Women and Disability in Medieval Literature

The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the
Religious Literature Southern Low Countries

edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary
Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren A. Suydam
Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural
Image Worship and Idolatry in England Clusters of a Dark Age
1350–1500 by Paul Edward Dutton
by Kathleen Kamerick
Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in
Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Medieval Text and Image
Literary Structure in Late Medieval England edited by Emma Campbell and Robert
by Elizabeth Scala Mills
Creating Community with Food and Drink in Queering Medieval Genres

Merovingian Gaul by Tison Pugh
by Bonnie Effros
Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism
Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: by L. Michael Harrington
Image and Empire
The Middle Ages at Work
by Anne McClanan
edited by Kellie Robertson and
Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Michael Uebel
Objects,Texts, Images
Chaucer’s Jobs
edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet
by David R. Carlson
Snyder
Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady
Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity
edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John
by John M. Ganim
Carmi Parsons
Queer Love in the Middle Ages
Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical by Anna Klosowska
Essays
edited by David A. Boruchoff Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex,
Gender, and the Iberian Lyric
Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male by Denise K. Filios
Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century
by Richard E. Zeikowitz Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in
Medieval England
Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, by David Gary Shaw
and Politics in England 1225–1350
by Linda E. Mitchell Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages
edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst
Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc Wenzel
by Maud Burnett McInerney
Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy
The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2
Adventures in Contemporary Culture edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy
by Angela Jane Weisl
False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later
Capetian Women Middle English Literature
edited by Kathleen D. Nolan by Elizabeth Allen
Joan of Arc and Spirituality Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity
edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie in the Middle Ages
Wheeler by Michael Uebel
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd ii 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature:
Modern Cultures: New Essays Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk
edited by Lawrence Besserman edited by Bonnie Wheeler
Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork,

edited by Jane Chance and Alfred and Other Cultural Imaginings
K. Siewers edited by E. Jane Burns
Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?:The
Medieval England Case for St. Florent of Saumur
by Frank Grady by George Beech
Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the
Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting Middle Ages
by Jennifer L. Ball by Erin L. Jordan
The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval
“Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, Britain: On Difficult Middles
1350–1500 by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
by Kellie Robertson Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s
The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500:Wife Pandarus
and Icon by Gretchen Mieszkowski
by Holly S. Hurlburt The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature
Logic,Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, by Jeremy J. Citrome
Abelard, and Alan of Lille:Words in the Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in
Absence of Things the Canterbury Tales
by Eileen C. Sweeney by Lee Patterson
The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious
Medieval Religious Renewal Movement Writing
by Patricia Ranft by Lara Farina
On the Purification of Women: Churching in Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval
Northern France, 1100–1500 Literature
by Paula M. Rieder by Sachi Shimomura
Writers of the Reign of Henry II:Twelve On Farting: Language and Laughter in the
Essays Middle Ages
edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon by Valerie Allen
Meecham-Jones
Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and
Lonesome Words:The Vocal Poetics of the Old the Limits of Epic Masculinity
English Lament and the African-American edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana
Blues Song K. Schulman
by M.G. McGeachy
Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval”
Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval Cinema
English Nunneries edited by Lynn T. Ramey and
by Anne Bagnell Yardley Tison Pugh
The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle
Chaucer Ages
by Robert R. Edwards by Noah D. Guynn
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd iii 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An
12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Edition,Translation, and Discussion
Political Exchanges by Sarah L. Higley
edited by María Bullón-Fernández
Medieval Romance and the Construction of
The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Heterosexuality
Process by Louise M. Sylvester
by Albrecht Classen
Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape
Claustrophilia:The Erotics of Enclosure in in the Later Middle Ages
Medieval Literature by Jeremy Goldberg
by Cary Howie Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in
Cannibalism in High Medieval English the Fifteenth Century
Literature edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea
by Heather Blurton Denny-Brown
The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle
English Guild Culture English Literature
by Christina M. Fitzgerald by Tison Pugh
Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-

by Holly A. Crocker Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen
Amor
The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Louise M. Haywood
by Jane Chance
The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance
Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and in the Late Middle Ages
Literature edited by Catherine E. Léglu and
by Scott Lightsey Stephen J. Milner
American Chaucers Battlefronts Real and Imagined:War, Border, and
by Candace Barrington Identity in the Chinese Middle Period
edited by Don J. Wyatt
Representing Others in Medieval Iberian
Literature Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early
by Michelle M. Hamilton Modern Hispanic Literature
by Emily C. Francomano
Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval
Studies Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval
edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Queenship: Maria de Luna
Lifshitz by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez
The King and the Whore: King Roderick and In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West,
La Cava and the Relevance of the Past
by Elizabeth Drayson edited by Simon R. Doubleday and
David Coleman, foreword by Giles
Langland’s Early Modern Identities Tremlett
by Sarah A. Kelen
Chaucerian Aesthetics
Cultural Studies of the Modern by Peggy A. Knapp
Middle Ages
edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi
Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Drama
Ramsey by Theodore K. Lerud
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd iv 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early
Archipelago, Island, England Medieval Landscape
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen by Alfred K. Siewers
Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and
and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics Political Women in the High Middle Ages
by Susan Signe Morrison by Miriam Shadis
Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism
Medieval Wales and Post-Medieval Reception
edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon edited by Sarah Salih and Denise
Meecham-Jones N. Baker
The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Mary Catherine Davidson
by Seeta Chaganti
The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: of Their Complete Correspondence and
Power, Faith, and Crusade Related Writings
edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace translated and edited by Mary
Stuckey Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie
Wheeler
The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An
English Translation of the Complete Works Women and Wealth in Late Medieval Europe
(1376/77–1445) edited by Theresa Earenfight
by Albrecht Classen
Visual Power and Fame in René d’Anjou,
Women and Experience in Later Medieval Geoffrey Chaucer, and the
Writing: Reading the Book of Life Black Prince
edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker by SunHee Kim Gertz
and Liz Herbert McAvoy
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: Medieval Studies
Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English and New Media
Literature: Singular Fortunes by Brantley L. Bryant
by J. Allan Mitchell
Margaret Paston’s Piety
Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval
by Joel T. Rosenthal
English Literature
by Kathleen E. Kennedy Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis
The Post-Historical Middle Ages by Theresa Tinkle
edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia
Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English
Federico
Literature
Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in by Roger A. Ladd
the Critical Tradition
Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval
by Geoffrey W. Gust
Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature,
Queens in Stone and Silver:The Creation of a Music
Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian edited by C. Stephen Jaeger
France
by Kathleen Nolan Medieval and Early Modern Devotional
Objects in Global Perspective: Translations of
Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art the Sacred
edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, edited by Elizabeth Robertson
and John K. Downey and Jennifer Jahner
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd v 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Women and Disability in Medieval
Beyond Literature
edited by Carmen Caballero-Navas and by Tory Vandeventer Pearman
Esperanza Alfonso
Heloise and the Paraclete: A Twelfth-Century
Outlawry in Medieval Literature Quest (forthcoming)
by Timothy S. Jones by Mary Martin McLaughlin
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd vi 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

WOMEN AND DISABILITY IN
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Tory Vandeventer Pearman
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd vii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

WOMEN AND DISABILITY IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Copyright © Tory Vandeventer Pearman, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–10511–9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearman, Tory Vandeventer, 1980–
Women and disability in medieval literature / Tory Vandeventer
Pearman.
p. cm.—(The new middle ages)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–10511–9 (alk. paper)
1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 2. Women in
literature. 3. People with disabilities in literature. I. Title.
PN682.W6P43 2010
809⬘.93352042—dc22 2010018390
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd viii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

For Gram and Marina
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9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd x 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and

the Disabled Female Body 1
1 (Dis)pleasure and (Dis)ability: The Topos of
Reproduction in Dame Sirith and
the “Merchant’s Tale” 19
2 Physical Education: Excessive Wives and
Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and
the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” 45
3 Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and
the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and
the Testament of Cresseid 73
4 Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the
Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe 113
Conclusion 151
Notes 155
Bibliography 187
Index 201
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9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he personal and professional assistance of many people has shaped

the conception and development of this book. Edward Wheatley’s
attentive and thoughtful comments were essential for not only this proj-
ect to take form, but also my own professional growth as a scholar. I am
thankful for his patience and persistence in pushing me to produce my
best work. Thanks to Pamela Caughie, for the painstaking care with
which she read my drafts was invaluable for the development of my own
critical voice. I am grateful to Dorsey Armstrong who forcefully, yet sup-
portively, challenged me to rethink and revise my work. I appreciate the
constructive comments provided by an anonymous reader for the New
Middle Ages. I am thankful, also, to Bonnie Wheeler, editor of the New
Middle Ages Series, for her support throughout the project. Discussions
and collaborations with my fellow members of the Society for the Study
of Disability in the Middle Ages have been both inf luential and enjoy-
able. The assistance of interlibrary loan staffs of both Loyola University
Chicago and the University of Southern Indiana was invaluable through-
out all stages of this project.
I wish to thank Andrew Higl, Shelly Jarenski, and Ann Mattis for
their encouragement and companionship throughout this project. I
also extend my gratitude to Stephanie Lundeen, who provided invalu-
able support in the form of careful readings, engaged and lively discus-
sions, and unwavering friendship. I am grateful to the Arthur J. Schmitt
Foundation for the generous financial support that made this project
possible.
Portions of the introduction and chapter 1 appeared previously as “ ‘O
Sweete Venym Queynte!’: Pregnancy and the Disabled Female Body in
The Merchant’s Tale” in Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and
Reverberations, edited by Joshua Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).
Part of chapter 3 was published as “Refiguring Disability: Deviance,
Blinding, and the Supernatural in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal” in the
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability 3.2 (2009). Both the published
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xiii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

xiv AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S
portions are reprinted with kind permission respectively from Ashgate

and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability.
Lastly, I offer a very special thanks to my parents, siblings, and
extended family, without whom I would not have made it this far. To
Jordan, Gram, and Marina, I send all of my love, for thanks would never
be enough.
9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xiv 9/20/2010 3:25:42 PM

INTRODUCTION
MEDIEVAL AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE AND

THE DISABLED FEMALE BODY
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 medi-
eval 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 cul-
ture 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
9780230105119_02_int.indd 1 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

2 WOM E N A N D DI S A BI L I T Y I N L I T E R AT U R E
sociocultural production of gender and bodily ability, is essential to any

study of embodied difference, an element that remains generally lacking
in most studies of disability. In addition, I contend that literary repre-
sentations of femaleness, femininity, and disability—though they do not
provide exact accounts of the lived experiences of women or those with
disabilities—are central to uncovering the social anxieties surrounding
such Othered figures.
In order to investigate the construction of sexual difference and ability
in late medieval discourses of authority, it is important to use the work
of contemporary feminist, gender, and disability theories of the body.
However, I do not mean to argue that medieval authors intended to pres-
ent particular notions of sex, gender, and bodily ability. Instead, I contend
that these discourses work together to produce and even demand a partic-
ular understanding of the sexed body and how it is interpreted in terms of
its gender and physical ability. With this in mind, I would like to brief ly
examine the prevalent issues at stake in the field of disability studies and
demonstrate how their conjunction with feminist theories of the body is
necessary to a more complete—and even political—understanding of the
female body and the disabled body not only today, but also in the late
medieval world.
Disability studies in academia has f lourished only recently. Following
attempts in the early twentieth century to construct a “history of disabil-
ity” and the political movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, schol-
ars have begun to investigate the material, psychological, cultural, and
historical components of disability as well as theorize disability as an
identity category.3 Current theorists of disability studies situate disability
within a sociohistorical context in which disability is a social process
that does not denote a deficient body but results from the interaction
between bodily difference and society. Other models of disability, such as
the medical and rehabilitation models, focus on the “restoration” of a dis-
abled body to a socially constructed “norm,” whereas the constructionist,
or social, model posits disability within “a social process in which no
inherent meanings attach to physical difference other than those assigned
by a community.”4 Erving Goffman’s book on stigma is an important
early contribution to the social model. Stigmatization, Goffman notes,
occurs in the interactions between those with visible physical difference
and those without when there is a discrepancy between one’s actual iden-
tity (how one sees himself or herself ) and one’s virtual identity (how
others view him or her).5 Goffman’s study, though important for its
acknowledgment of stigmatization as a process, is problematic in its sug-
gestion that the interpretation of difference remains negative in cultures
and histories. Mary Douglas, in her application of an anthropological
9780230105119_02_int.indd 2 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

I N T RO DU C T ION 3
perspective to stigmatization, contends that responses to embodied dif-

ference are based on a collective view of bodily perfection, a notion that
has led the way to analyses of disability that consider cultural change.6
Indeed, the social model provides a more complete assessment of disabil-
ity because it allows scholars to place disability within its sociohistorical
milieu. As Irina Metzler argues, “The notion of the social construction
of disability [ . . . ] permits historical investigation and analysis—of what is
and what is not disability,” whereas the medical model positions impair-
ment and disability as equal and thus natural and unchanging.7 In other
words, current scholars of disability distinguish between a person’s physi-
cal impairment and the social construction of disability, or the interaction
between the impairment and one’s sociohistorical context. It is this dis-
tinction between impairment and disability that allows for a medieval
understanding of the physically impaired.
In this book, I view disability as a process wherein cultural standards
for normalcy dictate whether those who do not fit such standards can
fully participate in their societies. As such, I use the terms disabled, dis-
ability, and people with disabilities to describe people whose physical or
mental faculties do not adhere to the sociocultural norms of their his-
torically located societies. When focusing specifically on the bodily or
mental faculty without regard to its social connotations, I use the terms
impaired, impairment, and people with impairments. In keeping disability and
impairment separate, I follow other disability scholars in uncovering the
social construction of disability by focusing on the “linguistic conven-
tions that structure the meanings assigned to disability and the patterns
of response to disability that emanate from, or are attendant upon, those
meanings.”8 Moreover, I adopt Susan Wendell’s understanding of “dis-
ability as difference” in which she views disability “as a form of dif-
ference from what is considered normal or usual or paradigmatic in a
society.”9 Wendell’s more general understanding of disability as differ-
ence dramatically opens up the category for what may be considered
a disability while still maintaining its status as socially constructed.
Wendell adds that labeling disability as difference allows for a value-
neutral description, “while recognizing that both stigma and being ‘the
Other’ are aspects of the social oppression of people with disabilities.”10
Through her reclassification, Wendell seeks to overturn the present-
day stigmatizing social understandings of disability by abandoning its
categorization as a lack and recasting those with disabilities as sources
of valuable knowledge and experience. Following Wendell in defining
disability as difference in a study of disability in medieval literature, I
let considerations of what constitutes disability remain f luid and leave
open the question of value, two important elements in an analysis of
9780230105119_02_int.indd 3 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

representations of disability in a society in which no identifiable defi-

nition of disability existed, and yet one in which those with physical
impairments were often stigmatized.
Only recently medieval scholars such as Edward Wheatley and Irina
Metzler have begun to directly incorporate disability studies in their
investigations of embodied difference in the Middle Ages, jointly
decrying the lack of a historical emphasis in contemporary studies of
disability. The first full-length account of medieval disability, Metzler’s
Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment in the
High Middle Ages, c. 1100–c. 1400, examines theoretical and medical
notions of the impaired body as well as the important role of impair-
ment in establishing a saint’s singularity.11 Ultimately, Metzler con-
cludes that there is no fully delineated concept of disability in the high
Middle Ages; instead, medieval people were concerned mostly with
impairment. Wheatley offers the first medieval-specific model for dis-
ability, the religious model, which illuminates the church’s power to
maintain control over how disability and the disabled were discursively
constructed.12 Drawing from the New Testament construction of Jesus
as a healer of both spiritual and physical maladies, Wheatley finds that
medieval notions of disability were tied to the linking of inward sin
with outward appearance in religious doctrine. In fact, the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215 directly associates the cause of bodily illness
to sin, explicitly asserting that divine intervention was important in
the treatment of such ailments.13
Current issues at stake in the newly forming field of medieval dis-
ability studies include attempts to locate and define disability in a period
that offers no linguistic equivalent to the term and questions of how to
provide a medieval definition of ability in order to better understand who
does not fit within that category and whether to keep separate or com-
bine notions of mental and physical impairment. In addition to strug-
gling with the “problem of definition”14 in medieval disability studies, I
have also noticed an innate desire on the part of scholars to “rescue” the
Middle Ages from assumptions that construe medieval society as intoler-
ant of and even cruel toward people with physical and mental impair-
ments in recent discussions of medieval disability. This desire follows
a trend in some recent scholarship on medieval disability that seeks to
nullify older analyses that draw a distinct connection between an out-
ward physical impairment and inward spiritual deficiency.15 While these
scholars rightly bring to light the ability of people with disabilities to
function and even thrive in medieval society as well as the frequently
benign reactions of others to their impairments, their drive to describe
the premodern era as devoid of a concept of the social process of disability
9780230105119_02_int.indd 4 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

ignores medieval discourses—religious, medical, and literary—that do

stigmatize physical and mental impairments as markers of sinfulness and/
or Otherness and comes dangerously close to supplanting a monolithic
view of the Middle Ages as intolerant with an equally monolithic view
that borders on nostalgic. In response, my project refuses to polarize
the Middle Ages as either inherently intolerant or entirely accepting of
those with embodied differences. Rather, I hope to take both views into
account, conceding the sometimes negative connotations surrounding
the impaired body in the Middle Ages while also acknowledging medi-
eval society’s frequent acceptance of and care for the impaired. It is from
within these conf licting views that my project takes shape. Specifically,
my project’s turn to medieval literature allows me to analyze the literary
representations of disabled women that expose the sometimes misogynist
and ableist discourses that link the disabled female body to sinfulness,
while also demonstrating the often subversive power such bodies have to
challenge those discourses.
My gendered model seeks to build upon Metzler’s and Wheatley’s
work by contributing to a medieval understanding of disability.
However, the gendered model, in its positioning of gender and disabil-
ity as social processes intricately connected by the body in medieval
culture, uncovers the links between medieval notions of femaleness,
femininity, and disability produced by religious and medical discourses
and then traces how those links function within and even profoundly
shape the narrative structure of medieval literature. When biblical,
medical, and literary representations of the female body merge with
the Aristotelian construction of the female body as a deformed male
body, a web of embodied Otherness begins to surface, demonstrat-
ing the intricate bonds between discursive notions of embodied iden-
tity categories such as gender, sex, sexuality, ability, and ethnicity.
Medieval scholars of disability, or of any bodily difference, must con-
sider these bonds in order to politicize our understanding of disability
in the Middle Ages.
As Wheatley has shown, “the church’s control over discourses related
to disability” operated “in a manner analogous to the way modern
medicine attempts to control it now.”16 However, medical discourses
held a great amount of power in determining how particular bodies
were interpreted and represented. The gendered model allows for an
analysis of how multiple discourses—biblical, religious, medical—work
together to link the female body, femininity, and disability. It is there-
fore important to focus on the understandings of the body produced
by medieval medical texts, particularly in the later medieval period.
The “science” that these texts assert, however, differs greatly from our
9780230105119_02_int.indd 5 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

modern notion of science as unquestionable proof. First of all, there was

no easy distinction between medicine and religion, and, in the early
Middle Ages, religious communities studied, copied, and translated
many medical texts. Moreover, the dissemination of these texts allowed
particular notions about the body and particular authors with whom
such notions were associated to gain authority. Thus, medieval medi-
cine describes and demonstrates popular medical notions of the body and
its functions, but does not categorically prove such assertions. Though
medieval medical texts did not wield the kind of discursive control over
the body and disability that medical discourse does today, the author-
ity that such texts and authors achieved had the ability to inf luence the
interpretation of bodies and thus the ability to produce certain bodies
as intelligible or unintelligible.
In her defense of the power of such a small component of medieval
society, Metzler explains that the institutionalization of medical knowl-
edge and its resultant exposure to popular culture led to a “ ‘medi-
calisation’ of later medieval society” that indeed provides evidence for
common medieval understandings of and treatments for physical impair-
ments.17 An increased interest in medical knowledge and practice led to
a growth in centers for systematic medical study throughout Europe in
the mid-twelfth century and, in turn, to an expansion in the translation
and dissemination of classical medical texts.18 The “medicalisation” of
the late medieval period resulted in the creation of authorities on the
body and, in turn, patients who were expected to go to such authorities
in order to seek advice and treatment. In other words, the creation of
authorities simultaneously results in the creation of “docile bodies,” or
bodies that “may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.”19 The
authority granted to medicine and medical practitioners—although not
absolute in the late medieval period—undoubtedly affected the repre-
sentations, treatment, and experiences of those with bodies deemed in
need of improvement. As Wendell remarks, “The cognitive and social
authority of medicine to describe our bodies affects how we experience
our bodies and our selves, how our society describes our experiences
and validates/invalidates them, how our society supports or fails to sup-
port our bodily sufferings and struggles, and what our culture knows
about the human body.”20 The effects of such authority over the body,
though inf luential to every body, “are compounded for people who
have little cognitive or social authority of their own, and for people
who are routinely treated as though they are without such authority,
such as women, and many men who are poor, old, disabled, and/or sub-
jected to racism.”21 In conjunction with biblical and religious discourses
on such Othered bodies, medical discourse links the unintelligibility
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of such bodies to biological sexual difference and its cultural interpre-

tations, laying the groundwork for later representations of the female
body and the disabled body.
The Female Body as Disabled in

