Meals became a significant area of research in New Testament Studies some decades ago, but later ancient Christian studies have been slower to follow this lead, hitherto. Where exceptions have occurred, food has tended to be linked to asceticism (and there often treated as subaltern to sexuality) and, somewhat more obliquely, to liturgy. Everyday eating however, both as material practice and then as subject of symbolic and discursive action, has too rarely been given serious attention. Dana Robinson's new book, revised and expanded from a 2016 Catholic University of America dissertation, is a welcome exception.
Since this is largely a book about how flesh often becomes word, Robinson's work invites comparison to a library as much as to a feast. This is an ambitious and dense book that sometimes feels like more than one, combining numerous personal and literary subjects, theoretical perspectives, and forms of information. These are presented in an engaging and thought-provoking set of case studies that breaks new ground, not only in treating some specific late ancient figures on these topics but even just in being thoughtful writing about food in early Christianity.
Despite its relative novelty of subject, Robinson's book is very much in continuity with recent scholarship on topics of clerical and monastic rhetoric and power. It addresses food and virtue in a varied set of chapters featuring the words of familiar ecclesiastical luminaries, John Chrysostom, Shenoute of Atripe, and Paulinus of Nola (the last named an addition since the dissertation version).
Robinson's ambition extends to method as well as content, with three theoretical models or discourses offered at the outset: the anthropological study of food (such as in the research of Mary Douglas), literary theory and especially cognitive metaphorical theory (via George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's work), and cultural geography as already manifest in a “spatial turn” in early Christian studies (such as in the scholarship of Christine Shepherdsen and Kimberly Bowes).
In the first of two chapters on the preaching of John Chrysostom, food is linked both to philosophy and to medicine. Robinson presents John exhorting his congregations to moderation in all things, his ideals of health and spiritual welfare not so much correlated as combined. Meals here have Robinson's attention more than food, however, and she sees John as concerned not merely for indulgence but for banqueting (a theme pursued in the second chapter). She attends carefully to the Antiochene setting, using literary comparisons such as the work of Libanius, as well as making fascinating use of the evidence for real elite food consumption in Antioch from the journal of Theophanes.
The second Chrysostom chapter considers the triclinium as a sort of little theater (drawing effectively on Blake Leyerle's work) on which John's anxiety about display is focused. Material evidence again features, here in mosaics from actual Antiochene dining rooms; while Chrysostom does not mention them himself, Robinson draws intriguing parallels between the themes manifest in this art and his homiletic constructions of virtue. Meals, more than food, are Robinson's concern as well as Chrysostom's, in these chapters at least. This shows in both their treatments of a monastic prayer (Homilies in Matthew 55.6–7) which, as Robinson says, “does not mention dining” (89). She quickly moves from this conclusion to discuss its use of the generic tropes of moderation and transience of life, although in fact food itself is central to the prayer. This is not the only point where effective engagement with Robinson's argument needs more text than the constraints of this book have allowed; the reader will benefit by seeing the discussion as an invitation to an even larger library and to read Chrysostom's own text also.
Food itself does get its due more clearly in the next two chapters on Shenoute of Atripe. Shenoute's metaphors (“people are plants,” etc.) are presented via cognitive metaphorical theory, the images obvious in basic structure but sophisticated in their detail. The focus on two unpublished translations of homilies makes this a more arm's-length exercise for the reader, who must depend on the lucid exposition but again not much text. The now-expected welcome appearance of realia as adjunct to Robinson's exposition in this case includes archaeobotany and the results of excavations in Egyptian monastic settings revealing extensive uses of fruits and vegetables. Discussions of Shenoute's exposition of the taste of fruits, and wine, are particularly engaging. The body is here both the site of virtue's production and its product.
If John assumed the dining room as center of his moralism, Shenoute is much more agrarian. While his discourses did not problematize consumption itself, Shenoute joins John in criticism of excess related to certain events—meaning martyr celebrations and funerary eucharistic rites—despite their apparent liturgical sanction. This also evokes Robinson's interest in space; Shenoute asserts monastic space as the ideal setting for authentic Christian meals and as a place from which to criticize practices which confuse eucharistic eating and drinking with mere sociability. Within the monastery, however, the symbolic connections between regular and sacral eating are allowed quite differently.
The last main chapter starts with Paulinus of Nola's well-known account of animal sacrifice at the tomb of Felix. Situating her account in recent scholarship on sacrificial ideas and practices, Robinson is more concerned with how Paulinus turns the idea of sacrifice into a verbal offering. Convincing as a whole, not every connection made in this account is equally compelling. The metaphorical world of poems in the Natalicia cycle seems to this reader more eucharistic or sacramental than sacrificial, although of course these are not exclusive alternatives. As Robinson herself points out, following Nicole Belayche and John Scheid, Roman religion might better be seen as votive- or gift-centered in any case, relative to the meal-focused meaty sacrifices of classical Greece—let alone to anachronistic assumptions about sacrifice as beneficial violence. Robinson, however, is still inclined to take hints at martyrdom or asceticism as inherently sacrificial, independently of verbal connections. Must Paulinus's exhortation to grind good works as a sort of wheat really be indebted to Ignatius's metaphor of his own body's grinding? Is Felix being depicted as a sacrifice in Carmina 12 just because there are references to torture and blood? The decentering of suffering as the primary clue to sacrifice is not quite complete here.
Robinson's capacity to engage such a variety both of texts and material evidence with evident skill, and to wield a complex set of theoretical tools to boot, make this a most impressive volume, one which seems at times to contain more than a single book. It invites further thought on numerous issues, including but not limited to food and meals, helping demonstrate how this most basic aspect of human practice offers insights not only into eating itself but into how the most basic values and ideas have been produced and shared and ingested, not least in late ancient Christianity.
