aristocrats. In seventeenth-century France, for Margaret Mary Alacoque the pungent smell of pre-modern cheese made its revolting ingestion the most burdensome way to prove her love for God. At the close of the nineteenth century, at the height of the bourgeois love affair with sugar, Thérèse Martin, the Little Flower of Lisieux, remembers with relish the sweet foods from her life before the convent; it is only as an ascetic Carmelite that she learns to appreciate condiments that are vinegary sour, or, worse, bitter as the criticism of her peers.

Holy women were fed, personally, by God, and that their lives and writings should have in turn nourished generations of Christians is no surprise. That some decidedly secular cultural figures have developed an intense taste for them, a veritable craving, on the other hand, is more likely to catch some people unawares.

Activist Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), widely regarded as one of the mothers of second-wave Italian feminism, was attracted since childhood to the autobiographies of women saints, and it is to Thérèse of Lisieux and Teresa of Avila that she returns at the beginning of her feminist journey: because Thérèse and Teresa entertain fewer self-deceptions about the world, and are less compromised with it, than other women; because they are stronger in terms of their personal experience; because, Lonzi believes, holy women more than other women possess an indestructible core, a sense of self made unbreakable by their relationship with the divine. Italian philosopher Luisa Muraro (1940-), also a secular thinker and a leading Italian feminist theorist, has dedicated several books to women mystics, referring to them as “theologians in the maternal tongue;” like Lonzi, Muraro turns to Thérèse of Lisieux because Thérèse had no self-deceptions, and because of her engagement with philosophy: to do philosophy, for Muraro, is to work on speaking the truth, and self-deceptions are a grave and insidious obstacle in this effort. More grandiosely, in the words of Luce Irigaray (1932-), mysticism is “the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly,” and “the love of God,” the Belgian-French psychoanalyst notes elsewhere, “has often been a haven for women. Certain women mystics have been among those rare women to achieve real social influence, notably in politics.”

Journeys towards the other and within the self, liberation from all self-deception, engagement with speaking and writing the truth, the hard work of spiritual, social, and political influence… These traits are standard fare for the protagonists of The Women in God's Kitchen. Most of them wrote or dictated their ideas, teachings, and experiences, and a few we know about from tradition. Many are mystics, having developed a personal, unmediated relationship with God in a spiritual path that included visions and other supernatural graces. (Mysticism and spirituality can have many definitions: Christian mystics are usually holy men and women who enjoyed extraordinary graces such as visions, ecstasies, and union with God; by the words “spiritual path” and “spirituality” I mean the myriad ways in which human beings experience and practice religion, or the sacred, in their daily life.) Mystical experiences often exceeded language, and were put down in writing only with much doubt and hesitation on the part of the authors themselves. Several of these women are official saints or blessed, canonized or beatified by the Church, acknowledged as having the ability to intercede with God on behalf of the faithful (an unofficial phenomenon in the early church, the recognition of sanctity was not formalized until the thirteenth century, and, interestingly enough by the same pope-Gregory IX-who instituted the Inquisition). To some extent, it is thanks to their ecclesiastical recognition that some of these women's writings and stories have been disseminated, and yet they need to be re-read because, all too often, as Elizabeth Johnson reminds us, “tales of their holy lives and images of their devout selves make them seem too perfect, too miraculous, too otherworldly, too eccentric to have anything useful to say.” A few of our protagonists had to contend with accusations of heresy, and, though many continued to regard them as saints, some of them were never officially rehabilitated by the institutional Church. Some were married with or without children, others preferred the company of women in or out of convents, still others lived primarily alone, as hermits. Many embraced changing lifestyles at different stages of their lives: Angela of Foligno, for example, a medieval spiritual follower of Francis of Assisi, first lived with her family and, after the death of her mother, husband, and children, remained in the world as a preacher, living and working with a female companion.

All of the women here considered have something to say to today's reader-about our connections with ourselves and with our loved ones, through the meals we make and share; about the struggle to mean what we say and to say what we mean, at home and in more public places; about the pleasures found in love and at the kitchen counters, stoves, and tables.