Medieval Authoritative Discourse
The use of the gendered model makes evident the connections between
discursive productions of the female body and the disabled body in
both contemporary and premodern medical and social interpretations.
By studying the female body produced by such discourses, we not
only can examine the challenges able-bodied women faced in medi-
eval culture, but also can better historicize what some authors have
called the “double defect” or “redundancy” of the disabled woman. 22
According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, the female body and the
disabled body are inescapably joined in the patriarchal order, a con-
nection she describes as “the cultural intertwining of femininity and
disability.” 23 The notion of women as inferior to men begins in male
discourses on physiology. A medieval understanding of women’s bod-
ies is rooted in the theories of scholars such as Hippocrates, Aristotle,
Soranus, and Galen, which, though often conf licting, collectively
indicate that women are the inverse of men and are therefore subor-
dinate. 24 In such discourses, a woman is, essentially, a defective man
whose genitals are reversed. 25 Despite Thomas Laqueur’s assertion
that male and female bodies were considered to be variations of one
overarching paradigm for sex, 26 it is clear that most medieval medical
authorities clearly identified anatomical sex difference between the
male and the female. In Katharine Park’s study of human dissection,
she notes that medical discourse and anatomical illustrations demon-
strate the “homology of the male and female genitals” by presenting
the female genitals as the inverse of a man’s: “If men’s genitals were
folded inward, they would resemble women’s with the scrotum cor-
responding to the uterus, the male testes to the female ones [ . . . ], the
vagina to the penis, and the foreskin to the labia.” 27 In conjunction
with a humoral understanding of women’s colder natures, as Jennifer
Wynne Hellwarth explains, “[t]hese formulations naturally led to
the supposed notion that if a woman only became hot enough her
penis would fall out and she would reach perfection and become a
man.” 28 However, as Park and Hellwarth both make clear, the prolif-
eration of such evidence in medieval medical texts does not prove
Laqueur’s “one-sex” model to be true to a medieval understanding
of sexual difference. 29 In fact, Joan Cadden’s research, which situates
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it sel f i n opposition to Laqueur’s, does not uncover an essentialist

binary notion of sex or gender, but rather “a cluster of gender-related
notions” that results from the evolution and accumulation of medi-
eval medical, philosophical, and theological understandings of sex and
gender differences. 30 In other words, medieval understandings of sex
and gender emerge from a complex “process by which a network of
gender constructs was negotiated and sustained.”31
Ultimately, it is an oversimplification to argue that the Aristotelian
notion of woman as man’s inverse prevailed as the only way in which
medieval medicine understood the female body. However, it is certain
that this notion garnered significant attention and use in the medieval
period (and, indeed, throughout history) and has contributed consider-
ably to the social interpretation of the female body and femininity. As
both Monica Green and Helen King demonstrate, the general notion
of sex difference in the later medieval period holds that the male and
female bodies are unequal, particularly with respect to physiology. 32
Aristotelian writings, which inform most medieval medical texts from
the twelfth century on, deem the woman herself an imperfect man
whose matter was not “concocted” long enough during prenatal devel-
opment. A woman is, in fact, an undercooked male, or “a deformity,
though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”33 Such
qualities cast the female body as incomplete in relation to the male
body, or norm, and subsequent medical writings iterate these value-
laden notions. 34
Moreover, conf licting theories concerning the function and action of
the womb construe the female body as imperfect. Despite the Hippocratic
“two-seed” theory, which granted agency to the female body in the
act of conception, Aristotelian writings posit female “seed” as passive
and inferior to the male’s.35 The womb itself was presented as having
active and passive qualities. Though Aristotle’s work does not focus on
the womb, Galen, following Hippocratic scholars like Soranus, depicts
the womb as an active organ capable of some movement. Some scholars
even believed that such movement was independent and could result in
various maladies. According to Plato, the womb has autonomous feel-
ings; it is “an indwelling creature desirous of childbearing.”36 When a
woman is unable to conceive, the womb “is vexed and takes ill; and by
straying all ways through the body and blocking up the passages of the
breath and preventing respiration it casts the body into the uttermost dis-
tress, and causes, moreover, all kinds of maladies.”37 This phenomenon,
known as the wandering womb, was not accepted by all theorists. While
Soranus and Galen oppose those who credited complete independence to
the womb, their texts still reveal latent belief in the womb’s animalistic
9780230105119_02_int.indd 8 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

nature.38 Moreover, Galen writes of womb suffocation, a defect of the

womb resulting in loss of appetite, dizziness, weakness, and troubled
breathing; this condition was considered serious enough to warrant sev-
eral remedies in various medical treatises. 39
The theories of Aristotle and Galen ref lect the nuanced and sometimes
conf licting notions of sex difference that came to the medieval West
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries via Latin translations and through
their use in the works of Arabic scholars such as Avicenna and Averroes.
For instance, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s thirteenth-century text Women’s
Secrets espouses the Aristotelian notion that the male produces the seed
while the female acts as a vessel to collect that seed and relies heavily
on the theories of Galen when constructing his explanation of womb
suffocation.40 Even the eleventh-century Trotula, sections of which are
attributed to a female author,41 evokes similar notions about the f lawed
female body.42
Notions of the womb, thus, situate it as both the passive vessel that
receives male seed in the act of reproduction and an active organ capable
of independent movement that seeks sexual intercourse. Moreover, some
medical scholars such as Avicenna comment on the physical inferiority
of the uterus, noting that it is the last organ to be formed and, hence, the
weakest.43 Considered both a weak, passive vessel and a strong, active, even
animal-like organ, the womb undoubtedly mystified medieval medical
scholars. Although these views seem oppositional, Cadden explains that
“they share the underlying suggestion that women are empty, void, lack-
ing” and that “each placed limits on the feminine” that could result in
antifeminist notions of the female body and, in turn, woman herself.44
Despite such nuanced and sometimes conf licting views of bodily dif-
ference between the sexes, one constant seems to be the assertion that the
female body is indeed different from the male body in both its anatomy
and physiology. Consequently, this physical difference, though deemed a
part of the natural order, is devalued. The devaluation of the female body
becomes strikingly clearer when classical medical understandings of the
body come together with biblical and patristic discourses on women.
The Aristotelian classification of the female body, however, did not reach
medieval Europe until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it came
via translations of Arabic medical texts that incorporated Aristotelian and
Galenic medical views.45 Thus, biblical and patristic writings were the
first to iterate the female body’s difference in the medieval period. The
creation story of Genesis not only classifies the female body as a deviation
from the male body—Eve is, of course, fashioned from Adam’s rib—
but also codes that difference within social structures: due to her infe-
rior physical embodiment, Eve must bear and raise children and remain
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subjugated to Adam. Moreover, subsequent writings link Eve’s implica-

tion in the Fall with the mental and physical inferiority that supposedly
stems from her bodily difference. Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century
encyclopedia of knowledge Etymologies demonstrates the combination of
biblical and medical discourses on the female body in its commentary
on women, noting that “[w]oman [mulier] gets her name from ‘softness’
[mollitie]” because “the two sexes are differentiated in the strength [for-
titudine] and weakness [imbecillitate] of their bodies.”46 In addition to
noting the physical weakness of the female body, Isidore links feminine
qualities to Eve: Eve is both “life” and “disaster” since she is both “the
origin of being born” and the “cause of dying. But some say that Eve is
called ‘life’ and ‘disaster’ because woman is often the cause of man’s wel-
fare, and often the cause of his disaster and death.”47 Moreover, patristic
writers such as Jerome and Augustine synthesize these notions in their
literature on sexuality and marriage, marking the female body as f leshly,
sexually excessive, and threatening.48
Medieval medical texts combine biblical and patristic writings and
Aristotelian views with Galenic, or humoral-based, medicine. As noted
above, later texts like the eleventh-century Trotula and Pseudo-Albertus
Magnus’ thirteenth-century Women’s Secrets reveal the common percep-
tion of a woman as a defective man; while men could effectively “cook”
wastes within their bodies, thereby decontaminating the wastes, women,
because of their colder bodies, were unable to generate enough heat to
decontaminate their bodies. As a result, menstruation was viewed as the
primary method by which women eliminated excess waste.
Two conf licting discourses concerning menstruation emerged in the
Middle Ages. Menstruation was often referred to as a woman’s “f lowers.”
These “f lowers,” if pollinated, would lead to fruit, or children.49 Though
the Trotula offers a fairly benign view of menses as a woman’s “f lowers”
that produce the fruit of children, other contemporary views categorize
menstrual f luid as dangerous. This relatively positive view of menstrua-
tion intersected with the prevailing notion of menstrual blood as poison.
Pliny’s second-century work Natural History, another major inf luence on
medieval medical texts, claims that menstrual blood had the power to
tarnish metals, wither plants, and madden dogs.50 His views were per-
petuated in varying degrees in the works by Galen, Soranus, and Pseudo-
Albertus Magnus. The male fear and anxiety over the unclean nature of
menstrual blood most likely stems from biblical views on women’s (un)
cleanliness in Leviticus as well as from the idea that menstruation was
one punishment for Eve’s sin.51 Green identifies a proliferation of these
“misogynistic views” about menstruation occurring in the thirteenth
century and impacting perceptions of gender from then on.52 Notably,
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Hildegard, though she employs the “f lower” metaphor when describ-

ing menstruation and reproduction in Scivias, links menstrual blood to
Eve’s sin, prohibiting men from having intercourse with a menstruating
woman.53
The uterus and menstruation, then, prove to be the determining fac-
tors that situate the female body as unequal to the male body. Thus,
despite the common perception that a female’s sexual organs are essen-
tially the opposite of a male’s, Laqueur’s “one-sex” model does not hold.
These two bodily differences, viewed to be the physical signs of the
female body’s inferior and even deformed status in relation to the male
body, demonstrate the female body’s link to the impaired body. In such
primarily male-authored medical, biblical, and patristic literature, the
female body arises as the original bearer of embodied difference, but one
with potentially threatening powers in its excess and in its ability to pro-
duce and destroy life.54 Because of the pervasiveness of such discourses,
especially during the institutionalization of medical culture beginning
in the twelfth century, it is probable that subsequent representations of
both womanhood and impairment in literature ref lect similar notions.
As Metzler affirms, the expansion of medical culture undoubtedly pro-
duced interactions between medical and popular culture; therefore,
“the growth of ‘bookish’ medicine was not just due to its promotion
by learned practitioners, but also due to public enthusiasm for learning
and public expectations of the medical profession.”55 If the “medicalisa-
tion” of the later medieval period results in the production of widespread
notions of the female body and the disabled body, then these notions will
surface in the literature of the period. The synthesis of medical views
on the female body in religious discourse and the increased number of
vernacular translations of classical medical texts in the late Middle Ages
attests to the predominance of such views in medieval culture and their
inf luence on and in literature. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, whom I
examine in chapters 2 and 3, references medical scholars throughout his
work, including Galen and Trotula.56
The Gendered Model: Toward a Medieval Feminist

Disability Perspective
The medical and biblical categorizations of the female body as a defec-
tive male are important to contemporary studies of gender and disability
in Western cultures. In fact, it is often cited as the sole evidence for the
link between the cultural productions of the female body, femininity, and
the disabled body, and it is clear that these socially produced categories
are indeed closely related.57 Moreover, feminist disability scholars often
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refer to biblical and spiritual discourses on Eve in their discussions. Felicity

Nussbaum, in her study of deformity and femininity in the eighteenth cen-
tury, describes “Eve’s prototypical defects” and their effects on the inter-
pretation and representation of women’s bodies.58 As Rosemarie Garland
Thomson asserts, the female body and the disabled body are inevitably
linked: “A firm boundary between ‘disabled’ and ‘nondisabled’ women
cannot be meaningfully drawn—just as an absolute distinction between
sex and gender is problematic. Femininity and disability are inextrica-
bly entangled in patriarchal culture.”59 In particular, a feminist approach
to disability studies demonstrates that disability—indeed, any embodied
difference—cannot be considered without acknowledging its ties to the
female body and femininity. Feminist approaches to disability, however,
often neglect to consider the premodern era in their analyses.60 Though I
am indebted to these scholars for including gender in their studies of dis-
ability, I must also critique their neglect of the Middle Ages. By relying on
the Aristotelian understanding of the female body in conjunction with bib-
lical depictions of women but neglecting the sociohistorical milieu within
which these discourses were disseminated, these scholars not only base their
investigations of disability and gender on an incomplete understanding of
the historical construction of the female anatomy, but also further obscure
the experiences of impaired women in the premodern era.
The recent conjunction of feminist theory and disability studies has
allowed for an investigation of intersections between the social con-
structions of gender and disability. Notably, the work of Susan Wendell
stresses the importance of bringing together these two fields by high-
lighting their shared characteristics, chief ly the struggle of both fields to
define their central objects of analysis. Just as feminist theory grapples
with its “problem” of defining what it means to be female, feminine, or
feminist61 so too do disability scholars “encounter the problem of defini-
tion as soon as [they] take an interest in disability.”62 Feminist theory asks
what is a woman; disability discourse asks what is disability and who is
disabled. Both fields question who gets to make these definitions and for
what purposes. Garland Thomson, in her juxtaposition of feminist theory
and disability studies, or what she terms feminist disability studies, notes
that the two discourses
challenge existing social relations; [ . . . ] resist interpretation of certain

bodily configurations and functions as deviant; [ . . . ] question the ways
that particularity or difference is invested with meaning; [ . . . ] examine
the enforcement of universalizing norms; [ . . . ] interrogate the politics of
appearance; [ . . . ] explore the politics of naming; [and] participate in posi-
tive identity politics.63
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Despite the similarities between the two fields, however, Garland

Thomson finds that the two can positively inf luence one another by
challenging the theoretical tenets of each other. For instance, feminism
pushes disability discourse to acknowledge the embodied experiences
and political and social issues of disabled women, while disability dis-
course compels postmodern feminists to interrogate the materiality of
the body in their examinations of identity and subjectivity.64 Ultimately,
Garland Thomson calls for a feminist disability discourse that incorporates
“standpoint theory and the feminist practice of explicitly situating oneself
when speaking” in order to “insist on disabled women’s particularity
and identity even while questioning its sources and its production.”65
Feminist disability studies, thus, challenge the sociocultural representa-
tions of gender and disability, question the association of women and the
disabled with the body, and acknowledge that identity categories such as
“disabled” and “woman” are fictions while also recognizing the extent
of their power.66
My project’s main objective is twofold: by using the gendered model, it
theorizes the ways in which medieval authoritative discourse produces the
categories of “woman” and “disabled” as inevitably linked, and it exam-
ines how those links function within and even shape the production of
literary texts. It is important, at the outset, to note that disability demands
a story. In other words, having an impairment necessitates that one must
narrate to others how one incurred the impairment; difference, thus, cre-
ates a gap that narration must fill. Similarly, the production of literary
narrative hinges on the differences, which are often embodied, that its
characters seek to resolve. Although I acknowledge that literary repre-
sentations of disability do not accurately portray lived experiences of dis-
ability, I nevertheless contend that they reveal the ways in which readers
(of texts and of bodies), who may consider themselves “normate,” make
meaning of disabled figures, both literary and actual.67 Literary represen-
tations of the disabled, thus, expose shared social anxieties about threats
to communal and individual identity formation that embodied Others
epitomize. Literary scholars of disability have already demonstrated how
disabled literary characters profoundly affect narrative and, in turn, the
real-life experiences of and social reactions to those with disabilities. For
instance, Leslie Fiedler asserts that readers’ responses to disabled charac-
ters in literature reveal a latent ambivalence about “real-life” people with
disabilities. This ambivalence bespeaks the readers’ fears about their own
bodily integrity.68 Garland Thomson argues that literature f lattens dis-
abled characters by reducing them to their visible physical f laws; this f lat-
tening not only serves the ends of the plot, but also simultaneously exposes
and even creates cultural stereotypes about those with disabilities.69
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As Garland Thomson suggests, the plot depends upon the difference

that disabled characters embody. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s
later work fully analyzes this dependency by not only examining how
disability operates within narrative to allow authors to metaphorically
present social ills through the aberrant bodies of their disabled characters,
but also asserting that narrative itself depends upon disability in order
to function.70 Their theory of narrative prosthesis, or the notion that dis-
ability creates a gap that narrative seeks to explain and then close, is
a cornerstone of this project. Though Mitchell and Snyder apply their
theory to modern narratives, it is a useful starting point for considering
medieval literary representations of disability. By construing narrative as
a teleological drive to close the gaps opened up by disabled literary fig-
ures, my project questions what happens when the disabled female char-
acters I consider frustrate that drive. Thus, this project mainly focuses
on instances in which prosthesis of the narrative fails, despite an appar-
ent narrative urge to close down the deviancy that a disabled charac-
ter creates. First, I demonstrate that medieval texts frequently construct
socially unruly female characters as the deviance that prompts narrative,
often by basing that unruliness on the defectiveness of the female body.
Thus, the narrative busies itself with attempts to control that deviance. In
other words, female behaviors rooted in a medieval understanding of the
female body as imperfect take the place of disabled bodies in Mitchell and
Snyder’s schema. Texts that couple this social unruliness with physical
impairment ultimately thwart a teleological narrative drive toward clo-
sure. What this study finds is that, though some texts, such as Geoffroy de
La Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, effectively silence
disabled female characters, often, a female character’s disability results
in the creation of new narratives that run counter to a master narrative
that would seek to limit the social and physical deviancies of the disabled
female body, as we will see in texts like Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of
Bath’s Prologue.” In cases like these, disability becomes imbued with
transgressive, even enabling power.
The literary analyses I offer in the chapters that follow represent only
a starting point into the discussion of gender and disability in medi-
eval literature. In order to narrow a seemingly infinite array of possible
choices, I have limited my texts to those produced or widely read in
England. In order to get a fuller sense of the medieval literary depiction
of female disability, I have chosen a wide variety of kinds of texts from
the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, including fabliaux, romance, con-
duct manuals, and spiritual autobiography. All of the texts I have selected
feature female characters with physical disabilities. Undoubtedly, male-
ness, masculinity, and disability are important elements of the gendered
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model, but men with disabilities are not the focus of this project. The
disabilities of the female characters I examine here, furthermore, are
often linked to the procreative body, and I do not examine in detail the
disabilities of young girls, nuns, saints, virgins, or women with same-
sex desires. This is not a deliberate attempt to elide procreation with
femaleness; I think it reveals, instead, the pervasive connections between
medieval authoritative notions of the female body, sexuality, and dis-
ability that surface in the literary depictions of disabled women I analyze
here. Of course, this only represents the beginning of the discussion of
medieval literary representations and gender; there is certainly much
more work to be done.
In its analysis of two Middle English fabliaux, “(Dis)pleasure and (Dis)
ability: The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the ‘Merchant’s
Tale’ ” explores how the fusion of gender and disability in authoritative
discourse thematically and formally affects literature. Primarily, I argue
here that, through a topos of reproduction that focuses on the repro-
ductive abilities or inabilities of their female characters (Dame Sirith’s
Margery and Chaucer’s May), the Bakhtinian carnival moments of these
fabliaux simultaneously restate and invert medieval notions of bodily and
gendered norms. Engaging David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory
of narrative prosthesis, my project considers the notion of the norm in
medieval society. Although, as this chapter shows, a statistical norm did
not exist in the Middle Ages, bodily norms were reiterated by newly
formed communities who “monsterized,” or exaggerated the bodily
aberrancies, of various cultural Others in the hope of shoring up their
own collective identities, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted. Already
aligned with the monstrous in its complete comingling of the self and
Other, I contend that the maternal body (here conceived as the pregnant
body and the body in childbirth) is central to this process of identity for-
mation, for, in this process, one must abject the Other in order to present
a unified self. Using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I investigate the
nuances between monstrous, disabled, and procreative bodies and assert
that Margery and May exploit medieval notions of each in order to con-
strue female disability not as stigmatizing, but life-affirming.
“Physical Education: Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the
Book of the Knight and the ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ ” examines punish-
ments against women that result in physical impairment in the Book of the
Knight and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” exposing the gendered aspects
of both the bodily deviance that prompts narrative and the narrative
drive to limit such deviance. In order to question how physical punish-
ments that result in impairment function in narrative, I consider several
examples of bodily punishment in one of the medieval era’s most violent
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conduct books, the Book of the Knight, and thus reveal the uncomfortable
double-bind of medieval women: texts like the Knight’s interpret unruly
behavior as evidence of the female body’s inherent defects and simul-
taneously align ideal femininity with disability. As my examples from
the Knight’s Book demonstrate, this text exemplifies narrative prosthesis;
here, each punished wife conforms to ideal wifely conduct and remains
within the limits of the masculine narrative drive that ultimately silences
her. Conversely, in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Alisoun’s disability,
the partial deafness that she incurs from a blow to her ear by her fifth
husband Jankyn, does not deter her social and physical unruliness. In
this chapter, I examine not only Alisoun’s deafness, but also her excessive
sexuality in terms of disability, arguing that it is her sexuality that serves
as the text’s narrative-producing deviance and her punishment that dem-
onstrates the narrative’s desire to curb it.
While chapter 2 examines texts in which human agents, mostly
husbands, punish socially unruly women with physical impairments,
“Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in
Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid” analyzes texts in which
supernatural agents are the punishers. The element of the supernatural in
these texts, I assert, creates a space within the narrative for an overt cri-
tique of common medieval notions of the body and identity. As with the
texts studied in chapter 2, the masculine narrative drives of Bisclavret, Sir
Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid construct female social deviancy as a
feminine problem in need of a solution. Instead of solving the problem of
feminine deviancy, however, the impairments that the female characters
incur at the hands of supernatural agents actually produce counternar-
ratives that challenge the very basis of each text’s deviancy. In Marie de
France’s Bisclavret, I argue, the narratives that are created by the noseless-
ness of Bisclavret’s wife and her female progeny signify an infinite sexual/
textual reproduction of femininity and disability that upends not only a
narrative desire for closure, but also the compulsory demands of gender
and bodily ability. Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, I contend, offers a simi-
lar challenge to received notions of gender and ability in the blinding of
Gwenore by the fairy Tryamour. By investigating the narrative’s mirror-
ing of Gwenore and Tryamour, I demonstrate that the text represents two
versions of the female body, one disabled and the other disabling. In the
narrative slippage in between, I find, lies a challenge to misogynistic and
ableist views of the female body. Finally, I consider Robert Henryson’s
Testament of Cresseid, whose heroine is divinely punished with leprosy for
her infidelity. I side with feminist readings of the tale that highlight the
importance of Cresseid’s punishment and exclusion to the perpetuation
of an illusory unified masculine identity (and the neat conclusion of a
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masculine narrative drive). However, I assert that Cresseid’s punishment

does not merely exclude her. Rather, it reveals the potentially transgres-
sive power of the disabled female body to disrupt cohesive identities and
narrative structures.
“Embodied Transcendence: Disability and the Procreative Body in
the Book of Margery Kempe” analyzes how disability functions within nar-
ratives that feature autobiographical elements. Going against a large body
of scholarship that seeks to medicalize Kempe’s physical and mental con-
ditions, this chapter explores how Kempe’s disabilities operate within and
even drive the production and structure of her text. Using contemporary
studies of life writing and disability, I first argue that Kempe’s text both
produces and is a product of her gendered and disabled body, noting
that her text presents a counterstory for disability: for Kempe, disabil-
ity does not signify sinfulness but instead enables her spiritual growth.
Next, I examine the connections between Kempe’s disabilities, primarily
her miraculous fits of tears, and medieval medical notions of the female
procreative body, finding that Kempe carefully redefines female bodily
deficiency as a site of spiritual excess by connecting it to Christ’s experi-
ence of the Passion. Moreover, in linking her fits of tears to childbirth,
Kempe aligns herself with the Virgin Mary and recasts the painful and
often dangerous experiences of earthly pregnancy and childbirth as pain-
less and spiritual. Kempe demonstrates her newfound spiritual maternity,
I argue, through her care for the impaired throughout her Book. As with
her own experiences with disability, Kempe’s interactions with people
with disabilities further her spiritual singularity. Ultimately, this chap-
ter contends that Kempe’s redefinitions of disability throughout her text
allow her to characterize the disabled female body not as deficient, but as
imbued with spiritual possibilities.
9780230105119_02_int.indd 17 9/20/2010 2:50:28 PM

