The body was at the centre of the physical and metaphysical worlds, an endlessly fecund source of metaphors and ideas around which their imaginative and intellectual lives evolved. His idea of approaching the medieval worldview through the body is inspired.

Jack Hartnell’s idea of approaching the medieval world-view through the body is inspired. Drawing on exquisite tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, medical textbooks, accounts from doctors and the sick, he reveals the “glittering and diverse” details of medieval life, death and art across Europe and the Middle East. Lasting from about 300 to 1500, the period has been characterised since the Enlightenment as an age of darkness, squalor and misery. The art historian Jack Hartnell tells this extraordinary story in his wonderfully rich study of the Middle Ages. Recalling her words, one of the sisters took a razor to the heart and sliced it in half: inside lay a very small image of Christ on the cross, with several tiny objects from the Passion, including the nails hammered into Christ’s body, all “wrought from the flesh of Chiara’s heart itself”. When she died the nuns were astonished that after five days her body had still not decayed.

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.W hile Abbess Chiara Vengente lay dying in August 1308, she told the nuns of the Umbrian monastery in Montefalco that Christ was in her heart, sustaining her. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time.īringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. In this witty 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. 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. Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children.

Medieval bodies hartnell