Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

This is very accessible writing erudite but unpretentious and frequently funny. 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 in the process.īringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy 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. Jack Hartnell Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages Kindle Edition by Jack Hartnell (Author) Format: Kindle Edition 64 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 14.81 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0. Medieval Bodies is an informative, entertaining and eminently readable rumination on how Medieval people thought about themselves, focusing on art, medicine and literature. 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. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or 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. this beautifully illustrated book succeeds brilliantly in bringing this much maligned period to life. makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.’ Dominic Sandbrook MEDIEVAL BODIES: LIFE, DEATH, AND ART IN THE MIDDLE AGES A Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2018 'A thick, spicy, plumb pudding of a book - London Review of Books 'A triumph of scholarship.

Medieval bodies jack hartnell