9780230105119_02_int.indd 18 9/20/2010 2:50:28 PM
CHAPTER 1
(DIS)PLEASURE AND (DIS)ABILITY:

THE TOPOS OF REPRODUCTION IN DAME
SIRITH AND THE “MERCHANT’S TALE”
T he antifeminism of many medieval fabliaux presents women as

shrewish, deceptive, and unfaithful, and often women are bodily
punished for their misdeeds, especially when their social and sexual behav-
iors exceed gendered standards.1 For an example, the Anglo-Norman
Chevalier a la Corbeille, which is found in Harley 2253, a manuscript cel-
ebrated for containing the largest surviving collection of Middle English
lyrics, features a young, adulterous couple who wishes harm the wife’s
mother-in-law in the form of physical impairments. When the mother-
in-law gets in the way of the couple’s illicit sexual escapades, the young
lover tells the wife that he would like to cripple, render mute, deafen,
and blind his mother. Although the lover does not act on his threats, the
threats are made manifest at the end of the tale in the form of bodily harm
the mother-in-law receives when she topples from a window, lands in the
lovers’ basket (the vehicle the lover uses to enter the wife’s bedchamber),
and crashes to the ground.2
Though many fabliaux punish women in some form, and often that
punishment is physical, two fabliaux in particular, the Middle English
Dame Sirith and the “Merchant’s Tale,” depict women who use physical
disability as a source of empowerment. While the physical impairments
of men spur the narrative of both tales (Wilekin’s lovesickness in Dame
Sirith and January’s blindness in the “Merchant’s Tale”), the disabilities
of Dame Sirith and May supplant them after the men have been “cured.”
In addition, in both cases, the women’s disabilities connect to female
reproductive ability or inability. As this chapter will show, in the car-
nival moment of these fabliaux, such disability becomes a renewing,
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cultural inversion that subverts common assumptions about not only the
body, but also narrative structure.
Disability and Text: Narrative Prosthesis and

the Problem of the Norm
Despite the relative invisibility of disability as a category of analysis in
literary studies, many literary texts feature characters with disabilities.
Indeed, some scholars argue that narrative itself demands a difference
that it then seeks to normalize or bring to a satisfactory conclusion and
that, often, this difference takes the form of mental or physical disabil-
ity. In his critique of the construction of normalcy, Lennard J. Davis
asserts that plot seeks to replicate the normal; thus, “[t]his normativ-
ity in narrative will by definition create the abnormal, the Other, the
disabled, the native, the colonized subject, and so on.”3 Ato Quayson
extends Davis’s work to suggest that the “deformations” that produce
narrative “emerge from the intersection of a variety of vectors including
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, urban identity, and particularly disability.”4
This intersection reveals not just a relationship between the abnormal
and the normal, but also a “dialectical interplay between unacknowl-
edged social assumptions and the reminders of contingency as ref lected
in the body of the person with disability.”5 As Quayson notes, such a
dialectical interplay affects every level—narrators, characters, literary
motifs—of not just the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that
Davis emphasizes, but “all literary texts.”6 A foundation of Quayson’s
project is David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative pros-
thesis, which provides a term for narrative’s dependency on difference.
As Mitchell and Snyder outline, “Narrative prosthesis (or the depen-
dency of literary narratives on disability) forwards the notion that all
narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to
rein in excess.” 7 Mitchell and Snyder base their literary theory on David
Wills’s notion of prosthesis, or that which negotiates between the literary
and the bodily. Wills notes that the norm is elusive; any body—whether
considered normal or deviant—is always already deficient in relation to
it. Thus, a prostheticized body becomes the norm, or, in other words,
pure artifice, thereby dismantling any notion of a perfect or perfectly
normal body. Wills compares the body to words: just as our unruly
bodies cannot fit artificial ideals, words remain illusory to the material
objects they name.8 A bodily prosthesis means to complete or fix an
incomplete body, and a textual or narrative prosthesis means “to resolve
or correct—to ‘prostheticize’ [ . . . ]—a deviance marked as improper to
a social context.” 9
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T H E T OP O S OF R E P RO DU C T ION 21
According to Mitchell and Snyder, literature’s pervasive reliance on

disability is twofold: disability defines a character and serves as a meta-
phor for greater social ills that are in need of reform. Though litera-
ture frequently depends on the disabled to function, it seldom explores
the social or political ramifications of the disabled body’s lived experi-
ences. Instead, a narrative may use a character’s disability as an impetus
to the storyline, but never engage the social construction of the disability.
Because disabled bodies are outside of the norm, literature often uses
these bodies to represent social problems in need of amelioration, often
at the expense of those who are disabled. For instance, gluttonous, over-
weight characters signify abstract notions of greed, deformities or scars
indicate evil intent, peptic disorders imply a discomfort with the body
politic, and physical blindness serves as evidence of a voluntary turning
away from absolute truths. These abstract notions, made material by the
disabled body, become reinscribed upon the bodies of those with disabili-
ties. Specifically, “Disability proves an exceptional textual fate in that it is
deployed in literary narratives as a master metaphor for social ills; thus the
characterization of disability provides a means through which literature
performs its social critique while simultaneously sedimenting stigmatiz-
ing beliefs about people with disabilities.”10
Some scholars may question the validity of investigating literature as a
means to theorize disability, arguing that literary representations are sev-
ered from the “real-life” experience of people with disabilities, that they
show us nothing of the “real” struggles of living with disabilities. Irina
Metzler, for instance, in her recent study of disability in the Middle Ages,
focuses on medieval medical, religious, and hagiographical texts, only
brief ly examining literature as a subject of analysis.11 In his study of the
representation of Jews and blindness in medieval drama, however, Edward
Wheatley has shown that literary texts can represent and parallel certain
lived experiences of those with disabilities and also reveal a society’s col-
lective anxiety about particular social groups.12 As Mitchell and Snyder
suggest, it is obvious that literary representations of the disabled do affect
the social understanding of and, in turn, the lived experiences of those
with disabilities, often in negative ways. However, literary discourse’s
proliferation of the disabled body allows for a complex interrogation of
the social, historical, and cultural understandings of the construction of
the body and its race, sex, gender, class, and ability that does not exist
in other discourses. Mitchell and Snyder list a number of “contemporary
classics” in American fiction—including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which
showcases mental illness, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which
features a main character whose limp shapes her identity—from which
readers “learn perspectives on disability [ . . . ] more than from policies
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 21 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

or personal interactions.”13 Thus, it is imperative that disability scholars

mine these literary representations of the disabled not to formulate an
understanding of lived experience based on literary representation, but
to theorize the complicated ways in which the body takes on meaning
in a particular culture and historical moment. Literary representations of
the disabled can provide cultural “commentaries on the status of disability
in other disciplines” while also exposing the power of literary discourses
to shape cultural notions of the body.14 Thus, by examining literature
that portrays disabled women, we can learn more about the attitudes and
anxieties about disabled and able-bodied men and women latent within
the culture that produces the literature.
In order to understand how literature produced in a particular socio-
historical moment seeks to normalize that which is aberrant in its nar-
rative, we must first examine how that culture constructs normalcy. As
Davis explains, the concept of normalcy in relation to an average is a
mid- to late-nineteenth-century concept. Davis links the emergence of
disability as a social process to the industrialization of western Europe,
noting that premodern cultures held a notion of the “ideal” human body,
a bodily notion connected to the divine and unattainable by humans.15
Davis demonstrates that the rise of the field of statistics in the nineteenth
century generated the “average man,” who then took the place of the
ideal and became the “norm.” The notion of the norm, in contrast to the
ideal, “implies that the majority of the population must or should some-
how be part of the norm.”16 This average man, then, is a fiction, one that
no human can hope to attain, but which all humans desire.
Karma Lochrie, in her study of normalcy, heteronormativity, and
heterosexuality in the later Middle Ages, agrees that normalcy is a his-
torical construct and questions how this formulation affects normalcy
and deviancy in premodern cultures. If one becomes normal through
the statistical mathematics of the nineteenth century, how do we dis-
cuss normativity in the Middle Ages? And, why is there an overarching
perception—in both popular culture and academia—of the premodern
past as fiercely normative? Lochrie notes that “[t]he modern is construed
as modern in part through its construction of a heteronormatively intran-
sigent past.”17 Thus, reading the past through modern concepts of the
norm actually produces the notion that the modern is somehow able to
break free of normativity and that the past remains hopelessly caught up
in it. The problem with using a modern concept of normativity to inter-
pret the past is that any variations on that norm become obscured and
thus remain uninvestigated.
Though the concept of a statistical norm did not exist in the premodern
era, medieval peoples certainly sought to define notions of collectivity,
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 22 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

particularly with respect to religious, cultural, or geographic interests and

conditions. The vast cultural, communal, and economic changes brought
on by medieval conquest meant that peoples from different religious,
cultural, and linguistic backgrounds were coming together to forge new
collective identities. For instance, after the Norman Conquest in 1066,
Anglo-Normans and Anglo-Saxons struggled to define themselves as
discretely English. As boundaries of communities, cultures, nations, and
power structures began to expand, contract, and blur, communal groups
sought to endure the changes by bolstering their own collective identi-
ties through the process of abjecting those considered to be “Other” than
the group. Jeffery Jerome Cohen has noted that the deciding factors of
who belongs and who is Othered from the group are largely corporeal.
In his study of community formation in the twelfth century, Cohen finds
that communal groups are distinguished by “such embodied phenomena
as social comportment, table manners, bathing habits, bodily modifica-
tion, clothing, self-adornment, hairstyle, [and] grooming.”18 In the forma-
tion of such “racial” identities, twelfth-century “English” communities
abjected difference onto foreign peoples. As a result, Irish, Welsh, and
Jewish peoples were “monsterized” in the act of bolstering an English
national identity.19 Though Cohen focuses specifically on twelfth-century
England, this act of “monsterizing,” or Othering, peoples of different eth-
nic, social, or religious groups occurred throughout the medieval peri-
od—and continues today—especially during times of social upheaval
when new national, communal, domestic, or individual boundaries are
being drawn. Often, medieval depictions of other races presented differ-
ent non-European peoples in strikingly physical ways. For instance, the
widely circulated Mandeville’s Travels specifically emphasizes the embodied
differences of non-European races, detailing groups of peoples that are
hermaphrodites; cannibalistic giants; headless, lipless, or mute; or have
large ears or only one foot. Mandeville also describes such monstrous races
as the cynocephali, or dog-headed men.20
Bodies of (Dis)pleasure: the Monstrous, the Grotesque,

the Disabled
Discursive representations of the strikingly visible physical aberrancies of
those with embodied differences—such as monsters and the physically
impaired—relegate such figures to the margins. As a result, I contend
that one cannot disentangle medieval discourses on the monstrous21 from
those on the impaired. As Henri-Jacques Stiker observes, the monster—
both the racial and the fantastic—and the disabled person demonstrate
the physical consequences of breaking taboos. Such figures answer the
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 23 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

question, “how would we be if we were not the way we are?”22 Despite

such similarities, Stiker cautions against an easy conf lation of the mon-
strous and the disabled, noting that behind such figures as “the beggar,
the monster, the criminal” resides “the silhouette of the disabled, bor-
rowing features from the other three all at the same time or successively,
and yet sharply contoured.”23
While a monster is not analogous to a person with disabilities, the
social construction of monsters certainly shares overlapping characteris-
tics with the social construction of disability and, I would add, femaleness
and femininity. The monster, itself a “deformed” and excessively physical
creature composed of human and unnatural characteristics, is directly
analogous to the female body in its Otherness and its sensuous f leshli-
ness, a quality that my introduction demonstrates is intricately linked to
the defectiveness of women in male-authored discourses. This is not to
suggest that all women are disabled or that all women who procreate are
monstrous but to demonstrate the linked social processes whereby the
fictions of “woman,” “disabled,” and “monster” as deviant or dangerous
are produced. As Cohen asserts, the monster “is a defiantly intermixed
figure that is in the end simply the most startling incarnation of hybridity
made f lesh.”24
However deviant such figures seem to those who label them Other,
they are all simultaneously familiar. In particular, scholars like Cohen
resist earlier scholarship that assumes a distinct opposition between the
human and the monstrous. Working with the Lacanian notion of extimité
(extimacy), Cohen reads monstrous figures as both familiar and Other to
humans, as integral to the process of constructing individual and collec-
tive identities. For instance, he reads the giant as central to the construc-
tion of the human in Anglo-Saxon culture, a culture marked by shifting
definitions of borders and communities. In his analysis of medieval indi-
vidual and group identity formation, Cohen incorporates Julia Kristeva’s
notion of abjection, or the process wherein subjective and group identity
are formed through the exclusion of that which threatens the subject’s
or group’s borders. In the process of abjecting the Other, that which
is abjected gets internalized. Consequently, the Other becomes part of
the self: the line between hero and monster is blurred. In later histori-
cal writings, as Britain scrambles to buttress its identity as a nation, the
giant becomes vital to notions of domestic, political, national, and famil-
ial roles, while late-medieval romances situate the giant even closer to the
human so that heroes like Sir Gawain must use the giant in the formation
of their individual, masculine identities. The space of the giant in these
works, moreover, becomes a queer space of possibility that escapes the
law of the Symbolic.25
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 24 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

What Cohen omits in his discussion is the relationship between the

abject and women, maternity, and femininity and, thus, the strong link
between the social production of Others and the female procreative body.
As Kristeva explains, the main threat to the notion of the self is one’s
dependence on the maternal body; one must, then, abject the maternal
body in order to become an individual subject. That which is abject, for
Kristeva, is always connected to that which is considered female or femi-
nine in culture. In effect, Kristeva maintains, the fear of the female body
is a “fear of her generative power.”26 The pregnant body, with its unstable
borders between subject and Other, represents the subject-in-process; the
birthing body, when it expels the child—or, more aptly, when the child
separates itself from its mother—demonstrates abjection. The fear of the
generative body is ultimately a fear of collapsing boundaries between the
self and Other. Kristeva follows Mary Douglas in asserting that cultures
use rituals of defilement in order to keep boundaries clear from polluting
bodies, or “dirt,” as Douglas labels them.27 Not surprisingly, such rituals
revolve around f luids that are excreted from the body, including men-
strual blood, the physical f luid necessary for female reproduction.28 If the
disability of the female body hinges on the reproductive parts, then one
can clearly see the intersection of the social construction of monstrosity,
disability, femaleness, and femininity in the abject figure of the procre-
ative woman.
In addition to considering the prejudicial ramifications that a disabled
mother or mother of a disabled child faces,29 it is important to note that
a woman who is pregnant also fits widely accepted notions of disabil-
ity: her “abnormal” body often prevents her from fully participating
in her society. On the f lip side, one may also consider the infertile or
postmenopausal woman disabled, for she cannot fulfill the socially con-
structed reproductive duties of her sex. Thus, as this chapter will explore,
the reproductive woman remains in a persistent double-bind. Already
connected to the monstrous through its designation as Other in the clas-
sical medicine I outline in my introduction, the female body is further
linked to the monstrous in pregnancy. The pregnant body is capable
of creating both “monsters” and the monstrous itself in its dramatic
physical changes. Rosi Braidotti notes, “The woman’s body can change
shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of defeating
the notion of fixed bodily form, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct
shapes as that which marks the contour of the body.”30 Tanya Titchkosky
adds, “[W]oman blurs and confounds the clear cut categories of self and
other especially in matters of maternity.”31 The pregnant woman, then,
makes manifest the confusion of extimité, for her body perpetually intermixes
self and Other. Though she does not directly engage disability theories,
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 25 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

Margaret Shildrick extends the connection between the monstrous and

the female to disability: “[T]he pregnant body is [ . . . ] actively and vis-
ibly deformed from within.”32 She concludes, “All these elements—cor-
poral disorganization, lack of resemblance, ontological impropriety, and
the link with the feminine—form a shifting epistemological pattern that
is likely to emerge in our contemporary society’s response to disabled
people as it is in periods when the concept of the monstrous was uncriti-
cally applied to a range of bodily differences.”33 As I suggest above, this
pattern is present already in the medieval response to those with physical
impairments. In fact, in some medieval fabliaux, the reproductive (in)
abilities of the female body are closely linked to and even conf lated with
physical impairments.
Ultimately, Kristeva advocates for a revaluation of the abject (and,
thus, the maternal) as a site of potential jouissance, a sensual pleasure
that celebrates multiple identities and sexualities and exploits excess,
similar to the queer space of Cohen’s monsters. The jouissance of the
abject echoes the victorious laughter of Bakhtin’s grotesque figures.
As this chapter will show, two comedic women of medieval fabliaux
delight in the subversive laughter that their excessively deviant bodies
produce.
In Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, the theorist offers the
Kerch terracotta figurines of laughing “senile pregnant hags” as exemplars
of the grotesque body that populates carnivalesque literature. These hags,
Bakhtin explains, represent the incomplete body of the grotesque: “They
combine a senile, decaying, deformed f lesh with the f lesh of new life.”34
In Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, the grotesque body becomes
central to carnivalesque’s literature’s ability to upset sociopolitical hierar-
chies through humor. Manifestations of carnival, including public feasts,
parodies, and, oaths, were moments of a “temporary suspension” of hier-
archies wherein the social order became topsy-turvy and allowed for a
“liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order.”35
Popular medieval culture becomes, for Bakhtin, continually renewing
and open, while the “official” culture of the church remains inherently
closed and unchanging. As a result, Bakhtin perhaps too easily divides
medieval folk culture and “official” culture, ultimately dividing them
into two disconnected worlds and ignoring the intertwined nature of
the two in medieval culture. As Arthur Lindley notes, “The proper rela-
tion of the two orders is not oppositional but dialectical, each supply-
ing forms to the other.”36 Despite his somewhat generalized portrayal
of medieval culture in his description of carnival, Bakhtin’s notion of
the carnivalesque, or those topsy-turvy moments in literature, remains
quite productive to literary studies. As such, I adopt Lindley’s use of the
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 26 9/20/2010 1:15:20 PM

concept by considering “the ways in which social practice (‘carnival’) is

refracted and reimagined in literary texts (‘carnivalesque’).”37
Literary carnivalesque employs the human body as the primary means
through which carnival is re-presented in literature, a concept that
Bakhtin names grotesque realism. In grotesque realism, the body renders
all that is “high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” into that which is low, mate-
rial, and degraded.38 The Bakhtinian grotesque body is a body in the
process of becoming. Images of the grotesque body concentrate on the
lower strata of the body and the mouth—it is through the mouth and out
of the bowels that the grotesque body is able to take in and expel other
“bodies,” thus signifying its incompleteness. Everything about the gro-
tesque body centers on excess; in fact, the grotesque body itself can never
be considered to be simply one body: “Actually, if we consider the gro-
tesque image in its extreme aspect, it never presents an individual body;
the image consists of orifices and convexities that present another, newly
conceived body. It is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed,
the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.”39 As such, images of
the grotesque body focus on eating, drinking, defecating, giving birth,
and dying. The fecundity and excess of the grotesque body align the
grotesque with the female body. The female body is able to produce and
expel another body in pregnancy and childbirth and, as I describe in
the introduction, is firmly associated with sexual excess in religious and
medical discourse.
Natalie Zemon Davis, in her chapter on carnival and gender in the
early modern period, cites this alignment of the grotesque and the female,
noting
The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep
women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that
could operate, first to widen behavioral options for women within and
even outside marriage, and second, to sanction riot and political disobedi-
ence for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders
few formal means of protest.40
For Zemon Davis, then, grotesque female bodies, like those of Bakhtin’s
Kerch hags, can signify powerful social change. Though Zemon Davis
sees the possibilities that the grotesque bodies like those of the hags can
suggest and Bakhtin considers them ambivalent, Mary Russo notes that
the alignment of the grotesque with the female body is not always posi-
tive or neutral, citing “the connotations of fear and loathing associated
with the biological processes of reproduction and aging.”41 Russo has
been the first to note Bakhtin’s failure “to acknowledge or incorporate
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 27 9/20/2010 1:15:20 PM

the social relations of gender” in his description of the hags, “and thus
his notion of the Female Grotesque remains, in all directions repressed
and undeveloped.”42 Russo calls feminists to consider the association of
the female body with the grotesque and use it productively in order to
challenge social concepts of gender by asking what Bakhtin never does:
“Why are these old hags laughing?”43
In this chapter, I take up Russo’s challenge, but I do so not simply by
investigating the social relations of gender inherent in the female gro-
tesque, but also by exploiting the connections between female bodies, the
grotesque, and the disabled. Disability scholars have examined the link
between the grotesque body and the disabled body. Davis, for example,
notes that “the use of the grotesque had a life-affirming, transgressive
quality” that could transform the norm while “the disabled body [ . . . ] was
formulated as by definition excluded from culture, society, the norm.”44
Davis laments that the modern notion of disability robs the disabled per-
son of such subversive potential. Garland Thomson, however, finds that
the disabled and the grotesque intersect in such a way as to disrupt and
reform the social order. She contends that Bakhtin’s carnivalesque body
is “perhaps his version of the disabled figure,” an embodied Other when
viewed as “a challenge to the existing order suggests the radical poten-
tial that the disabled body as sign for difference might possess within
representation.”45 Indeed, such a revision of the usual interpretation of
the disabled literary figure indicates “the possibility of interpreting both
dirt and disability not as discomforting abnormalities or intolerable ambi-
guities, but rather as the entitled bearers of a fresh view of reality.”46 As
my examples of the disabled women of medieval fabliaux demonstrate,
the disabled figure, particularly the disabled female figure, can challenge
and even restructure cultural and social standards.
The Reproduction of the Aging Female Body:

