Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (The New Middle Ages)

This book serves as the first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, the study proposes a “gendered model” for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant. Coverpage......Page 1 Title......Page 7 Copyright......Page 8 Dedication......Page 9 Contents......Page 11 Acknowledgments......Page 13 Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body......Page 15 1 (Dis)pleasure and (Dis)ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale”......Page 33 2 Physical Education: Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue”......Page 59 3 Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid......Page 87 4 Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe......Page 127 Conclusion......Page 165 Notes......Page 169 Bibliography......Page 201 Index......Page 215

This book is the first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Tory Vandeventer Pearman establishes that medieval authoritative discourse, such as religious and medical writings, conflate femaleness, femininity, and disability. Reading fabliaux, romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, this study proposes a gendered model for exploring the linked social processes by which embodied differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant. This project demonstrates that some narratives succeed in silencing feminine deviance, while others thwart such masculine drives by creating alternative narratives and thus reveal female disability as a potentially enabling power.