A History of the Body in the Middle Ages

7 hrs. 18 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Authors Jacques Le Goff, Nicolas Truong

Author Jacques Le Goff

Author Nicolas Truong

Narrator Mikhail Roslyakov

Description

Jacques Le Goff, one of the best-known specialists in the Middle Ages, in his brief course on the history of the body tells about the central object of debates and conflicts of that time—considering freedom, sensuality, and sexuality. Attitudes toward a body that was both oppressed and glorified in the Middle Ages were contradictory and ambiguous: from priests’ abstinence to the pleasure of laypeople, from the foundations of Christianity to remnants of paganism, from clothing fashion to eating habits, from celibacy to passionate love.

Contents:

Preface. Adventures of the body
Introduction. The story of oblivion
“Post” and “carnival”: dynamics of development in Western Europe
The Great Refusal
Tabooing semen and blood
Demeaning the body in sexual relations
Theory and practice
Origins of suppression: late antiquity
Christianity makes a great turn against the body
The subordinate position of women
Stigmata and self-flagellation
Thin and fat
Revenge of the body
A stone snake against a willow dragon
Work: burdensome or creative
A tearful gift
Taking laughter seriously
Dreams under supervision
Living and dying in the Middle Ages
The road of life
Ages of life
“Did they sleep together?”
At last a child appears
Authority and the cunning of old age
Illness and medicine
The sick, the rejected, and the chosen
“A proper mixture” and the theory of four fluids
Brother body
Urine and blood
Under the mask of Galen
The boundaries of scholastic medicine
Public assistance
Opening the body
The dead and the dying: celebrated and disgusting
A guide for the dying
The presence of the dead
The process of civilizing the body
Gula and gastronomy
A meeting of two cultures and food models
Good manners
Presentation of the body
Naked or clothed?
Women’s beauty: between Eve and Mary
Bathing
Culture of gestures
The body in all its states
Monsters
Sport?
The body as metaphor
Man as a microcosm
The heart, delirium of the body
The head—the leading function
Liver, the great loser
The hand—a dual instrument
The political use of bodily metaphor
Head or heart?
How eyes are on the body
The state is a body
The overthrow of the head
The head rises to its feet
The king and the saint
The body of the city
Conclusion. A slow history