Dame Sirith
Bakhtin lists the medieval fabliau as a prime example of carnivalesque
humor in its comic reversals of hierarchical roles, particularly those
played by husbands and wives. One of the earliest examples of fabliau
in English is the late thirteenth-century Dame Sirith. Along with the
Interludium de clerico et puella, Dame Sirith represents the presence of the
fabliau genre in English before Chaucer. This particular tale centers on
the ability of an old woman known for her “crafftes” and “dedes” to trick
a young wife, Margery, into cheating on her merchant husband using a
cleric named Wilekin.47 By feeding her dog mustard and vinegar, Dame
Sirith is able to convince Margery that her “weeping bitch” is in fact her
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 28 9/20/2010 1:15:20 PM

own daughter who has been transformed into a dog for rebuking a clerk’s
sexual advances. Afraid of facing a similar fate, Margery bribes Dame
Sirith to find Wilekin and essentially pays to become an adulterer.
As Eve Salisbury notes, Dame Sirith represents the epitome of the car-
nivalesque moment of fabliaux, taking the “absurdity” of adultery “to a
new level in the intricacy of plot, character development, and the addi-
tion of a ‘weeping bitch.’ ”48 Scholars of medieval drama even suspect that
the tale may have been performed by a single jongleur and a performing
dog or even by multiple actors during courtly feasts or festivals, thus
heightening its ties to carnivalesque: in addition to demonstrating liter-
ary carnivalesque, the tale may have been orally performed at a carni-
val.49 The manuscript itself (M.S. Digby 86) includes what may be speech
markers at the beginning of each speaker’s lines.50
Dame Sirith undoubtedly portrays the social relations of an official
world gone topsy-turvy. Like many satires on religious men, the cleric
becomes the lusty lover, willfully straying from his vows.51 In a direct
reversal of the usual Ovidian metamorphosis, the young and true wife
becomes the eager adulterer in order to save her own body from transfor-
mation. Most significantly, perhaps, Dame Sirith blurs the line between
the “official”—religion—and the “folk”—magic. The clerk, who should
be a principal symbol and practitioner of official religious culture, actively
seeks out the services of a well-known witch. When Wilekin approaches
Dame Sirith, he indicates that her notoriety for working “crafftes” is
widespread, noting that a friend bade him to visit her:
“He saide me, withhouten faille,

That thou me coutheste helpe and vaile,
And bringen me of wo
Thoru thine crafftes and thine dedes
And ich wile geve thee riche mede,
With that hit be so.” (187–92)
Dame Sirith, however, vehemently denies her association with the occult,
asserting “Ich am on holi wimon, / On wicchecrafft nout I ne con”
(205–6) and proclaiming her penchant for repeating her “Pater Noster”
and her “Crede,” the successful completion of which was often used to
determine the innocence of accused heretics and witches. After some
prodding and the promise of a swift and adequate payment, Dame Sirith
promises to fulfill Wilekin’s wish, on the condition that he take an oath
of absolute silence. Though Dame Sirith vehemently denies an associa-
tion with witchcraft, her knowledge of the tests and punishments for her-
etics and witches reveals that her anxiety may be more to do with being
caught than actually conjuring spells.
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Dame Sirith further blurs the line between religion and magic in the
trick she plays on Margery. To Margery, Dame Sirith weaves the story of
a rebuked clerk working witchcraft on her daughter. Thus, it is the clerk
who actively does the conjuring and transforming of her daughter into a
dog: “Thenne bigon the clerc to wiche, / And shop mi douter til a biche”
(353–4). Though the audience knows Dame Sirith’s trick is a trick and
not witchcraft at all, in her story, it is the cleric who has the power to
actually transform her daughter.
With the roles of religion and magic, husbands and wives, and daugh-
ters and dogs turned upside down, one element remains steadfastly cen-
tral to the fabliau: the grotesque body of Dame Sirith. Though the scant
scholarship available on Dame Sirith focuses on the tale as performance
or the hideous figure of the weeping bitch, none specifically consid-
ers Dame Sirith’s body. However, the tale does provide evidence that
suggests that Dame Sirith’s body ref lects the grotesque realism of car-
nivalesque literature, and the grotesqueness of her body directly inter-
sects with disability. Although the text does not expressly depict Dame
Sirith’s body, she presents herself as poor, old, and physically impaired.
For instance, she describes herself to Wilekin as “old, and sek and lame”
(199). Though Dame Sirith does not specify the particularities of her
lameness, it is clear that it affects her ability to control her body. Later, she
tells Margery that she is a “poure wif ” who has fallen “in ansine” (306).
Salisbury notes that the Middle English “in ansine” signifies “ ‘decline
or fail in appearance.’ ”52 While this may simply suggest that her facial
features have changed due to age, I argue that Dame Sirith’s body itself has
declined. Consequently, the focus remains on the abnormal status of her
body. Not only can she not stand nor sit (308), but, due to severe dehydra-
tion, she has lost control of her extremities: “Ich ne mai mine limes on
wold” (311). One can easily picture the old woman hunched and limping,
her limbs wildly askew.
It is important to emphasize that it is Dame Sirith who describes
her disabilities; consequently, the reader or listener only experiences
her lameness through the hag’s own depiction. Even if we consider
that the narrative may have been performed by a player or group of
players, vocal intonations, body language, and/or costumes would have
emphasized the performance and, in turn, ambiguity of Dame Sirith’s
lameness. By leaving ambiguous the reality of Dame Sirith’s physical
impairments, the text exposes the very real social anxiety of those who
feign disability for financial gain. Although medieval social interpreta-
tions of lameness were often mixed—Old Testament scriptures link
lameness to sin (Deuteronomy 28:35 and Leviticus 21:17–20), while
the New Testament showcases the curing of lameness to demonstrate
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Christ’s and his followers’ divine powers (Matthew 15:31 and Acts 3:2,
for example), a trope echoed in saint’s lives53 —one constant concern,
especially in the later Middle Ages, was the authenticity of impairments
that hindered one’s ability to work. Wheatley describes the processes
by which institutions such as hospitals and churches attempted to dis-
tinguish those entitled to charity from those who feigned impairment
out of idleness; those with legitimate impairments were demarcated
by separate dress, segregated living spaces, and/or limited freedom of
movement throughout cities and countries.54 In his initial vision of
the world in is prologue to Piers Plowman, William Langland deems
those who shirk labor through false pretenses “wastours.” These wasters
include able-bodied men and women who beg instead of working for
their financial survival. In Passus VI, Langland describes how some of
the “wastours” feign disability in order to evade hard labor in the fields:
“Tho were faitours afered and feyned hem blynde; / Somme leide hir
legges aliry, as swiche losels kenneth.”55Considering how the narrative
fully establishes her reputation as a liar and a trickster, it is possible to
read Dame Sirith’s disability as feigned, merely a ruse to gain entrance
into Margery’s home.
Indeed, it is directly after the old woman rues her pitiful physical
and economic states that Margery opens her home to her and decides to
offer her food and drink. Though Dame Sirith stresses the physical con-
sequences of her disabilities, Margery mainly focuses on the economic
ones, such as her shabby dress:
“Ich have reuthe of thi wo

For evele i-clothed I se thee go,
And evele i-shoed.
Com herin, ich wile thee fede.
God Almightten do thee mede,
And the Louerd that wes on Rode i-don,
And faste fourti daiis to non,
And hevene and erthe haveth to welde.
As thilke Louerd thee foryelde,
Have her f les and eke bred,
And make thee glad, hit is mi red;
And have her the coppe with the drinke;
God do thee mede for thi swinke.” (318–30)
Margery here demonstrates that her desire to help Dame Sirith is based
on her faith, particularly in her comparison of the old woman’s woes to
Christ’s suffering on the cross. As disability historians like Stiker and
Metzler have shown, the poor and disabled played an important role
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in the spiritual lives of the able-bodied.56 Didactic works of the later

medieval period categorized charity, or the Works of Mercy, into two
divisions: the Seven Corporal Works and Seven Spiritual Works. As
their titles suggest, the Seven Corporal Works focused on bodily acts
of charity like feeding, clothing, and giving shelter to the needy, caring
for the sick and imprisoned, and providing proper burial for the dead,
while the Seven Spiritual Acts concentrated on contemplative acts like
teaching others, reproving sinners, praying, patiently enduring personal
injuries and forgiving those who inf lict them, and providing comfort to
those who are grieving. Laypeople particularly focused on the Corporal
Works, whereas clerics were more prepared to complete the Spiritual
Works. The disabled were, consequently, an integral part of the economy
of charity and salvation. P. H. Cullum, in his essay on Margery Kempe’s
participation in acts of charity, notes that the existence of hospital alms-
boxes allowed townspeople to donate money “as a way to fulfill all of the
Corporal Works of Mercy in one go.”57
As a result of this spiritual economy, the poor and the disabled,
though excluded and marginalized—in fact, because of their exclusion
and marginalization—became sites of access to salvation through char-
ity. Additionally, through their ties to Christ in the Franciscan view
of the less fortunate, these groups became associated not only with
wretchedness and poverty, but also with the promise of divine redemp-
tion. New Testament depictions of Christ’s miraculous cures of the sick
and disabled further linked divine reward to helping those in need, and
medieval hagiographers often employed this construction of the physi-
cally impaired as a figure in need of divine charity in order to demon-
strate the saintliness of their subjects. Dame Sirith takes full advantage
of her role in the spiritual economy, knowing Margery will help her not
only in order to grant “mede” to the old woman, but also to gain her
own spiritual “mede.”
Dame Sirith’s physical impairments are productive to not only
Margery’s spiritual gains, but also to the carnival inversion that the
tale exhibits. Bakhtin affirms that a body like that of Dame Sirith is
undoubtedly the body of the female grotesque, noting that in genres
such as fabliau, the female body “debases, brings down to earth, lends
a bodily substance to things, and destroys; but first of all, she is the
principle that gives birth. She is the womb.”58 In the comedy of the
fabliau, this ambivalence is less distinct, thus rendering the woman “a
wayward, sensual, concupiscent character of falsehood, materialism
and baseness.”59 As a result, she begins to represent the unraveling of
all that seems complete or static. Thus, Bakhtin surmises, the preva-
lent motif of cuckoldry in fabliaux like Dame Sirith demonstrates “the
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uncrowning of the old husband and a new act of procreation with the
young husband.”60 The cuckoldry of the old husband inverts traditional
hierarchies and results in a privileging of a new order, here signified
by procreating with a younger man. In this tale, Dame Sirith facilitates
the cuckolding of Margery’s husband with the young clerk; the old,
crippled, grotesque body of Dame Sirith produces change, transform-
ing the old into new.
The young and beautiful Margery contrasts starkly with the aged and
crippled Dame Sirith. Effectively, the two become polar opposites on
a sort of continuum of age and ability; in fact, the two could easily be
the same woman at different times of her life. As disability scholars have
noted, the aging body is, in effect, a disabled body, and the youthful
body is only a TAB (temporarily able-bodied). Janet Price and Margaret
Shildrick affirm that refiguring “normal” bodies as TABs highlights
“the material vulnerability of the healthy body, not least in the pro-
cess of aging.”61 In medieval discourse, the menopausal female body is
particularly defective, as it is not only unable to produce children, but
also capable of harming them. Because the menopausal woman does
not menstruate, she does not effectively f lush the wastes from her body.
Consequently, those wastes accumulate in her body and escape through
other orifices, such as the eyes. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s Women’s
Secrets reports that “old women who still have their monthly f low, and
some who do not menstruate, poison the eyes of children lying in their
cradles by their glance.”62 Pseudo-Albert further stresses that, though
menstrual f luid is poisonous in and of itself, “non-menstruating women
are even more seriously infected, because the menstrual f low has a pur-
gative function.”63
Although Dame Sirith’s decidedly excessive body is central to the
tale, the narrative does not succeed in prosetheticizing it, for, despite its
centrality, the difference of Dame Sirith’s body is not what first propels
the narrative forward. In the beginning lines, the narrator informs us
of Wilekin’s symptoms of lovesickness caused by his desire for Margery.
He is sad, unable to sleep, and later admits he will “wakese wod / Other
miselve quelle” if he’s unable to have her (7–15, 182–3). Thus, Wilekin’s
illness sets the tale in motion, but Dame Sirith intrudes upon the text,
supplanting his deficiency with her unruly body.64 Mitchell and Snyder
explain that narrative attempts to close the gap that a deviance produces
in a number of ways: through cure, removal from social condemnation,
death or annihilation, or the reassessment of the difference as socially
acceptable.65 While Dame Sirith effectively cures Wilekin of his love-
sickness, the tale never suppresses the subversion that its title character
personifies.66 Instead, her body actually exceeds the narrative at the end
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of the tale when she turns and offers her “services” to the audience:
“And wose is onwis

And for non pris
Ne con geten his levemon,
I shal, for mi mede,
Garen him to spede,
For ful wel I con.” (445–50)
Considering the possibility that the text was either meant to be read or
enacted complicates how we interpret Dame Sirith’s concluding words to
the audience. As a read text, Dame Sirith presents a narratorial contract
of sorts to its readers that stipulates that the narrator who begins the nar-
rative should comment on and conclude the narrative. Moreover, Dame
Sirith ultimately surpasses her fellow characters: she not only displaces
Wilekin from the center of the text, but also becomes its title character,
despite the fact that Margery is the tale’s protagonist. In the same ways
in which bodily boundaries are breached in the acts of menstruation and
birth, Dame Sirith violates the boundaries of the text. Just as that which is
part of the self becomes the Other in such reproductive functions, Dame
Sirith crosses the boundaries of her text and becomes both part of and
outside of the narrative.
If we read the text as a performance, however, no such narratorial
contract exists. If a single player or group of players performed the drama,
then there would be no expectation of a narrator’s conclusion. However,
having Dame Sirith turn to the audience and speak would extend the
dialogue to the audience and bring them into its carnival moment of
subversion;67 the old woman’s final words would transport the audience
into the performance and also evoke the transgressive laughter charac-
teristic of carnivalesque literature. Actors could also disrupt gendered
and bodily boundaries through the use of costumes and voices. A male
actor performing as Dame Sirith might augment his voice, stature, and
body in order to appear as an old disabled woman. For example, at one
of Edward I’s Round Tables, a male actor performed an interlude as
a “loathly lady, with foot-long nose, donkey ears, neck sores, a gap-
ing mouth, and blackened teeth” that ordered the knights to retrieve
lost territories.68 The performance of both gender and disability here
attests to the powerful subversion an able-bodied male actor playing
Dame Sirith could enact. While such a performance indeed draws atten-
tion to the social anxiety surrounding feigned disabilities, it simultane-
ously reveals the illusory nature of both gendered and bodily norms.
Ultimately, in her final actions, Dame Sirith completely exceeds the
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narrative, and the tale concludes with this senile hag, pregnant with
subversion and laughter.
“O Sweete Venym Queynte!”: Pregnancy as

(Dis)ability in the “Merchant’s Tale”
I next move to another fabliau that features a woman who uses her dis-
abled body in order to gain power: Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale.” Thus, we
move from the aging, defective female body of Dame Sirith to the young
and fertile May. Though these women reside on opposite ends of the
spectrum in terms of age and reproductive ability, I plan to demonstrate
that both are subject to—and ultimately exploit to their advantage—the
same discourses that link femaleness, femininity, and disability.
While most studies of disability within the “Merchant’s Tale” focus on
January’s metaphoric and physical blindness, none has focused specifically
on May’s participation in his blinding. However, it is important to note
that Chaucer deliberately posits May in relation to January’s metaphoric
blindness and that May’s excessively physical body usurps January’s sight.
Thus, though January’s disabilities begin the tale, the focus of disability
shifts onto May’s potentially dangerous female body. Chaucer’s depic-
tion of May’s body as dangerous echoes medieval antifeminist authorities
within biblical, patristic, and medical texts and, subsequently, renders her
both disabled and capable of disabling others. Particularly, the pregnant
body, which is interwoven throughout the tale’s subtext and finally liter-
alized in May’s possible pregnancy at the end of the tale, represents both
the threat and the disruptive possibilities of the disabled female body.
As I demonstrate in the introduction, medieval male-authored dis-
courses, particularly in conjunction with medical discourses, link female
reproductive organs and feminine qualities to disability. In particular,
medical texts often emphasized the ability of the vagina to harm men.
For instance, Women’s Secrets reports ejaculation moistens the woman’s
body, but dries up the man’s insides, resulting in illness and subsequent
death: “This is the reason why those who have a great deal of sexual
intercourse do not live for a long time because their bodies are deprived
of their natural humidity, and this drying out is the cause of death.”69 The
act of sexual intercourse and, in turn, the drying up of the man’s f luids is
similar to a sucking action: “[During the sex act] the man feels his penis
drawn and sucked into the closure of the vulva.” 70 Bettina Bildhauer
links the portrayal of the vagina’s ability to “suck” the life out of men
to vampirism. She writes that “unchecked, insatiable female desire [ . . . ]
jeopardizes this guarded contact and encroaches upon the masculine sub-
ject, both physically and by usurping his active, dominant position.” 71
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Moreover, medieval instantiations of female monsters are most often

connected to fears of uncontainable female sexuality. For example, the
Sheela-na-Gig possesses an oversized, gaping vagina, and the vagina den-
tata exhibits its insatiable sexual appetite by devouring a man’s sexual
organs with its jagged teeth.72
The explicit association of female desire with the destruction of male
bodies reveals an anxiety about the female body’s capability of not only
destroying men, but also usurping established structures of male power.
The reproductive function of the female sexual organs, however, con-
tradicts the notion of the dangerous female body. As such, the vagina
embodies both destructive and productive qualities: it can devour the
old and give birth to the new. Bakhtin links the gaping mouth of the
grotesque body to the vagina, both sites that reinforce the open and pen-
etrable qualities of the grotesque body: “This image [of the gaping jaws]
is organically combined on the one hand with swallowing and devour-
ing, on the other hand with the stomach, the womb, and childbirth.” 73
Both the open mouth and the vagina signify an entrance into the body
that is productive: “The bodily depths are fertile; the old dies in them,
and the new is born in abundance.” 74 May’s destructive yet reproductive
vagina not only is able to deplete enough f luid and spiritus from January
to diminish his eyesight, but also to dismantle traditional gender hierar-
chies through its procreative abilities. May’s pregnant body at the end of
the tale, thus, stands in as the manifestation of the disabled female body’s
ability to destroy and produce.
In accordance with Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of disability in narra-
tive, embodied difference launches the “Merchant’s Tale.” The tale begins
with a wealthy, aged Lombard who, due to his age, seeks a wife with
whom to produce his heirs. In addition to his advanced age, January’s
body bears other marks of difference: his Lombard status situates him as
greedy, prone to sexual excess, and metaphorically blind.75 Consequently,
January’s disabilities open the first section of the tale and are ref lected in
his misguided approach to marriage, but the female reproductive body
remains just under the surface of the text. After spending “sixty yeer”
(1248) indulging in sexual pursuits, he decides it is time to marry so that
he may produce an heir and enjoy his own “paradyse terrestre” (1272,
1332).76 January’s decision to marry is thus rooted only in the material
world; he is concerned merely with the earthly delights his wife will pro-
vide and the economic longevity that the heir she will produce signifies;
the female body is the vehicle by which he will receive sexual and eco-
nomic profits. Despite his old age, January seeks a wife “nat passe twenty
yeer” (1417); predictably, the text presents such a union as undoubt-
edly unnatural.77 January’s search for a bride prompts a marriage debate
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between his two brothers, Placebo and Justinus. While Placebo does just
what his name suggests and indulges January by agreeing with his plan
to marry a young woman, Justinus, by recalling his own experience as
well as antifeminist discourse, urges January to reconsider, noting that
he will never be able to “plesen [a young wife] fully yeres thre” (1562).
January, however, eschews Justinus’s advice and continues his search for a
young and beautiful wife. He decides instead to follow his “owene aucto-
ritee; / For love is blynd alday, and may nat see” (1597–8). The old man’s
disregard of Justinus’s counsel highlights his metaphoric blindness; he is
unable to see that his intended marriage to May will not work.
Allusions to January’s Lombard ties to blindness and greed continue
when he begins his search for his future bride. In his mind, January views
“many fair shap and many a fair visage” as if someone had placed a bright
mirror in a “market-place” (1580, 1583). January’s focus on the appearance
of the women in his fantasies emphasizes his reliance on outward appear-
ances and materialism as well as his inability to see properly. Moreover, he
imagines his search for a wife occurring in a marketplace, which exhibits
his Lombard ties to economics. To him, a wife is a “thyng,” a “disport,”
and a producer of heirs (1278, 1332). Later, after he has selected May as
his product and producer of choice, he declares that the “heven in erthe”
of his marriage has been “boght so deere,” clearly locating his marriage
decision within the secular, economic realm (1647, 1648). Not only does
the text present January as disabled, but it also highlights his “unnatural”
marriage. In addition to the obvious differences between the appearance
of the “fresshe May” and the “hoor and oold” January with his bris-
tly beard and wrinkled neck, the two are sexually incompatible (1822,
1400). January must rely on aphrodisiacs in order to sexually perform for
his young wife; nevertheless, regardless of his herbally induced “corage,”
May “preyseth nat his pleyying worth a bene” (1808, 1852).
While the first section of the poem fully establishes January’s greed,
lecherousness, and metaphoric blindness, it is not until after his marriage
to May that January’s physical disabilities (other than his old age) come to
the forefront. In fact, it is “[a]mydde his lust and his prosperitee,” those
particularly Lombard characteristics, that January “is woxen [physically]
blynd” (2070, 2071), suggesting that the text implicitly attributes January’s
physical blindness to his Lombard connections, an obvious reference to
the Lombard-Jew link. However, the text also locates January’s physical
blindness within medieval medical discourse, adding a physiological ele-
ment to the religious and social constructions of Judaism and Lombardy
that already mark January as metaphorically blind. As Carol Everest
explains, January’s loss of physical sight is directly linked to his old age
and sexual excess.78 Particularly, medieval medical texts associate “loss
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 37 9/20/2010 1:15:22 PM

of sight with excessive sexual indulgence and with a perilous physiologi-

cal decline.” 79 In such medical discourse, young male bodies are warm
and sufficiently moist; conversely, with age, such warmth and moisture
decline. Sexual activity further threatens the loss of this humoral balance
because it was thought to deplete moisture from the male body through
the passing of semen. As Everest explains, this depletion in moisture leads
to blindness because in medieval physiology “the eyes, the brain, and the
genital secretions are closely connected.”80 Moreover, engaging in exces-
sive sexual contact diminishes a second bodily element called spiritus,
“the mysterious life-giving breath which permeates all living things,” a
vital component of the eyes and, in turn, vision.81 While aging naturally
depletes moisture and spiritus, sexual intercourse compounds the loss. As
a result, January’s physical condition renders him particularly susceptible
to losing his vision.
In a general sense, January’s lecherous nature leads to the loss of his
eyesight. But, it is specifically through sexual intercourse with May that
January “contracts” his physical blindness. Chaucer directly relates May
to January’s eyesight before he loses his vision. As noted above, January’s
search for a wife is explicitly rooted in appearances; he even “purtrey[s] in
his herte and in his thoght” the image of his fantasy wife (1600), an image
that focuses on his future spouse’s young and shapely body (1601–2).
Moreover, during his marriage feast, “January is ravysshed in a traunce /
At every tyme he looked on [May’s] face” (1750–1). By establishing a rela-
tionship between January’s eyesight and May, Chaucer not only draws
upon the common medieval tradition that stipulates that love begins with
sight, but also lays the groundwork for situating May as a direct cause
for January’s blindness. Indeed, Chaucer emphasizes sight much more
than his probable source text, the Italian Novellino tales. While Chaucer
has Damian and May communicate via hand signals, the lovers speak to
one another through a long, thin tube in the source text.82 Moreover,
Chaucer’s Damian exaggerates his love-sickness, which has been caused
by the sight of May.
Chaucer overtly implicates May in January’s blindness in the
Merchant’s apostrophe to the audience that occurs just before January is
struck blind:
O sodeyn hap! O thou Fortune unstable!

