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While the signification of food abstention has been located within hagiographical and early nineteenth-century medicoliterary texts, an intertextual examination of elective starvation has been neglected by Romantic scholars. Religiosity within nineteenth-century food abstinence and consumptive symptomatology has been assessed, yet hagiographical influence has been overlooked. A hagiographical examination of elective starvation may supplement our analysis of nineteenth-century food abstention, as well as gendered consumptive symptomatology. For example, elective starvation, as well as food expulsion, genders the ascetic body; food determines gendered religious signification, feminizing the self-mutilative practices of food practice. Moreover, food abstinence is disproportionately assigned to female religiosity, as quantitative evidence demonstrates that penitential asceticism, such as fasting, predominates the female religious experience. Yet in hagiography, somatopsychic conditions of starvation, such as terminal lucidity, redirect food abstention from a self-mutilative practice to the Eucharistic experience. The symptomatology of the consumptive is similarly reduced to a psychosomatic reaction of a “refined nervous system,” rather than as the pathogenic effect of tuberculosis. Consumption signifies sensibility, and is likewise feminized as emaciation, or constitutional delicacy, materializes the consumptive’s interior disposition. This sensibility regulates the secular body into the aesthetic and non-secular, as illness provides spiritual redemption. While early nineteenth-century medicoliterary texts lack the religiosity of their Victorian successors, pathological discourse is still inextricable from evangelical. If we examine medical rhetoric against hagiographical accounts, consumptive symptomatology is normative Eucharistic practice of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century women. Hagiography can therefore be applied within Romantic literature as a surrogate for contemporary discourse on gendered consumptive bodies.

John Keats is the exemplar of this practice, most remarkably within his 1820 text “The Eve of St. Agnes.” At its publication, Keats had yet to contract the illness. He was, however, acquainted with pulmonary tuberculosis as a trained apothecary-surgeon. He was moreover familiar with the illness through the diagnoses and consequent deaths of his mother and uncle, as well as through his brother, Tom, whom he oversaw throughout the extent of the infirmity. Keats would have been aware of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century disease ontology, including the Romantic notion that illness “was but the expression of the deepest truth of the consumptive, a being ‘apart,’ threatened but all the more precious for it.” Although Romantic ideology situated consumption as a “learned” disease, or the psychosomatic effect of an irritable yet superior nervous system, it maintained a religiosity. Indeed,

Despite the medicalization of disease, tuberculosis remained intertwined with the conception of Divine will, as sin and redemption persisted as prominent features of a consumptive’s life and death. The prevailing approach rested upon the Christian ideology of atonement […] ‘The sequence of sin, suffering, contrition, despair, comfort, and grace – shows that pain was regarded as an essential part of God’s order, and is bound up with the machinery of judgment and conversion.’

While the religiosity of the disease has been abstracted and reproduced throughout scholarship, these texts decenter the physicality of the consumptive. Or, rather, they fail to correlate the cruder symptomatology with the religious experience. Bodily expulsion, for example, is overlooked in favor of the inoffensive aspects of the condition: tuberculosis is remodeled as the “beautiful death,” neglecting any indelicate symptomatology such as distension, nausea, ulceration, or vomiting. Even in Keats’ 1819 “Ode to a Nightingale,” his attention to the consumptive’s body does not extend past “youth grows pale, spectre thin, and dies,” − despite his references to Tom’s “spitting of blood” throughout his letters to Benjamin Bailey. Although resources on Tom’s death are limited, we can assume that Tom’s condition may have resembled James Severn’s account of Keats’ own consumptive episodes, in which more attention is given to food expulsion, abstention, and hemoptysis. In a letter from December 17, 1820, Severn relates Keats’ symptomatology:

I had seen him wake on the morning of this attack, and to all appearance he was going on merrily and he had unusual good spirits, when in an instant a Cough seized him and he vomited near two Cupfuls of blood […] This is the 9th day, and no change for the better […] But this is the lesser evil when compared with his Stomach. Not a single thing will digest. The torture he suffers all and every night and best part of the day is dreadful in the extreme. The distended stomach keeps him in perpetual hunger or craving, and this is augmented by the little nourishment he takes to keep down the blood.

