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Toward a transhuman model of medieval disability

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Abstract

To elaborate an understanding of medieval humanity rooted in the body, we must consider a broad class of ‘bodies’ beyond the physical. Applying the methodologies of disability studies to textual corpora offers new ways to reflect on the boundaries of the human in medieval literature. The dits, generically mixed texts, may thus be read as a corpus generated from a posthuman blending of textual elements; the prevalence of disabled narrators in the dits compounds their play with the margins of humanity. This essay proposes a ‘transhuman’ model of medieval disability, an elastic and non-binary paradigm of corporeal difference. According to this transhuman model, disability in medieval texts can represent an enhancement, a constructive alteration of the human state. A brief reading of lyric ‘insertions’ in Guillaume de Machaut's Livre du Voir Dit suggests the concept of textual prosthesis as a productive point of contact between Disability Studies and the posthuman.

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Notes

  1. On this phenomenon see De Looze (1997).

  2. For an overview of these models I refer the reader to the essays and excerpts collected by Davis (2006).

  3. ‘Supercrips’ are ‘exceptional’ people who ‘overcome’ their disabilities, often through acts of physical prowess. The medieval ‘supercrip’ narratives to which I allude here imply a trade-off wherein enhanced courage or virtue compensates for a physical impairment.

  4. Mitchell and Snyder cite the children's tale The Steadfast Tin Soldier as an exemplary prosthetic narrative: the physiological deviance of the one-legged protagonist, foregrounded by the narrator, gives rise to the narrative conflict.

References

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  • Guillaume de Machaut. 1999. Le livre du voir dit, eds. P. Imbs and J. Cerquiglini-Toulet. Paris: Librairie Générale Française.

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Singer, J. Toward a transhuman model of medieval disability. Postmedieval 1, 173–179 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2009.4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2009.4

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