Faith on the Menu: Conflicts around Fasting in Muscovy

Food choice is a matter of dogmatic dispute—and not just in our era, in which dietary concepts like "just eat half," halal, low carb, and vegetarian are commonplace. One could argue—albeit provocatively and not entirely accurately—that the Reformation in Western Europe was triggered by illicit consumption of sausage: in Switzerland the Reformation began in 1522 with Ulrich Zwingli's polemic "Vom Erkiesen und der Freyheit der Spysen" (On the Choice and Freedom of Foods). In it Zwingli defended Christoph Froschauer, who had provided his workers with sausage during Lent to keep up their spirits while they hurried to complete a book. Zwingli argued that the Bible does not prescribe fasting and God does not care whether people eat meat or plants. Drawing on the writings of Paul, the Reformers claimed that we do not find salvation through "works"—that is, prayer, fasting, or other forms of asceticism—but only through the grace of God.

The debate over whether fasting was pleasing to God increasingly became a concern in Russia, too, where—as foreigners often noted—the fasting requirements were much stricter than in Western Europe. For more than half the year, Russians gave up many worldly things: they ate no meat, drank no milk, and abstained from sex. During the fasting period, they prepared their meals using only oil—the smell of which, as the French diplomat Foy de la Neuville commented in 1689, was even more vile than the odeur of the Russians themselves.¹ It is hardly surprising that foreigners visiting Russia dedicated such a central place in their travelogues to Russians' food and voluntary starvation. Nothing creates a sense of a community like sitting together in companionship over a meal. And nothing excludes and segregates so much as the refusal to partake in a shared meal or to freely abstain from food while others are eating. The strict fasting of the Russians and, in contrast, their extravagance on nonfasting days was one feature of Russian life that travelers experienced as particularly alien.

This essay imagines how a new history of fasting and abstinence from food as a practice and an object of political, medical, and religious contestation in premodern Russia could be written. I consider perspectives from cultural and church history, the history of medicine, and political history and examine the ways in which abstinence from food was interpreted by contemporaries, both those fasting and third parties (whether those involved directly in the debates or outsiders). What was the significance of voluntarily going hungry in various social contexts, and what political relevance was ascribed to it? At the center of the investigation are the points in time and dimensions in which abstinence and fasting were considered to have more than just religious meaning. In particular, I am interested in the conflicts that arose both from fasting and from breaking the fast. Even though these conflicts often constituted disputes about the social order, they have received little scholarly attention. This is due to the fact that the social dimensions of abstention from food in Russia are still largely unresearched.

Before turning to a more in-depth examination of three areas of conflict that were particularly significant for the discussions of fasting in Russia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, I offer a brief sketch of what a social and cultural history of fasting might look like. I start by describing desiderata in the research on fasting and abstinence from food in Russia. Subsequently I point out the usefulness of questions and perspectives from food studies and food history and argue that the investigation of practices that involve going without food would similarly benefit from more serious consideration of the social dimensions. I aim to show that it is not sufficient to look at fasting simply in terms of religious history, which considers the practice primarily within the context of asceticism.² In terms of their social dimensions, the consumption of food and voluntary abstention from food need to be considered as inherently related.

Fasting and Abstinence in the History of Eastern Europe

The social and political...