Guardian - PD Smith
"Jack Hartnell tells [an] extraordinary story in his wonderfully rich study of the Middle Ages…His idea of approaching the medieval worldview through the body is inspired…This beautifully illustrated book succeeds brilliantly in bringing this much maligned period to life…A triumph of scholarship."
Church Times - G. R. Evans
"An ambitiously interdisciplinary study…[E]xtravagantly illustrated…[F]ull of lively information."
Evening Standard - Melanie McDonagh
"One of the achievements of this splendid book is to make our world view seem more narrow and fragmented than that of the extensive period we place somewhere between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance…[A]t every point you’ll encounter wit, learning and riveting stories. A wonderful read."
Times Literary Supplement - Mary Wellesley
"[Medieval Bodies will] make you smile and squirm in equal measure…This is a book about the body, but in some ways it is an exploration of the recesses of the medieval mind"
London Review of Books - Barbara Newman
"A thick, spicy plum pudding of a book."
Times Higher Education - Rachel Moss
"A dazzling tour through physiognomy and across time, medieval bodies are a route into understanding a richly imaginative and curious age…[C]apacious and entertaining…[M]arvellously detailed…Medieval Bodies lets its readers see through medieval eyes. Guided by Hartnell’s expertise, we gaze upon a long-ago world."
Kirkus Reviews
2019-09-15
An in-depth look at the medieval conception of the human body.
Some readers may be put off initially by this head-to-toe dissection of the body, but they should press on to encounter a delightful mixture of thought, experiment, discovery, and religion. In his debut book, Hartnell (Art History/Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich) uses his knowledge of art history and the drawings and paintings that showed then-current thinking on organs, bones, blood, and the body in general. The key to understanding this era is the interaction among diverse cultures. "A shared classical heritage undeniably binds together the medieval history of the regions on all sides of the Mediterranean," writes the author, "separating them somewhat from the busy parallel stories of the Far East, India, China, sub-Saharan Africa or the pre-Columbian Americas. Three principal inheritors of the legacy of Rome [Byzantium, Western and Central Europe, and the Islamic world] come to the fore, each representing a different texture of the medieval bodies that I want to try to trace." With the exception of the Crusades, the Muslim kingdoms thrived through tolerance for other religions and cultures, enabling trade and, most importantly, the sharing of ideas. For Hartnell, two of the most interesting illustrations are the "Hebrew Bloodletting Figure" and the "German Wound Man." The bloodletting figure provided a map of the most efficacious spots to bleed a patient while the Wound Man offered cures for punctures and other wounds as well as instructions on the placement of a styptic. Among other intriguing topics, the author discusses a 10th-century Arabic author who provided dental advice and instructions on suturing wounds. As Hartnell shows, medieval conceptions of medicine and the body fluctuated between tangible and fantastic and often conflated thoughts, philosophy, and religion with artistic imagination. When we consider that observational dissections didn't regularly take place until the 1500s, the scope of the work of these cultures is quite impressive.
A wise, eye-opening interdisciplinary view of an era that "featured numerous exciting conceptions of the human form."
