RELIGIOUS CONVICTION, SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY, AND
MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE
Sydney Watts
In 1698 the archbishop of Rouen received news of highly irregular activity at the Benedictine abbey in Le Tréport on the channel coast of northern France. Members of the monastic order had offered “the forbidden flesh” during Lent with the claim that it was a proper food for the holy fast. According to the parish priest who exposed the sinful behavior, the animal in question (a puffin) was in keeping with the dietary laws of the Catholic Church. Not only was this species truly fatty, but its natural habitat was as much terrestrial as aquatic, its feathery features more avicular than pisciform. The puffin’s morphology posed a problem of taxonomy for the monks who identified the animal as a source of protein akin to fish but not of the family of warm-blooded birds. The archbishop did not delve into the semantics of their observations, but ruled its consumption to be highly unorthodox: Such a proposal would be abusive to the spiritual discipline of the monks, as it breeched the rules of religious fasting that set the Lenten season apart from the meat-laden meals prepared for Carnival and feast days. His written response—to be read from the pulpits of all the local parishes—was swift and unequivocal, putting an end to what seemed to be a minor dispute. The investigation that ensued with the intent to appeal the ruling must have taken the parish priest by surprise: not only did it involve the Benedictine brothers who, familiar with puffins that nested along their rocky coast, cried fish not fowl, but also the doctors from the medical college in Rouen who convened to study the biological and nutritional properties of puffins over the course of several weeks of culinary experiments. These findings, presented at the clerical assembly at Saint-Ouen in April, convinced the archbishop to overturn his decision.1
The multifarious efforts of both scientific and holy circles to categorize the esoteric as not only edible but sacrosanct bring into focus one of the central problems in early modern religious life: how acts of piety changed during the Enlightenment with the focus on rational, scientific understandings of the world. The abbey’s investigation of puffins reveals how a reformulated taxonomy of taboo foods confronted the rules of the Lenten fast. During this forty-day period of abstinence, the Church dictated what Catholics (and among the reformed communities what many Protestants) could not eat,2 what dishes cooks should prepare in place of meat, poultry, and dairy products as well as when butcher stalls would be closed to the public. In this instance, eating such an unusual bird challenged the communal tradition of Lent as a time of penance and fasting that prepared Christians for the Easter season. Yet, as Caroline Walker Bynum has shown through her study of the medieval cult of the Eucharistic host, the religious meanings of food and hunger are historical notions contingent upon intellectual understandings of piety. For the patristic poets and theologians of the early Church, “hunger meant human vulnerability, which God comforted with food, or it meant human selfcontrol, adopted in an effort to keep God’s commandments,” while in the high Middle Ages “hunger was unquenchable desire; it was suffering.”3 In seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France, Lenten food habits were under attack because they revealed as much about a believer’s commitment to divine inspiration as his rational understandings of dietary nutrition. This chapter examines the collaboration of both holy and scientific circles to highlight the complex interplay of religious and secular thought. More often than not, those who upheld traditional notions of the Lenten fast were also well versed in the latest theories of digestion. Their commitment to religious dietary law varied according to different beliefs about its influence over the body and the soul. The doctors and theologians who debated over which dietary regime best maintained good health also came into conflict over the proper penitential response to Lent as preparation for Holy Week and Easter Sunday.4
Viewed within a broader scope, the problem of maintaining the Lenten fast, especially in urban areas, became increasingly visible to contemporaries as individuals blatantly ignored, abused, or transgressed the Church’s commands. And, as the eighteenth century progressed, critics of the Church (led by its premiere spokesman, Voltaire) contributed to the desacralization of Lent as they voiced opinions about the hypocrisy and injustice of its dietary rules. In his Philosophical Dictionary, under the entry “Lent,” Voltaire poses the question directly: “Why, on days of abstinence, does the Roman Church consider it a sin to eat terrestrial animals, and a good work to be served with sole and salmon? The rich Papist who has five hundred francs’ worth of fish on his table shall be saved, and the poor wretch dying with hunger who has eaten four sous’ worth of salt pork, shall be damned.”5 The eighteenth-century philosophe aimed his critique of the “absurd law” at the blind followers of Christian legalism. His acerbic wit, which decried “the aversion of bishops to omelets,” breeched the respectful boundaries kept by earlier thinkers of the French Enlightenment such as Descartes, who avoided any attack on the dominant religion’s obligatory credence and obedience.
