Medieval Bodies

• The centuries sandwiched between the accolades of ancient Greece or Rome and the European renaissance are seen as a static, an idea we read in their different names: the “Dark” Ages or the “Medieval,” from the Latin medium aevum, a “Middle Age.”
  • The stereotype is that from roughly the years 300 to 1500, most people inhabited a world of misery and squalor.
• But there was a classical heritage that bound together the history of the regions on all sides of the Mediterranean.
  • The first is Byzantium, a Greek-speaking, Christian empire which at its height extended throughout Greece and the Balkans, Anatolia, north Africa, and much of the Levant.
  • Then were those living in western and central Europe, from Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, some of whom had actually toppled Rome itself.
  • And third of these Roman heirs was the Islamic world. As a combined religious and political force they expanded remarkably quickly. Unlike its Christian neighbors, Islam was united by a common language.
• If you were to travel back, the differences:
  • Emptiness – there are roughly as many people in the UK today as there probably were across all of Europe.
  • Religion played a much greater role in the fundamentals of medieval life.
  • By the standards of the present day, almost everyone lived in extreme poverty.
    • Those who owned land had both financial control of its produce–wool, wheat, wood, slaves, iron, furs, ships–and political control of the people who lived on it.
  • There’s almost no difference in people’s height between the Middle Ages and the Victorian era, averaging around 5 feet 7 inches for a man and 5 feet 3 inches for a woman. Nor were these people all toothless, crippled or constantly sick.
    • The air they breathed and the food they ate would have been free of chemicals and pollutants–potentially far healthier than our own.
• One of the biggest differences may have been the way medieval people thought their bodies worked.
  • Their owners believed things about their bodies through theories that have since been totally disproved but which nevertheless could not have seemed more logical.
    • We think of our bodies now as a relatively closed and contented circuit. But the human form in the medieval period was considered far more open
    • People believed that nature was composed of four primary base elements–fire, water, air, and earth–and that they could affect the external appearance and internal properties of all things.
    • Local schools and universities taught a fluid form of medical curriculum. From the 700s onwards, Muslim Middle Eastern cities were amongst the most important centers for medicine.
• Universities were open only to men of good character and breeding, who were expected to subscribe to the standards of what were largely religious institutions, as well as having the substantial wealth needed to support their studies.
  • For most medieval people, treatment would have been sought from a far broader range of healers: surgeons, midwives, apothecaries, barbers, dentists.
  • Depending on where you lived, free medical care might have been available at the expense of the state, ensuring at least some treatment for the most needy.
• A great leveler of the medical playing field was religion. Almost everyone believed their physical health was directly related to their spiritual well-being.
  • External symptoms may present a more deep-rooted, sinful sickness.

Head

• Although medieval people knew little of its actual workings, the brain was considered one of the body’s most important organs, responsible for both intellect and motion.
  • Neither of these functions were considered the result of coordinated action of the body’s organs; instead, those were believed to be governed by the soul.
  • There are paintings of the insides of heads, with interlinked lines and circles mapped in black and red ink, guiding the reader through the brain.
    • This sought to represent the processes of thought itself, an operation occurring across a series of the organ’s sections or cells.
      • The first stage via a network of nerves that received and processed information from the body’s other sensors.
      • The second was imagination and cognition–turning sensed images into concepts, and then our estimation, turning images and concepts into judgments. 
      • Third, at the very back of the brain, was memory.
      • The quality of a person’s intelligence hinged on the speed with which the brain’s liquid-like ideas traveled across its cells.
  • Medieval people believed that a person’s mental state could be reflected in all things, from facial expressions to skin quality.
    • This was a common idea – that physical stature or facial features were a shorthand of intelligence, nobility, or more negative character flaws.

