A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A triumph' Guardian 'Glorious ... makes the past at once familiar, exotic and thrilling.' Dominic Sandbrook 'A brilliant book' Mail on Sunday 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 to our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule. In this richly-illustrated 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 in the process. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy 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. Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEARDripping with blood and gold, fetishized and tortured, gateway to earthly delights and point of contact with the divine, forcibly divided and powerful even beyond death, there was no territory more contested than the body in the medieval world. In Medieval Bodies, art historian Jack Hartnell uncovers the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves. In paintings and reliquaries that celebrated the - sometimes bizarre - martyrdoms of saints, the sacred dimension of the physical left its mark on their environment. In literature and politics, hearts and heads became powerful metaphors that shaped governance and society in ways that are still visible today. And doctors and natural philosophers were at the centre of a collision between centuries of sophisticated medical knowledge, and an ignorance of physiology as profound as its results were gruesome. Like a medieval pageant, this striking and unusual history brings together medicine, art, poetry, music, politics, cultural and social history and philosophy to reveal what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages.Medieval Bodies is published in association with Wellcome Collection.

In this book, available at last in paperback, Kauppi develops a structural constructivist theory of the European Union and critically analyses, through French and Finnish empirical cases, the political practices that maintain the Union's 'democratic deficit'. Kauppi conceptualises the European Union as both an arena for political contention and a nascent political order. In this evolving, multi-levelled European political field, individuals and groups construct material and symbolic structures of political power, grounded in a variety of social resources such as nationality, culture, and gender. The author shows how the dominance of both executive political resources and domestic political cultures has prevented the development of European democracy. Supranational executive networks have become more autonomous, reinforcing the dominance of the resources they control. At the same time, national political cultures condition the political status of elected institutions such as the European parliament. The book is particularly suited for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European Politics, European Union Studies and International Relations.

In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.

"Bashir weaves a rich history of Sufi Islam around the depiction of bodily actions in Sufi literature and miniature paintings produced circa 1300-1500 CE. Focusing on the Persianate societies of Iran and Central Asia, he explores medieval Sufis' conception of the human body as the primary shuttle between interior (batin) and exterior (zahir) realities with particular attention to three arenas: religious activity in the form of rituals, rules of etiquette, asceticism, and a universal hierarchy of saints; the deep imprint of Persian poetic paradigms on the articulation of love, desire, and gender; and the reputation of Sufi masters for working miracles, which empowered them in all domains of social activity. Bashir ultimately offers a new methodology for extracting historical information from religious narratives"--Cover p. [4].

This volume is a collection of essays focusing on marginalized women mostly in Central and Eastern Europe from around 1350 to 1650. "Other" women are discussed in three different categories: women whose religious practices put them on the social margins, "common women" who are in society but not of society because they are in the sex trade, and women whose occupations were reason enough to shunt them. In order to fill a gap in gender history for countries east of the Rhine River, the studies included present how official city-funded brothels in medieval Austria worked, how a princess' disability affected her life as Byzantine empress, how one unmarried Transylvanian woman who got pregnant dealt with being the center of a court case, and how enslaved women in medieval Hungary were treated as sexual property. The hope with this volume is that it will show the many interdisciplinary ways that women on the margins can be studied in this region, and to diminish the taboo of discussing this topic to begin with.

Burning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God's love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this discourse of communal love. For them, human communities were bodies on fire. Medieval theologians and academics often described the corporate identity of the Christian world as a body joined together by the love of God. This love was like a fire, melting individuals together into one whole. Those who did not spiritually burn with God's love were destined to burn literally in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, and the fires of execution were often described as an earthly extension of these fires. Through this analysis, Barbezat demonstrates how presentations of heresy, and to some extent actual responses to perceived heretics, were shaped by long-standing images of biblical commentary and exegesis. He finds that this imagery is more than a literary curiosity; it is, in fact, a formative historical agent.