Food for Thought: Domestic Surplus and Female Hunger

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sculpture-Relief in Terra-Cotta: Holy Women, 1487

In last week’s post we considered how Heywood presents the “realities” of love and marriage in comparison to Whately’s advice to husbands and wives. In the critical readings for this week, Orlin and Bynum led us to consider how the home was key agent in maintaining a social and familial order. We saw too that resistance to its demands was a difficult business. Individuals might threaten the home, but in both main plot and underplot of AWKK, it demands to be reconstituted, sometimes at great sacrifice. Given the power it exerts, it is not surprising to find the household so richly represented in Heywood’s tragedy; we might even say that the food, the objects, the furnishings, etc. that make up the home also make it the most fleshed-out character in the play. In this blog we will consider whether the force of goods is a force of good, while bearing in mind Bynum’s argument about how asceticism allowed women to shirk the demands of marriage and household.

The first text we will consider is The Christian Mans Closet, a child-rearing manual from 1581:



In the following passages, Barthélemy Batt prescribes the proper eating habits of daughters:

“Let her to not eate openly (that is to say) in the feastes and banquetes of her parentes, lest she see such meats as she might desire and lust after: Let her not learn to drinke wine, wherein is all excess and riotte.” (75)

“Let her to eat, as that shee may be always an hungred, that immediately after her meate she may either read or sing psalms.” (75)

The second work, The English Gentlewoman by Richard Braithwaite, outlines the proper practices of women in all aspects of their lives.



Again, Braithwaite warns women about the dangers of an over-abundant “appetite”:

“Luscious fare is the fuell of every inordinate concupiscence. Nothing so much feeds it, nor insensates the understanding by delighting in it. By restraint of this, you shall learne to moderate your desires. Whence you may rejoice, yet in him, who is your joy, if you can live sparingly, and embrace the means that may chastise in you all sensuality: for by your spare life is lust extinguished, vertue nourished the minde strengthened, the understanding of heavenly things raysed. Yea, abstinence assaileth much for preserving health of body and length of life.” (140)


In light of the advocacy for women’s restraint, how are we to read the household’s excess of goods? (Return to Orlin’s chapter to recall the extent of the goods AWKK puts on display.) More particularly, how do we reconcile the fact that the virtuousness of Frankford’s householding is expressed by his generosity—his sharing and giving away of his stuff—while on the other hand, his wife Anne displays her goodness by refusing stuff? Or to put the matter in a slightly different way, what are we to make of the fact that Frankford follows the Christian dictum “feed my sheep,” whereas Anne follows the lead of the mystic anorexics who make themselves virtuous by refusing to be fed? In your posting, consider how Heywood asks us to think about consumable, consumer and consumed by attending to the materials and bodies involved in the play’s production. You may take up this question with regard to any subject that interests you—theatrical, sexological, matrimonial, hierarchical, theological, etc. Just make sure to be specific in your use of evidence.