Video of the lecture “Planetary Bodies: Religion and Medicine in Medieval Anatomical Images” by US art historian Taylor McCall

US art historian Taylor McCall kicked off the lecture and reading series “Aesthetic Conceptions of the Body between Religion and Politics” in the annual theme “Body and Religion” of the Cluster of Excellence by talking about the relationship between body and religion in medieval medicine.

In medieval medicine, healing the body was inseparably tied to conceptions of the micro- and macrocosm – the relationship between the body and the cosmos – and the Christian worldview. To better understand these  ideas, medieval thinkers developed diagrams and images to translate complex information an medical knowledge into simplified graphic forms.

In her English-language lecture entitled “Planetary Bodies: Religion and Medicine in Medieval Anatomical Images”, McCall, who has conducted research at Cambridge University, among other places, refers to a variety of medieval anatomical images, including zodiac and planetary figures in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral, as well as bodies as microcosms and depictions of physiological processes, to shed light on the ways in which medieval people understood their physical bodies relative to the divine.