Like to the scorpion so deceyvable
That f laterest with thyn heed whan thou wolt stinge;
Thy tayl is deeth, thurge thyn envenymynge.
O brotil joye! O sweete venym queynte!
O monster, that so subtilly kanst peynte
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Thy yiftes under hewe of stidefastnesse,

That thou deceyvest bothe moore and less!
Why hastow Januarie thus deceyved,
That haddest hym for thy fulle freend receyved?
And now thou has biraft hym both his yen,
For sorwe of which desireth he to dyen. (2057–68)
Notably, Everest draws a link between the narrator’s allusion to Fortune’s

stinging tail and May’s dangerous vagina.83 Everest relates the bibli-
cal tradition of likening a scorpion to sexually excessive women to
the Merchant’s allusion to Fortune’s “tayl” of “deeth” and the subse-
quent interjection, “O swete venym queynte!” (2059, 2061). Thus, “the
Merchant may despise January for senile lustfulness, but in this passage
he equally condemns May as the agent of her husband’s disability.”84
Although here he uses queynte as an adjective to describe venom’s “curi-
ous” properties, Chaucer is clearly punning on the term’s sexual conno-
tations. The Riverside Chaucer glosses queynte’s noun form as an “elegant
pleasing thing” or “sexual favor,” and Chaucer uses the term in both the
“Miller’s Tale” (3276) and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (608) to refer
to a woman’s external genitals. Paired with swete and venym, May’s vagina
becomes both pleasing and poisonous. Bildhauer’s notion of the vampiric
vagina comes to mind here, as does Bakhtin’s devouring yet life-giving
womb. May’s vagina is not only able to “sting” January, but also to “suck”
the sight and, potentially, the life out of him.
While Everest does suggest that the tale implicates May in the physical
disabling of January, her study mostly focuses on the aging male body and
its vulnerability to blindness. However, medical texts of the Middle Ages
provide valuable insight into how medieval people perceived the female
body. Just as the Merchant’s pun on Fortune’s tail recalls May’s venomous
“queynte,” medieval medical texts depict the female body, specifically
the vagina, as potentially dangerous to men.
The “Merchant’s Tale” effectively draws on these conf licting dis-
courses about women’s bodies by using garden imagery in conjunction
with the image of the poisonous scorpion’s tale. Scholars like Cynthia
Kraman have noted May’s connection to the hortus conclusus, or enclosed
garden that January has constructed, which marks May’s body as both
desirable and fear-inducing. January wants to possess May’s body, but in
linking her body to the landscape, Chaucer presents the female body as
something “possessable” by men as well as “effectively disembodied” and
marginalized.85 As stated above, January explicitly declares that he desires
a wife to be “the fruyt of his tresor” upon which he hopes to beget a male
heir (1270). Moreover, he frequently deems May an earthly “paradyse”
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 39 9/20/2010 1:15:22 PM

and even constructs an enclosed garden in which he may “taken [ . . . ] dis-

port” in the hopes of impregnating his wife (2147). Chaucer most clearly
makes this link by setting May’s sexual escapade with Damian in the pear
tree of January’s garden. May’s sudden craving for pears, the ruse she
employs in order to deceive January, suggests May’s later pregnancy, as I
will discuss in detail below. Additionally, the pear tree itself both suggests
the potential fruitfulness of the female body and serves as the site where
May’s scorpion-like “tayl” further deceives January; though the tree pro-
duces fruit, the fruit may not be legitimate, effectively terminating his
familial line. Just as May’s body is linked to a garden wherein January
may plant his seed so that she will bear fruit, the Merchant’s allusions to
Fortune’s venomous, scorpion-like tail locates May’s vagina as poisonous
and deadly; thus, it is both fruit-bearing and destructive.
Within a gendered model of disability, it is possible to read both the
inability to reproduce (as demonstrated by Dame Sirith) and the ability to
reproduce (as evidenced by May) in relation to disability because medi-
eval discourses on femaleness and femininity root the defective nature of
woman/Woman in the dysfunctions of their reproductive organs. Just
as medieval medical texts describe the menopausal woman as f lawed in
her inability to purge wastes or bear children, such discourses portray
pregnancy as a physical condition that hinders a woman’s participation
in everyday life. As noted above, medieval medical, biblical, and patristic
discourse link the female body to the disabled body in its f lawed nature
and its ability to threaten and potentially destroy male bodies. Male
thinkers and writers find further evidence of the female body’s danger to
men in pregnancy. The pregnant body, itself excessive—swollen belly and
breasts, uncontrollable physical and emotional changes—serves as tan-
gible evidence of sexual intemperance and the transgression of gendered
societal norms. In the thirteenth-century didactic text Hali Meidenhad,
the author provides a detailed description of the pregnant body in order
to discourage young women from marriage:
Þi rudie neb schal leanin, ant ase gres grenin; Þine ehnen schule doskin,
ant underneoðe wonnin, ant of Þi breines turnunge Þin heaued aken sare.
Inwið i thi wombe, swel in Þi butte the bereð Þe forð as a weater-bulge,
Þine Þearmes Þralunge ant stiches i Þi lonke and i Þi lenden sar eche riue;
heuivesse in euch lim; Þine breostes burÞerne o Þine twa pappes, ant te
milc-strunden Þe Þerof strikeð. Al is wið a weolewunge Þi wlite ouer-
warpen [ . . . ]. [F]orwourðest a wrecche.
[Your rosy face will grow thin, and turn green as grass; your eyes will
grow dull, and shadowed underneath, and because of your dizziness your
head will ache cruelly. Inside, in your belly, a swelling your womb which
bulges out like a water-skin, discomfort in your bowels and stitches in your
9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 40 9/20/2010 1:15:22 PM

side, and often painful backache; heaviness in every limb; the dragging weight
of your two breasts, and the streams of milk that run from them. Your beauty
is all destroyed by pallor [ . . . ]. [Y] ou are reduced to a wretch.]86
The text’s obsessive focus on the unpleasant side effects of the pregnant
woman’s changing body emphasizes the very real physical impairments
that a woman endures in pregnancy.
Additionally, the pregnant body threatens the promulgation of
male lineage in the dangers it poses to its unborn fetus. In order to
restrain the excessiveness of the pregnant body and reduce the harm
it may impose on the fetus, restrictions on the pregnant body abound
in medieval medical texts. In effect, the medicalization of pregnancy
deems pregnancy a disability in an effort to control it. For instance,
medieval medical discourse restricts the pregnant woman’s movements,
diet, positions, and frequency of sexual intercourse, and even emotions.
Classical texts like Soranus’s warn, “One must oppose the desires of
pregnant women for harmful things [because] the damage from [them]
harms the fetus just as it harms the stomach; because the fetus obtains
food which is neither clean nor suitable, but only such food as a body
in bad condition can supply.” 87 A body in such “bad condition”—in
other words, the pregnant body—could effectively kill an unborn child
through its monstrous appetite. The eleventh-century Trotula presents
an anxiety about the pregnant woman’s appetite in relation to her dis-
ordered imagination: “care ought to be taken that nothing is named in
front of [the pregnant woman] which she is not able to have because
if she sets her mind on it and it is not given to her, this occasions
miscarriage.”88
May’s declaration that a “womman in [her] plit” must have unripe
pears signals to January that she is already pregnant with his heir (2335).
Such a craving is indicative of pica, a condition that medieval medical
authorities knew and commonly affects pregnant women, causing them
to experience nausea, digestive troubles, loss of appetite, increased appe-
tite for certain foods, general malaise, and vomiting.89 However, Milton
Miller and Everest note that it is improbable that May is actually pregnant
at the moment of her request due to numerous factors, including January’s
advanced age, apparent impotence, and, as Everest explains, the widely
accepted “two-seed” theory, which stipulates that a woman must have an
orgasm in order to conceive.90 According to the two-seed theory, both
the man and the woman must emit seed, an act that only occurs during
orgasm, in order for conception to take place. May’s own pronouncement
of her displeasure in January’s sexual performance suggests that she has
not achieved orgasm during her “disport” with January.91 It is probable,
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then, that May’s craving functions as a deceptive ploy that allows her to
mislead January only to betray him. Similar to Dame Sirith’s ambigu-
ous disabilities that gain her entrance into Margery’s home, it is unclear
whether May is indeed pregnant and suffering from pica or simply feign-
ing the condition in order to get what she wants. May’s “disabled” body
succeeds in figuratively and literally turning the roles within her mar-
riage upside down. January, in his delight at his wife’s condition, stoops
over and allows her to step on his back in order to climb up into the tree,
thus implicitly consenting to his own cuckolding (2348). May’s “disabil-
ity” allows her to escape the sexual advances of her husband and procreate
with a more suitable partner.
Just as the validity of her pica remains ambiguous, the “fruitful” tri-
umph of her union with Damian remains uncertain.92 Ultimately, I side
with Miller and Everest in reading May’s allusion to her pregnancy after
her tryst with Damian as probable. Not only is the medical evidence
convincing, but January’s early fear that his “heritage sholde falle / In
straunge hand” (1439–40) becomes literalized in May’s actual illegitimate
pregnancy, which fits the tale’s structural pattern of setting up metaphors
and then literalizing them. The pear tree itself alludes to Damian’s prob-
able impregnation of May: the “peres” function as phallic images and
simultaneously evoke the French term père, or father. Though January’s
impotence will not allow May to bear fruit, in this “père” tree, May will
find a father for the heir January so desperately wants. In addition to lit-
eralizing January’s fears about promulgating a legitimate lineage, May’s
pregnancy reinstates his figurative blindness. Though Pluto restores
January’s physical sight, he is still unable to “see,” for he believes his
wife’s excuse and accepts her unborn child as his own when he “stroketh”
her belly “full softe” (2414). January regains his physical sight, but this
miraculous act of healing is not complete, for his disability transfers onto
May in the form of her pregnancy.
In addition to fearing a pregnant woman’s imagination and appetite,
male authorities also feared the pregnant woman’s ability to produce and
carry defective or monstrous births to term. Hali Meidenhad warns virgins
not to marry and procreate not only due to the pain and physical impair-
ment of pregnancy and labor, but also the chance that they may give birth
to impaired children:
For ȝef hit is misboren, as hit ilome ilimeoð, anti wonti ei of his limen,
oðer sum misfeare, hit is sorhe to hire ant to al his cun scheome, upbrud
in uuel muð, tale bimong alle.
[For if it is born handicapped, as often happens, and one of its limbs
is missing or has some kind of defect, it is a grief to [its mother] and
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shame to all of its family, a reproach for malicious tongues, and the talk
of everyone.]93
Many medical texts refer to “monstrous” deliveries of dead children,

mole births, babies with physical defects, hermaphrodites, two-headed
beings, creatures that are half-human and half-animal, and creatures
with rotted f lesh. Of particular concern were mole births: blackened,
shapeless masses of tissue that bore no resemblance to a “well-shaped”
child.94 Though experts were conf licted on the causes for mole births,
some maintained that lack of sexual intercourse triggers an overabun-
dance of sexual desire and, hence, seed in the womb. This surplus of seed
results in pollution, which produces the mole.95 Most medieval medical
authorities blame such monstrous births on the parents’ sinful behavior,
such as sexual deviancy or drunkenness. Monstrous births, thus, were
tangible, visible signs of parents’ subversion of natural law.96
Though we do not know whether May’s illegitimate pregnancy will
result in a literal monstrous birth, the child necessarily damages the purity
of January’s lineage. Furthermore, the child itself, as well as its unortho-
dox conception, will come to tangibly represent the couple’s unnatural
pairing and their own physical disabilities. May’s body is thus capable
of producing a “monster” that will demonstrate, or serve as a sign of, the
couple’s shared disabilities. However, because May’s body is the body
that will produce the “monster,” she assumes the role of the disabled and
the disabler. In this sense, disability not only hinders May, but also grants
her a sort of power: May knowingly terminates January’s male line, and
only she knows the true father of her child. As May remarks at the end
of the tale: “He that mysconceyveth, he mysdemeth” (2410). May’s state-
ment not only alludes to January’s physical and metaphoric blindness—he
“mis-sees” by witnessing his wife’s adulterous behavior and misjudges by
accepting her excuse anyway—but also emphasizes January’s inability to
get her pregnant (he literally “misconceives”) and his misguided belief
that he has, in fact, fathered a child.
Just as in Dame Sirith, the hierarchical roles of the “official” world
become topsy-turvy in the “Merchant’s Tale.” The old husband is over-
thrown so that the young and fertile wife can mate with the young lover,
and Proserpina triumphs over Pluto by granting May an excuse for her
actions. Even Chaucer’s replacement of the Novellino tale’s God and
St. Peter with Pluto and Proserpina suggests the reign of the “unofficial”
over the “official.” Though both Pluto and Proserpina use biblical exam-
ples to support their arguments for and against women, the use of the
pagan gods allows for female commentary on Christian doctrine, and,
ultimately, Proserpina maintains the last word in the debate and provides
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May with an excuse for her adultery.97 Moreover, May’s subsequent adop-
tion of the role of January’s miraculous healer when she claims that her
adulterous actions have restored his sight (2388) completely undermines
the notion of miraculous cure that populates Christian hagiography. In
this parody of hagiographic convention, May’s “saintly” suffering is a
tussle with her lover in a tree.
Thus, in this tale, it is the pregnant body that takes the place of the
grotesque body: her “pregnancy” facilitates her coupling with Damian.
Whether May is truly pregnant is irrelevant; what matters is that she
performs the part of the incomplete, changing, pregnant body that
undermines all that is static and transgresses all that is defined. While the
narrative attempts to prostheticize January’s blindness, it simply supplants
his blindness with May’s pregnancy, effectively leaving the conclusion
insufficiently concluded, the “deviation” inappropriately prostheticized.
Thus, May’s pregnant body signifies what the grotesque female body is
capable of: destroying (causing January’s blindness) and creating (pro-
creating with Damian). Although Chaucer allows May to have the last
word, her body, pregnant with an illegitimate child, functions as a cor-
poreal reminder that the female body remains inextricably linked to the
disabled body.
As both Dame Sirith and May show, the carnival moment of some
fabliaux allowed for some women to use the discourse of disability in
order to gain power. By exploiting the disruption of boundaries that dis-
ability causes, these women demonstrate that the “defect” of the female
body can effect change. However, not all of the women of medieval
literature are able to use the discourse and fact of disability in such pro-
ductive ways. As my next chapter will demonstrate, the unruly women
of much medieval literature endure physical punishment that results in
impairment in an attempt to contain their unruliness.
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CHAPTER 2
PHYSICAL EDUCATION: EXCESSIVE WIVES

AND BODILY PUNISHMENT IN THE BOOK OF
THE KNIGHT AND THE “WIFE OF BATH’S
PROLOGUE”
G eoffroy de La Tour-Landry’s Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry

(the Book of the Knight) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s
Prologue” feature socially unruly female characters that are punished
by male agents, usually husbands, in order to normalize their excessive
behavior. In each of these texts, able-bodied wives face violent castiga-
tion that results in physical impairment for their sinfulness, thus demon-
strating a direct link between inward corruption and outward physical
appearance.1 Each text explicitly positions physical impairment as a threat
to excessive women, furthering this link and thereby demonstrating the
disabling effects of femininity. Moreover, both of these texts demonstrate
that the unruly able-bodied woman was already socially interpreted as
disabled prior to incurring her punitive physical impairment. These texts,
consequently, place women in an uncomfortable predicament by marking
unruly women as deviant, yet aligning ideal femininity with disability.
If, as I will show, the physical violence in each text seeks to enforce
narrative closure while also disciplining the already excessive female bod-
ies that the narratives attempt to textualize, then, as a result, the bod-
ies of the texts’ female characters make outwardly manifest their inward
sins. Thus, the creation of a new deviance—the physical impairment the
woman incurs—attempts to normalize the original “problem” of the nar-
rative—the unruly woman. In these cases, disability becomes prosthesis;
essentially, the texts attempt to use difference (the physical impairment
that the punishment causes) to normalize difference (the deviancy of the
socially unruly woman). While this punishment can result in the complete
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silencing of women, as in the Book of the Knight, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath

stands as a woman who cannot and will not be limited by her disability.
The “Domestication of Violence”: Physical Violence and

Marriage in Medieval Society
Before discussing my texts of study, I would like to outline brief ly the
role of violence against women in medieval society as ref lected in canon
and secular laws.2 I must emphasize that my study of literary depic-
tions of physical violence against women that result in impairment does
not seek to classify medieval society as overtly and distinctively violent
toward women. Rather, I hope to examine the ways in which violence
against women in medieval literature ref lected, reinforced, complicated,
and even inf luenced the lives of medieval women. As Anna Roberts
contends, texts that feature violence against women reveal “strategies
through which violence against women was naturalized and sanctified by
particular, gendered constructs of heroism, nationalism, domestic space,
[and] memory.” Thus, while violence may not be “the ‘subject’ of [such]
texts [ . . . ], nonetheless, the habits of thought ‘normalizing’ violence
against women persisted, inscribed in narratives whose popularity with-
stood the trial of many centuries.”3 Eve Salisbury, noting the oft-studied
link between medieval laws and literature, finds that “a body of literature
endorsed by authors and poets conversant with the laws of late medieval
England” added to the “normalization of domestic violence” in the later
Middle Ages.4 Angela Weisl, in her study of violence against women in
the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales, notes that literary representations of
violence both ref lect and affect the gendered power structures of medi-
eval society: “Man’s need to control women through violence, doubly
revealed in literature and life, becomes a kind of quiting of them for the
sins of Eve, a continuous justified abuse that goes primarily unquestioned
through a long and varied tradition.”5
Due to her representation as the sinful and weak descendant of Eve
in religious discourse, the medieval woman often faced physical punish-
ments for her indiscretions. Violence in marriage did occur and was even
encouraged: in her study of erotic violence in the Middle Ages, Marilynn
Desmond notes that Christian marriage after the fourth century became
an institution built upon the notion of the “conjugal couple,” which was
held to “new standards of conduct, including fidelity for both partners,”
the violation of which could be punishable through violence.6 In later
medieval society, Desmond claims, medieval discourse justifies violence as
a way to uphold such standards, thereby linking marital love and violence.
She explains, “Legal texts, sermons, conduct literature, and literary texts all
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E XC E S S I V E W I V E S A N D B O D I LY P U N I S H M E N T 47
assume a certain level of violence to be normative in marriage.” 7 Though