Among the many holy women writers whose texts have come down to us, I have chosen quite a few-but still only a sample-because they dwell on cooking and eating but also because, quite personally, I find them irresistible (those two reasons being more interconnected, maybe, than I am willing to admit). They all, one way or another, bitingly defy stereotypes of female self-effacement in the pursuit of goodness; they all had personality, behavior, or lifestyle traits that preclude them from being comfortable models of womanliness, that prevent them from proclaiming the message that there is only one way to love God, only one way to be a good woman.

At a time, the twelfth century, when women were normally barred from formal educational establishments, Hildegard of Bingen became a writer, physician, composer, and theologian. Her contemporary Elisabeth of Schönau saw in a vision the humanity of Christ embodied in a beautiful young woman sitting in the sun. In late-medieval England, Margery Kempe bargained with her husband so that she could stop having sex with him, and a century or so earlier Angela of Foligno, more radically, had successfully prayed for the death of her family so that she could follow God. Teresa of Avila was pursued by the Spanish Inquisition in the period of the Counter Reformation, and Sor Juana forced to give up her intellectual pursuits and her library (among the largest in colonial Mexico). In seventeenth-century Venice, Cecilia Ferrazzi, Sor Juana's near contemporary, heard the confessions of, and gave absolution to, her many protégées; two centuries later, in France, Thérèse of Lisieux repeatedly claimed the vocation to be a priest. Gemma Galgani, an Italian contemporary of Thérèse, was repeatedly rejected from the convent but wore a habit-like outfit nevertheless, and, like Thérèse, decided early on that she would become a canonized saint. In nineteenth-century America, Elizabeth Ann Seton converted to Catholicism as a single mom and became a nun while raising five children aged seven to fourteen.

“To be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination,” poet and critic Adrienne Rich (1951-1999) famously stated. And subversive, in a variety of ways, these women certainly were.

However one may define “traditional”-the key word, in Rich's quotation, for she is quick to point out on the same page that “there must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united”-the stories that the protagonists of The Women in God's Kitchen tell of themselves resist being cooked up into a recipe for appropriate womanly personality, behavior, lifestyle. Their stories grasp at homemaking even as they reject it, for not always can the “energy of relation” and the “energy of creation,” as Rich puts it, be reconciled. Angela prays for the death of her family and then wanders around central Italy in search of her lover. Margery wanders much farther away, abandoning home and, for a time, country. Teresa of Avila, though in theory a cloistered nun, never settled anywhere for very long, and in her quest to found more convents, she died during her travels. Elizabeth Seton was in practice homeless for much of her life, and if her voyage to Italy eventually gave her a religious dwelling in the Catholic Church, it also deprived her of acceptance in the city-New York-that she had called, until then, her home.

These women's creation of a spiritual home based on the fulfillment of the bodily, and particularly the eating and drinking needs of their neighbor, is predicated on the rejection of the permanence of a fixed home, of a set table. Angela gives away everything she owns, even sells her head veils to buy fish for the poor at the hospital, and literally and spiritually strips herself naked to follow Christ: this holy woman's Franciscan choice of poverty is amply rewarded by the vision of God as a lavishly set table. Elizabeth Seton's change from American to Tuscan food sounds to us today like a culinary improvement, yet knowledge of the context in which she was forced to endure this change-in a damp and cold lazaretto with a small child and her dying consumptive husband-neutralizes the flavor we might otherwise have imagined.