In January of the succeeding year, Keats’ physician James Clarke affirmed that Keats’ stomach was “ruined.” He continued that “the chief part of his disease seems seated in his Stomach.” While it’s uncertain if Tom had an identical experience, it’s likely that similar conditions were present. Keats would have been moreover aware of the gastrological damage of the disease throughout his education at Guy’s Hospital. This gastrological damage would have registered significantly with Keats, whose “unpleasant insistence on the palate” and “extensiveness of reference to eating and drinking” would come to individualize him within the world of Romantics. For instance, Keats’ cyclical relationship with feeding is unmistakable within his marginalia of Paradise Lost, though the marginalia lack the hagiographical context of “The Eve of St. Agnes.” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” provides further context of Keats’ gustatory preoccupations, though, again, it does not allow for a hagiographical reading. Keats’ deliberate inclusion of the image of St. Agnes in his 1820 text, coupled with the inclusion of food practice, therefore demands a reexamination of the body through hagiographical and medicoliterary modes.

Keats’ inclusion of St. Agnes is moreover remarkable as, in English folklore, the protection of St. Agnes “was invoked against ague, as it would appear from a charm which was said to be efficacious when used on the eve of her feast.” Custom dictated that the eldest female of the home would recite the following incantation:

Tremble and go.
First day shiver and burn,
Tremble and quake;
Second day shiver and burn,
Tremble and die;
Third day never return.

If performed correctly, this incantation would obstruct illnesses “involving fever and shivering.” Although ague commonly refers to malaria, it may likewise indicate pulmonary tuberculosis. Fever and chill are both symptomatic of the disease, though it’s uncertain if Keats was aware of St. Agnes’ affiliation with preventive healthcare. If so, the analogue of disease and hagiographical feast cannot be undervalued. The specificity of female religiosity is furthermore striking as pulmonary tuberculosis was regarded as a feminizing illness. Indeed, Keats “appealed to middle-class women as a feminized figure who could help explain their apparently greater susceptibility to consumption.” Leigh Hunt too considered that Keats’ “natural tendency to pleasure, as a poet, sometimes degenerated, by reason of his ill health, into a poetical effeminacy,” while Swinburne described Keats as a “vapid and effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood.” Pulmonary tuberculosis as a gendered and/or gendering disease may likewise account for the speculative interest with hagiographical food abstention, a “female concern” of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century religiosity. Such food practice would engage Keats’ attention both as a consuming and consumptive body.

The specificity of female religiosity is additionally striking as fasting, sleep deprivation, food expulsion, malnutrition, and audiovisual hallucinations were characteristic of female hagiographical figures. In fact, accounts of female hagiographical figures read comparatively to consumptive symptomatology:

Another royal saint, Margaret of Hungary, a nun from girlhood who ferociously refused offers of marriage, practiced similar food asceticism […] To avoid eating, Margaret several times served her sisters at the beginning of the meal, escaped to the chapel to pray, and returned to serve them again; she frequently covered her face with a cloth during meals. She hid her own illnesses, lest she be sent to the infirmary and offered meat, and her body was so ‘emaciated and pale’ from fasting that all marveled.

Saint Dorothy of Montau, a laywoman of the fourteenth century, “developed nausea at the sight or smell of food,” and “ate so little she ceased excreting.” Yet John Marienwerder, Dorothy’s confessor, recorded that

Sometimes […] she could hardly stand of walk […] She remained in bed as if oppressed with a grave illness […] For now she hungered in such intense desire and destitution of al strength that it appeared to her that she could never express her hunger or accept into her mouth any corporeal food […] And this desire grew night and day.

Marienwerder’s account follows closely to that of Keats’ “distended stomach,” and “perpetual hunger or craving.” Though, again, Keats did not contract pulmonary tuberculosis during the composition of “The Eve of St. Agnes,” it was understood that he was “destined to die from tuberculosis.”

