A history of the body in the Middle Ages

For a long time, the body was forgotten by history and historians. Historically, the idea that the body was strictly linked to nature and did not exist as a cultural object was long maintained. However, caught between repression and freedom, between Lent and Carnival, the body in the Middle Ages was the site of one of the West's main tensions. Revisiting this long-hidden body, Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong present, in a history of the body in the Middle Ages, the body's journey from humiliation to glory.

“Why the body in the Middle Ages? Because it constitutes one of the great gaps in history, a The historian's great oversight. Traditional history was, in fact, disembodied. It was interested in men and, incidentally, women. But almost always without a body. As if their lives were situated outside of time and space, confined to the presumed immobility of the species. Frequently, it sought to depict the powerful, kings and saints, warriors and lords, and other great figures from lost worlds that needed to be rediscovered, magnified, and sometimes even mythologized, at the mercy of the causes and needs of the moment. Reduced to their exposed parts, these beings were dispossessed of their flesh. Their bodies were nothing more than symbols, representations, and figures; their acts, merely successions, sacraments, battles, events. Enumerated, written, and inscribed, as on so many stelae that purport to punctuate universal history. As for this human tide that surrounded and competed for its glory or its failure, the names plebeian and people were enough to tell its story, its raptures and its attitudes, its ways of acting and its afflictions.”