How should I model large bodies of textual content in a django app?
You can definitely store relatively large bodies of text in database. If you mean by performance there are two angles:

Searching. You should not do then free form searches in database. You may use specific features of ElasticSearch-like tools.
Serving large bodies of text. Unavoidable, naturally, if you want to present it, however you can use GZIP compression that will reduce the bandwidth drastically.
This is a question about best-practice for modelling a Django app. The project is a blog which will present articles written in something similar to Markdown or RST. 
I've checked out a few tutorials to give me some sort of starting point and so far they all store the body of the article in the model. This seems wrong: my understanding of modern database engines isn't the best but storing textfields of arbitrary lengths can't be good for performance.
Three alternatives present themselves:

Limit the article model to metadata and create a separate model to
store the body of an article. At least only one table is a mess!
Limit the article model to metadata and store the article body as a
static file.
Ask someone with more experience. Maybe storing the body in the model
isn't so bad after all... at least it's easily searchable!

How should I model this app? How would you make your solution searchable?