Barbara Hanawalt contends that violence against women in medieval soci-
ety was not as prevalent as we may expect, she does concede “that corpo-
ral correction of the wife by the husband was a generally accepted social
custom.”8 As Christian marriage became increasingly institutionalized
in the West, ideologies for proper marital conduct began to materialize,
which delineated a gendered hierarchy. Husbands frequently maintained
this hierarchy through violence.9 Desmond contends that eros and vio-
lence intermingle in medieval marriage: “The nature of marital affection
that emerges in Christianity depends on the proper hierarchical arrange-
ment within the household and the exemplary husband will perform his
hierarchical role through violence and the threat of violence,” resulting in
what Desmond calls the “domestication” of erotic violence.10
Both canon laws and secular laws allowed husbands to “correct” wives
through physical force. Hanawalt finds that, though both lay and eccle-
siastical courts punished husbands who took abuse too far, ecclesiastical
courts had a “broader definition of reasonable correction” and were thus
more lenient against accused husbands.11 James A. Brundage observes that
the fundamental bodily difference between the sexes as outlined in scrip-
ture directly inf luenced canon laws dealing with violence in marriage.
Genesis asserts that different materials compose male and female bodies—
God forms Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib—and scriptural
writings like the letters of Paul imply that woman is inferior to man. As a
result, canon laws follow this line of thinking, granting a husband powers
similar to those of the Roman paterfamilias, which included corporeal pun-
ishment against women and children. Brundage notes that under canon
laws, a husband has “the legal right to enforce his commands and that he
could do so, when necessary, by force.”12 Despite a husband’s freedom
to “correct” his wife’s behavior through physical force under such laws,
canonists often attempted to restrain the amount or degree of physical
force used, though these efforts were limited. For example, the twelfth-
century Summa Parisiensis decreed that husbands could use violence as long
as it did not result in the wife’s death.13 Brundage concludes that, while
canonists did attempt to limit domestic violence and even acknowledged
it as a viable cause for some marital separations, they ultimately “possessed
few means to repress, or even to discourage, domestic violence.”14
Physical Education: Medieval Conduct

Literature for Women
In order to teach young women the proper ideology of wifely conduct,
medieval conduct literature for women often portrays “unruly” wives
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receiving violent physical punishments from their husbands or other

authoritative male figures. I adopt Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A.
Clark’s definition of conduct literature as “written texts systematizing a
society’s codes of behavior,” including texts such as the Book of the Knight,
Christine de Pizan’s Livre de trois vertus and the Ménagier de Paris, and
poems such as “The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” and “How a
Wise Man Taught His Son.”15 The production of these texts for both
young men and women burgeoned in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies. Diane Bornstein, whose analysis of conduct literature for women
was the first to take seriously medieval conduct literature as an impor-
tant object of literary and historical study, notes that “the encyclopedic
impulse to classify and define, the insistence upon hierarchy in political
and social theory, the actual social mobility and instability of the time,
the attempt of the aristocracy to affirm their position, and the rise of the
middle class” of the later Middle Ages led to a proliferation of conduct
literature all across Europe.16
Notably, conduct literature for women most frequently adopts the
threat of physical violence as a pedagogical tool. The turn to bodily
violence in these texts ref lects the medieval medical/scientific under-
standing of the female body as f leshly. According to Clarissa Atkinson,
medieval patristic thinkers believed that “the education of women ought
to be completely unlike the education of men because their destiny was
different, and the goal was not to overcome but to recognize and affirm
the essential (biological) division.”17 Since men viewed women as infe-
rior in body, mind, and social position, much of women’s education was
informal and vocational. Anna Dronzek theorizes that conduct books
addressed to males and females exhibit gendered rhetoric that is rooted
in a medical understanding of the sexed body. Because medical and reli-
gious discourses deemed the female body itself as defective, they also
cast female intellect as inferior to male intellect. Consequently, teaching
methods ref lect this gender bias. In her study of late-fourteenth- and early
fifteenth-century conduct books, Dronzek discovers that the texts con-
sistently demonstrate that their authors “expected boys and girls to learn
in different contexts, to absorb information in different ways, to require
different uses of physical correction as an educational tool and to possess
honor grounded in different principles,” and contends that the medi-
cal understanding “of women as more rooted than men in the physical
world” underscores such gendered expectations.18 Dronzek observes that
conduct literature for girls that is written in verse contains more repeti-
tive refrains than that for boys does. These refrains often mark the change
from one stanza to another or occur after the central speaker or char-
acter teaches a lesson and is about to teach another. Dronzek concludes
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that these refrains may be aural devices that would allow young girls to
memorize the poems as they were read aloud. While poems for girls rely
on these mnemonic aural devices for memorization, the poems for boys
include visual cues that suggest the poems were read upon the page: “In
short, authors appear to have expected boys to read their texts, perhaps as
they would study in a schoolroom, but anticipated that girls would listen
to another person read the texts to them.”19
In addition to its aural organization, conduct literature for girls
expresses its content differently than that for boys. Namely, conduct
books for girls focus more on experience, while the conduct literature for
boys uses more abstract concepts. For instance, conduct literature for boys
catalog “lists of duties” that are “devoid of examples or illustrations.”20
Conversely, due to the medical notion of the female body as physically
and therefore mentally inferior, conduct literature for girls incorpo-
rates familial figures, physical symbols, and concrete examples to define
abstract concepts. Elizabeth Robertson has found that a similar under-
standing of the female body and female learning inf luences earlier medi-
eval prose written for young women. Her analysis of devotional prose
such as Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meidenhad demonstrates that such educa-
tional treatises for women, though centered on female spiritual growth,
incorporate practical, concrete examples that remain focused on the quo-
tidian, domestic, and bodily lives of women.21 The focus on the body and
experience in educational literature for women echoes its focus on what
Droznek calls embodied honor. While conduct literature for young boys
taught the transcendence of the body and the pursuit of the abstract quali-
ties of logic, rational thought, and social standing, it thoroughly confined
young girls to their bodies by admonishing them to fulfill domestic roles
and remain sexually chaste.
Most significant is Dronzek’s finding that female conduct literature
uses more examples of physical violence to teach lessons compared to
that written for boys. Although medieval educators did use physical chas-
tisement in the classroom, textual examples of violence against young
women in female conduct literature far outnumber those against young
men in male conduct manuals. Dronzek finds that in textual depictions of
violence against women “violence to the women occurs upon their mis-
takes, in the same way that a schoolboy’s mistake would incur violence
upon him.”22 Whereas educators may physically punish young men in the
classroom for their mistakes, conduct literature for young women textu-
alizes the violence: in a direct reversal of Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative
prosthesis, a woman’s deviance is not prostheticized through a cure or
remediation of the deviance, but rendered even more deviant by an inf lic-
tion of violence that sometimes results in a visible physical impairment.
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Ultimately, the literary depictions of violence against women “inscribe”

the lesson “upon the fictional woman’s body.”23 The literary depiction of
violence, then, grounds both a young woman’s improper behavior and
the resulting punishment for that behavior in her “defective” body.
Dronzek continues her analysis by outlining specific examples of vio-
lence against women in conduct manuals. Though Dronzek links the use
of these examples to a medical understanding of the female body and the
way that body learns, she does not investigate the effects of the violence
upon the fictional female bodies of the texts she examines. What happens
to these women after they are punished? How do their resulting physical
impairments function in the narrative? What happens when a woman
reciprocates or even desires such violent punishment? In my next section,
I turn to the most violent of instruction manuals for young women, the
Book of the Knight, in order to explore these questions and examine fur-
ther the intersections between femaleness, femininity, and disability that
occur in literary depictions of women with disabilities.
Broken Bodies, Ideal Wives: The Book of the

Knight of the Tower
A well-known conduct book of the late fourteenth century that portrays
violence against women in its exempla is Chevalier Geoffrey de la Tour-
Landry’s Book of the Knight of the Tower. I turn to the Book of the Knight here
not simply because of its popularity in fifteenth-century England, but
because of its incredibly violent depictions of punishment against women
that results in their physical impairment. Written in the late fourteenth
century, this widely circulated text was available in two English transla-
tions by the fifteenth century. Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry (known as
the Knight of the Tower, or simply the Knight) originally wrote this text
for his daughters in the hope of providing them with examples of proper
behavior for young ladies. William Caxton later translated and printed
the French text into English in 1484 at “the request & desire of a noble
lady which hath brouȝt forth many noble & fayre douȝters which ben vir-
tuously nourished & lerned.”24 Thus, both the original French text and
Caxton’s translation were published on demand from parents who hoped
to offer their daughters proper social instruction. Caxton even suggests
that other parents show their daughters the text: “I aduyse euery gentil-
man or woman hauying such children/ desyryng them to be virtuously
brouȝt forth to gete & haue this book to thende that they may lerne/ hou
they ouȝt to gouern them virtuously in this present lyf ” (3).
As M. Y. Offord explains, the book “is largely a compilation of moral
precepts, with advice on religious and social conduct, supported by stories
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illustrating how women should and should not behave.”25 The Knight’s
compilation includes biblical stories, well-known tales and myths, and
personal stories from his own life. He provides examples of the conduct
of “good” women as well as “bad” women. The Knight also stresses
the embodied aspect of female honor by emphasizing the importance of
female chastity and detailing horrific bodily punishments that unchaste
or dishonest women endure due to their indiscretions. While other con-
duct manuals for young women may brief ly mention or allude to the
threat of bodily punishment for unchaste women, the Knight’s text is
almost obsessed with enforcing moral conduct upon women through the
use of corporeal penalties. Dronzek has noted that women in the text do
not have to commit sexual indiscretions in order to be punished. In fact,
“remarkably few cases result from straightforward sexual misbehavior on
the woman’s part [ . . . ]. More frequently, the Knight demonstrates how
simply the hint of impropriety, even when the woman in fact did noth-
ing wrong, can ruin a woman’s reputation.”26 The Knight’s emphasis on
complete moral propriety implies a fear of female sexuality; consequently,
he details gruesome punishments for unchaste and dishonest women, lit-
erally attempting to terrify them into proper behavior.
The Knight begins his book with an emphasis on religious piety.
Women must first serve God at all times (14). As the book progresses, we
find that women are then subject to obeying their fathers, and afterwards,
their husbands. Indeed, all of the Knight’s examples of “bad” women
depict young women who disobey the rules established by God, their
fathers, or their husbands. The Knight’s formula, thus, places women
under constant patriarchal control. And, as we soon discover, any trans-
gression of that control results in grave penalties. While the text pres-
ents several exempla of “good” women who are rewarded—such as the
daughter of the King of Denmark who is rewarded for her meek behavior
by winning the hand of the King of England (Chapter XII)—and “bad”
women who are punished—such as the vain woman who is paralyzed by
a gust of wind (Chapter XXVI)—I will be focusing here on the episodes
in which “bad” women are punished with violence by male figures that
causes visible, physical impairment.
The Knight clearly roots the potential deviance of women in their
defective bodies, noting that “by cause she is of lyghter courage than the
man is/ that is to saye that the woman was fourmed and made out of the
mans body/ And in so moche that she is more feble than the man is/ And
yf she resisteth agenynste the temptacions of the deuylle/ of the world/
and of the f lesshe/ the more worthy to haue gretter meryte than the man”
(157). Mark Addison Amos, who notes that the Knight’s book seeks both
to educate and “gentrify” his daughters, finds that the Knight gives his
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daughters the method of fasting as means to restrain their lustfulness. By

connecting a woman’s abstinence from meat to the control of her sexual
desires, the Knight “makes explicit [fasting’s] connection to lechery and
its purpose in regulating sexual desire.”27 As Caroline Walker Bynum has
shown, fasting was frequently used in the Middle Ages in order to hasten
access to the divine. In particular, Bynum contends that women used
self-starvation in the hopes of controlling the f lesh and exploiting it to
enact imitatio Christi.28 The Knight emphasizes that fasting is particularly
useful for women in his chapter entitled “How good doughters ought to
faste till they be maryed,” in which he stresses to his daughters that fast-
ing will “adaunte youre f lesshe” in order “to kepe yow more clene and
holyly in the seruyce of god” and “to kepe clene youre vyrgynyte and
youre chastyte” (19, 20). Here, he directly associates the control of the
body’s appetite for food to the control of the female body’s sexual appe-
tites. In later chapters, the Knight continues to emphasize the importance
of controlling what one eats and drinks through exempla that reward
some women for fasting and punish those who indulge in feasting.29
Amos connects the Knight’s focus on women’s temperance in sexual-
ity and food to the Bakhtinian grotesque female body that possesses a
devouring mouth and vagina that threaten to erode stable identity bound-
aries. Amos writes that the Knight’s obsession with female sexual and
bodily appetite alludes to “the potential for transgression and violation
of the socially-constructed bodies of women through their orifices.”30
Amos notes that, in the Book of the Knight, women’s mouths impart the
same dangerous boundary-crossing as their vaginas imply: “For the text,
female mouths are dangerous not only because of what women might
(unwisely) choose to put in them, but for what might come out of them
in the form of speech.”31 As chapter 1 demonstrates, the grotesque female
body closely aligns with literary depictions of both the unruly and the
disabled female body. In these depictions, the deviance that visible bodily
impairment produces only increases the already transgressive female
body’s potential power to disrupt and violate boundaries. And yet, while
physically abusing women and causing impairment potentially heightens
the women’s powers to disrupt, in the Knight’s book, this is not the case.
Instead of bestowing these women with increased power, the trauma to
their bodies renders them completely silent.
The exemplum that occurs just before the Knight’s chapter on why
women should fast directly links a woman’s disorderly eating habits to her
deviance and ensuing bodily punishment. Though this exemplum does
not represent direct man-on-woman violence, it does demonstrate how
physical violence could serve as proper punishment for an unruly woman.
The Knight narrates the story of two sisters. The eldest remains steadfast
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in her prayers and fasting, while the youngest secretly feasts on “soupe or
somme lycorous thyng” while “her fader and moder were a bedde” (18).
Soon, the youngest marries a man who tries to change her ways. One
night, her husband awakens and feels for his wife only to find her gone
from bed. Upon searching for her, he finds her feasting with other men
and women in a wardrobe. Suddenly, the husband sees one of his servants
“had embracid one of the wymmen of the chambre” and angrily strikes
the man with his staff, breaking off a splinter: “a splynt sprange out of the
staf in to the one eye of his wyf/ which was by hym/ in suche manere/
that by mysauenture her eye was smeton oute/ and loste her eye” (18).
The husband soon abandons his blind wife and marries another. When
the father of the two daughters comes to visit them, he is thrilled by his
eldest daughter’s happy and richly adorned home. However, when he
visits his youngest, he finds her and her house “all oute of arraye And
how she had gouerned her nycely and wantonly” (19). He returns home
and scolds his wife for allowing their youngest daughter to eat whenever
and whatever she wanted.
In this exemplum, the Knight associates the young woman’s immod-
erate eating habits with the groping that occurs in the wardrobe; thus,
bodily appetite blurs with sexual desire. Though the narrative remains
ambiguous on whether the woman who is groped is the wife or someone
else, the husband’s actions imply his wife is to blame, and, ultimately, it is
she who endures the brunt of the punishment by being blinded. Notably,
it is only after his wife’s impairment that her husband decides to leave her:
“And thus her husbond had her in suche hate. That he tooke his herte
fro her/ and set it in another” (18). The Knight, then, makes clear that
her injury is the reason for the husband’s leaving, but he is quick to add
that her impairment is a fair punishment for her excessive eating: “And
[the blinding] happed by the euyl gouernaunce of his wyf/ whiche was
acustommed to lyue dyssolutely and disordynately/ bothe on mornynges
and on euenynges/ werof the grete part of the harme was heres/ by cause
she lost her eye/ and the loue of her hosbond” (18). Thus, in serving his
duty as the man of the house by attacking a male servant for inappropriate
behavior, the husband fortuitously punishes his wife for her misbehavior.
In other words, he inadvertently, yet fittingly, causes her outward appear-
ance to match her inward imperfection.32
In one wave of a staff, the wife loses her eye, “her houshold and
menage wente all to nought and to perdicion,” and her husband aban-
dons her, causing her to fall “in an euyll astate & moche lassed and lesse
sette by of al men that knew her” (19). The Knight here stresses that the
woman’s physical injury impairs not only her vision, but also her ability
to function as a “proper” wife, a role played perfectly by the older sister.
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When the sisters’ father comes to visit them, he sees his eldest daughter’s
well-managed, lavish home and his younger daughter’s disorganized,
messy home. The youngest daughter, now husbandless and one-eyed, is
presumably unable to keep the household in order, the primary responsi-
bility of a noble wife. According to Bornstein, “a medieval wife played an
important economic role. As head of her household, she was practically a
business manager. If she was a noblewoman, she had to supervise a larger
staff of ladies-in-waiting, pages, and servants.”33 The Knight explicitly
suggests that this wife and her husband are of a noble status and that the
company in the wardrobe consists of members of their staff; the husband
finds his wife with “his clerk and two of his seruauntes” (18). At the loss
of her eye, however, she becomes unable to maintain her economic role
as household manager. Her house is not only in disarray, but it is also in
“perdicion” (18). The Knight, thus, closely aligns poverty with disability,
a connection shared by his contemporaries. Henri-Jacques Stiker explains
that the poor and the disabled often intermingled in medieval society.34
Those with disabilities who were unable to work often had to resort
to begging, which sometimes allowed them to act as important sites of
access to eternal life (although this clearly is not the case for the wife of
this exemplum).35 In France, where the Knight was writing, blind people
were directly linked to the poor because of aveugleries that sanctioned
begging, such as Louis IX’s Hospice des Quinze-Vingts. In addition,
city-wide expulsions of mendicants that included the blind throughout
Europe helped to lump together the blind and the poor in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries.36 The blind wife, her home now unkempt and
impoverished, has lost not only her husband and vision, but also her abil-
ity to manage her home, a distinct marker of her upper-class status.
By grouping the older and younger sisters together, the Knight is
able to portray the ideal young woman and her counterpart, effectively
demonstrating how “good” women are rewarded and “bad” women
are punished. Amos contends that the “good” women of the text, those
who remain under the control of their fathers or husbands, represent
Bakhtin’s classical body, while the “bad” women take the shape of the
grotesque body. An ideal wife remains “circumscribed by her mar-
riage,” her body “accessible only to her rightful husband in their private
space.”37 Conversely, an imperfect wife “violates that regulatory system”
and becomes the incomplete, public body of the female grotesque.38 In
this particular exemplum, the older sister fits the schema of the classical
body: she follows her father’s orders and later remains steadfast in both her
appetitive and sexual desires after her marriage. Her body remains closed,
private, and the property of her husband. The younger sister, however,
defies both her father and her husband by indulging her appetites. By
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hosting a public feast in the private space of her wardrobe, the wife dem-
onstrates the boundary-crossing that her grotesque body produces. In the
wardrobe, her body is not merely her husband’s; while he “groped” for
his wife, presumably to access her body in the privacy of their bed, she
was “synging and crienge, iaping, and plaieng, [and] making suche noise
that unnethe thei haue herde the thunder” with several men and women
(8, 9). The public, carnivalesque space that the wardrobe becomes under-
scores the wife’s grotesque body and appetite. Bakhtin contends that ban-
quet and feasting scenes clearly depict the clashing of boundaries that
the grotesque body represents. He writes, “Eating and drinking are one
of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. [ . . . ]. [T]
he body transgresses here its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the
world apart, is enriched and grows at the world’s expense.”39 By engaging
in feasting and sexual exploits with her staff in her wardrobe, the wife
brings the public sphere into the domestic space of her home, completely
undermining the hierarchy of her marriage and household. Her husband,
in an attempt to turn the topsy-turvy right-side up, violently punishes
her, albeit indirectly, causing both her body and the body domestic (her
household) to take on the outward appearance of her grotesque actions.
Whereas the women of chapter 1 were able to use their disabilities
to disrupt, the world of the Knight’s exempla prohibits the wife from
accessing such power. Her accidental punishment leaves her completely
silenced, left only with a ramshackle house, one eye, and her father’s deep
disappointment. The exemplum ends with the father blaming his own
wife for his daughter’s misdeeds and misfortunes. His wife, heretofore
unmentioned, assumes the burden of the blame for her daughter’s fate
and, like her daughter, remains silent.
While the exemplum above depicts the unintentional disabling pun-
ishment of a woman by a man, it is important to my study because it
demonstrates three important elements of the entanglement of violence,
femininity, disability, and the female body in the text’s milieu: the exem-
plum shows the simultaneous intertwining of female misbehavior and
proper femininity with physical disability, demonstrates that the rejection
of a physically disabled woman is a suitable response, and makes evident
that physical violence against the female body serves as an appropriate
teaching tool for female readers. The following exemplum, which depicts
direct man-on-woman violence, demonstrates these three elements by
portraying the sometimes harsh punishment that a woman may receive
for speaking out of turn. In Chapter XVII, the Knight asserts that “a
woman in no maner wyse ought stryue ageynst her husbond/ ne answere
hym so that he take therby displaysyre” (35). The Knight then tells of a
woman who foolishly spoke for her husband in public “so noiously. And
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shamefully to fore the peple/ that he bicam angry and felle to see hym
self so relyed to fore the peple/ that he had therof shame” (35). Despite
the husband’s pleas for her to discontinue her insults of him in public,
the woman persists. Finally fed up with her verbal insults, the husband
“smote her with his fyste to the erthe. And smote her with his foote on
the vysage so that he brake her nose/ by whiche she was euer after al dis-
fygured. And soo by her ryotte and ennoye she gate her a croked nose”
(35). The Knight ends the tale with an assertion that the wife’s punish-
ment was warranted, for a wife should remain silent and let “the hubonde
haue the hyhe wordes” (35). Whereas a husband can speak “to fore the
peple,” a wife should only “reprehende hym and aduyse him” when she
finds “hym alone” (35).
While the wife in the previous exemplum receives punishment for
making a spectacle of her eating habits in front of others, this wife receives
punishment for speaking ill of her husband in public. The Knight clearly
delineates public speech as the husband’s responsibility—as only a husband
should “haue the wordes”—and only grants the wife the ability to ver-
balize any disagreements with her husband in the privacy of their home.
The public setting of the wife’s speech thus lends to the carnivalesque
moment of the tale and the potential disruptive power of her speech.
What’s even more threatening than the setting of her speech, however,
is the kind of speech she presents. Bakhtin notes that curses, insults, and
oaths “are the unofficial elements of speech. They were and are still con-
ceived as a breach of the established norms of verbal address; they refuse
to conform to conventions, to etiquette, civility, respectability.”40 The
wife completely inverts the hierarchical roles of her marriage by hurling
insults against her husband in public. Such an action marks the wife as
unwomanly, and the Knight emphasizes the gender boundary-crossing
of her actions by labeling her a “chydar” and a “rampe” (35). The Middle
English Dictionary (MED) defines rampe as “a virago,” or a woman with
manly qualities “who usurps a man’s office.” By speaking against her
husband in front of a public audience, the wife steps out of her prescribed
social role as the manager of the private, domestic sphere and attempts to
assume a masculine role. As in the previous exemplum, the boundaries
of public and private, masculine and feminine blur as a result of a woman
violating gender norms.
Because of the wife’s deliberate violation of her prescribed social role,
her husband violently punishes her. Again, the male authority of the tale
uses physical violence in an attempt to limit the threat that the grotesque
female body suggests. This time, the wife’s face is permanently disfigured
when her husband breaks her nose with his foot. As Bakhtin suggests, as a
feature of the grotesque body, the nose “always symbolizes the phallus.”41
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Thus, by breaking her nose, the husband essentially “castrates” his

