Ravaged by plague, war and famine, the Middle Ages can seem an era defined by mortality – a millennium of corrupt decline following the fall of Rome, before a heady rebirth of science and culture in the Renaissance.īut as Jack Hartnell argues in this dazzling tour through physiognomy and across time, medieval bodies are a route into understanding a richly imaginative and curious age, where the barriers between earthly, heavenly and infernal worlds were parchment-thin – and where immortality was found within the pages of books as well as in a life beyond this mortal coil. Paper falls into decay centuries faster than near-indestructible parchment, a skin stripped of its fleshy corruptibility and able to withstand most of the vagaries of time. An obvious cost-cutting decision, maybe – and one that reflects a modern understanding of the law as mutable, editable and of its time. Until 2017, the United Kingdom’s laws were still painstakingly recorded on it, until MPs voted to save £80,000 a year by switching to paper. But parchment is not just a historic curio. Calf or lamb’s hide washed and scraped into smooth parchment, found in every monastery and royal court, was the foundation on which medieval libraries were built. In the Middle Ages, skin stretched beyond the body.
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