Beginning from an understanding that for Dante the heart rules the body, Italian literary scholar Heather Webb has sought to address the distinctively medieval perception of that organ. Rather than the modern notion of a mechanical tightly enclosed pump of circulation subservient to the brain, as described by William Harvey in the seventeenth century, Webb argues that for medieval thinkers the heart was the primary organ and one that was “porous” and open. Not solely a metaphor of love and spirit, the medieval “heart” was physiologically and theologically the center of the body and the location of the soul: “It was [even] imagined as a breathing organ . . . exhaling heat and spirit into the rest of the body” (106). Modulating the biblical Pauline model in which the head (Christ) rules in a hierarchical position over the body (Church) in Romans 12:5, and elsewhere, Webb finds evidence that religious and political writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth century proposed a model “organized around a life-giving source, rather than an authoritarian head” (41). In her first chapter, “The Sovereign Heart,” Webb argues that such notions led to very concrete actions such as the royal practice in France of the removal and separate burial of the king's heart, or Catherine of Siena's plea to the Count of Fondi to accept the Pope as the means of circulation of the life-giving “blood” of the Church.

Webb's essay encompasses discussions of science, literature, and theology. Her methodology joins a consideration of the physical body with an analysis of texts, arguing: “The body was always embedded in texts. This does not necessarily imply a subordination of body to text, but rather a continuity between the two that nonetheless distinguishes between the two entities” (176). Webb ranges widely from the medical to the literary. She explains the physiological definition of the soul or spirit as a vapor produced by mixing air and blood in the chambers of the heart (through the mechanism of pores in its ventricular walls and the inhalation of air by the arteries through the skin). Through a fascinating set of twists and turns this leads to the poetry of courtly love and an understanding of the senses as not a matter of “impression,” but of “intercourse” or exchange whereby the lover and his lady can have a literally physical interaction without ever touching at all (27, 69).

This latter example is developed in a thorough and excellent discussion of the working of each of the five senses in chapter two, “The Porous Heart.” Rather than the common medieval figure of inscription or impression on the heart (discussed thoroughly by Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000]), Webb focuses an alternative understanding of the heart that highlights circulation. She shows that, although the brain sorted sensory data, it was the heart that was the origin and destination of sensory involvement with the world, subject to constant input and generative output. When Dante and his Italian predecessors talk of “inspiration” or a “voice from the heart,” these are not poetic figures but built on the medieval understanding of the anatomy and function of the heart. Products of vision are received into the heart as into a vessel. Remarkably, although the subject of medieval vision has been much discussed of late, a bibliography not thoroughly covered in this discussion, Webb is able to make intriguing contributions to this material. (See for example, Michael Camille, “Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. R. Nelson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]).

Chapter three, the “Engendering Heart,” discusses the heart's role in life and the creation of heat in the body, along with medieval notions of gender, the uterus, and birth, and long passages on various texts by Dante. Webb concludes with discussions of the cold or hard heart, that is, the isolated heart, once again reinforcing the importance of circulation and porosity and the consequences of its absence. The final chapter, “The Animate Heart,” considers the mystery and alienation of the heart extracted from the body—through dissection, stories of vengeful husbands who force wives to eat the hearts of their lovers, and the miracle of the heart of Saint Clare of Montefalco. In one of the most remarkable realizations of the importance of the heart as the center of the soul and the body (in this case a saintly body), after death Clare's heart was reportedly found to contain a crucifix, three nails, the flail, the crown of thorns, nails, spear, reed and pillar, all formed of nerves and flesh.

In making her argument, Webb cites as ancient and medieval authorities among others: Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna, Aquinas, and Albert the Great; but she also uses modern figures liberally, including Harvey and William James. The book is eloquent and convincing if read carefully, but the free ranging discussion across centuries also leads to a somewhat loose sense of historical location. Its arguments are strongest for the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Above all, the book focuses on “thought community” (6), or metaphor rather than the history of science per se, and revels in an exploration of Dante (with generous attention to Boccaccio and Catherine of Siena) as a literary figure. In attempting to articulate a “thought style at variance with our own” (182), Webb succeeds in both vividly illuminating metaphors that persist in our language today, as well as challenging the certainty of our own understanding of the body and the sovereignty of the head.