... wonderfully rich ... Drawing on exquisite tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, medical textbooks, accounts from doctors and the sick, [Hartnell] reveals the 'glittering and diverse' details of medieval life, death and art across Europe and the Middle East ... 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. Hartnell shows that medieval culture was suffused with bodily tropes, from nuns plucking penises from a tree and flatulists kept by royalty to entertain the court, to the belief that the heart was 'a glowing internal sun'. A triumph of scholarship.
.... a fascinating compendium of quackery, surgery, science, faith, magic and superstition from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of the Early Modern period. The bodies he describes in this lively, wide-ranging history are sacred and profane, immaculate and bloodied, devoutly worshipped and lustily spanked ... Hartnell is particularly good on holy bodies: the cruel and visceral martyrdoms of saints, the miraculous innards of abbesses and the veneration of relics ... an erudite, wide-ranging, thoughtfully illustrated book with more than a dash of Carry On Monastery.
... 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 ... You can read the chapters separately — several reviewers seem to have chanced on genitalia — and at every point you’ll encounter wit, learning and riveting stories. A wonderful read.
Armed with Hartnell’s telling, readers will reassess their traditional view of the Middle Ages. Far from a Dark Age of superstition and ignorance, this was a time of curiosity, inquiry, and experimentation—a collision of the legacies of the past and the realities of the present. His knowledge and insight are impressive, and he shows uses with wit and humor.
... gloriously illustrated ... While capturing the humor inherent in looking so far back in time, Hartnell points to the common humanity between our modern selves and the men (and women!) who left behind these writings ... Hartnell’s head-to-toe examination of the medieval body invokes nearly all other aspects of medieval culture and life. Food, literature, music and the prevalence of the spiritual are all present in great detail in Medieval Bodies, and it makes sense: We, on an ordinary day, do not perceive ourselves as a collection of viscera. We understand ourselves, both physically and otherwise, in relation to the things we come into contact with in the surrounding world. This was also true of our long-ago ancestors—and in making this clear, Hartnell’s book provides a most human look into a world that is neither so far away nor very separate from us at all.
Hartnell is an art historian, so his book is copiously illustrated. But it’s also a history of medicine and much more, treating each topic under its pertinent body part ... a thick, spicy plum pudding of a book ... Hartnell ends with a bracing look at the future of the past.
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 ... 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.
... entertaining, comprehensive ... the book’s broadness is also its strength, recasting Dark Age medicine and culture as more globally interconnected and enduring than previously thought. Curious readers will marvel at Hartnell’s lucid prose and generous selection of illustrations.