“virago” wife, rendering her body—already viewed as lacking because it
is female—even more incomplete. With this in mind, we can thus char-
acterize such punishments—those that leave the female body even more
deficient—in the text as acts of castration that seek to take power away
from women who have transgressed their gendered social roles.
The double-bind of femininity and disability emerges here when the
husband, unhappy that his wife has overstepped her gendered bounds,
“castrates” his wife, causing her a disfigurement that destroys her physical
beauty. At first glance, facial disfigurement may not seem like a blatant
physical disability; presumably, the wife retains physical mobility, the
classic marker of physical ability, after her injury. However, the visibility
of the wife’s disfigurement compounds the severity of the deformity,
causing it to become a true disability for her. As I discuss in my intro-
duction, the movement from impairment to disability is a process that
involves the reaction to and interpretation of the impairment by others.
Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma is helpful here: when one possesses a
visibly different physical attribute, the negative reactions of others who
do not possess such a difference result in discrediting the one who pos-
sesses the difference as deviant. When this “discrepancy between virtual
and actual social identity” occurs, the impairment moves from a non-
negotiable physical reality to the social perception of the impairment.42
Though the Knight does not say whether her husband leaves her after she
is impaired, the tale that occurs just before Chapter XVII suggests the
reaction a husband may have to such a facial defect. In this tale, a wife
becomes jealous of another woman and instigates a fight. The rival grabs
a staff, hits the wife, and breaks her nose, leaving it permanently crooked.
The Knight declares that such a blemish is particularly injurious, “which
is the moost syttyng membre that a man or woman may haue/ as it that
stondeth in the myddes of the vysage” (32). Ultimately, the husband leaves
his wife because, “by the dysfyguryng of her nose and myschaunce/ her
husbond myght not loue her soo parfytely after/ as he dyde to fore/ as he
woned to doo/ And other whyle took other” (32). Although we do not
know whether the previous wife loses her husband after her disfigure-
ment, it is clear that she loses her ability to speak in public. In fact, the
wife becomes so ashamed of her looks that she never again shows her face
in public. Consequently, her husband succeeds in fully relegating her to
the domestic sphere, and her castration is complete.
In both of the exempla described above, a wife reveals her unruliness
through actions that center on her mouth: the first wife eats immoder-
ately, and the second wife speaks ill of her husband. As Amos suggests,
the Knight focuses on the transgressive capabilities of women’s orifices.
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In the tale of the roper’s wife (Chapter LXII), the Knight extends that
focus to another female orifice, the vagina, by depicting a sexually insa-
tiable wife who cheats on her husband with a prior. In this tale, a roper’s
wife follows the advice of her “gossip,” who both persuades her to cheat
and helps her to cover up her actions. On two separate occasions, the
husband almost catches his wife, but each time, the gossip concocts an
excuse for the wife, and the roper accepts it. After seeing his wife enter
the priory alone, he warns “her vpon payne of losynge of her eye/ that
neuer she sholde be so hardy to goo ne conuerse in the hows of the sayd
pryour” (89).
The wife, however, cannot contain her temptation, and she again goes
to the prior. The husband follows his wife into town and watches as she
enters the priory. After he sees the illicit couple together, he “brought
her ageyne/ and told her/ that euylle she had kepte his commaunde-
ment” (90–1). Angry, he goes into town and makes a “couenaunt with
a Cyrurgyne to hele and sette ageyne fast to gyder two broken legges,”
returns home, and breaks both of his wife’s legs with a stamper, declar-
ing, “ ‘At the lest shalt thou hold a whyle my couenaunt/ and shalt not
go ageynst my deffence there as it pleaseth me not’ ” (90). The wife is
then crippled and bedridden for some time. However, her punishment is
not enough to contain her voracious sexual desires; she soon goes back
to her adulterous ways: “Whan she was amended of her legges/ came
the Pryour secretley to her” in bed (90). Due to the commotion in his
bed, the roper wakes to find the couple together, explodes in anger, and
takes out his knife and slays the lovers. When the authorities arrive, they
absolve him of his crime, noting that the sinful actions of the wife and
the prior “made them bothe to receuye deth vylaynysly” (91). The hus-
band calls his neighbors over, who, observing the ugliness of the prior,
compare the wife to “the she wulf/ that is the female of the wulf/ whiche
taketh and cheseth to her loue the most fowle and lothly wolf ” (90).
Like the wives in the previously discussed tales, the roper’s wife steps
out of her prescribed role as a wedded woman. While the other two
transgress boundaries with what they put in or what comes out of their
mouths, the roper’s wife takes her unruliness a step farther by engaging
in sexual activity with the prior. By having the roper’s wife commit adul-
tery with a prior, the tale completely upsets the hierarchical structure of
not only marriage, but also religion. The Knight asserts that “by cause he
was a man of Relygyon/ and the woman wedded was the synne gretter”
(90). In effect, the world of this tale becomes topsy-turvy, and the closed,
classical body of a “good” wife becomes the grotesque body of a “bad”
wife, open to all including men-religious. The Knight further under-
scores the carnivalesque atmosphere of the tale and the grotesqueness of
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the female body by aligning female speech with female sexual miscon-
duct. In implicating the wife’s gossip in her misdeeds, the Knight directly
intertwines the potential dangers of the female mouth and vagina. The
gossip plays the roles of instigator and enabler by persuading the wife to
cheat on her husband and then providing her with explanations for her
suspicious actions. Accordingly, the Knight cautions his own daughters
against the dangers of women like the gossip, warning, “wherfor the sage
sayth/ She that taketh [a gossip] selleth her self ” (87–8).
The wife’s punishment for her indiscretions is to lose the ability to
walk by having her legs broken by her husband. Just as she “broke [his]
commaundement,” he will break her legs. Before doing so, however, the
husband interestingly forges a covenant with a surgeon to heal two bro-
ken legs. This seemingly superf luous detail shows that the roper, unlike
our other two husbands, does not intend to make his wife’s punishment
permanent. The impairment is to only temporarily confine the wife to
the house—to keep her within the domestic realm—so that she can no
longer break her husband’s commandment. When her legs are broken,
the commandment remains intact; however, when the wife’s legs begin
to heal, she again breaks her husband’s commandment. Nevertheless,
the roper’s punishment does not have its desired effect because of the
temporary nature of the punishment. The Knight surmises, the wife
“wente ageyne to the pryours hows/ as ye hed to fore/ And ouermore
as the grete anguysshe and dolour that she had suffred of her legges was
past/ yet she ne wold chastyse ne kepe her self clene of tht fowle synne of
lechery” (91). With her body whole, the wife is again capable of violat-
ing her husband’s laws.
The wife’s predicament nicely sums up what happens to the wives
of the Knight’s book: an unruly woman whose body is broken will stay
within the limits of proper wifely conduct. Physical punishment that
impairs women works to keep wives within their prescribed social role by
either restricting them to the domestic sphere (the disfigured wife can’t
go out in public; the roper’s wife is confined to her bed) or deeming them
unfit to remain within it altogether (the one-eyed wife loses her husband
and the ability to manage her home). It is clear that, within the logic of
the Knight’s book, an unruly woman’s body must be broken in order for
her to be silenced. The husbands of the Book of the Knight thus attempt to
curtail the unruliness—the deviance, in Mitchell and Snyder’s terms—of
their “bad” wives by making their bodies physically deviant. While it
would seem that the text’s constant displacement of deviance might be
disruptive and empowering, ultimately, violence only succeeds in stif ling
all of the potentially unruly women of the text. In fact, the roper’s wife,
the one wife that comes the closest to countering her husband’s control
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through her direct disregard of his rules, ends up paying for her disrup-
tiveness in the most extreme fashion: she loses her life.
Deafness and (Dis)ability in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue”

Though the women of the Book of the Knight become silenced by their
physical chastisement, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath remains undeterred by the
corporal punishment that her excessive behavior prompts. The Wife of
Bath, thus, functions as the ultimate example of the “good” wife gone
bad. Several scholars have turned to conduct literature like the Book of
the Knight when analyzing the behavior of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. For
instance, Mary Carruthers’s foundational feminist essay “The Wife of
Bath and the Painting of the Lions” notes that Alisoun’s “primary attack
in both the prologue and the tale is directed at a body of marital lore held
commonly by her own class and articulated most fully in the deport-
ment books written to foster ‘gentilesse’.”43 Bornstein adds that Chaucer
may have been directly drawing from conduct literature for women,
specifically The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, when detailing Alisoun’s
intemperance in dress and behavior in the prologue.44 Margaret Hallissy
even labels Alisoun the definitive “archwife,” or the polar opposite of
the ideal wives constructed in conduct manuals.45 Juliette Dor suggests
that Alisoun embodies a subversion of the prototypical “good” wife that
the women of the Book of the Knight represent. Dor finds that Alisoun’s
“wandering by the weye” (469)46 suggests not only her participation in
pilgrimage, but also her drifting outside of the physical and moral spaces
designated for women in conduct literature.47 In particular, Alisoun
deviates from the virtues of modesty, chastity, silence, and sobriety that
conduct manuals prescribe for women in her ostentatious dress, overt
sexuality, outspokenness, and love for wine. As a result of her purposeful
deviation from the social norms of wifely behavior, Alisoun suffers vio-
lence from her fifth husband that first results in bruises and culminates in
the partial loss of her hearing.
While the Wife of Bath’s partial deafness is immediately highlighted
in the second line of her portrait in the “General Prologue,” little schol-
arship directly explores the significance or implications of her disabil-
ity. Most readers gloss over the feature, noting that it serves only as yet
another reminder of Chaucer’s attention to detail .48 However, as Melvin
Storm rightly notes, we cannot ignore the significance of Alisoun’s deaf-
ness, for it both opens her portrait and closes her prologue.49 Moreover,
Chaucer singles out Alisoun’s deafness by making it the only bodily
defect he describes in both the “General Prologue” and the “Wife of
Bath’s Prologue.” Although Chaucer informs us of the Cook’s ulcer, the
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Friar’s lisp, the Miller’s wart, and the Summoner’s pustules, none of these
bodily defects surfaces in the prologues and tales of the pilgrims.50
Though Storm views Alisoun’s deafness as a marker of her spiritual
ignorance and her ability to “turn a deaf ear” to spiritual truths, he fails to
investigate the gendered elements of her disability. Furthermore, Storm
limits Alisoun’s disability to her partial deafness. Keeping in mind the
connections between femininity, femaleness, and disability that I outline
in my introduction and chapter 1, I contend that Chaucer’s text enmeshes
Alisoun’s body in the discourse of disability before Jankin strikes his blow.
As Alisoun informs her audience, women are defective in both mind
and body simply because of their sex: “For al swich wit is yeven us in
our byrthe; / Deceite, wepynge, spynnyng God hath yive / To wom-
men kyndely, whil that they may lyve” (400–2). Alisoun thus blames
her “continueel murmur” and “grucchyng” on the natural predisposition
of her sex, demonstrating her belief in (or awareness of ) the linking of
stereotypically negative feminine attributes to biological sex (406). As I
will show, in the view of Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, what
spurs the narrative of the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is not her deafness;
it is her excessively sexual body, overtly masculine behavior, and her pre-
sumed childlessness and postmenopausal infertility.51 Her deafness, thus,
is her punishment, an attempt to restore order to her unruly state and to
normalize the difference that her excessive female body represents.
Alisoun is one of three women—including the Prioress and the
Second Nun—that populate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the “General
Prologue” only profiles her and the Prioress. Notably, as Priscilla Martin
has suggested, though both women are defined in terms of their sexuality
(either the lack or excess of it), it is the excessive sexual nature of Alisoun
that is threatening; though the Prioress is feminine and perhaps sexu-
ally attractive, Alisoun eagerly acts on her lustful desires.52 It is obvious
that Alisoun deviates from the prescribed social roles for wives: she has
had multiple sexual partners, may not have had children, and is presum-
ably unable to bear children at the moment of her prologue. Thus, her
sexuality is not productive; it is, as Martin succinctly notes, potentially
“destructive and insatiable.”53
The Wife of Bath materializes as a particularly bawdy and bodily
figure, and certain features of her body correspond to her moral indis-
cretions. Well versed in “that art of the olde daunce,” Alisoun is “gat-
tothed” and has “hipes large,” two physical characteristics that allude
to her overt sexuality (468, 472). While Alisoun’s wide hips accentuate
her shapely body, her wide-set teeth most likely suggest her lecherous-
ness. According to “medieval physiognomy such teeth indicated an envi-
ous, irreverent, luxurious, bold, faithless, and suspicious nature.”54 Later,
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in her prologue, Alisoun draws attention to her teeth, noting that they
were an asset to her pursuit of her twenty-year-old fifth husband (603).
Alisoun also mentions that she has “the prente of seint Venus seel” as well
as the “Martes mark upon [her] face” (604, 619). The Riverside Chaucer
glosses these as birthmarks that symbolize sexuality: the “Venus seel”
appears most frequently on the “ ‘loins, testicles, thighs, or perhaps on the
neck,’ ” while the “Martes mark” refers to one born with Mars ascend-
ing, an astrological sign that a woman will be unchaste.55
Karma Lochrie finds that these birthmarks are not birthmarks at all,
but instead imply Alisoun’s hypertrophied clitoris, a female defect docu-
mented by medieval medical texts that was thought to cause same-sex
desire in women. Though Lochrie does not label Alisoun as disabled and
does not directly engage disability theory, it is evident that a hypertro-
phied clitoris was indeed considered to be a bodily defect in medieval
culture. For instance, in the medical writings of Soranus and Avicenna,
an enlarged clitoris was thought to be dangerous, for it not only appeared
penis-like, but it also actively sought out sexual pleasure from other
women. Soranus claims that “ ‘those possessed of the tentigo [clitoris]
assume an appetite resembling that of men and they engage in the vene-
real act,’ ” while Avicenna links another disorder, ragadia of the womb,
or a large finger-like growth that results from a prolapsed uterus or an
ulcer in the womb, to tribadism: “Sometimes there arises additional f lesh
in the mouth of the womb, and sometimes there appears on a woman a
thing that is just like the penis aroused in coitus. And sometimes it occurs
to her to perform with women a coitus similar to what is done to them
with men.”56 Lochrie finds evidence that Alisoun not only possesses an
enlarged clitoris, but that she is also a medical virago, a woman “whose
physiological assimilation to masculinity through the retention of men-
ses” causes “exorbitant sexual desire and masculine strength.”57 Citing
the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” as an example of the wife’s use of “len-
gua queynte,” Lochrie explains that Alisoun’s references to her “queynte,”
“bele chose,” “pith,” and “bren” suggest her clitoris and grant her sexual
desire a “masculine” agency that seeks sexual domination (444, 447, 475,
478). Ultimately, Lochrie asserts that Alisoun’s status as an overly mas-
culine “hypertrophied clitoris-wielding woman” exposes “male mascu-
linity as prosthetic.”58 In the same way, I argue, Alisoun’s hypersexual
body that must be physically disabled in order to be controlled reveals the
prosthetic of the “normal” female body.
Alisoun’s prologue delineates her deficient status as a sexually active
woman far before her hearing impairment comes into play. Alisoun
begins the “Prologue” by speaking of her experiences with marriage and
her desire to “bistowe the f lour of al [her] age / In the actes and in fruyt
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of mariage” (114–15). The social standard that defines Alisoun, and other
wives like her, is a standard set forth in scriptural, patristic, and deport-
ment literature: that “greet perfeccion” of “virginitee” (105). In what we
might call her “dissertation” on the perfection of virginity (lines 105–61),
Alisoun does not measure herself up to the Virgin, the female representa-
tion of perfection. Instead, Alisoun identifies Christ as the ideal example
of virginity when she explains, “Crist was a mayde and shapen as a man”
(138). Designating Christ as the embodiment of virginal perfection per-
haps emphasizes Alisoun’s knowledge that even virgin female bodies are
seen as lacking in relation to male bodies. All other bodies that fall out-
side of Christ’s “perfeccion,” then are inferior and imperfect. Within a
gendered model for disability, we can examine the intersection of dis-
ability and gender as on a continuum. On one side, we see the “norm,”
or the male, heterosexual, nondisabled, virgin body. In the middle rests
the female, heterosexual, nondisabled, virgin body, and on the other side
exists the female, disabled, sexual body. The female body differentiates
from the perfect, male body, while the sexual female body distinguishes
from the virgin female body, ultimately rendering the sexually active
female body, in its excess, as imperfect. In other words, the perfection
of the male virgin body mitigates the perfection of the female virgin
body, which, in turn, relegates the sexual female body into the position
of Other. As my introduction suggests, medical and scriptural discourse
implicitly link the overly sexualized woman and the disabled person.
Arguing that the female sexual body is imperfect does not imply that
the married woman had no place in medieval society. Some medieval
patristic discourse on marriage, however, outlines a distinct hierarchy
of sexual purity. According to religious writers like Jerome, virginity,
celibacy, and chaste marriage were clearly the purest options for medieval
women. Other writers like Augustine upheld the notion that celibacy
was a purer state than marriage, but contended that if such states of per-
fection were too difficult to attain, sexual intercourse within marriage
was the next best option, for it would produce good (i.e., children) out
of evil (i.e., lust).59 Consequently, a sexual marriage was by no means
condemned, but it was imperfect in relation to virginity or even chaste
marriage. Furthermore, the appropriateness of multiple marriages was an
apparent source of anxiety and debate, as the antifeminist discourse that
Alisoun alludes to in her prologue evidences. Alisoun’s support of mul-
tiple marriages and fondness for sex as a means of pleasure, not procre-
ation, designate her body as deviant and, in turn, potentially dangerous.
As such, the prologue marks her deviant body as in need of discipline.
Acting as a deviance that generates discourse, Alisoun’s disruptive, sexual
body initiates her narrative, and the narrative itself attempts to limit it.
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Unlike the women depicted in chapter 1, who are able to transcend the
limiting effects of the narrative, Alisoun’s body is rendered deaf in order
to contain her excessiveness. Just as the “bad” wives of the Knight’s book
suffer punishment, the difference that Alisoun’s excessive body represents
leads to her punishment, which creates further bodily difference. In con-
trast to the Knight’s “wives,” however, Alisoun’s impairment does not
hinder her behavior; she continues to enact her sexual deviancy.
It is Alisoun’s sexual body that generates the narrative of her prologue;
in this narrative, she recounts the experiences of her multiple marriages.
At the same time, her prologue acknowledges the narratives that the sexual
female body has generated among patristic writers. Specifically, through her
own life story, Alisoun demonstrates the (male) desire to bring unwieldy
bodies like hers under control in her synthesis of antifeminist discourse.
In the first part of the prologue, Alisoun manipulates patristic texts, par-
ticularly Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, in order to ref lect on her own views
of marriage. By questioning patristic interpretations of the superiority of
virginity to marriage, she is able to defend her multiple marriages and her
affinity for sex. Later, as she narrates the accounts of her five marriages,
she weaves throughout it antifeminist writings by such authors as Jerome,
Theophrastus, Walter Map, and Deschamps that attempt to restrain or
reform the excess or disorder of the sexual female body.
Antifeminist, protofeminist, historical figure, battered wife—Alisoun
morphs into an endless procession of roles within critical discourse. The
contradictory nature of these multiple roles emphasizes the potentially
subversive ambiguity that Alisoun represents; however, scholars often
ignore Alisoun’s ambiguity in favor of searching for the one “true” read-
ing of her. As Arthur Lindley remarks, such scholars assert “she’s good
or she’s bad, she’s smart or she’s dumb, Chaucer’s for her or against her”
when they should embrace that she’s not simply the Wife of Bath, “she is
the Wife of Both.”60 Some scholars find that Alisoun’s use of antifeminist
discourse is evidence of her adherence to her own imprisonment in the
patriarchal system: she must use male authority as her own.61 Others,
like Jill Mann and Carolyn Dinshaw, contend that she reworks male
authorities in order to allow multiple readings of their discourse—in-
cluding readings that highlight a woman’s perspective.62 Though Alisoun
rehearses such antifeminist diatribes as “we wyves wol oure vices hide /
Til we be fast, and thane we wol hem shewe— / Wel may that be a prov-
erebe of a shrewe!” (282–4) and “For half so boldely kan ther no man/
Swere and lyen, as a womman kan” (227–8), she makes no apologies
for her actions. Instead, she uses the discourse to indict her former hus-
bands by claiming they spouted such verbal abuse while they were drunk
(380–2). Her simultaneous resistance and adherence to male authority in
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both her prologue, which details her intellectual and physical opposition
to her husbands, and her tale, which recounts a female-based intercession
into a rape case, invite scholars to praise her as an activist against domestic
violence63 or condemn her as a “a proper wife who not only enjoys being
beaten up but who is also an incurable romantic.”64 Instead of resorting
to an “either/or” methodology that attempts to limit Alisoun as a figure
of her text and of the discourse on her text, I follow Lindley in resisting
a “true” reading of Alisoun as either protofeminist activist or oppressed
wife. Rather, I seek to exploit her complexity by adding another poten-
tial role to her list: disabled woman.
Chaucer, the narrator, begins his portrait of Alisoun by identifying
her deafness: “A good wif was ther of biside Bathe, / But she was somdel
deef, and that was scathe” (445–6). Describing her deafness as “scathe”
labels her deafness as both a pity (as the Riverside glosses the term) and as
a punishment. The MED defines scathe as a “matter of regret, a pity,” but
also explains that the term can signify “harm, injury, loss, damage” and
can specifically indicate “harm or injury resulting from battle or war”
or “harm resulting from punishment.” Chaucer here calls attention to
both the misfortune of her impairment and the impairment’s status as a
punishment. Though Jankin intends the impairment to teach Alisoun a
lesson, it is apparent that she does not heed to the message. Instead, like
a battle scar, Alisoun’s deafness serves as bodily evidence of her involve-
ment in and survival of a very real battle of the sexes.
It is clear that readers are to interpret the injury as a punishment for
Alisoun’s excessive behavior when Alisoun reports that, like the husbands
in the Knight’s book, at least one of her husbands resorts to physical vio-
lence in an attempt to control her unruly behavior:
Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle.