Yet food abstention does not introduce the hagiographical context of the poem until Madeline receives instruction for St. Agnes’ Eve: she is told that “young virgins might have visions of delight […] if ceremonies due they did aright.” These ceremonies require that a young woman go to sleep without clothing or food. They are then directed to lie prostrate upon her bed with her eyes looking upward. It’s dictated that, upon this procedure, her future husband will visit her within a dream. Her food abstention can only discontinue after the two figures exchange a kiss. This exchange is necessary in the procession of the St. Agnes feast, where food abstention and nudity are satisfied through immoderate eating. Food deprivation, such as fasting, purifies the body for the reception of Christ, or imitate Christ’s “macerated body […] the bleeding meat they often saw in Eucharistic visions.” Pathophysiological effects of food abstention, such as audiovisual hallucinations, redirect non-eating to a “paramystical phenomenon.” Elective starvation is reconstructed as an evangelical food practice, in which the female body, through disciplinary processes, produces corporeal visions. Although Madeline is not expected to visualize the Christ figure, the disciplinary process of food abstention allows her to look “of Heaven with upward eyes for all that [she] desire[s].” Her “visions of delight” correlate with hagiographical accounts of food practice, though the husband supplants the Christ figure. Keats provides an accurate adaptation of the procession, though he supplements the image with consumptive iconography. While the line “supperless to bed they must retire” has a hagiographical correlative, it also duplicates the nineteenth-century “evangelical deathbed.”

Consumptive iconography is furthered through the prostration of the virgin, who must “couch supine […] lily white.” Femininity is achieved through food abstinence, as the consumptive body is elevated to an aesthetic ideal. This aesthetic ideal is typified through her “pallid hue,” as well as her “diseased constitution.” Although Madeline’s condition is less aestheticized upon her introduction, consumptive imagery dominates her eventual encounter with Porphyro. Yet even before this encounter, Keats decorates the piece with elegiac motif. For example, Porphyro requests to see Madeline once he is in a “little moonlight room, / Pale, lattic’d, chill, and silent as a tomb.” Madeline’s deathlike composition is prefigured through Porphyro’s choice of location, and the poem adopts a funerary ambience. Consumptive symptomatology is likewise prefigured through the reply of Madeline’s nurse, Angela, as she tells Porphyro that, if he is to find Madeline, he “must hold water in a witch’s sieve.” This comment could be explicated to refer to the involuntary expulsion of the stomach, as fluid retention, or the lack thereof, marks the consumptive body. Yet even if this reading is ambitious, Angela reinstates consumptive iconography through her description of Madeline:

[…] a feeble soul?
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing,
Whose passing-bell may ere the midnight toll;
Whose prayers for thee, each morn and evening,
Were never miss’d.

“Feeble,” “poor,” “weak,” and “palsy-stricken” refer to the diseased body, while the inclusion of prayer intimates religiosity. Illness is a conduit for piety, though the aestheticization of the condition is decidedly secular. To Porphyro, Madeline’s constitution erects her as a “peerless bride,” whose beauty “he might see […] unespy’d.” The sanctification of her condition is doubled beforehand as Porphyro “implore[d] all Saints to give him sight of Madeline,” so that he “might gaze and worship all unseen.” Madeline is recurrently identified through symptomatological and hagiographical descriptive, allowing for a multimodal response.

Food practice is reintroduced once Angela allows Porphyro entry to Madeline’s chambers. She directs that “all cakes and dainties shall be stored there / Quickly on this feast-night.” Yet this exchange is contingent upon Madeline’s engagement as Angela concludes the instruction with “Ah! thou must needs the lady wed, / Or may I never leave my grave among the dead.” The centralization of marriage alongside the intermittent religious remarks, such as Angela’s instruction that Porphyro “kneel in prayer” before attending to Madeline, neuter the sexual overtones of the piece. Madeline’s piety is extended once they arrive to her “maiden chamber,” established as “silken, hush’d, and chaste.” Yet once they are within the chamber, the object of food practice becomes unclear. The composition of the scene centers Madeline as the food object, although Keats maintains consumptive descriptors:

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
[…]
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint:
She seem'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:—Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Although scholars assess this sequence as “the sensuous becoming the sensual, intensifying by degrees into full sexual realization,” woman as edible object is not incongruous with hagiography. Indeed,

The extreme interest in physicality and the close association of woman with body and food that characterized late medieval culture seem to lie behind not only women's eucharistic piety and food asceticism but also the startling number of women's miracles that involve bodily change. Women's bodies gave off sweet smells as well as healing effluvia, indulged in ecstatic nosebleeds and trances, displayed abrupt changes in size and appearance, and broke out in miraculous physical marks ranging from espousal rings to stigmata. Once we take as seriously as medieval people did the idea that on the altar God becomes food (torn and bleeding meat), we can see as never before how much of such piety was literally imitatio Christi. The somatic changes women underwent parallel to a striking extent the savors, aromas, marks, and alterations that occur in the consecrated host.

