"The decoding of slenderness to reveal deep associations with autonomy, will, discipline, conquest of desire, enhanced spirituality, purity, and transcendence of the female body suggests that the continuities proposed by Rudolph Bell between contemporary anorexia and the self-starvation of medieval saints are not so farfetched as such critics as Brumberg have claimed. Brumberg argues that attempts to find common psychological or political features in the anorexia of medieval saints and that of contemporary women founder on the fact that anorexia mirabilia was centered on a quest for spiritual perfection, “while the modern anoretic strives for perfection in terms of society’s ideal of physical rather than spiritual beauty.” But Brumberg here operates on the assumption-an assumption challenged by the essays in this volume-that there is such a thing as purely “physical” beauty. Granted, the medieval saint was utterly uninterested in attaining a slender appearance. But it does not follow that the contemporary obsession with slenderness is without deep “spiritual” dimensions, and that these cannot share important-that is, illuminating-affinities with the ascetic ambitions of medieval saints. Here, one anoretic explicitly makes the connection: “I felt like one of those early Christian saints who starved themselves in the desert sun.” This is not to say that meaning of self-starvation for the fasting nuns of the Middle Ages can be simply equated with its meaning for adolescent anoretics of today. But in the context of enduring historical traditions that have dominantly coded appetite, lack of will, temptation, and, indeed, the body itself as female, surely we would expect that women’s projects to transcend hunger and desire would reveal some continuous elements."