He explains that religion did not dominate medieval life in the sense that it crowded out all other thoughts and conversations, but rather that it formed an essential baseline for how people understood the world – as inarguable and as inescapable as the existence of gravity. Hartnell begins by unpacking the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the medieval understanding of the body. As the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch put it, “There was a more fortunate age and probably there will be one again…My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms.” Medieval people had a sad sense that they were living through a time between periods of greatness. A lecturer in art history at the University of East Anglia, Hartnell peels back the skin of the Middle Ages to reveal the meat of a distinctive culture now gone the way of all flesh.Īs this capacious and entertaining volume reveals, while most of the medieval world has disappeared, reduced to artefacts in museums and libraries, its influence is still felt today. Ravaged by plague, war and famine, the Middle Ages can seem an era defined by mortality – a millennium of corrupt decline following the fall of Rome, before a heady rebirth of science and culture in the Renaissance.īut as Jack Hartnell argues in this dazzling tour through physiognomy and across time, medieval bodies are a route into understanding a richly imaginative and curious age, where the barriers between earthly, heavenly and infernal worlds were parchment-thin – and where immortality was found within the pages of books as well as in a life beyond this mortal coil. Paper falls into decay centuries faster than near-indestructible parchment, a skin stripped of its fleshy corruptibility and able to withstand most of the vagaries of time. An obvious cost-cutting decision, maybe – and one that reflects a modern understanding of the law as mutable, editable and of its time. Until 2017, the United Kingdom’s laws were still painstakingly recorded on it, until MPs voted to save £80,000 a year by switching to paper.

But parchment is not just a historic curio.

Calf or lamb’s hide washed and scraped into smooth parchment, found in every monastery and royal court, was the foundation on which medieval libraries were built.

In the Middle Ages, skin stretched beyond the body.

Hartnell medieval bodies