Looking to Voltaire and other French philosophes, historians have argued that by the mid eighteenth century there emerged a new public sphere led by an educated elite whose exercise of skepticism and critical judgment tipped the scales toward an irreversible process of secularization in France. This chapter follows recent scholarship that challenges secularization construed as a determinate historical process, triumphed by the Age of Reason.6 It aims to reveal an earlier phase of the Enlightenment where men collaborated fruitfully in the reasoned pursuit to better the human condition, where scientists and clerics sought divine purpose in the study of human health and physiological function, and where dietary choices held moral bearing upon those who willingly and knowingly made them. Rather than seeing the Lenten fast as an autocratic prescription based on Church dogma, these men examined dietary choices in light of biological evidence and sought ways to unite Christian precepts of fasting with medical knowledge of nutrition and physiology. Their search for a viable food choice points to the common insistence of clergy in this period of Catholic Enlightenment claiming that Christianity and reason complemented each other as part of the divine plan to be followed.
FRENCH CATHOLIC REFORM
While many studies have focused on France as the center of the Enlightenment, a place where religious skepticism took the most radical turn, most historians agree that France remained a stronghold of Catholic orthodoxy during the Reformation. Evidence of religious piety existed throughout France under Louis XIV and continued, according to John McManners, well into the eighteenth century.7 Likewise, Church reform, which brought a revitalization of Catholicism in France, began with the Council of Trent (1545–63) and continued to be implemented by Crown and Church throughout this period. These reforms aimed primarily at the Protestant challenge to Christian orthodoxy, in particular the meaning and execution of the sacraments and the question of faith versus works in gaining salvation. Intending to reinvigorate faith among believers and uphold Catholic orthodoxy, Church leaders sought ways to reeducate the clergy and laity in basic Christian tenets, as well as renew liturgical and penitential practices to which the Catholic Church held fast. While not central to their teachings, Tridentine decrees underscored Lent as a sacred time of penitence which required believers to follow specific forms of religious observance in order to reconcile themselves with God.8 Yet, even as the Roman Church defended Christian tradition, they followed the Protestants’ shift from the legalistic understanding of penitential acts to win salvation to more spiritually driven expressions of personal piety, fasting among them, by decreasing the number of official fasting days throughout the year under the Tridentine decrees.
Further relaxation of Lenten rules could be seen as eggs, butter, and cheese, which had been forbidden during Lent, were now approved for popular consumption by ecclesiastical authorities on a handful of occasions. Historians have pointed to the Church’s moderate attitude toward dietary law, particularly in regard to collective dispensations as evidence of the waning of the Lenten fast. Yet the evidence is not convincing. During a period of eighty-four years, from 1670 to 1754, the Church granted permission for the laity to eat eggs during Lent only eighteen times. These dispensations were not granted willingly. They were accorded once the lieutenant of police had addressed the Parliament of Paris with a case for the dearth of fish and vegetables. If the magistrates agreed, and the Parliament endorsed the proposal, then it went to the archbishop of Paris to pray for a dispensation for Parisians. The prelate responded with a mandement which had to be executed by the Parliament under a legal decree (arrêt ). Such lengthy procedures made blanket dispensations difficult to obtain.9
French Catholicism was renewed during the decades of reform that followed Trent, most directly through the hundreds of newly established seminaries and religious communities devoted to clerical education as well as the primary education of young men and women. Chief among these orders were the Jesuits (founded in 1540) and the Ursulines (founded in 1535, established as a convent in 1612 in Paris), who sought official sanction from their “most Christian King.” Jesuits pursued scholarship in humanistic studies and scientific inquiry as well as theology and played a large role in the care of souls as private confessors to kings and queens as well as numerous religious chapters and parishes. The confessional impact of teaching orders was felt broadly among the laity as the priests, monks, and nuns who served them focused on the moral status and interior life of individuals. Sexual sins and gluttony now seemed more dangerous than economic sins like avarice or usury. Even penance was understood as less a “restitution” that would reintegrate one into the Christian community than a process of coming to feel a true sense of contrition for sins. Historians such as John Bossy have argued that the Reformation ended communal Christianity, creating in its place a more introspective, self-disciplined religious practice that saw greater emphasis on meditation and prayer.10
The Congregation of Saint Maur (established in 1621) followed the wave of reformed clergy who sought new rules in the wake of Catholic revival.11 Their reinvigorated monasticism swept through a number of religious houses in northern France, including the puffin-eating monks of Le Tréport mentioned at the opening of this chapter. By the end of the century, the congregation had become the largest branch of the Benedictine order in France, the greatest concentration of which dominated upper Normandy. Benedictine Maurists, as they were commonly known, valued scientific study and classical scholarship as well as strict forms of piety. Over nearly two centuries they produced monumental tomes on history, theology, philosophy, and diplomacy, which earned these scholarly monks a reputation for their arduous, intellectual work, travailler à la benedictine. The Maurist movement of the seventeenth century also sought greater emphasis on liturgical practices, which regulated their lives throughout the day and the calendar year. The congregation focused on self-discipline, encouraging monks to practice acts of mortification, denying themselves not only meat but even fish. Its zeal for reform hearkened back to the original intentions of Saint Benedict’s Rule, which focused on fasting and abstinence as a way of gaining spiritual acuity through the depletion of bodily pleasure.
