
Medieval Bodies
Life and Death in the Middle Ages
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Narrated by:
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Michael Page
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By:
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Jack Hartnell
About this listen
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.
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I really wanted to enjoy this -
- By Doris on 01-19-18
By: Johannes Fried, and others
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The Light Ages
- The Surprising Story of Medieval Science
- By: Seb Falk
- Narrated by: Seb Falk
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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An illuminating guide to the scientific and technological achievements of the Middle Ages through the life of a crusading astronomer-monk.
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Fascinating exploration of medieval science
- By Celia on 07-05-21
By: Seb Falk
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How to Be a Tudor
- A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life
- By: Ruth Goodman
- Narrated by: Heather Wilds
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as our intrepid guide to 16th-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era.
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Excellent book!
- By Kathi on 02-18-16
By: Ruth Goodman
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Lost Heirs of the Medieval Crown
- The Kings and Queens Who Never Were
- By: J.F. Andrews
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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When William the Conqueror died in 1087, he left the throne of England to William Rufus . . . his second son. The result was an immediate war as Rufus's elder brother Robert fought to gain the crown he saw as rightfully his; this conflict marked the start of 400 years of bloody disputes as the English monarchy's line of hereditary succession was bent, twisted, and finally broken when the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, fell at Bosworth in 1485.
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Great Listen
- By PrettyinPink on 01-03-24
By: J.F. Andrews
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The Age of Insight
- The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
- By: Eric R. Kandel
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 16 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind - our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions - and how mind and brain relate to art.
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Worth the listen
- By Amazon Customer on 01-28-19
By: Eric R. Kandel
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The Hundred Years War
- A People's History
- By: David Green
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) dominated life in England and France for well over a century. It became the defining feature of existence for generations. This sweeping book is the first to tell the human story of the longest military conflict in history. Historian David Green focuses on the ways the war affected different groups, among them knights, clerics, women, peasants, soldiers, peacemakers, and kings.
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Instructive
- By Faycal Ikhouane on 09-10-23
By: David Green
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Matilda
- Empress, Queen, Warrior
- By: Catherine Hanley
- Narrated by: Jennifer M. Dixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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A life of Matilda - empress, skilled military leader, and one of the greatest figures of the English Middle Ages.
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Both entertaining and scholarly
- By Anonymous User on 09-10-19
By: Catherine Hanley
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The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women
- An Inside Look at Women & Sex in Medieval Times
- By: Rosalie Gilbert
- Narrated by: Cat Gould
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Inside The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women, a fascinating book about life during medieval times, you will discover tantalizing true stories about medieval women and a myriad of historical facts.
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Very Well Done!
- By Stephanie Meier on 03-25-21
By: Rosalie Gilbert
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Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
- By: Frances Gies, Joseph Gies
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Historians have only recently awakened to the importance of the family, the basic social unit throughout human history. This book traces the development of marriage and the family from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. It describes how the Roman and barbarian cultural streams merged under the influence of the Christian church to forge new concepts, customs, laws, and practices. Century by century, it follows the development—sometimes gradual, at other times revolutionary—of significant elements in the history of the family.
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Fun narration for an interesting topic
- By Anonymous User on 05-31-24
By: Frances Gies, and others
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Blood Sisters
- The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses
- By: Sarah Gristwood
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a "cousins' war." The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in 15th-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies.
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The narrator is killing me....
- By DaNick on 10-02-20
By: Sarah Gristwood
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Henry IV
- The Righteous King
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 22 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The talented, confident, and intelligent son of John of Gaunt, Henry IV started his reign as a popular and charismatic king after he dethroned the tyrannical and wildly unpopular Richard II. But six years into his reign, Henry had survived eight assassination and overthrow attempts. Having broken God's law of primogeniture by overthrowing the man many people saw as the chosen king, Henry IV left himself vulnerable to challenges from powerful enemies about the validity of his reign. Even so, Henry managed to establish the new Lancastrian dynasty and a new rule of law.
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Detailed and compelling
- By kayakman on 12-15-17
By: Ian Mortimer
What listeners say about Medieval Bodies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael Kiele
- 09-07-22
A delight!
Get it and listen to Michael Page's expert reading. The research is fantastic, and Hartnell weaves a good story, rich with supporting history. It is worth the time and effort!
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- Lydia
- 07-19-24
Fascinating
A novel look at human biology. Science lovers will enjoy it and who knows what we’ll might re-think from the Medieval Period.
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- jan_maliniak
- 02-24-25
A superficial correction of faintly interesting anecdotes
The scope of this book is both too broad and too narrow for it to be illuminating. Too broad because it presents a wealth of material from the entirety of the Middle Ages, some 800 hundred years, from the expanse of land between the strait of Gibraltar to Baghdad, from the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish civilizations; it does all this without framing this world in any useful way. Too narrow because it all remains very superficial. This book never goes beyond being a collection of faintly amusing facts and anecdotes vaguely united by the theme. It’s quite a disappointing scratch on the surface of a fascinating subject in a fascinating era.
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- Barry Hufstedler
- 02-17-20
An interesting medieval time machine
This book was an interesting introduction to the medieval world. If you are interested in medieval history or life, then you should listen to this book. How the medieval world thought about the body and its functions are explored and there are some surprising revelations. The narrator was engaging and this book is not some dry read.
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3 people found this helpful
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- J. T. Estes
- 09-04-21
Probably Better Reading Physically
I found the permise and many of the informational tidbits fascinating. Yet, I found this book hard to pay attention to. I think this would be better read physically than as an audiobook.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ladyethyme
- 02-25-25
Excellent, informative, and accessible
A very excellent little book, giving anecdotes, archeological findings, and literary references, all orbiting around the ‘body’ without being grotesque or intentionally exaggerated.
I’ll probably purchase this in hardcopy!
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- Shane Ravenbane
- 08-26-24
Grossly Inaccurate. Don't waste your time.
The title is a thinly veiled excuse to repeatedly attack Christianity with misinformation and snide sarcasm. That being said, approximately 10-15% of the statements made have any basis in actual history, and 0% of the statements have citations.
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- Annie Fitt
- 05-18-21
I really wanted to love this book, but...
This topic is one of my favorite genres so I was disappointed to find it boring. Lots of allusions to contemporary writers and texts, but if I hadn’t already read widely I never would’ve gotten those references. The timeline jumps back and forth in time, and doesn’t tie everything together. It was supposed to compare and contrast the knowledge of the‘People’s of the book’, but mostly skipped going deeper into Islamic and Jewish practices. I will admit that as I never made through a full chapter without falling asleep it could be used to lull you into sleep at bedtime so if you’re looking for a bedtime story this book fits the bill
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3 people found this helpful