Admittedly, holy women-including some of the ones mentioned thus far-are better known for their rejection of food than for their embrace of good eats. The work on the subject of religious inedia by historians Caroline Walker Bynum and Rudolph Bell, especially, has been groundbreaking. By working on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century European holy women, Bynum has found in Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) that food, a significant theme in late-medieval spirituality, was more important in women's than in men's piety: women used their own ordinary biological and social experiences as the source of their symbols; for women, food was a way of controlling, by preparation or renunciation, self and world; women, linked to body like men to spirit, found in the humanity, the physicality of Christ a bond to their own flesh-a flesh made bread in the Eucharist, a flesh made milk flowing, in blood, from Christ's pierced breast. Fasting from ordinary food and feasting on the Eucharist, like Bynum's holy women (who sacrifice ordinary food in favor of the Communion wafer), are the protagonists of Bell's study, Holy Anorexia (1985)-though Bell's holy women are all Italian and belong to a wider historical spectrum, from the thirteenth well into the twentieth century. Anorexia, be it holy or nervosa, develops mostly (though not exclusively) in young women, creating in them the desire to transcend the body-its drives, its physicality-and to achieve a non-corporeal purity.

Overall, both Bell's work and Bynum's focus on a “negative” view of ordinary food in connection to the spiritual life: this daily food is generally renounced, they both rightly note, in favor of the spiritual nourishment that is the Eucharist. Bell and Bynum are historians, and their work accesses a wide variety of documents in order to understand and explain behaviors and attitudes shared by a group-in the case of Holy Anorexia and Holy Feast and Holy Fast, religious women. As a literary critic, my objective is primarily to read and understand each text-and, with some exceptions (in the first and fifth chapters), my book focuses on the writings by the holy women themselves. Historical, religious, alimentary contexts are necessary to my work, but I am trained to observe the text in itself, more than as a document from which to learn about a world. And in this process, I have found that, although not as prevalent as the holy anorexia that often destroyed them, not as frequently alluded to as the holy fast broken only by equally holy feasts, not as adored as the Eucharist that fed them body and soul, still regular food can be found in the writings of many Christian holy women, where, though it is usually a minor element, it can be an immensely useful one for understanding their relationship with God and with others.

Often joyous and life-giving, usually meaningful and binding, sometimes tender as love and tough as rejection, other times soupy as a failing memory or crispy as a well-planned action: examples of food that is not refused, food that is not Eucharistic bread and wine, also pervade the lives and the writings of many holy women, and are to be explored further-in this world where food is all too often either insufficient or excessive, and where its glut is, ironically but typically, accompanied by a loss of connection, of meaning, of pleasure. (Needless to say, food images also appear in the writings of spiritual writers of the male sex; though some of these are occasionally mentioned in the upcoming pages, I leave that study, and a comparison of holy men and women writers on food, for another occasion.)

The Women in God's Kitchen begins with a chapter on bread, starting with images in the New Testament then going on to the very early and the very late medieval period: poverty, chosen or inevitable, hardens the bread of the poor and the bread of the holy women of Byzantium, and, several centuries later, impels Catherine of Genoa to knead bread the way she gives hope to the sick and poor (Chapter One). Back to the twelfth century: for Hildegard of Bingen, an intellectual omnivore and a discriminating palate, food preparation provides a means of explaining dense theological matter, food ingestion an excuse to learn more about God and about the world; a century later, poet and seer Hadewijch of Antwerp will, like Hildegard, see human beings as food for their ability to be eaten by God (Chapter Two). For Elisabeth of Schönau, in the same century as Hildegard, and for Margaret Ebner, in the first half of the fourteenth, sweets are the sensual equivalent of the loving feelings inspired by their divine lover-whether as honey and cinnamon (for Elisabeth in Chapter Three) or as honey, sugar, and apples (for Margaret in Chapter Four). The following chapter does not focus on particular mystics and embraces a longer historical span: Italian nuns have for centuries confected spiritual delight into candies and baked goods oozing with creamy fillings and symbolic meanings-candies and baked goods that, through their shape and function, insist on the proximity between sweetness, women, and the divine, and connect present pastry making with a martyr of late antiquity, Saint Agatha (Chapter Five). Living between the thirteenth century and the fourteenth, Angela of Foligno memorably sets the scene of a fight with the devil at her kitchen sink, or its medieval equivalent, while she washes lettuce (Chapter Six). A century later, when she identifies herself with food, English mystic Margery Kempe stays away from Eucharistic bread, choosing stockfish and stew instead (Chapter Seven). The Counter-Reformation kitchen cabinets of Teresa of Avila are known to have seen God walking among their pots and pans thanks to the virtue of obedience, capable of turning a menial job into the most transcendent of tasks (Chapter Eight). While Hildegard saw in cheese a reflection of human reproduction and a place to learn and teach about the varieties of the human soul, Margaret Mary Alacoque, in seventeenth-century France, used the disgust cheese inspired in her so as to better test her love of God; during those same years, in colonial Mexico, Sor Juana, who craved cheese as a child, gave it up in favor not of God but of learning; for their Venetian near contemporary Cecilia Ferrazzi, too, food works as an instrument of divine knowledge, and it is through her manipulation of food that God teaches Cecilia to save a baby with almond oil, heal the sick with roast thrush, and return to wholeness her injured sister by feeding her lasagna with buttered greens (Chapter Nine). For Elizabeth Seton and Thérèse of Lisieux, the significance of food lies primarily in the workings of memory it embodies and in the memories it recalls. In the first part of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Seton remembers American food in Italy and Tuscan food in America: both bind her to God and neighbor in preparation and enjoyment (Chapter Ten). Elizabeth makes healing candies for her family, Gemma Galgani, a few decades later, only consumes them-their sweetness alone, among earthly foods, being able to compare, in intensity of flavor, to Christ's passionate embrace (Chapter Eleven). As an ascetic Carmelite, Gemma's contemporary Thérèse Martin remembers the sweet treats of her childhood at a time when sourness and bitterness provide the exclusive flavor of her daily life, but manages to return to sweets-a chocolate éclair, no less-as she approaches death (Chapter Twelve).