Even as fasting implies total abstinence from food and drink, the stomachs of most well-provisioned religious men and women, however, were never empty for more than a day. Even the mendicant orders were permitted to sustain themselves with parvitas materiae (literally, the “slightness of matter”), which was a small quantity of nourishment such as bread and vegetables not to exceed eight ounces, a quantity of sustenance that by definition did not break the fast. Other relaxations of the fast included an evening drink, known as the collation which could mean a light meal with water or, in many monasteries, beer, wine, or fortified wine. Many parishes that lacked the funds to pay orators to preach during Lent attracted them with food. Even behind the cloistered walls of monasteries la collation du prédicateur was an excuse for monks to entertain numerous guests and sample various wines. Convents enticed guest preachers with detailed descriptions of their accommodations to encourage competition for the residential position: “for 40 days he will enjoy … the compliments of vicars and minor clergy, will sit down at well furnished tables where they will offer him the choicest morsels. … He may very well never fast at all, and Lent will end all too quickly for him.” 12
CHANGING TASTES AND HEALTH CONCERNS
While some may have seen Lent as a season to indulge in a whole other variety of foods, many more Christians felt the strains of a Lenten fast that focused on the meagerness and monotony of eating root vegetables, legumes, and salted fish for six weeks, especially the much loathed red herring of northern Europe. With the development of trade routes and commercial life throughout the interior of France, green vegetables and fresh fish became more prevalent in the market stalls of major cities. Yet, even with the rise of more innovative cookery after 1650, a vegetarian or fish-based diet was most often associated with self-denial and penitence. Public rituals, such as the “au revoirs” of Saint-Rémy, where clerics on their way to church paraded (and tried to squash) salt herring tied on a string, aimed to ease the affliction with humor.13 Indeed, the association of Lent with austerity and deprivation, a time that was entered into with some sinking of the heart, is evident in the common seventeenth-century expression face de carême, meaning pale, dower, or glum.14
Even as both vegetable and fish recipes gained prominence in the new culinary fashion forwarded by cookbook authors La Varenne and Nicolas de Bonnefons, the royal court at Versailles continued to regard them as penitential foods, serving them almost exclusively during Lent and especially on Good Friday. By the end of the seventeenth century, we see a clear division between the court’s traditionalism and the innovation of Parisian cooks whose “nouvelle cuisine” became the trend for urbane men and women of taste who sought the natural flavors of foods, lighter preparations, and fewer courses served in more intimate settings.15 Their search for refinement extended beyond royal banquets to Parisian salons where they could cultivate what was “convivial, genteel, well-bred and morally decent all at once.”16
As much as elites tempered their diet with fish, poultry, and vegetables, the vast majority of the working population, especially in the Parisian metropolis, sought meat as part of their daily diet. Most French in the early modern period considered some form of red meat to be vital in maintaining good health. Bouillon had long been the prescription for the infirm and the mainstay of hospitals. Meat broth’s restorative powers made it the most popular treatment for a number of conditions including malnourishment. Nearly every major city in France supported a Lenten butchery at the central hospital where the sick, the aged (over seventy), and the young (under twenty-one) as well as pregnant and nursing mothers could purchase freshly butchered meat.17 Most statutes dictated that parish priests grant personal dispensations to allow access to the Lenten butcheries, but in 1657 the Parliament of Paris gave physicians the authority to prescribe meat during Lent. These allowances meant that any person seeking the restorative powers of bouillon no longer needed to submit to an examination of one’s conscience in front of a priest, but could, instead, present one’s bodily complaints to a doctor. Historians have made much of this change in procedure as evidence of the relaxation of dietary law, which not only fueled business for the city hospitals in Paris and Lyon but also spurred the growth of an even larger black market among experienced butchers and itinerant meat sellers.18 This widespread fraud became an embarrassment to Church leaders who saw their authority over dispensations vanish, citing more vice than virtue in religious practice. Likewise, it was a frustration for the urban police who could not contain the steady flow of rogue butchers entering the city to sell meat out of courtyards. As enforcement waxed and waned over the eighteenth century, the French were deeply conflicted over dietary law. Yet, even under the “debauched” reigns of the Duke d’Orléans and Louis XV, policing and arrests continued.19
Finally, in 1774, the government responded to the abuses by granting any licensed merchant the right to sell meat during Lent and allowing all food merchants to keep their shops open throughout the year. The royal declaration ended the monopoly that the city hospital, l’Hotel Dieu, held over the Lenten meat trade, while it emphasized the pragmatic necessity of liberalizing commerce. The reasons given are for the public good (especially for the poor) and to end exclusive privilege, “having become more onerous than profitable” and “being only prejudicial to the Public by its abuses when resulted necessarily from them, by numerous [instances of] fraud, etc.” The decree also required all Parisians to conform to the “Laws of the Church,” which permitted the consumption of meat “according to the conditions prescribed by them.”20 Whereas authorities could be accused of accommodating the sacrilegious behavior of business-minded merchants, the royal declaration saw fit to hold to the religious tenets of dietary law, giving Parisians the choice of eating or fasting according to their own physical and spiritual needs.
