Social dimensions of medieval disease and disability / edited by Sally Crawford, Christina Lee.

Date:
2014
  • Books

About this work

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.

Publication/Creation

Oxford : Archaeopress, 2014.

Physical description

82 pages ; 30 cm.

Series

Contributors

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references.

Contents

Foreword -- Contributors -- Introduction: social dimensions of medieval disease and disability / Sally Crawford -- The unhal and the semantics of Anglo Saxon disability / Fay Skevington -- Invisible enemies: the role of epidemics in the shaping of historical events in the early medieval period / Christina Lee -- The Madness of King Sigurðr: Narrating Insanity in an Old Norse Kings' Saga / Ármann Jakobsson -- 'He was not an idiota from birth, nor is he now': false, temporary, and overturned charges of mental incapacity in 14th-century England / Wendy Turner -- Disabling Masculinity: Manhood and Infertility in the High Middle Ages / Rachel Middlemass and Theresa Tyers -- Speechless: speech and hearing impairments as problem of medieval normative texts -- theological, natural-philosophical, legal / Irina Metzler -- Leprosy, Lepers and Leper-houses: between Human Law and God's Law (6th-15th centuries) / Damien Jeanne.

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Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    NH.AA2
    		Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 140731310X
  • 9781407313108