After a person was flayed, the skin would be displayed on the city walls as a means of instilling fear into the hearts of the people. This was a slow and painful method of execution in which the skin is removed from the body, preferably in one piece. Reliefs from the Neo- Assyrian period, for instance, show prisoners or captives being flayed. The use or abuse of a dead person’s skin may be traced back to ancient times. When Did the Practice of Anthropodermic Bibliopegy Begin? The first reliable accounts of books being bound in human skin, however, date to the 17 th century and it seems to have become popular during the 19 th century. According to folk legend, the binding of books (or more appropriately manuscripts, as they were hand-written) in human skin can be traced all the way back to 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.Anthropodermic bibliopegy refers to the practice of binding books in human skin.

Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, this book throws light on the medieval body from head to toe-revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time.īringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, Hartnell's work is an excellent guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. 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.

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. Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. With wit, wisdom, and a sharp scalpel, Jack Hartnell dissects the medieval body and offers a remedy to our preconceptions.

Medieval bodies book