The transfer of authority from the parish priest to the physician granted by the Paris Parliament in 1657 was by no means automatic nor clear-cut. Doctors now held the responsibility of determining whether or not a person was “fit” to fast. This very choice, by law, rested primarily on the physical needs and temperament of a particular patient and secondarily on his or her religious obligation. Nearly seventy years later, the dean of the medical faculty published a stern reminder of doctors’ rights over Lenten prescriptions, reminding each curé that he could not give a dispensation to a parishioner without an official medical certificate from a doctor.21
Reading a patient for his or her illness meant taking into consideration the major organs and bodily humors in conjunction with the environment and lifestyle that either maintained or offset a patient’s temperament. This practice of medicine followed the Galenic tradition, which considered the human physical condition as a careful balancing act between health and illness. Good health meant practicing moderation in the use of the non-naturals: air temperature and quality, sleep habits, the passions and emotions, and, most especially, a dietary regime. As much as doctors understood the importance of dietetics to prevent illness and maintain good health, their focus remained on the categories of foods that could pollute or corrupt a given constitution. This Galenic paradigm directed their thinking toward an individualist view of health and its conservation, away from any universal definitions based upon human physiology and nutrition. Even as new understandings about the digestive process gained ground among the scientific community, many physicians either ignored them or adapted them to the Galenic theory. Historian of science Mary Lindemann argues that this tendency to revert to Galen’s humoral terms drew on “a broad substratum of common beliefs about health, illness, and therapeutics that most members of society shared.”22
However rudimentary their knowledge of actual biological functions, most doctors believed that certain foods enriched the blood better than others and commonly used food therapy to cure a variety of conditions. Eating fresh, red meat was commonly considered the best way to nourish the body, as the doctors considered its essences particularly rich. The sanguine qualities of meat had a powerful effect on the bodily humors. But eating too much of it was potentially dangerous because it corrupted the body’s delicate balance. If it remained too long in the stomach, red meat could overpower the liver, the organ thought responsible for making good blood that nourishes all parts of the body. According to one of the early treatises on dietetics, Le Thresor de santé (1607), beef was high in caustic properties; it “engendered a very crude blood, from which those who are of natural melancholy derive different maladies,” and “the frequent usage of this meat engenders cankers, tumors, itching, leprosy, quatrain fever, or turgidity of the spleen accompanied by dropsy.” 23 Eating too many vegetables was likewise seen as a potential health threat, for its choleric qualities brought on flatulence, colic, fluxes, and dysentery.
Most doctors who followed the theory of non-naturals, and the growing number of readers who subscribed to the literature that abounded on the topic, focused on maintaining a proper regimen appropriate to one’s humoral temperament, age, and activity. So the heat generated by eating meat was appropriate for laborers, who expended great amounts of energy, and lactating and pregnant women, who depleted more than their normal amount of vital fluids. Galen spoke of the curative powers derived from the essence (le suc) of red meat, prescribed to pregnant women as its sanguine characteristics were thought to be an essential component of reproduction. For the aged, meat was necessary to maintain thick blood that restores health and prolongs life. Popular medical treatises also pointed out the dangers of beef, as the vulgar quality of this particular meat made it unworthy for the more sedentary members of the social elite. These medical prescriptions continued well into the eighteenth century, found in popular dietary regimes that cited beef as “very healthy (saine) and with a very good taste. It contains the coarse juices that, once condensed in the fibers, do not easily separate; it is why those who eat lots of beef are strong, vigorous, and robust.” In the same way, meat gives energy to an active person, for a sedentary person, meat contracts (resserre) the body, leading to “harmful blockages” whose cure required diuretics and other forms of purgation. 24
Even as popular medicine clung to Galenic theory, increasingly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, doctors understood digestion as central to bodily health. Often diagnoses were focused on poor digestion as the trigger of illness that corrupted the blood and generated bad and foul humors. Scientific investigation into digestive health was well underway by the mid seventeenth century, most notably in the laboratory work published by René Descartes, Francis Glisson, Giovanni Borelli, and Franciscus Sylvius de Le Boë.25 Their findings about this biological function would subvert the conventional wisdom about diet and therapeutics that had reigned for nearly two millennia. Most significantly, they demonstrated the chemical properties of food and the physical ways in which food was broken down in the digestive system. Their pioneering work in laboratory science and their critical reading of natural philosophy led them to adapt their observations to theories about humors and physiology in various ways, arriving at different therapies for the same condition. Doctors now had to consider competing theories about the chemical and mechanical processes of digestion and the absorption of food. By the early eighteenth century, the point of contention was as much theological and medical, as the debates over digestion turned to the doctor’s role in prescribing or dispensing with a Lenten diet.
