The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe
By Taylor McCall
Reaktion Books 2023

To the presumably limited number of general-interest readers who encounter Taylor McCall’s new book The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe at random out in the wild (a small-distribution $22 entry in Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series – the number might not be large), the subject invoked by the subtitle currently standing in for the book’s title will be ready to hand: that the detailed visual study of human anatomy only ascended to art with Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance. The image of the so-called Dark Ages leadenly fumbling in crude ignorance is as persistent as all too-easy images are. 

This little book should completely dispel that image. McCall, managing editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, consults a long list of often obscure written sources and, crucially, deploys a stunning array of the anatomical illustrations that filled so many books from the 12th to the 15th century. 

Those illustrations are the central wonder of the book; they immediately transport the reader to an earlier world full of desperate speculation and the inevitable melding of anatomical studies and the cosmologies of organized religion (be it Islam or Christianity). That earlier world had stood firm for millennia, populated by completely discredited theories of things like the four humors or bloodletting or astrological influences (“completely discredited” being a bit important to mention here, since McCall rather noticeably never mentions it himself). But those theories were only the ideological overlays on very practical research, generations of men and women learning where things are and how they operate by gruesome trial and error, and the illustrations show their work. Cartoonish drawings of bodies show colored traceries of veins and arteries, rough organs, attempts at nerves. 

“The use of the full-body figure placed the practice of surgical and therapeutic interventions on the canvas of the body, relatable to the viewer and acting as a map for the practitioner,” McCall writes, using appropriately painterly language, “… bloodletting and disease figures did not include visualizations of the internal organs, those that did not explicitly linked the hidden interior with the universe, reinforcing the belief that each person was connected to a far greater force than themselves and imbuing the functioning of an individual’s body with a larger significance than just the mundane aches and pains of the flesh.”

Nevertheless (since that far greater force doesn’t exist, or at least has never popped by to offer pointers during a tricky lung resection), these remarkable pictures, very much feel like responses to the mundane aches and pains of the flesh, responses to the mystery of it all. This is most emphatic in the numerous attempts at clarifying childbirth, for obvious reasons, but it extends to fiery nerves, pulled muscles, little cramps – all the aches and pains that have long since been laid bare by modern medicine.

Such illustrations were naturally expensive; most students couldn’t afford them and had to settle for cheaply printed booklets (libelli) with no pictures, although, as McCall notes, even these knock-off products were carefully monitored by universities for the quality of their information. This is the feeling that runs throughout this book, the very opposite of fumbling: there’s care and precision and real concern in these illustrations. And despite the theological translations McCall traces so well, there’s also a real sense of simply digging around to find out how things work. In the fine detail of these inquiries, the Enlightenment was struggling to be born.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.