Abstract
This chapter offers a targeted, macrolevel “need to know” overview of medieval disability scholarship and disability in the Middle Ages. History, art history, literature, and archaeology are all disciplines that count scholars working on issues linked to disability. The main argument I advance is that the common Christian culture operative in the Middle Ages supported the constitution of a pan-European identity, albeit with differences and nuances owing to local and national circumstances. In this context, disability was an intersectional node of identity that “sat beneath” the dominant identity category of Christian. We certainly encounter in the sources people with disabilities who faced numerous personal, daily challenges that sometimes impacted their ability to participate fully in medieval culture. Nevertheless, people with disabilities were not wholly excluded from their communities. In fact, people with disabilities were present in all spheres of medieval society, even playing leading roles, and thus were not inevitably marginalized. This chapter, then, aims to show that we find people with disabilities everywhere in the Middle Ages – if only we look for them.
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Dubourg, N. (2022). European Medieval Disability History: An Overview. In: Rioux, M.H., Viera, J., Buettgen, A., Zubrow, E. (eds) Handbook of Disability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_2-1
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