Heather Webb . The Medieval Heart . New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 241. $55.00.

Abstract

Using a concept from Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), which anticipated recent constructionist approaches in science studies, Heather Webb describes her book as an attempt to delineate an “earlier thought style by examining a series of dominant concepts that seem impossible or incomprehensible today” (p. 182). The “thought style” in question focuses on the heart as described in late medieval writing, both Latin and vernacular, as the body's principal organ—source of its life, heat, and vital spirits—to which the brain itself was subordinated. The heart was, furthermore, a porous space, open to the outside world through the physiological processes of breathing and sensation and the closely related immaterial, though nonetheless literally understood, processes of poetic and divine inspiration. This openness allowed the hearts of mystics and visionaries to receive the Holy Spirit and rendered the human heart vulnerable to sudden possession by the image of the beloved, as described by Dante Alighieri and other late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Italian poets known as the Dolce stil novisti. It also accounted for the infectious, even contagious, nature of plague, in which putrefied air was inhaled into the heart, triggering a process by which the humors of the body were themselves heated and corrupted, often to fatal effect.