Senses

• By the later Middle Ages, the traditional “Five Senses” were considered the five fundamental forms of sensory interaction that took place between bodies and their environments.
• Sight
  • Two contrasting theories:
    • First, the notion that the eyes functioned as receptors, accepting visual rays that were cast outwards from objects and conveying this information back to the brain.
    • Second, eyes functioned the other way around–the eyes expressed rays outwards until they alighted upon an object.
  • Medieval opinion spoke of a circular organ with a lens in the middle, though generally ocular anatomy was thought less important than an understanding of bodily humors.
    • A healthy eye was thought to be humorally cold and wet, and if there was swelling, irritation or bleeding, medics attempted cures to return it to its natural condition
    • Cataracts, for instance, were described as an unwanted gathering of cloudy vapors, and could be addressed by applying herbs to the cornea, or minor surgery to the cornea with thin needles.
• Smell
  • They thought of smell much like sight, with scents traveling on the air to the nose, and from there via the body’s animating spirit back to the brain for comprehension.
    • Smell was a fundamental part of medieval churches, as both Catholics and eastern Orthodox ceremonies regularly called for incense. Sweet smells were mentioned in biblical texts as indicators of sanctity.
  • Disease was believed to be spread via the polluted vapors of miasma, and good smells could counteract this bad air, cleansing and scenting their surroundings.
• Hearing
  • There were three influential classifications of sounds:
    • First, voices and instruments.
    • Second, the complex form of spiritual music, which was inaudible to humans but constantly playing between the body and soul.
    • Third, musica mundana, the music of the world – a permanent dialogue with the study of philosophy and mathematics.
• Mouth, tongue, teeth
  • Medical authors knew that the mouth absorbed taste and could be used for communication.
  • Kissing holy remains were thought to give direct access to the divine, and following this logic, all sorts of objects became targets of medieval kisses.
  • If a person’s taste became problematic (based on a humoral misalignment, indicated by inflamed tongue pores of discoloration), medical authorities recommended rubbing the tongue with small packages of spices.

Skin

• They saw skin as protecting a secret inner life and forming an external social character.
  • Although skin was thought permeable, absorbing the humoral surrounds, it was still an opaque barrier whose contents were not clear.
  • Medieval medicine thought of the skin as being made up of two layers: an outer layer, called the skin proper, and an inner, muscular layer, called the panicle.
    • Leprosy, for instance, was one of the most discussed diseases of the period. Its sufferers were clearly identifiable from their scarred skin.
      • Yet the disease was also thought to penetrate beneath the panicle and to a person’s character, leading to serious stigmatization.
• Race
  • The rapid expansion of Islam out of the Arabian Gulf was met with an equally fierce response from the West.
    • From the end of the 11th century, choreographed campaigns and counter-campaigns of Crusade and Jihad saw many wars, religion against religion, race against race.
    • Theories had been circulating for some time in Middle Eastern medicine that the bodies of Europeans had several humoral failings.
      • They presented these physical differences as intellectual flaws: the strange whiteness and unsettling blueness of their eyes proved incompetence on the battlefield and cowardice.
    • Christian propagandists on the other side were even more consumed with skin color, echoing a prominent Christian association of blackness with sinfulness.
    • Ironically, both Christians and Muslims were using the same theories of human biology to emphasize that each other’s skin was dangerously different.

Bone

• Medieval osteological health had a well-established repertoire.
  • For instance, for hip dislocations, the lower legs would be bound together at the shins and a small animal-skin bag inflated between the thighs, popping pelvic joints back into place. For the spine, medics used elaborate wooden racks in conjunction with the surgeon’s body weight to palpate or stretch the patient.
  • Even more successful was the resetting of fractured or fully broken bones using braces and tight bandaging.
• Burials – the dedication to the place of death was integral to all faiths.
  • In religious terms, death was not seen as a finite end, but rather as a crossing point into another realm.
  • For most Christians, death marked the soul’s shift into a complicated state of limbo.
    • While alive, living as a good Christian would begin a favorable process of judgment. When dead, the continued well-being of your eternal soul was believed to be entrusted to the living. Each time they invoked your name in prayer, your purgatorial sentence was shortened.
  • Discussions of the appropriate way to treat a body and its burial place after death are not much mentioned in the Quar’an.
    • Medieval Islamic thinkers built their own recommendations in a series of advisory manuals on burying bones. They knew that it should happen quickly after death. In some graves, bodies were correctly dressed, with hands covering their face, a gesture of perpetual holy deference.
  • The final resting places of medieval Jews are difficult to uncover and interpret. Jewish communities lived as minorities throughout the Middle Ages, so they rarely had the political freedom to bury their dead as they wished.
    • Usually the body would be anointed and shrouded in linen sheets and clothes, and then taken to the nearest cemetery and marked with a simple stone.

Heart

• The heart is the internal organ that we can sense most acutely; it’s one of the only things inside ourselves that we can feel.
  • For some medieval thinkers, the heart was the body’s principal and most powerful part.
• But the heart played a relatively small part in medical practice, though everyone agreed that it was hugely important for bodily heat. It was also thought to be equally affected by external influences (like a lance) or conceptual influences (like love).
• As a spiritual tool – Religions thought literally about the heart’s role in loving God. Muslim commentators occasionally recounted the miraculous tale of the Prophet, when a young Muhammad was received by angels and they removed his heart and ritually washed and then replaced it in his chest, rendering him theologically purified.

