But the book’s broadness is also its strength, recasting Dark Age medicine and culture as more globally interconnected and enduring than previously thought. 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. In the Middle Ages, Hartnell writes, the body was everything to everyonea statement that holds true for any historical era. 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. 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 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. Dr Jack Hartnell is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia.

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children.

Medieval bodies jack hartnell