Medieval Bodies

Life and Death in the Middle Ages

De: Jack Hartnell

Narrado por: Michael Page

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 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!

Fascinating

A novel look at human biology. Science lovers will enjoy it and who knows what we’ll might re-think from the Medieval Period.

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.

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.

Probably Better Reading Physically

I found the permise and many of the informational tidbits fascinating. Yet, I found this book hard to pay attention to. I think this would be better read physically than as an audiobook.

Excellent, informative, and accessible

A very excellent little book, giving anecdotes, archeological findings, and literary references, all orbiting around the ‘body’ without being grotesque or intentionally exaggerated.
I’ll probably purchase this in hardcopy!

Grossly Inaccurate. Don't waste your time.

The title is a thinly veiled excuse to repeatedly attack Christianity with misinformation and snide sarcasm. That being said, approximately 10-15% of the statements made have any basis in actual history, and 0% of the statements have citations.

I really wanted to love this book, but...

This topic is one of my favorite genres so I was disappointed to find it boring. Lots of allusions to contemporary writers and texts, but if I hadn’t already read widely I never would’ve gotten those references. The timeline jumps back and forth in time, and doesn’t tie everything together. It was supposed to compare and contrast the knowledge of the‘People’s of the book’, but mostly skipped going deeper into Islamic and Jewish practices. I will admit that as I never made through a full chapter without falling asleep it could be used to lull you into sleep at bedtime so if you’re looking for a bedtime story this book fits the bill