Social Dimensions of Medieval Disease and Disability

Description

The chronological and geographical focus of this volume is medieval northern Europe, from the 6th to the 15th centuries. The contributors examine the sometimes arbitrary social factors which resulted in people being deliberately, accidentally or temporarily categorised as 'disabled' within their society, in ways that are peculiar to the medieval period. Health and disease are not static and unchanging; they are subject to cultural construction, manipulation and definition. Medieval ideas of healthy and unhealthy, as these papers show, were not necessarily - or even usually - comparable to modern approaches. Each of the papers represented in this volume assesses social constructs of health and ill-health in different guises within the medieval period. Front Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributors Chapter 1. Introduction: social dimensions of medieval disease and disability Chapter 2. The unhal and the semantics of Anglo Saxon disability Chapter 3. Invisible enemies: the role of epidemics in the shaping of historical events in the early medieval period Chapter 4. The Madness of King Sigurðr: Narrating Insanity in an Old Norse Kings’ Saga Chapter 5. ‘He was not an idiota from birth, nor is he now’: false, temporary, and overturned charges of mental incapacity in 14th-century England Chapter 6. Disabling Masculinity: Manhood and Infertility in the High Middle Ages Chapter 7. Speechless: speech and hearing impairments as problem of medieval normative texts -- theological, natural-philosophical, legal Chapter 8. Leprosy, Lepers and Leper-houses: between Human Law and God’s Law (6th-15th centuries)