DOCTORS DEBATE THE LENTEN DIET
By the end of the seventeenth century, there was little dispute among doctors over the anatomical structure of the digestive organs or the fact that food transformed into chyle in the stomach and then passed via the lacteal ducts to the bloodstream. At issue was the actual process by which food was broken down and metabolized in the bloodstream. The older, more established school of iatrochemists, led by Jan van Helmont and Franciscus Sylvius de la Boë, explained digestion as a result of acid-alkali fermentation—a “dangerous fermentation”—that took place in the stomach. The process of digestion continued as nutrients were absorbed through a metaphysical process of assimilation of matter-and-spirit, whereby material changes were governed by a spiritual agency Helmont called Blas. While iatrochemists held to the older physiology of assimilation, drawn from Aristotlian models of the nutritive or vegetal soul where food was converted into humors and spirits, they also recognized the importance of saliva and pancreatic secretions in the digestive process.
The opposing school of iatromechanics, or iatrophysics, led by Giovanni Borelli followed the laws of physics and precise mathematical rules. Digestion was explained not as a chemical change effected by fermentation but as a physical change effected by grinding. These mechanical interpretations were often characterized as purely functional and less metaphysically driven, which may have exposed some iatrophysicists to unmerited criticism by old-school iatrochemists. The points at issue between these two systems of thought proved to be much more than academic, as opponents sought religious and moral reasons to discredit each side in various publications.
In the early 1700s these two scientific schools became the center of a public debate in the Mémoires de Trévoux, a journal that reviewed physiology books, particularly those that offered chemical explanations of digestion. The newspaper’s name came from its place of publication, which also happened to be the French base of the Jesuit religious order. Discussions often turned to the relative importance of a meat-based diet for well-read, polite society, especially for those valetudinary creatures who claimed dispensations for health reasons. In 1700, the Paris physician, Barthélemy Linand, attacked the equivocations of lapsed believers, arguing that corporeal delicacy was no adequate reason to grant dispensations. Linand contended that Catholics should exert more selfdiscipline and fast more regularly without the Church’s imposition of dietary rules. The reviewer of Linand’s book concurred, while engaging in playful casuistry, “nowadays when the laxity of Christians is so great, one is obliged to Mr. Linand for removing the vain pretexts which they use to avoid the painful duties that Religion imposes on them.”26
Such discussions took a more heated turn in 1709 when Philippe Hecquet, doctor at the Paris medical faculty, published his treatise on Lenten dispensations (Traité des dispenses du Carême ) to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of the Church and to radically change the food habits of the French. His argument was rebutted the following year in an anonymous work actually written by a fellow faculty member and rival, Nicolas Andry de Boisregard. Andry was three years Hecquet’s senior. Both had attended the College des Grassins in Paris, perhaps as classmates. Both obtained their first medical degrees from Reims and then entered the medical faculty within a few years of one another. Hecquet served as dean of faculty in 1712 and Andry became dean in 1724. Even though the two shared career paths, they followed opposing sets of religious convictions and scientific leanings. Andry, an iatrochemist, whose opinions echoed many of the Jesuit editors of the Memoires de Trevoux, held more Molinist leanings characterized by Jesuit teachings that minimized the fallen nature of man and emphasized his residual goodness. Hecquet, an iatrophysicist, was a Jansenist who served at Port-Royal-des-Champs, a wellknown center of Jansenism, before coming to the Paris faculty. Jansenism stressed the depravity of man as a result of his fall from grace. God only bestowed efficacious grace to those elect who engaged in unremitting labor of good works and self-denial.27 For a Jansenist, fasting was an authentic expression of religious devotion that followed Cartesian dualism: in order to elevate the soul one needed to quell the needs of the body. For a Jesuit, fasting was maintained as a traditional practice, but not by embracing physical pain and bodily deprivation in ways that bordered on religious fanaticism. Hecquet would hold to his own ascetic principles throughout his lifetime in ways that informed his scientific understandings of the body and his medical prescriptions for dietary health.28
