Medieval Disability Sourcebook

Scholars of disability studies have shaped current debates about exclusion and justice for disabled people. This volume turns back to the premodern past and asks how people in medieval Western Europe understood disability, and what those understandings can tell readers today.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of sources, the collection gathers historical documents, medical writing, accounts of saints' lives and miracles, poems, prose, plays, and images from manuscripts. Together they show that medieval attitudes toward disability were varied and tangled rather than uniform, and that disability touched nearly every part of medieval life. The selections include voices written to, from, and about disabled people.

Most texts appear in modern English, though some are in Middle English, and many are printed in side-by-side translation for close study. Each entry opens with a scholarly introduction and ends with a bibliography for further reading. Designed for undergraduate and graduate classrooms as well as for researchers, the book is the first in a planned series on disability in other premodern cultures, histories, and regions.