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A review by siria
Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell
2.0
I was excited to read this, because it got rave reviews and the cover is so enticing—I thought perhaps it could become the core text for a course I'm thinking of teaching on the medieval body and medicine in the near future. Unfortunately, while lavishly illustrated and containing some interesting anecdotes, Medieval Bodies is a let down. It's an example of the pitfalls that can befall someone who's writing not only about a very broad topic, encompassing all of Europe and the Mediterranean region over the period of a thousand years, but also outside of their discipline.
Jack Hartnell is an art historian, and it shows. While his teasing apart of the objects and images he discusses is often very well done, his analysis of texts is often, um, less so, and his historiography is often dated and/or shallow. So for instance, you cannot talk about how Urban II's 1095 call to Crusade shows anything about his own racial thinking, because the text of his sermon doesn't survive. (We've got, I think, something like four medieval versions, written down from people's memories of the speech well after the fact—they all diverge substantially. Any undergrad could see the problems with using this as a source for Urban's thinking.) His account of medieval women and their access to power was positively Duby-esque (Duby's not mentioned in the bibliography, but given that Hartnell doesn't seem to have read deeper on the topic than Schaus's Encyclopedia, that's unsurprising). Those are big picture failings, but there are also lots of factual mistakes. For instance, the Catalan Atlas isn't oriented towards the north—it's a portolan chart, so "orientation" doesn't apply. I'm pretty sure Mansa Musa is depicted on it holding either a world orb or a lump of gold ore, not "an enormous gold coin."
These examples could all be multiplied, but I don't like reviews which descend into a litany of all the errors in a book—especially when there's the kernel of such a good idea and approach here. Suffice to say this is not the introductory survey I hoped it could be.
Jack Hartnell is an art historian, and it shows. While his teasing apart of the objects and images he discusses is often very well done, his analysis of texts is often, um, less so, and his historiography is often dated and/or shallow. So for instance, you cannot talk about how Urban II's 1095 call to Crusade shows anything about his own racial thinking, because the text of his sermon doesn't survive. (We've got, I think, something like four medieval versions, written down from people's memories of the speech well after the fact—they all diverge substantially. Any undergrad could see the problems with using this as a source for Urban's thinking.) His account of medieval women and their access to power was positively Duby-esque (Duby's not mentioned in the bibliography, but given that Hartnell doesn't seem to have read deeper on the topic than Schaus's Encyclopedia, that's unsurprising). Those are big picture failings, but there are also lots of factual mistakes. For instance, the Catalan Atlas isn't oriented towards the north—it's a portolan chart, so "orientation" doesn't apply. I'm pretty sure Mansa Musa is depicted on it holding either a world orb or a lump of gold ore, not "an enormous gold coin."
These examples could all be multiplied, but I don't like reviews which descend into a litany of all the errors in a book—especially when there's the kernel of such a good idea and approach here. Suffice to say this is not the introductory survey I hoped it could be.