Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages

Written by Jack Hartnell

Narrated by Michael Page

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 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. 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.

Bringing 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. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684574865

Jack Hartnell

Jack Hartnell is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia, where his research and teaching focuses on the visual culture of medieval and early modern Europe and the Middle East. He has previously held positions at Columbia University, The Courtauld Institute of Art, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte and the Victoria and Albert Museum.