Digesting Faith

In seventeenth-century Rome, the consumption of meat was on the rise. By the 1630s, Romans were eating double the amount of meat they had consumed fifty years previously, even accounting for growth in population. At the same time that all this meat was being consumed, the papacy came to fiercely defend another comestible: the wafer eaten in the Eucharist. These two products came to be at the center of papal reform in Rome. Eating meat, especially at Easter, and regularly partaking in the body of Christ signaled one's adherence to Catholicism and obedience to the Pope. But the matter was not that simple; accusations of cannibalism in Rome—both real and imagined—led to lengthy medical and theological discussion over how the body digests food. Furthermore, most contemporary medical advice did not recommend heavy consumption of meat. This article thus explores how an alliance between the medical community and the papacy sought to remake alimentary and anatomical ideas related to digestion and healthy eating in early modern Rome. Various sections will detail evolving theories of digestion in the papal capital; how such theories were applied to theological and practical issues such as giving the Eucharist to the sick; whether cannibals could gain sustenance from human flesh; and physician commentary on rising meat consumption in the city. In the end, medical expertise allied with Church authority to defend the aims of the Counter-Reformation papacy.