The Medieval Heart

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Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other literary, philosophic, and scientific texts, Heather Webb studies medieval notions of the heart to explore the � lost circulations” of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities.

The Medieval Heart Review

Returning to the Heart

It was once believed that the air we breathed mixed with the blood in our hearts to form generative spirits that, sent back into the world, connected us to one another and to the greater circulating universe. "According to the Aristotelian and Aquinian theory, the heart should imperfectly mimic the circulations of the heavens" (Webb, 117).
All that changed with the treatise of William Harvey in the seventeenth-century whose De motu cordis of 1628 emplaced the heart as mover of blood and not as font of spirit and blood. Examining this shift from reciprocal to self-circulative heart, Professor Heather Webb of The Ohio State University, in a seminal first work, The Medieval Heart, (Yale University Press, 2010) writes of the resulting impact with a poetic and scholarly suggestiveness that borders on the revolutionary. Where does life begin? Where does it end and, how did we arrive at the detached role ascribed to today's modern heart? Using the book as a metaphor for the four-chambered human heart, the questions are considered in each of its four chapters: The Sovereign, The Porous, The Engendering, and The Animate Heart.

In Canon, written in 1012, Avicenna privileged Aristotle's (d. 322 B.C.) works on the "principality" of the heart rather than Greek philosopher and physician Galen's (d. 200 C. E.) on the head as part of Avicenna's own organizing principal of the body. "For Aristotle, the heart's principality in the body was absolute. Galen proposed a contradictory, multipolar model, suggesting that many functions that Aristotle attributed to the heart were in fact functions of the brain or liver" (Webb, 19-20). Interpretations of Avicenna's work, Webb notes, along with other responses concordant with that work (Albert the Great's De animalibus, for example) produced a shift in medieval, intellectual thinking. Vertical hierarchies of head as political power, and as body's life locus, shifted in the Middle Ages to the heart, where figurative political metaphors became horizontal centralities of power and literal physiological metaphors became being. The debate shifted back again to encephalocentric with the treatise of William Harvey.
The heart has changed, Webb suggests in The Medieval Heart, or rather, it has become petrified in the poetic and, as a result, has lost the breath of its once unifying literalness. Using anatomical, literary and theological readings from Aristotle to Catherine of Siena, Webb asks us to consider the resulting isolation.

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