Whether they write about making food or ingesting it, preparing it or serving it; whether they identify themselves with food or instead taste, in it, God; and whether God, in food, bestows knowledge or withholds divine mysteries, shares miracles or exposes a mirage, the women in God's kitchen set in their writings a table adaptable to a variety of uses: it is a spacious kitchen table, where they can cook, eat, and write. At this kitchen table, heavenly food and culinary paradise mix with theological and visionary ingredients, and food is given the words to say when, how, and why it tastes, teaches, and transforms the way it does. At this table, the women in God's kitchen preserve, in writing, their mystical and gustatory pleasure. And, full as their lives are, the women in God's kitchen always, so to speak, save room for dessert-in hopes, perhaps, that in recognition of their cooking, serving, and eating work, God will allow them, for once, to practice paradox, to share with others and to keep for themselves, and, especially, to write of their divine cake and eat it, too.

With its emphasis on preparing, consuming, and imagining food, The Women in God's Kitchen is neither a comprehensive study of Christian holy women, nor an in-depth reading of one or two great mystics. If the former would have been a recipe with too many ingredients leading to a half-baked result, pursuing the latter task would have meant rudely ignoring too many cooks calling me to their table-a table already so full of dishes and so empty of guests. Because positive images of food in mystical writings have been little noticed, much less studied, it seemed right to let readers sample this topic broadly, and thus to learn, at a plentiful table, how generous a wide variety of Christian holy women have been with their eating and cooking knowledge and wisdom. At the same time, no one book could include them all, or even most. My selection has been based on a combination of relevance, general interest, personal attraction, and a variety of historical periods-from late antiquity to the very first years of the twentieth century.

Holy women's writings have been read and analyzed by a variety of disciplines, each of which has uniquely enriched the field of mystical studies: historians have discovered in mystic writing precious evidence for alternative religious views through the centuries; feminists have perceived in mystic texts the audible presence, in the past, of women's voices; psychoanalysts have recognized in mystic writers kindred spirits, because of their in-depth exploration of the human soul; linguists have identified some veritable masterpieces of rhetoric among mystic books; theologians have been humbled by the intellectual and experiential complexity of these seemingly unlearned writers.

