Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body

Abstract

A s a good amount of academic scholarship in the field of medieval studies has shown, the Middle Ages was a time in which the body was an important site of spiritual, scientific, philosophical, and episte-mological questioning. Scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have documented the increased emphasis on the intersection of the spiritual and the bodily in the later medieval periods, an emphasis Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury term "an incarnational aesthetic." 1 This incarna-tional aesthetic, which informed the spiritual and secular lives of medieval people, has also governed the last decade of medieval scholarship, especially with contemporary theories of identity formation, including feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, gaining widespread use. More recently, medieval scholars have considered disability theory in their analyses of the connections between bodily difference and the formation of cultural, ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities. 2 However, no one study succeeds in both combining disability studies with post-structuralist interrogations of the relationship between the body and culture and directly considering how discourses on the female body intersect with those on impairment. In this book, I use a feminist disability perspective to examine the social production of gender and disability in the literature of the high and late medieval periods in order to argue that the conf lation of the female body, femininity, and disability that arises in the authoritative discourses of the Middle Ages-such as biblical, patristic, and medical writings-often succeeds in frustrating the teleological narrative drives of literary works read in England that feature disabled female characters. Primarily, this project proposes that viewing disability through what I call the gen-dered model, or a historicized consideration of the links between the Pearman, T.. Women and Disability in Medieval Literature, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,