For Hecquet and Andry, their opposing religious beliefs informed their opposing views of physiology. While Hecquet may have imbued scientific causation with divine providence later in his career, his early publication of the 1709 Traité took a less godly focus; rather, it stressed the mechanical explanation of digestion and the qualities of food that promoted good health. Aside from his social critique of Lenten practices, and his theological defense of them, the treatise promoted a new digestive theory of “trituration” that emphasized the grinding action of mastication and peristalsis of the muscle walls of the stomach. Hecquet regarded trituration as the primary biological function of contraction and dilation, as the force that regulates the body—food had no regulatory affect. Hecquet, like other physicians, had been influenced by the works of early modern physiologists Giovanni Borelli and Archibald Pitcairn who abandoned iatrochemical explanations and replaced them with physical explanations of digestion.29 Mechanical trituration of food, in particular, posed a direct challenge to the Galenic suppositions of many doctors of the age who explained nutrition and dietary health in terms of humoral effect. Nonetheless, Hecquet paid attention to diet insofar as one food could be more easily digested than another. Yet, unlike popular medical opinion, he regarded vegetables and fish to be superior foods because of their material composition, which was easily broken down through trituration. According to Hecquet’s medical opinion, the bodily effect of a Lenten diet was not simply benign; it was healthful and prolonged life better than a meat-based diet. Later in his career, Hecquet would credit the origins of this biological process to the Creator; the all-encompassing, life force of trituration that alternated between contraction and dilation was due to God’s personal intervention.30
In his Traité des alimens de caresme, Andry challenged Hecquet’s findings on all fronts. Trained as an apothecary in the provinces, then later as a chemist, he forwarded his iatrochemical view of digestion that emphasized the textures and chemical properties of foods while keeping many Galenic understandings of dietetics. More important for Andry than Hecquet’s misinterpretation of the digestive process was his promotion of the meatless diet as superior to all others. If fish and vegetables were as healthful and pure as Hecquet claimed, what purpose was there for the tradition of Lent? Andry asked. The Church’s prohibition of meat resided on the widely accepted view that meat nourished the body better than any other food and that fish and vegetables were watery, “cold” foods that hampered digestion. Andry contended that meat’s energizing effect—the fact that it is “too good a food” and too much of it “fortified the passions”—was precisely the reason the Church demanded a fast that included “lean foods that nourished less well, and, without being harmful in themselves, satisfied the needs of the body a little less.”31
Claims and counterclaims over the benefits and the reasons for fasting filled their publications over the next six years. While the debaters aimed to limit their discussion to scientific fact, the rifts between their two camps revealed the theological differences upon which they viewed their role as leading physicians of dietary science.32 Both Hecquet’s religious heterodoxy and his newfound medical authority mediated his dietetic reforms for an overindulged clientele, many of whom stigmatized fava beans and root vegetables as not only unhealthy but also socially degrading. Conversely, Andry, who sided with more traditional medical opinion, sought ways for hungry but obedient Catholics to maintain their increasingly refined lifestyle, if not their notion of good health. Seen another way, the high moral tone that characterized this public debate pointed directly to schism in the medical profession, undermined by the intrusion of lay practitioners and barber-surgeons who perpetuated popular misconceptions of the Galenic dietary system for their own gain, while it underscored the Jesuit/Jansenist divide that widened into a partisan conflict between the crown and the judges of Parliament in the mid eighteenth century.
While Andry may have sided with the losing party (the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764), Hecquet’s theologically inspired iatromechanics would soon be discredited by the secular impulse of scientists who led the field of physiology into the nineteenth century. Yet, at this moment when physicians and scientists worked together to address the problem of how best to fast, Andry claimed to have the more reasoned, enlightened view. His moderate stance that, on the one hand, sided with Church orthodoxy in keeping the Lenten fast a liminal experience to separate oneself from the temptations of the world, on the other hand promoted his own “wise discernment” whereby his recommendations neither extolled the virtues of bodily deprivation nor condemned gustatory desires for exotic preparations. Rather, by pursuing the juste mileu, Andry explored questions of taxonomy in dietary law on scientific grounds, seeking a broader, more ecologically informed understanding of animal classification and the “correct” interpretation of a given food’s role in digestive function. In so doing, Andry applauded those who sought ways to accommodate the special dietary needs of Lenten practitioners (like the Benedictine Maurist of Le Tréport, allergic to salted fish) by finding alternatives to the traditional fast. Andry agreed that the zeal which characterized those who justified fasting as a way of life was not only unenlightened, but prejudicial, as it blinded their ability to make accurate observations about the nature of animal life. Citing Hecquet’s objections to the Church’s allowance for amphibious creatures such as mackerel, tortoise, and otter, Andry attacked his opponent’s flagrant disregard of biological fact as well as his lack of scientific method. Andry then cited the “clearly developed reason” and careful observations upon which the celebrated monks of Le Tréport drew in making their successful case for the dispensation of puffins, along with the laboratory work of medical professionals, all of which, according to Andry, convinced ecclesiastical authorities to reconsider the aquatic bird for Lenten fast “in its infinite wisdom and generosity.”