Since my training is that of a literary critic, my primary allegiance is to reading texts, and connections, meanings, and pleasure drive all my work: the connections within each piece of writing and the connections between it and other texts and contexts; the meanings we as readers find in a written work, and the meanings others may have derived from it; the esthetic pleasure reading gives us, but also the spiritual pleasure thanks to which the mystic was convinced to write. It is important to me, for example-even though all these things may not be possible in every text-to read in the original language, to determine the authorship of a text, to discern its aesthetic value, to learn of its reception and influence, to see how it fits in the tradition of its genre, to understand the worldview it represents and helps to construct, and to discover its more subtle connections-the ways in which its meanings are not always what they at first sight seem, its pleasures not necessarily the ones the reader expected.

This book, then, is not interdisciplinary-I remain a literary critic throughout-but the different disciplinary approaches I mentioned above remain essential to what I do. Knowledge of history limits my freedom of interpretation even as it accentuates the need to interpret in order to understand the past and its remains. Feminism encourages me to seek the voice of women, even when that voice is almost inaudible. Psychoanalysis helps me grapple with some of the more bizarre wordings and practices of these mystic writers, and, more importantly, with their unrelenting focus on the Other-God, neighbor, words, as well as the otherness within oneself. It is close linguistic analysis that unveiled for me the most literary aspects of the mystic's words, their rhetorical import. Theology provides the tools to grasp the extent of these writers' claims, the novelty of their statements, and their continued relevance in discussions about our relationship with the divine Word: not for nothing, mystic writers have been called, as I mentioned, “theologians in the maternal tongue.” While acknowledging my debt to these disciplines, I do not directly make historical claims, issue feminist calls to action, psychoanalyze the saints, discover new uses of language, or produce a mystical theology. But, hopefully, these tools can reveal each work's connections, clarify its meanings, and let us share in its pleasures.

There are two medieval holy women who, though they are among my very favorites, for reasons that have nothing to do with the value of their written work (mostly because their period, the Middle Ages, was already heavily represented), did not make the final cut as teachers of eating and cooking: the French Marguerite Porete and the English Julian of Norwich. I would like nevertheless to invoke them now, at the inception of our reading, as sources of inspiration and as guiding spirits-as patron saints, perhaps.

Marguerite Porete was born around 1250 and was a beguine, a laywoman who dedicated her life to prayer, poverty, chastity, and service to the poor-without, however, taking vows or living in a convent. She was burned at the stake in 1310, charged with being a relapsed heretic. A few years earlier, between 1285 and 1295, Marguerite had written in Old French a book known as The Mirror of Simple Souls, claiming that the soul united with the will of God does not need an external law in order to be saved. Indeed, a soul united with the will of God is incapable of sinning.

Marguerite's statement was interpreted by the Inquisition as an open invitation to hold oneself above the law, and thus to sin freely. But this accusation, to the modern reader, is an obvious act of misreading, of reading out of context-and there was a self-serving reason for this on the part of the Inquisition, since Marguerite criticized the Church and claimed that those who are pure should have the right and the duty to also expose ecclesiastical abuse. (Ironically, a few centuries later, the name of its author forgotten, The Mirror of Simple Souls was taken as an example of the highest stages of mysticism, and in turn used, in all likelihood, to differentiate true mystics from dangerous heretics.) The instrument of Marguerite's condemnation, though, whatever its true motives, was a lop-sided reading of her book: bits and pieces of The Mirror of Simple Souls were read to mean what it is clear, upon a more holistic reading, Marguerite did not intend to say.

For this, we might elect Marguerite Porete as the protectress of literary critics. More personally, I might ask her not to let me become a sort of counter Inquisitor, one who reads out of context in order to make words mean what they do not say. In Marguerite's own words, “Grasp the gloss, hearers of this book, for the kernel is there which nourishes the bride . . .. Grasp the gloss, for whatever nourishes is savory, and, as one says often, what nourishes badly is unsavory.” The gloss to which Marguerite refers is more than an explanatory note or even an extensive commentary. Her gloss is meaning itself: the author, like Hildegard in the letter about the grape, is pleading with us to seek understanding, for while ignorance is deadly, reading correctly is an activity as life-giving and nourishing as eating kernels of wheat. With the help of Marguerite Porete's memory, may I not read feast where there is famine, hunger where there is satiety, cooking where, in fact, there is only a lot of cleaning up.

