Disabled Storytellers in the Global Middle Ages

Craft and Community in the Medieval World
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-72995-6
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten

What can disability teach us about knowledge, art, and community? Jonathan Hsy explores this question through medieval writings, bringing their authors' voices into conversation with crip theory and activist-oriented disability studies. Discussing major European writers Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve, John Gower, and Teresa de Cartagena – alongside non-European authors Ibn Battuta, Bai Juyi, and Shangguan Wan'er – Hsy reveals the remarkable global variety of disability life writing in the period. Across genres – spiritual visions, lyric poetry, and travel narratives – medieval authors craft inventive ways to theorize their own experiences of blindness, deafness, mobility, aging, and mental and chronic illness. Challenging social stigma and systems of marginalization, these writers offer – Hsy shows – compelling insights into language, time, gender, and bodies in perpetual transformation. Their voices from the past remain urgent today, teaching us about the dynamic relationship between mind, body, and spirit, and the power of storytelling to create social change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hsy, Jonathan

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: live experience and crip community; 1. Becoming deaf: Teresa de Cartagena and social transformation; 2. Writing blind: adaptation, media, and John Gower; 3. Feeling unwell: disability, mad studies, and Thomas Hoccleve; 4. Crip care: communing with Margery Kempe; 5. Moving together: disabled travel writing in a global middle ages; Coda: ancestors and crip futures.

Über Autor(innen)

Hsy, Jonathan
Jonathan Hsy is Professor of English at the George Washington University. He is co-editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (2020) and author of Antiracist Medievalisms: From 'Yellow Peril' to Black Lives Matter (2021).