This volume significantly expands current understandings of both disability and sanctity in the Middle Ages. Across the collection, heterogeneous constructions, and experiences, of disability and holiness are excavated. Analyses span the sixth to the fifteenth century, with discussion of holy men and holy women, Western Christian and Buddhist traditions, hagiographic texts, images, and artefacts. Each chapter underscores that disability and sanctity co-exist with a vast array of connotations, not just fully positive or fully negative, but also every inflection in between. The collection is a powerful rebuttal to the notion of the integral relationship of disability—medieval and otherwise—with sin, stigma, and shame. So doing, it recentres medieval disability history as a lived history that merits exploration and celebration. In this way, the volume serves to reclaim sanctity in disability histories as a means to affirm the possibility of radical disability futures.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Medieval Disability beyond the Sin-Sanctity Binary
- Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Pope Parker, and Alicia Spencer-Hall
- Part I: Disabled Saints
- 1. Francis’s Disappearing Infirmities: Disability and the Expectations of Masculine Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century
- 2. The Paradoxes of Margaret the Lame: Disability and Authorial Work in Thirteenth-Century Magdeburg
- 3. Perspectives on Blindness, Deafness, and Muteness in the Chinese Eminent Monks Literature: The ‘Eight Difficulties’ in Context
- 4. Perfect Disabled Embodiment: Gelongma Palmo in the Tibetan Buddhist Hagiographies
- 5. Writing Sanctity Upon the Body: The Healed Wounds of St Æthelthryth and St Edmund
- 6. Sacred Spectacles? Eyeglasses, Iconography and the Holy Body
- Part II: Saints and the Disability Community
- 7. The Socio-Economic Value of Healing Miracles in the Liber Miraculorum s. Fidis
- 8. Disability and Healing Touch in Representations of the Midwife with the Withered Hands in Late Medieval Books of Hours
- 9. Holy Women and Leprosy: Communities of Care
- 10. Healing the Unborn: Natal Disability and the Old English Life of St Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii
- Epilogue: Curative Time and Crip Ancestorship
- Index
- List of Figures
- Figure 6.1: Hugh of St Cher (right), painted by Tommaso da Modena in a fresco, c. 1352. Image credit: Alamy.
- Figure 6.2: Haintz-Nar-Meister, illustration of Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brant (Basel: Johann Bergmann, 1498). Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries.
- Figure 8.1: Spitz Master (French, active c. 1415–1425), The Nativity, c. 1420. Tempera colours, gold, and ink; leaf: 20.2 × 14.9 cm (7 15/16 × 5 7/8 in.). MS 57 (94.ML.26), fol. 84. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS 57, fol. 84.
- Figure 8.2: The Nativity, 1490–1500. Tempera colours and ink. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS M. 7, fol. 14r.
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