Marguerite never claims to be small and unlettered, never refers to her feminine weakness and womanly inadequacy. This might be because she was a woman writing for other women to whom, Marguerite well knew, she had much to teach; perhaps it was a stylistic choice, perhaps a spiritual one. A few decades later, Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), a recluse and the first woman known to have written a book in English, entitled Showings, makes a different choice: “I am a woman, unlearned, feeble, and frail,” she laments. “But because I am a woman, should I therefore believe that I should not tell you the goodness of God?” Julian's self-proclaimed ignorance, weakness, and frailty, however, did not prevent her from fulfilling her calling, nor from elaborating a sophisticated and original theology that is sweetly summed up in God's repeated assurance to her that, “all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

It is Julian's optimistic focus on the importance of the unimportant that makes her central to those seeking meaning in ordinary food. For Julian's vision of the entirety of creation consisted of a hazelnut. Not a jewel, nor a gem, gold, or fire, but a small, plain, brown, hard-shelled hazelnut (hazelnuts may be relatively exotic in the U.S., but certainly not in Europe-where they grow by roadsides and flavor a variety of cakes and confections). As Julian tells her reader, “ [God] showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and I perceived that it was as round as a ball.” When Julian wonders about the hazelnut, not recognizing its significance, God explains to her, “It is everything which is made. I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that it was so little that it could suddenly fall into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”

“A littil thing the quantitye of an hesil nutt,” wrote Julian in her Middle English: the hazelnut emerges from Julian's memory much like lettuce from Angela of Foligno's, corn pudding and pork fat from Elizabeth Ann Seton's, coffee, chocolate, and wine from Gemma Galgani's. Founded in Jesus' invitation to eat the bread that is his body, as he put it, “in memory of me” (Luke 22:19), the bond between food and memory resonates through the writings of women like Julian as a way of understanding the present through the past, but also as a means of recapturing past moments through the flavors they share with present experiences. Rather than being imagined or invented, the hazelnut belongs to Julian's past, to that very experiential knowledge that gave her and other women mystics the ability to speak, to write, to be listened to and even followed despite their lack of education and thus of officially recognized credibility.

Borrowing from the vocabulary of rhetoric, we might note that Julian's hazelnut is not only a symbol (indicating salvation because of its alleged ability to cure scorpions' stings, and thus to save lives), but especially a metonymy, that figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole: a hazelnut for all that is. Metonymy is an especially apt figure in this case, since, with the metonymy of the hazelnut, Julian underlines for us the fundamental unity of creation, that we are all metonymies, parts of a whole, that is, and that metonymic thinking is therefore inescapable. That smallness causing Julian's surprise, the seeming insignificance of the hazelnut, is actually replete with meaning-for the Christian message heard time and again by women mystics, the message of the hazelnut, we might call it, is that the last shall be first, and that, as Mary's “Magnificat” pronounces, “God has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:46-55).

Through a misreading Marguerite was condemned to the stake. Through the metonymy of the hazelnut, Julian is shown the salvation of all that is. And so it is in the metonymic spirit of Julian of Norwich's hazelnut, we might say, and with the caveats of Marguerite Porete's more than rhetorical troubles, that I invite you to seek out and to savor with me, in the following pages, the food concocted, dished out, bitten into, tasted, and swallowed in the writings of holy women: food that may be mundane, unexceptional, and commonplace, but food that may also be delicious, nutritious, indulgent or healthful. Whether in the form of stockfish and stew or chocolate and jam, whether baked as lasagna with greens or curdled into a fine or bitter cheese, this food-through metaphors and similes, through anecdotes and memories-leads to mystical connections, underlines the presence of meaning even, or especially, in the midst of seeming meaninglessness, and leads us to share in the pleasure of cooking, eating, and learning at a divine table, in God's kitchen.