Jack Hartnell

Hartnell breaks it all down from head to toe, literally! Arabic and Western medicine are both featured, demonstrating an equal exchange. Each chapter is dedicated to a region that, altogether, would've composed the medieval image of the human body: the head, the senses, skin, bone, the heart, blood, the hands, the stomach, the genitals, and feet. This was a time before commonplace microscopes, so our lymph nodes, brain cells, a layout of our nervous system, didn't appear until much later. show more But as Hartnell attests, medieval medicine was not a "dark age" of constant bloodletting and wishful thinking. Medieval doctors knew that the head was "the locus of human rationality, sanity and personhood," of blood poisoning and inherited conditions, that oral hygiene was a necessity, and that an unvaried, heavy diet or a night of drunken binging could easily put an otherwise healthy individual into an early grave.

You'll be happy to know that this book is full of bright, full page illustrations to demonstrate how, in more ways than not, progress was being made. One of my favorites is a 9th c. Arabic diagram of the eye. My only qualm is that the chapter on the "Senses" felt neglected. "Miasma," or polluted air, that dominated the medieval understanding of the spread of disease, got 2 sentences. But Hartnell's style is delightful, and what they do include, I haven't read anywhere else. The German personnification of love, Frau Minne; animated headless saints called cephalophores, the Wundenmann, the leche finger, chyle, monastic sign language, a dirty Anglo-Saxon riddle, and why Maubuisson Abbey is full of royal entrails. I learned so much from this read, and it was a great double-feature with Caciola's "Afterlives!" show less

'Medieval Bodies' is a cultural history for the general reader. You should not expect anything more deep or less anecdotal than you get. Nevertheless as a run-through of examples of how the medieval mind worked and the body acted, the book is informative, useful and entertaining.

Hartnell (under the Wellcome Collection imprint) uses the parts of the human body from the head to the feet to provide a flow of mini-essays on whatever aspect of medieval culture comes to mind at each stage.

From show more this perspective, it can be seen as a loose small-scale encyclopedia on a whole variety of subjects from attitudes to nudity, burial customs and the heart in courtly love through to blood miracles and bleeding icons, surgical instruments and the medieval attitude to farting.

Where it scores is not only in its up to date scholarship but in its superb and copious illustrations and its inclusion of Islamic and to a lesser extent Judaic medieval ideas and images. The publishers have made a real effort to have each relevant illustration match its text. A model of its kind in this respect.

There are, of course, many things that will be new to the average reader in the book although probably not its general picture of the medieval mind with its faith-based world view. What is striking as one reads it is just how much of that world survives today.

We see a medieval population no different in fundamentals from us but with a different ideological structure that had its logic and use-value in its time and which would only be changed with the arrival of scientific method and empirical investigation of claims about the world.

Materially our world is very different but a surprisingly large number of people today still believe things believed in then. Such ideas as the heart as expression of certain emotions have a 'stickiness' that provides strong continuity with that long multicultural age of approximately 1,000 years.

There is too much detail in the book to review and share here but one insight should noted - that we seem to have lost the bulk of a complex language of hand signals and possibly of touch of which there remains only traces in Catholic signing and (I would add) Italian expression.

The medieval world is both different in its priorities from ours and the same in its essential humanity. 'Medieval Bodies' adds value as a non-academic popular gateway to that world, clearly written and with something of interest on almost very page. show less

I read this because it was recommended to me by the barista at my favorite bookshop (I get a free coffee with my books there) who said it was the best nonfiction they had read all of last year. Happy to report that the barista has excellent taste (in a literary and literal sense it seems).

I might have enjoyed it even more during my “historical bodies in artistic representation” phase, which began with The Sick Rose, but it was still excellent and I do love a book with pictures despite show more being a fully grown adult with multiple degrees show less

A very readable, head-to-toe survey of how the human body was perceived and understood by people in medieval times, as evidenced in artwork and manuscripts of the time. The handsome and judiciously selected color illustrations enhance the text and make this an enjoyable read. However "wrong" many of the concepts of the body's workings were, art historian Hartnell successfully makes a case for the complexity and sophistication of medieval thoughts on the subject - the beautiful 12th century show more Thorney Computus illustrates a delightfully kaleidoscopic interweaving of elements, humors, zodiac, months, winds and ages. A thirteenth century diagram of the brain is of course grossly oversimplified and flat wrong, but they DID get the optic chiasm right: the optic nerves correctly cross over, sending impulses from each eye to the opposite sides of the brain.

Other reviewers have "complained" that the book trends to wander from its structure of focusing on specific body parts - the sense of hearing includes discussion of the significance of church bells, for example - and the lengthy discursion from feet into pilgrimage travel goes a little too far afield. But Hartnell's stated intent is to consider the medieval body in "its very broadest sense, a jumping-off point for exploring all kinds of aspects of medieval life." Fair enough. I found it all engaging, fascinating, amusing (see the nuns harvesting a penis tree on p. 252), and particularly enjoyed his inclusion of Islamic, Jewish, and north African ideas alongside the western European. A nice addition to the history of medicine collection, and an interesting companion to David Bainbridge's Stripped Bare on the art of veterinary anatomy.

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