Medieval Bodies

Life and Death in the Middle Ages

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.

©2018 Jack Hartnell (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A superficial correction of faintly interesting anecdotes

The scope of this book is both too broad and too narrow for it to be illuminating. Too broad because it presents a wealth of material from the entirety of the Middle Ages, some 800 hundred years, from the expanse of land between the strait of Gibraltar to Baghdad, from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish civilizations; it does all this without framing this world in any useful way. Too narrow because it all remains very superficial. This book never goes beyond being a collection of faintly amusing facts and anecdotes vaguely united by the theme. It’s quite a disappointing scratch on the surface of a fascinating subject in a fascinating era.

A delight!

Get it and listen to Michael Page's expert reading. The research is fantastic, and Hartnell weaves a good story, rich with supporting history. It is worth the time and effort!

An interesting medieval time machine

This book was an interesting introduction to the medieval world. If you are interested in medieval history or life, then you should listen to this book. How the medieval world thought about the body and its functions are explored and there are some surprising revelations. The narrator was engaging and this book is not some dry read.

Better in Actual Book Form

I had this book in my wishlist for a while and finally bought it during a 2 for 1 credit sale.

I was disappointed to find that the narrator doesn’t really even seem interested in this book. He rushes (somehow slowly) from chapter to chapter and while the subject matter held my attention, this narrator did not.

The information in the book is interesting but it’s just presented in such a pedantic way.

I think I could have skimmed this book, taken in the information, and felt far more satisfied.

An interesting look/point of view of life in the middle ages

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this, but I feel like the experience is somewhat incomplete without the actual images and I wonder if somehow I missed a detail when I ordered it.