Tim Smith-Laing
The Venerable Bod
Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages
By Jack Hartnell
Profile/Wellcome Collection 346pp £25 order from our bookshop
Medieval bodies do not, generally speaking, carry the best connotations. As art historian Jack Hartnell points out, in the popular imagination the medieval world is one of ‘generalised misery and ignorance’, ‘piteous squalor’ and ‘fretful darkness’, occasionally enlivened by a good war. And bodies are the spot where all that squalor and pain get actualised. Imagine the medieval body in relation to the quotidian ordeals of lice, ticks and fleas, to the sweeping scythes of disease, famine and war, or to the horrors of deliberately inflicted pains and punishments, and it is hard not to conceive of it as a fairly wretched object.
Medievalists have, of course, long been in on the secret that the medieval world was not the monochromatic slough of despond of popular belief. If you look beyond what Hartnell fairly terms the modern tendency to ‘patronise’ the period, it reveals itself as one of the most ‘glittering and diverse’
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This is entertainment of the highest class.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews new thrillers by Mick Herron, Kassandra Montag, @LVaughanwrites, @AuthorSJBolton, @ajaychow, @tombradby, @SaraParetsky, @writejemmawayne & @GillianMAuthor.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/may-2022-crime-round-up
'The day Simon and I Vespa-d from Daunt to Daunt to John Sandoe to Hatchards to Goldsboro, places where many of the booksellers have become my friends over the years, was the one with the high puffy clouds, the very strong breeze, the cool-warm sunlight.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
Some salient thoughts on book collecting from Michael Dirda with a semi tragic conclusion that I suspect many of us can relate to from the @Lit_Review #WednesdayMotivation