Description:
The Middle Ages was an era of dynamic social transformation, and notions of disability in medieval culture reflected how norms and forms of embodiment interacted with gender, class, and race, among other dimensions of human difference. Ideas of disability in courtly romance, saints' lives, chronicles, sagas, secular lyrics, dramas, and pageants demonstrate the nuanced, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between cultural constructions of disability and the lived experience of impairment.
An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, literature, visual art, cultural studies, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages explores themes and topics such as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.
Brief description: Jonathan Hsy is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, USA and founding co-Director of the GW Digital Humanities Institute. His books include Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (2013).
Review Quotes: "This volume stands as a testament to the work being done to connect medieval history to the broader field of disability studies to create a better understanding of disabilities as a transhistorical social construct." --Ceræ An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies