Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love and had children. makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.'Glorious. Melanie McDonagh * Evening Standard * An erudite, wide-ranging, thoughtfully illustrated book - Laura Freeman * The Times * 'Glorious. at every point you'll encounter wit, learning and riveting stories. PD Smith * Guardian * 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. This beautifully illustrated book succeeds brilliantly in bringing this much maligned period to life.

Hartnell's idea of approaching the medieval worldview through the body is inspired.

A triumphant piece of historical writing - Kathryn Hughes * Mail on Sunday * An extraordinary story and a wonderfully rich study of the Middle Ages. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection. 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.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. 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. 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.

Hartnell medieval bodies