Women and Disability in Medieval Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 1-17

3. (Dis)Pleasure and (Dis)Ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale”

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 19-44

4. Physical Education: Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue”

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 45-71

5. Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 73-111

6. Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 113-149

7. Conclusion

   • Tory Vandeventer Pearman

   Pages 151-154

8. Back Matter

   Pages 155-206

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This book is 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, it proposes a 'gendered model' for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.

• English literature
• gender
• medieval literature
• Middle Ages
• women
• British and Irish Literature

TORY VANDEVENTER PEARMAN is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton, USA. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Essays in Medieval Studies and The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability.

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