![]() ![]() Drawing on exquisite tapestries, illuminated manuscripts, medical textbooks, accounts from doctors and the sick, he reveals the “glittering and diverse” details of medieval life, death and art across Europe and the Middle East. Lasting from about 300 to 1500, the period has been characterised since the Enlightenment as an age of darkness, squalor and misery. The art historian Jack Hartnell tells this extraordinary story in his wonderfully rich study of the Middle Ages. Recalling her words, one of the sisters took a razor to the heart and sliced it in half: inside lay a very small image of Christ on the cross, with several tiny objects from the Passion, including the nails hammered into Christ’s body, all “wrought from the flesh of Chiara’s heart itself”. When she died the nuns were astonished that after five days her body had still not decayed. ![]() ![]() W hile Abbess Chiara Vengente lay dying in August 1308, she told the nuns of the Umbrian monastery in Montefalco that Christ was in her heart, sustaining her. ![]()
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