This accommodationist position, one that welcomed scientific pursuit of knowledge as a way to greater wisdom and allegiance for all Catholics, happened to represent the Church’s view as well, a point made plain by the royal censors of Andry’s treatise. In his forward to Andry’s 1713 edition, rector and theologian Berthé of the University of Paris applauded the revised work that “shed light on every corner” of this subject, “giving a double blow to trituration [in ways that] ended up pulverizing the system.” Berthé also enticed readers by identifying the two conditions that prevent many from keeping the fast: on the one hand, there is “the blind sensuality, [of the] less enlightened Christian [who] is attached to eating meat [and sees any other food] as a source of corruption and death.” On the other hand, Berthé characterized men like Hecquet, “the more spiritual Christian [whose] zealous enthusiasm transforms meat into poison and conveys an excellence and deliciousness to vile vegetables, which claims to infinitely surpass the most exquisite fat and must captivate the refinement of kings.”33
Andry aimed to discredit Hecquet’s findings by emphasizing the role of science and reason. He hoped to convince the reading public that littleknown foods could be reclassified through règles plus sûres. His exaltation of these “sure” methods did not, however, preclude the role of taste, which determined how to select an appropriate diet. Andry allowed that everyone’s tastes differ—at the very least, taste determines what is good or bad for us. By proclaiming taste, on the one hand, relative to an individual’s palate and, on the other hand, a mechanism that allows all humans to discern the edible from the inedible, Andry demonstrated a more modern view than the holistic theories of medicine that had directed food therapy for centuries. Such an intellectual departure may reflect Andry’s familiarity with Lemery’s Traité des aliments (1705), a standard food reference in the eighteenth century that systematically categorized foods by their physical properties and sensory qualities, especially taste. Each food entry suggested proper preparation in order to gain the greatest gustatory results. Lemery’s work is credited as a turning point in the liberation of dietary science from the culinary preferences of what determined good taste.34 This liberation did not mean that doctors had abandoned food therapy or that their attention to diet in diagnosing and caring for the body had waned. To be sure, doctors, laymen, and even clergymen remained attuned to the healthful effects of foods. But, increasingly, they saw the importance of the “noblest of senses” and the skills necessary to prepare foods that taste good, like the monks at Le Tréport, whose various preparations of the puffin were done to overcome a fellow brother’s disgust for (and vomiting of) salted fish. Their culinary experiments looked to balance flavor and cooking techniques that revealed the fleshy quality of the aquatic fowl as much as it appealed to the more refined palates of the fasting gourmet. According to Jean-Louis Flandrin, taste came to mean “the idea that the quality of a dish is an intrinsic property of the dish itself, independent of the temperament of the person who eats it. Good taste was an objective fact and cooking, as in literature and the other aristocratic arts such as hunting, fencing and dance, had become an object of study for those whose sensibility and acumen excelled in these classical forms as hommes de gout.”35
This “objective fact” did not escape the world of the Jesuits, and the humanist concept of good taste was as familiar to them as the culinary notion of what tasted good. Most famous among these priestly gastronomes being Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant and Pierre Brumoy, who met as fellow contributors to the Memoires de Trévoux and, in 1739, contributed their thoughts on the development of haute cuisine through the refinement of the French palate in the preface to the 1742 edition of Les Dons de Comus by François Marin, the text that proclaimed the shift from classic to modern through its new definition of taste.36
Cooking, like any other art invented for need or for pleasure, was perfected along with the national genius of each nation and became more delicate as the nations became more polite. … Among the civilized nations, progress in cooking followed progress in all the other arts. … The Italians civilized all of Europe, and without a doubt it was they who taught us how to eat. … Although good cooking has been known in France for more than two centuries, it is fair to say that it has never been as delicate as it is now, or done so properly or with a taste so refined.37
Like his Jesuit brothers Bougeant and Brumoy, Andry’s willingness to appeal to the validity of one’s taste, and his embrace of the widening selection of food preparations and ingredients, demonstrates what was perhaps a more cosmopolitan, if not more “enlightened,” interpretation of what diet had become to many discerning French elites. By the end of the eighteenth century, the more individualized notion of what was palatable would eventually win out, as elites sought new tastes and preparations in a burgeoning marketplace. To be sure, consumer-driven tastes in a world of ever increasing choices shaped how individuals moderated their desires for particular foods as Lenten rules became more relaxed after 1774, when the Crown removed barriers to the meat trade that had existed during the forty-day fast. In questioning their blind duty to the Church’s teachings, and in searching for more authentic means of atoning for sin, believers encountered a new set of possibilities for keeping the fast, inasmuch as the pursuit of a more refined and discerning sense of taste had contributed to the ways in which the French were learning how to eat.
