The Role of Public Humiliation and Fasting in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Disaster

“In toto corde vestro in ieiunio et in fletu et in planctu: The role of public humiliation and fasting in 16^th and 17^th century disaster”

Ken Albala, Professor of History, University of the Pacific

This paper will explore the revival of the ancient Old Testament form of fasting, total abstinence from food when whole communities faced potential danger: war, plague and persecution. The 16^th and 17^th centuries suffered many disasters as well as potential opportunities to express communal repentance. These occasions include war time parliaments in England, Lutherans facing destruction in the Thirty Years War, Anabaptists fleeing from sporadic purges, French Huguenots in the French Civil Wars. How theologians among Catholic, Protestant and Radical denominations interpreted the practice of public fasting will be explored, as well as the unique relationship to food which had developed among these various groups.

Surprisingly, it was not always so simple that Calvinists with their biblical literalism reverted to the Hebrew fast, nor that Catholics merely defended the traditional medieval form of fasting on set days. In their theological arguments it is clear that all sides in the debate over fasting were forced to reassess their assumptions about how authorities should publicly express their fears and communicate those feelings convincingly to God. Theologians also reveal their anxiety over how to convince the community of the necessity of true inward fasting of the type that Joel had prescribed centuries before and how to avoid the kind of rote superficial fast they were sure many parishioners followed out of mere custom rather than sincere self abnegation.