Blood

• Medieval medics developed specific techniques of phlebotomy–to cure a particular illness, blood could be taken either directly to the vicinity of a painfully affected area or drawn away.
• They believed that certain bloodlines strongly corresponded with certain conditions.
  • For instance, the veins in the thumb addressed aches and pains in the head. The timing of blood treatments were also crucial, given that the human body was thought to hold a central position in the broader universe, medics often also considered cosmology.
  • To heal wounds, there were recipes for anti-hemorrhagic powder that could be used to staunch the bleeding so that it could be stitched. This powder was generally formed of red things, like a dark wine or red tree sap.
    • Surgical thread could be made of fine wool and the healer needed to understand the difference between cartilage, muscle, and skin.
• Bad blood
  • Although only a small group, the relatively recent arrival of Jews in parts of Europe made them highly unpopular.
    • Around the 1100s, there was a nascent medieval anti-Semitic movement; for instance, several murders were reported in one village in France, and although there was no victim ever found, thirty accused Jews, most of the village’s community, were burned alive at the stake. There were many blood libel claims against the Jewish community.

Hands

• Touch was thought to be an animating spirit that flowed through the medieval body, transferring sensory information from the surface of the skin back to the brain.
• Depictions of hands appear frequently in the margins of medieval manuscripts, medical, fictional, and poetical.
  • These little hands are the remnants of medieval readers, designed to draw the eye to an important phrase, chapter, etc.
• There must have been countless social customs of signs and symbols during the Middle Ages, entire gestural dialects that have vanished.
  • One author described a sophisticated method of numerating digits on the fingers which allowed different combinations of folding, closing, and bending of two hands to sign individual numbers all the way from 0 to 9,999.

Stomach

• People believed food traveled down the throat via strips of muscle (the esophagus) down to the stomach. Digestion then happened through a trio of actions.
  • First, in the belly. As food passed through the stomach, it was refined by the body’s digestive faculties removing fecal matter, and leaving behind a pale white liquid known as chyle. 
  • In the second stage, chyle went to the liver, which then produced blood and other humors.
  • In the third stage, the blood and other humors were pumped outwards by the heart to the extremities.
• Vomiting, when not being induced by a doctor, was taken as a sign of serious abdominal issues and even a physical manifestation of moral depravity.

Women

• Even ordinary medieval pregnancies followed a highly complicated anatomical process.
  • Most agreed that the womb formed a central part of a larger system within the woman.
    • Male and female sex organs mirrored one another, each inverted versions of each other that suggested a certain similarity between the sexes. That is, masculine presence contrasted with feminine absence.
  • The female body was believed to be biologically subordinate to the male.
    • Men’s bodies produced a vital nourishing warmth with ease (they grew larger and produced more hair), while female bodies were far colder, as  women grew slower and were physically weak and fragile.
  • Catholic theology viewed childbirth as punishment for Original Sin, and religious discourses equating blood with uncleanliness in both Judaism and Islam also provided superstitions for demonizing menstruating women.
• This secondary status carried through almost every institutional context possible, from religion, to universities, to the court system.
• There were also a range of marriage models across different cultures, each of which impacted on a woman’s quality of life in different ways.
  • Some were quickly married off without choice and the dangerous process of motherhood, while others were able to work and forge a more independent path. 

Urine

• Physicians were incredibly focused on urine, and it became a prominent part of medical culture.
• They would test the urine’s viscosity and any suspended particles, grading its smell or evaluating its sweetness or bitterness, and sometimes even tasting it.

Feet

• Feet had long been used as elaborate displays of loyalty to royals; popes reportedly began requiring the custom of kissing feet in the 8th century.
• The majority of shoes from the Middle Ages seem to have been relatively simple. In warmer climates, most people had simple leather or hemp cord sandals. In colder regions, there were wooden-soled clogs.
  • Prisoners were stripped of their shoes based on the idea that it would slow them down if they ever tried to flee.

Future bodies

• In the 1500s, the medieval world was about to change significantly, shaking many ideological foundations.
  • For instance, Spanish ships crossed the Atlantic and Portuguese sailors rounded the southern tip of Africa, reshaping centuries-old maps and forging routes to Asia.
• Since the 1980s, bioarchaeologists have been getting better at searching the densest parts of skeletons for preserved samples of ancient DNA.
  • aDNA can be extracted and sequenced to present a unique profile of the skeleton sampled.
  • Even with just fragments, we can tell a person’s sex, their likely geographical or ethnic background–the medieval world is just beginning to open to us.

• The tales of headless saints and their devotees
• How animal skins were used for paper, clothes, and shoes
• Details about how medieval thinkers thought about love and how it originated from the heart
• The importance of fasting and its connection to religion, as well as the massive importance of pilgrimages
• Incredible colored-pictures of artifacts, paintings, and other relics from the age