The Lenten diet was of as much interest to theologians and men of letters as it was to physicians and chemists, with all seeking to better the condition of their clientele, whether for spiritual or bodily needs or both. Their inquiry into the science and tradition of Lent targeted an elite audience often seen as self-indulgent and in need of discipline. While men and women of taste advocated lighter, more refined food habits, the social expectations of this privileged lifestyle too often led its followers to overeating and digestive maladies. Even as the individual made his or her own choice about dietary regimen, these choices carried cultural stigmas and moral consequences that reflected the proclaimed virtues and vices of a society in the midst of dramatic transformation of needs and wants. To be sure, these debates over the meaning and significance of Lenten observances reveal the diversity in religious convictions in early modern France, yet, as we have seen, these differences do not neatly fall into secular versus religious camps. Rather, the understandings of science and theology fed into the intellectual pursuits of physicians and clergy in novel ways, as they sought reasoned justifications for dietary regimes during Lent. The Lenten diet proved to be the centerpiece of a convergence of concerns about health, taste, piety, and penance that were being tested and challenged by competing medical theories and an increasingly vocal world of religious heterodoxy.
Notes
1. For a detailed discussion of the Benedictine study of puffins, see “Dissertation sur le Pilet” published as a separate essay in Andry, Traité des alimens de caresme, 475–495.
2. See Mentzer, “Fasting, Piety, and Political Anxiety.”
3. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 54.
4. See entries “Fast” and “Lent” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1907–12). For further discussion on medieval practices, see Henisch, Fast and Feast, 30–49.
5. The Portable Voltaire, ed. Ben Ray Redman (New York: Penguin, 1977), 147.
6. McCleod and Ustorf, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 7.
7. McManners, Church and Society, 2:96–98, 106–118.
8. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds., Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition: Reformation Era, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 2:853.
9. Luynes, Mémoires du duc de Luynes, 11:59 and 13:183.
10. Bossy, Christianity in the West.
11. Robinson, Regulars and the Secular Realm, 2.
12. McManners, Church and Society, 2:60.
13. Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London: Folio Society, 1970), 150.
14. See Littré, “Carême.”
15. Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste.
16. Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74. See also Benadetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 219–221, 228–230.
17. Documentation in the municipal archives of Lyon, Caen, Marseille, Rouen, as well as Paris, detail the provisioning of Lenten butcheries and the regulation of the urban meat trade during Lent throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most often, city officials contacted with private butchers to supply fresh meat to city hospitals for the infirm as well as those whose physical condition made meat a necessity.
18. Abad, “Une indice de déchristianization?”; Montenach, “Esquisse d’une économie illicite.”
19. See police arrests in Paris from 1722 to 1732 in Archives de la Bastille, ms. 10973, 10752, 10980, 10985, 10999, 11069, 11116, 11150, 11151, 11174, 11193, and 11406. Ordinances from 1769, 1775, and 1776 prescribe a fine of three hundred livres for violations Lenten regulations. Bibliothèque nationale de la France, MS français 11355: “Table chronologique des édits, déclarations, arrêts et sentences contenus dans le traité de la Police.”
20. Archives de Paris 2AZ2.
21. Letter dated March 5, 1726, in A. Franklin, La vie privée d’ autrefois, 184.
22. Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 11–12.
23. Le Thresor de santé (Paris, 1607) as quoted in Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy,” 421.
24. The Best and Easiest Method of Preserving Uninterrupted Health to Extreme Old Age: Established upon the justest laws of animal oeconomy and confirmed by the suffrages of the most celebrated practitioners among the ancients and moderns (London, 1748); translated to the French by L. Preville as Méthode aisée pour conserver la santé jusqu’à une extreme vieillesse, Fondée sur les Loix de l’oeconomie animale, & les Observations pratiques des meilleurs Médecins, tant anciens que modernes (Paris, 1752), 78–79.
25. Leake, Some Founders of Physiology.
26. Mémoires pour l’Histoire des sciences 32–33.
27. Doyle, Jansenism 21–22.
28. Brockliss, “The Medico-Religious Universe,” 191–221.
29. Merton, “Old and New Physiology”; Rothschuh, History of Physiology.
30. See Hecquet, La médecine théologique.
31. Andry, Traité des alimens de caresme 6.
32. Brockliss claimed that “Hecquet did not only strengthen his medical prejudices through his religious opinions, but also used his science to confirm his theology.” See “The Medico-Religious Universe,” 215; I would contend that Andry’s orthodox views about Lenten practices informed his own writings, which sought religious sources for scientific observation and discovery.
33. Preface to Andry, Traité des alimens de caresme.
34. See Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy.”
35. Ibid., 430–31.
36. Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste 158.
37. See “Avertissement” in Marin, Suite des Dons de Comus (Paris, 1742), cited in Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy,” 430.