Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
With wit, wisdom, and a sharp scalpel, Jack Hartnell dissects the medieval body and offers a remedy to our preconceptions.
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.
In this richly illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, this book throws light on the medieval body from head to toe—revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time.
Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, Hartnell's work is an excellent guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Hartnell's entertaining, comprehensive debut contradicts the popular conception of the Middle Ages as a "backwards, muddy" time by surveying medieval attitudes toward the human body. Analyzing medical textbooks, physicians' accounts, poetry, religious sermons, and artworks from Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic world, Hartnell works his way from "head to heel," addressing each body part in turn. Hair types, he notes, were seen to reflect certain mental characteristics: lank, blonde hair indicated deviousness, while red hair suggested a quick temper. Middle Eastern writers thought the pale skin and "unsettling" blue eyes of Northern Europeans were indicative of cowardice; Christians, meanwhile, associated dark skin with sinfulness. The heart maintained the body's "humoral equilibrium," according to physicians, and generated romantic feelings, according to the poets of "courtly love." Male and female sex organs were understood to be inverted versions of each other, with the exteriority of male genitals taken as proof of masculine superiority. In the Middle Ages, Hartnell writes, "the body was everything to everyone" a statement that holds true for any historical era. But the book's broadness is also its strength, recasting Dark Age medicine and culture as more globally interconnected and enduring than previously thought. Curious readers will marvel at Hartnell's lucid prose and generous selection of illustrations.