However, the sanctification of the female body is only made possible through food asceticism. A woman is “free from mortal taint” once she partakes in food abstention, drawing from “miraculous fasters” such as Colette of Corbie, Joan the Meatless, Catherine of Siena, or Mary of Oignies. Madeline herself is pronounced “like a saint,” with “maiden eyes divine,” after retiring “supperless to bed.” As with female hagiographical figures, this abstention allows her to “dream awake,” inferring a somatopsychic condition. Her moment of vision is also her moment of undressing, situating her further as a consumable object; Porphyro watches as Madeline “unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;” and “loosens her fragrant bodice.” Porphyro as consumer is advanced once he thereafter self-identifies as a “famish’d pilgrim,” though this self-identification is unnecessary to establish him as a gustatory figure.

Madeline’s symptomatological signification is reinstated by the references to her “poppied warmth of sleep.” Although an analgesia and sedative, opiates were prescribed to alleviate cough and pain in the later stages of pulmonary consumption. Keats himself “sought refuge in the ‘cursed bottle of Opium,’” three months before his death, though he references “Asian poppy” beforehand throughout “The Fall of Hyperion.” It’s notable that botanist William Salisbury, whose works Keats had familiarized himself with throughout 1816, “describes the aftereffects of opium as ‘a degree of nausea, a difficulty of respiration…’” Nausea is a striking yet deliberate image to evoke before proceeding to a feast, therefore Keats’ readings of Salisbury, as well as his own experience with the opiate, cannot be understated. While “soothed limbs” and “soul fatigued away” may refer to the opiate’s soporific effect, consumptive symptomatology was likewise marked by deterioration or physical torpor.

The text’s subsequent devolution of the rose advances this once Keats suggests that the female body “should shut, and be a bud again.” The sequence imitates the evangelical deathbed, juxtaposing nineteenth-century ideas of illness and religiosity. The typology of the rose is supplemented with symptomatology, as diseased women were more often identified through botanic descriptors. Although speculative, Keats may have stumbled upon Thomas Beddoe’s 1779 Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Consumption during his time at Guys’ Hospital. Within this text, Beddoe determines that women are

flowers brought forward by the cherishing heat of the conservatory […] They cannot with impunity bear to be roughly visited by the winds of heaven. The slightest cause disorders them, and […] they exist in a perpetual state of dangerous weakness. For in this country, by whatever cause women under thirty are weakened, there is always considerable hazard of consumption.

Indeed, it was not uncommon for the consumptive body to adopt floral analogues, as even Percy Shelley discusses Keats as a “young flower […] blighted in the bud.” Yet Porphyro is likewise associated with the aforementioned images of “full-blown” roses, prefiguring his consumptive symptomatology. Floral analogues further the link between gender and disease as the text states that “Into her dream he melted, as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet.” If we understand Porphyro as the rose, he is consequently feminized; indeed, Porphyro is “that most Keatsian of heroes, roes, effeminate, and naive.” As the violet implicates death, the consumptive symptomatology of Madeline and Porphyro is inferred.

The subsequent food procession is equally striking: Madeline’s evangelical sleep is offset by Porphyro’s voyeurism, as he “[gazes] upon her empty dress” from the recess of the closet. Once “crept […] over the hush’d carpet,” he arranges a table cloth of “crimson, gold, and jet,” a stark antithesis from the “blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d” of Madeline. Madeline, now nude, is demarcated through pious iconography. Her sanctity is reinforced before the initiation of the food procession, furthering the interdependence between woman as edible object through food abstention and woman as hagiographical figure. The exoticism of the delicacies selected accentuates Madeline’s ascetic body:

[…] candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

The sequence continues, as

These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—

Once the feast has been assembled, Porphyro invokes St. Agnes: “And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake […] Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake.” The invocation is curious after Porphyro has established himself as a voyeur, an unusual juxtaposition to a hagiographical figure renowned for her virginity and execution.

