medieval bodies life death and art in the middle ages

Like a medieval pageant, this striking and unusual history brings together medicine, art, poetry, music, politics, cultural and social history and philosophy to reveal what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. And doctors and natural philosophers were at the centre of a collision between centuries of sophisticated medical knowledge, and an ignorance of physiology as profound as its results were gruesome.

In literature and politics, hearts and heads became powerful metaphors that shaped governance and society in ways that are still visible today. In paintings and reliquaries that celebrated the - sometimes bizarre - martyrdoms of saints, the sacred dimension of the physical left its mark on their environment. In Medieval Bodies, art historian Jack Hartnell uncovers the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves. Medieval Bodies is an informative, entertaining and eminently readable rumination on how Medieval people thought about themselves, focusing on art, medicine and. MORE: Read an extract from 'Medieval Bodies'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.Dripping with blood and gold, fetishized and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. 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.

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. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages (Wellcome Collection) Paperback Februby Jack Hartnell (Author) 225 ratings See all formats and editions Hardcover 35.28 7 Used from 31.28 Paperback 19.57 7 Used from 14.42 10 New from 15. 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.

Medieval bodies life death and art in the middle ages