Virtual – Hooked on History Book Club (Zoom)


Event Details


Join us as we read the book Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages by Jack Hartnell.  You can get this title as an audiobook on Hoopla with your library card.  Here is the link: https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?scope=everything&q=Medieval%20Bodies 

About Medieval Bodies:

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.

In this witty and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe-revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time.

Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.

We will meet by Zoom for June.  Here is the link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83387303167?pwd=UEYrRzUwWmZTcUdQSThEZ0plWVZkUT09

Meeting ID: 833 8730 3167
Password: 345225

Dial by your location
+1 929 436 2866 US (New York)

Don’t know how to link to Zoom?  Call the Reference Desk Monday – Friday 10 am – 5 pm (610-446-3082) for tech help.