Porphyro’s food arrangement is in itself subtextual seeing that he has selected “children’s food.” This signification is deliberate: St. Agnes was the patron of young girls, furthering the correlative between food abstention, religiosity, and sexual “immaturity.” Madeline as an inexperienced hagiographical figure is implicated by the feast she represents yet cannot eat. The gustatory catalogue is further pressing, seeing as “it was the stanzas describing the dainties which Keats selected with peculiar pleasure to read aloud to his host Leigh Hunt.” Yet at no point in are the delicacies ingested despite their supremacy within the text. If Madeline takes notice of the banquet, the notice is unrecorded.

Madeline’s virtue is again underscored once Porphyro addresses her as his “seraph fair,” and “heaven.” Food abstention is maintained, though it’s unclear if sexual abstention occurs. Notwithstanding Porphyro’s demands, or Porphyro’s invasion of her bed, Madeline remains “stedfast.” It isn’t until Porphyro plays “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” that she awakes, redirecting the attention to the “ancient ditty” selected. As aforementioned, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is a gustatory experience, though, as with The Eve of St. Agnes,” “one never knows for certain whether any food has been consumed.”

Yet upon waking, Madeline reads Porphyro as a diseased body, even demanding that’s he’s “pallid, chill, and drear.” This characterization is remarkable as Porphyro, once described as a “full-blown rose,” is inscribed with consumptive specification. Even as he displaces the identification, he reconditions himself through modifiers such as “ethereal” and “flush’d” as if a “throbbing star.” The consumptive body is again inferred, as “hectic flush” is symptomatic of pulmonary tuberculosis. “Hectic flush,” the effect of phthisis, “illuminated the consumptive pallor,” and was “by which the disease could be identified.” In 1790, George Keate determined that “light blue eyes” and “hectic cheeks” are “lit by the bale fires of decline.” Madeline’s own “blue affrayed eyes” take in Porphyro’s disposition, as “pale as smooth-sculptured stone.” The consumptive complexion was “marked by a clear, smooth, soft, nearly transparent skin that was pale in color – possessing an almost brilliant whiteness that was only relieved by the ‘bloom of the rose,’ the result of the low-grade hectic fever.” Gerard van Swieten of 1776 concluded that the disposition “consists by a very fair and rosy complexion, and a transparent skin.” This symptomatology extends to emaciation, which Porphyro establishes as he self-identifies as a “famish’d pilgrim.” Madeline herself is again delineated with consumptive modifiers as she professes that “Porphyro will leave [her] here to fade and pine” as a “dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing.” Both figures are situated within medicoliterary rhetoric while they abstain from food procession.

Yet because of their food abstention, they may, undetected, “glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall.” Porphyro alerts Madeline that the “bloated wassaillers will never heed” their departure, as they’re “drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead.” A direct correlative is made between immoderate eating and food abstention, situating food abstention as the liberatory food practice. Porphyro and Madeline are rewarded for their abstinence, able only to flee because they do not eat. Consumptive symptomatology is, however, again speculatively present in the reiteration of “phantom.” Porphyro and Madeline may have reached the termination of the disease by the text’s conclusion, appearing as deceased figures. This is maintained by their inability to produce sound, as they remain unheard by the Porter who is “in uneasy sprawl, / with a huge empty flagon by his side.” The figure of Angela may also serve as a female double for Madeline and Porphyro, furthering the possibility of Madeline and Porphyro’s death. As Angela “[dies] palsy-twitch’d,” gendered consumptive symptomatology resolves the hagiographical exposition of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

While Keats’ religiosity and food abstention has been explicated throughout Romantic scholarship, hagiography has been excluded. Yet through a hagiographical explication, Romantic scholarship may locate consumptive symptomatology where it has been otherwise overlooked. For John Keats, hagiographical analogues, particularly in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” provide discourse on gendered consumptive bodies. Madeline and Porphyro are marked with consumptive indicators throughout the text, yet “The Eve of St. Agnes,” has been disregarded within studies of Romantic illness. If “The Eve of St. Agnes,” is reread as a hagiographical account, food abstention feminizes disease while it redirects the pathological towards the evangelical. Hagiography functions as a surrogate for consumptive symptomatology, allowing for a multimodal examination of nineteenth-century food abstention.

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