Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Stephanie Grace-Petinos ,  Leah Parker ,  Alicia Spencer-Hall ,  Alicia Spencer-Hall
Publisher:   Amsterdam University Press
Imprint:   Amsterdam University Press
ISBN:  

9789463724333

ISBN 10:   9463724338
Pages:   308
Publication Date:   28 April 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   No Longer Our Product
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: Medieval Disability beyond the Sin-Sanctity Binary Part I: Disabled Saints 1. Francis’ 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

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Author Information

Stephanie Grace-Petinos is Assistant Editor of the Film and Media list at Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. She received her PhD in 2016 from the City University of New York Graduate Center and is the former Outreach Chair for the Hagiography Society. Her research interests include medieval hagiography, medieval spirituality, disability, dismemberment, and materiality. Leah Pope Parker is Assistant Professor of English and English Undergraduate Coordinator at the University of Southern Mississippi. Parker’s research explores disability and religion in medieval English literature and has been published in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and Early Middle English. Her monograph, Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, is forthcoming in 2025 from University of Michigan Press. Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Their research interests include: medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture, and film and media studies. Her first monograph, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018, and is now available Open Access. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, a collection co-edited with Blake Gutt, was published in 2021. Shortlisted for the Transgender Non-Fiction award at the 34th Lambda Literary Awards, the volume is now also available Open Access. Their second monograph, Medieval Twitter, was published by Arc Humanities Press in 2024. Alicia Spencer-Hall is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College London. Their research interests include: medieval hagiography, disability, gender, digital culture, and film and media studies. Her first monograph, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018, and is now available Open Access. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, a collection co-edited with Blake Gutt, was published in 2021. Shortlisted for the Transgender Non-Fiction award at the 34th Lambda Literary Awards, the volume is now also available Open Access. Their second monograph, Medieval Twitter, was published by Arc Humanities Press in 2024.

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