Art historian Jack Hartnell sheds new light on how people in the Middle Ages thought about and experienced their physical selves. “We will notice, all the way through, this idea of sameness and difference,” he said, “this very distant past was remarkably like our own world and at the same time, completely different.”
In a series of colourful sketches, charts and illustrations, he walked the audience through the medieval understanding of the body, attempting to quash the common misconceptions he believes we have about the Middle Ages and its medicine. “Images and pictures are the building-blocks of the medieval mind,” he said.
From trained physicians to street surgeons and superstitious, folkloric figures, he explained the medieval fascination with balance in the body. He looked at the believed correlation between zodiac signs, the four elements and the seasons, describing it as an "encompassing connecting world".
In the final part of the talk, Hartnell invited the audience to pick a specific section of the body for him to verbally dissect it through the prism of his medieval understanding. They selected the brain to which he laughed. “I wonder if maybe that’s because we feel like maybe we’re in a similar stage to people in the Medieval ages in some way. We don’t know a huge amount about the brain.” He went on to guide the audience through the four stages of common sense, imagination, cognitive acts and memory. An hour in his presence was certainly an invitation to reconsider the way we understand our bodies and minds.
If you missed this, you might also like event 285, Recovering Religious Texts, at 4pm on Thursday, 31 May 31