Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

He has previously held positions at Columbia University, the Courtauld Institute, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. 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. Jack Hartnell is a lecturer in art history at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. 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. 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. From manuscripts to wash basins, medieval objects can tell us a lot about how people conceived of the world.

Medieval bodies by jack hartnell