God lete his soule nevere come in helle!
And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe;
That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe,
And evere shal unto myn endyng day.
But in oure bed he was so fresshe and gay,
And therewithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose;
That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon,
He koude wynne again my love anon.
I trowe I loved hym best, for that he
Was of his love daungerous to me. (503–14)
That Alisoun admits to feeling the painful bruises that Jankin leaves
on her body makes evident his sometimes violent treatment of her; her
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body becomes the text that documents the material effects that anti-
feminist discourse and unreliable laws can have on women. Eve Salisbury
explains, “By verbally unveiling her bruised and battered body Alisoun
discloses a heretofore hidden body of evidence; she indicts legislation that
in theory claims to protect women while in practice it more often brutal-
izes them.”65 However, despite his violence towards her, Jankin remains
Alisoun’s favorite husband, especially in the bedroom. Indeed, one can
read Alisoun’s representation of the violence Jankin imposes on her as
thoroughly entangled in her sexual pleasure. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen has
shown, the Middle English lexicon allows for Jankin’s “daungerous” love
to be both “standoffish,” as The Riverside Chaucer glosses it, and “domi-
neering,” “overbearing,” and “risky.”66
Earlier in the prologue, Alisoun describes her own sexual desire as
“daungerous” when she asserts her plan to marry as many men as pos-
sible: “in wyf hod I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Makere hath
it sent. / If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe!” (149–51). Though the
Riverside glosses this use of the word as “grudgingly,” thus describing her
intent to use her “instrument” liberally, the other medieval denotations
of the word undoubtedly underscore Alisoun’s own penchant for erotic
violence. Alisoun’s entanglement of sexual desire and violence demon-
strates Desmond’s notion of the “domestication of violence,” or the “con-
ceptual link between eros and violence” in medieval marriage.67 Indeed,
throughout her prologue, Alisoun clearly connects sex to violence, claim-
ing to have made her first three husbands “swynke” until their deaths
(202) and bragging that she tortured her fourth husband for cheating
on her (494). Her tale explicitly fuses the link between sex and violence
that her prologue implies by recounting the rape of a nameless maiden.
Salisbury further analyzes Alisoun’s ambivalent stance on erotic violence,
noting that Alisoun’s ultimate act of resistance to male authority—her
defacement of the “book of wikked wyves” (685) from which Jankin
religiously reads—may actually signify her obedience to male mastery
and her desire for a physical reaction from her husband: “[The destruc-
tion of the book] is precisely the action that provokes a violent response
from Jankyn; he is willing neither to listen to her homily on appropriate
reading materials for husbands nor to tolerate her spontaneous editing of
the book she finds so reprehensible.”68
The book, a compilation of antifeminist texts that profiles the evils of
historical, mythological, and biblical wives, is the tangible evidence of
the patriarchal discourse—like the Knight’s conduct manual—that sets
out to regulate the disobedience of women. She violently damages the
narrative of such antifeminist discourse by ripping out three of the book’s
pages. The violence of her action is crucial: she wounds the very narrative
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that her deviant body produces and that produces her body as deviant.
The antifeminism of the book lambasts marriage by rehearsing the innate
evils of women. One of the authors included in the book is Trotula,
the eleventh-century physician who contributed to the medical treatise
known as the Trotula. While most scholars remain puzzled as to why the
female author, who offers tempered views on the female body and its
functions, is included in a list of antifeminist texts,69 they fail to point
out that the physician wrote only part of the text. Subsequent sections, as
my introduction outlines, root stereotypically negative feminine qualities
in the imperfect anatomy of the female body.70 Hansen adds, “Jankyn’s
and the Wife’s fight, summed up by her claim that she was ‘beten for
a book’ (712), represents what modern feminist critics have repeatedly
alleged, the real power of mere words and stories to do material damage
to women.” 71 Thus, Alisoun’s violence to the book anticipates Jankin’s
violence to her body, which ultimately results in her physical impair-
ment. After tearing out the pages, she hits Jankin on the cheek, knocking
him to the ground. He then arises and strikes the blow that leaves her deaf
in one ear (788–96).
As Irina Metzler shows, examples of literal deafness abound in medieval
medical textbooks and the miracle stories of saints. Authorities differenti-
ated between congenital and acquired deafness, and though treatments
existed, medical experts frequently found deafness to be incurable.72
Medieval people metaphorically interpreted deafness in a similar fashion
as blindness. The ears, like the eyes, were necessary portals through which
to receive important spiritual information. Hearing often symbolized
knowledge, while deafness signified a restricted ability to comprehend.
Storm reports that, in patristic writings, deafness signifies “the sickness
of disobedience and ignorance.” 73 Moreover, he finds that biblical writers
frequently used the metaphor of deafness, noting that, in such writings,
the ears become “the internal hearing of the soul, obedience to God’s
precepts, the hearing of faith, or understanding.” 74 Some writers even
linked deafness, like blindness, to non-Christians who purposefully turn
away from the truth of Christianity.75 Because of the many connections
between the social interpretations of deafness and blindness, it is prob-
able that the same excessive bodily and sexual deviances assoicated with
blind people may have become linked to those who were deaf. Chaucer’s
Alisoun certainly embodies many of those deviances—excessive sexual-
ity and bodily aberrance to cite a few.
Storm reads Alisoun’s deafness as a metaphor for her imperfect spiri-
tual state. Because the ear would be the portal through which Alisoun
would learn spiritual doctrine, its blockage would then signify her inabil-
ity to process such teachings. Storm cites Alisoun’s “misunderstanding”
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and “distortion” of religious texts in the prologue as evidence for her

deafness to spiritual authority and, in turn, her f lawed spiritual state.76
Storm’s reading of Alisoun’s deafness corresponds to Mitchell’s theory
of the “materiality of metaphor” brought about by the disabled body,
which states that narrative relies on the disabled body to represent greater
social maladies; in this case, physical deafness demonstrates the defective
spiritual state of sexually voracious wives. Storm fails to read Alisoun
closely enough, however. Her use of antifeminist discourse clearly does
not ref lect one who “takes her authorities [ . . . ] out of context, fails her-
self to understand and interpret them aright, and distorts them in the
recounting.” 77 While the literalness of Alisoun’s disability is indeed
clear-cut—both Chaucer as narrator and Alisoun speak of her deafness
(446, 668)—its metaphoric significance is not.
Though Alisoun may in fact “distort” her male authorities, she dem-
onstrates a solid understanding of them in the process of that distortion.
She is not completely “deaf ” to such teachings; on the contrary, she is
fully aware that she must understand the rules in order to know why she
breaks them. Many scholars have already noted Alisoun’s vast knowledge
of scriptural, classical, and patristic texts, as her close adherence to them
demonstrates.78 Consequently, Alisoun’s use and exclusion of such writ-
ings is a matter of choice, not ignorance. For instance, she deliberately cites
biblical passages that support her outlook on marriage and omits those
that do not.79 Additionally, as noted above, she manipulates antifeminist
discourse to represent not an argument against women, but one against
men who abuse their power over women. In a sense, Alisoun’s reworking
of her male authorities represents the woman-authored discourse that she
so desires (and that her own sexual body produces) when she states,
By God, if women hadde writen stories,

As clerkes han withinne hire oratories
They would han written of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (693–6)
Even though the teachings and language of male “auctoritee” may confine
Alisoun, she demonstrates how a knowledge of the rules of her oppressors
permits her to manipulate the rules into something less disabling: Jankin
burns the book and grants her sovereignty over their relationship and his
estate (813–22).
Jankin’s gift of sovereignty after his physical abuse of her seems to sug-
gest that Alisoun is actually rewarded by her physical impairment instead
of being punished. However, as is everything associated with the Wife of
Bath, her sovereignty remains ambiguous. Despite earning dominion over
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Jankin’s estate, Alisoun ultimately submits to him, remaining “kynde”

and “trewe” for the rest of their marriage (823, 825). This uncharacter-
istic obedience to Jankin conf licts with the freedom Alisoun claims to
have won, leaving readers to question whether she has dominated her
husband or has been dominated by him. The tale she tells her fellow pil-
grims is no exception. The rapist-knight marries an old hag—frequently
presumed to be an alter ego of Alisoun herself 80 —after receiving from
her the answer to what women most desire. After the knight grants the
loathly lady sovereignty, she comes into line with the values of the court,
transforming into a young, beautiful woman who is deferential to her
husband’s command. In both instances, a husband grants the freedom of
choice to a wife whose body is imperfect; thus, in both the prologue and
the tale, a woman’s imperfection leads to her own reward. However, such
reward is quickly tempered, for, in each case, the wife relinquishes her
newfound freedom to the husband.
Though Alisoun’s sovereignty in her marriage is tempered by her obe-
dience to her husband, the physical punishment she endures does not
silence her in the ways that the abuses in the Book of the Knight silence
women. While the wives of the Knight’s book lose their beauty, status,
voices, and even their lives, Alisoun’s physical disability does not immobi-
lize her in any way. As the “General Prologue” explains, Alisoun enjoys a
successful position as a skilled cloth-maker (447–8), thwarting any notion
that her impairment may impede her ability to contribute to the labor
force. In addition to being able to work, Alisoun is a seasoned pilgrim,
having traveled to such famous pilgrimage sites as Jerusalem, Rome,
Boulogne, Spain, and Cologne (463–6), and she presumably travels with-
out the company of Jankin.81 Thus, at first it seems that Alisoun travels
in spite of her impairment, but is equally possible that she travels because of
her impairment. In fact, in accordance with Mitchell and Snyder’s narra-
tive prosthesis, the entire narrative of the Canterbury Tales hinges on the
imperfect bodies of the pilgrims. As Chaucer reveals, each of his pilgrims
is making the trip in order to thank St. Thomas for his help during an
illness: “[ . . . ] to Caunterbury they wende / The hooly blissful martir
for to seke, / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke” (16–8).
Thomas á Becket’s shrine was a well-known site for miraculous cures at
the time Chaucer was writing. By 1275, Jacobus de Voragine included St.
Thomas in his compilation of the lives of the saints, The Golden Legend.
Voragine reports that at his tomb “our blessed Lord hath showed many
miracles” and that it would be impossible to recount them all.82 Despite
their vast number, Voragine does list some of the miracles, including
cures for blindness, muteness, and lameness. Notably, the saint is known
to grant “the deaf their hearing.”83 This begs the question, is Alisoun
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traveling to Canterbury—and has she traveled to other shrines—in search

of a cure for her deafness?
As Metzler has shown, medieval medical textbooks generally treat
deafness, especially congenital deafness and deafness longer than three
years, as incurable.84 Though Chaucer does not specify how many years
have lapsed since Alisoun lost part of her hearing, it is possible to infer
that more than a few years have passed, especially when Alisoun speaks
in the past tense of their reformed relationship: she reminisces of the time
“after that day” when they stopped fighting and reports that she “was to
hym as kynde / As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, / And also trewe,
and so was he to me” (822, 823–5). Moreover, while Alisoun’s deafness is
acquired and partial, medical practitioners would most likely consider it
irreversible since it was caused by an injury and not a disease of the ear.85
As a result of the existence of few reliable medical treatments for her hear-
ing loss, Alisoun may have resorted to seeking out a miraculous cure.
However, as always, nothing is straightforward when it comes to
Alisoun. Because she declares that her intentions to go on pilgrimages
are not devout, we cannot conclude irrefutably that she is searching for a
miraculous cure. On her own admission, Alisoun asserts that her love of
pilgrimages is based on “leyser” and seeing and being seen (551–3):
Therefore I made my visitaciouns

To vigilies and to processiouns,
To prechyng eek, and to thise pilgrimages,
To pleyes of miyracles, and to mariages,
And wered upon my gaye scarlet gytes. (555–9)
Thus, perhaps the more interesting question here is whether Alisoun is

using her deafness as a rationale for going on pilgrimages, or, in other
words, taking vacations under the guise of pilgrimage. Could she, like
Dame Sirith and May, be exploiting her disability for personal gain? It
is certainly not unwarranted to think so. Alisoun has no qualms about
feigning bodily infirmity in order to get what she wants from Jankin; after
he hits her ear, she falls to the ground, pretending to die. Immediately
remorseful, he kneels at her side, and she quickly strikes him back, which
leads him to relinquish his land and estate to her (796–821).
Nevertheless, in the process of becoming enabled through the physi-
cal abuse her husband doles out, Alisoun’s body becomes permanently
altered. But, unlike the silent wives of the Knight’s book, Alisoun fights
back, not only by striking Jankin but also by gaining temporary “gov-
ernance” of his “tonge” (814–5). In a mutual act of violence, corporal
punishment disciplines both Alisoun’s deviant body and Jankin’s abusive
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body. Only Alisoun’s body, however, remains permanently impaired;

though Jankin may feasibly escape from his wife’s control (and perhaps
has, as her prologue and tale imply), Alisoun’s deafness is likely to be
never reversed. Alisoun’s story, thus, begins and ends with disability. Her
disability produces her narrative, which is a response to the antifemi-
nist discourse that seeks to limit disorderly female bodies like her own.
Therefore, the prologue directly hinges on her sexual body, and the anti-
feminist discourse woven throughout constantly threatens to limit it. By
examining these texts through a lens that considers gender and disability,
we find that narrative drive takes on a “masculine” role that seeks to
control “feminine” deviance.
What happens to the wives of the Book of the Knight and Alisoun,
then, demonstrates that narratorial control over unruly female characters
is inscribed in the text, and, often, that control takes the form of disabling
physical violence. Alisoun, however, attempts to resist such masculine
control by turning the violence upon her husband and his book. But,
when she crosses the line by attempting to disable a man and his text,
she bears the mark of her punishment on her body. We are left ask-
ing whether Alisoun breaks free from male authority by exploiting her
impairments, or whether she simply reiterates the cycle present in texts
like the Book of the Knight: woman deviates from man, man physically
abuses woman, and woman defers to man. We will continue this explo-
ration in the next chapter by considering women who are punished by
supernatural sources.
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9780230105119_04_ch02.indd 72 9/20/2010 3:26:28 PM
CHAPTER 3
REFIGURING DISABILITY: DEVIANCE,

PUNISHMENT, AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN
BISCLAVRET, SIR LAUNFAL, AND THE
TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID
T o continue our discussion of medieval texts in which violence

against women results in physical impairment, this chapter will
examine texts that portray women punished by both divine agents and
humans (both male and female) under supernatural enchantment. In
Marie de France’s Bisclavret, Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, and Robert
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, a woman behaving subversively soon
suffers a violent punishment that causes her to incur a physical impair-
ment at the hands of a supernatural agent. The effect of incorporating
a supernatural agent into the narrative is twofold. First, supernatural
agents of punishment create an opening in the narrative that allows for a
critical assessment of discourses that present women as inherently defec-
tive in both body and character. Second, the supernatural punishments
represent an intrinsic narrative drive to control the deviancy that the
unruly female character creates. However, instead of neatly concluding
the narrative, the bodily impairments caused by the punishment of the
character end up producing alternative narratives that challenge common
medieval notions of femaleness, femininity, and disability. As a result,
these alternative narratives work against the fundamental narrative drive
to control textual deviancy—represented by unruly women—by cri-
tiquing the very notions of femininity and disability upon which the
text’s deviancy is based. The supernatural elements, thus, provide a space
in each text for a critical analysis of dominant representations of women
and ablebodiedness.
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Textual/Sexual (Re)production in Marie de

France’s Bisclavret
Considered the earliest known female French poet, Marie de France prob-
ably wrote for the Norman-ruled British court in the twelfth century.1
Little is known about Marie except for her name (which she identifies in
Guigemar, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, and the epilogue of her Fables) and her
works—a collection of Breton Lais, a collection of Fables, and the moral
tale St. Patrick’s Purgatory.2 Marie’s lais, from which Bisclavret comes, are
short, rhymed tales of Celtic origin that often contain chivalric and/or
supernatural elements. In her Prologue to the Lais, Marie claims to be con-
verting the original oral Breton tales into written text (33–40).
Scholars have often commented on whether Marie’s status as a woman
writing for a male-dominated court could have affected her narrative
style. Although evidently educated (in addition to writing in Anglo-
Norman French, she demonstrates knowledge of Breton, Latin, and
English in her translations), Marie takes great pains to prove not only her
ability, but also her suitability as a woman writer. Stephen Nichols notes,
“Perhaps, as woman, because she could not enjoy the advantages of a
clerkly education, her prologue [to the Lais] takes rather more pains than
others of the period to spell out the nature of her knowledge and how she
intends to use it.”3 For instance, in the Prologue, she asserts that one who
is gifted at writing should not hide her talent from others:
Ki Deus ad duné escïence

E de parler bone eloquence
Ne s’en deit taisir ne celer,
Ainz se deit voluntiers mustrer. (1–4)
[Whoever has received knowledge
And eloquence in speech from God
Should not be silent or secretive
But demonstrate it willingly.]
Thus, instead of secreting away her skill, Marie chooses to continue to

preserve the oral tales she has heard by transforming them “into word
and rhyme” for public consumption even though such labors have kept
her awake at night (40, 41). Marie’s hard work into the night demon-
strates her commitment to perfecting her craft. Moreover, as Nichols has
surmised, Marie’s labors into the night suggest the economic value of her
writing and her desire for patronage.4 Diana Faust adds that her nightly
writing may have been more than a vocation; it may have been more akin
“to an obsession” that “preempted even sleep.”5 Perhaps most intrigu-
ingly, Faust suggests that Marie’s gender may have compelled her to take
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D E V I A N C E , P U N I S H M E N T, S U P E R N A T U R A L 75
the precautions of composing “her written narratives in secret, hidden

away from the eyes of others.”6 Faust links Marie’s writing in the night to
several of her female characters’ propensity for creating secret narratives
in the Lais. I note, however, that Marie’s desire not to “secret away” her
writing skills, her secret night writing, and her prominent announcement
of her authorship illustrate several contradictions that uniquely demon-
strate her vexed position as a female court poet.
In addition to demonstrating Marie’s need to defend her marginal
position as a female court poet, Marie’s narrative techniques in her Lais
often reveal a particular form of writing that several scholars attribute
to the medieval understanding of women. Nichols links Marie’s conver-
sion of oral folk tales into written texts not just to the hybrid culture
of Anglo-Norman England but to her own status as a woman as well.7
He argues that Marie’s meshing of oral culture and literacy forms “an
inversion of the usual medieval hierarchy where Latin represents iden-
tity and power [ . . . ] while the folk culture figures as a marginalized
other.”8 This technique allows her to connect the masculine discourse
of “authoritative institutions” with folk traditions commonly “associ-
ated with the domestic labor of women—the spinning song (chanson de
toile)—so-called because it was long assumed that women sang such songs
while working.”9 Because it straddles the line between elite and popular
culture, Marie’s poetry demarcates a f luid space that both acknowledges
the changing Anglo-Norman culture and includes women in the liter-
ary audience.
Michelle Freeman’s earlier article anticipates Nichols’s findings.
Freeman finds that Marie’s narrative structure—particularly her use of
narratorial beginnings, such as prologues, etymologies, and origin sto-
ries—represents Marie’s desire to gender the (male) literary tradition by
rewriting male-authored discourses from a gendered perspective that
relies upon notions of textual production and female reproduction.10
Using what Freeman calls a “poetics of silence,” Marie purposefully
omits elements crucial to the production of her text (i.e., she does not
quote or translate her sources), thus revealing a “feminine” poetics that
may be viewed as a “paradoxical absence-presence that brings forth, that
gives birth to and speaks the poem before us.”11 Similarly, Rupert Pickens
links Marie’s narrative style to female (re)production by asserting that
Marie’s use of violence and sexually ambiguous characters in the Lais
exploits the connections between creative and procreative fruitfulness in
order to portray “the nature of womanly writing.”12 Pickens focuses on
Marie’s frequent use of the “body poetic,” a sexually ambiguous body
that both produces and is the product of discourse, a body that is “the
locus ofproductive textuality born in pain.”13 Marie’s sexually ambiguous
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characters, who are often subject to violent acts, create textual and/or
oral discourse as a result of enduring bodily violence. Pickens aligns these
characters and the often painful processes they endure in order to create
their own discourse not only with Marie’s sexually ambiguous narrator,
but also with Marie herself, a woman author who Pickens claims must
present herself as androgynous so that her texts are accepted by a male-
dominated court.
Pickens’s theory that bodily violence produces discourse resembles
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, or
the notion that literary discourse depends upon a deviance—one that is
often represented by a physically impaired character—that must be “cor-
rected” by the text’s narrative drive. In other words, a disabled body is
always already both the producer and the product of narrative. As chap-
ter 2 demonstrates, frequently this narrative drive presents itself as a mas-
culine force that employs male agents that use crippling physical violence
in order to restrain the feminine deviance—usually represented by an
unruly woman—in the text. Readers may wonder why a female author
like Marie, whose narrative style may be called “feminine,” also uses cor-
poral punishment that results in impairment in order to temper unruly
women. This is not a question I seek to answer here. Unlike scholars such
as Pickens and Freeman, I do not wish to make an issue of Marie’s sex;
rather, I hope to explore how texts that employ supernatural elements
such as Bisclavret—whether written by men or women—produce alter-
native representations of the female and/or disabled body that frustrate
the closure demanded by dominant narrative drives. The supernatural
elements of the romances this chapter examines represent what we may
call a “feminine” form of writing that challenges the “masculine” narra-
tive drive toward closure that is often present in textual representations
of female and/or disabled bodies, for it allows for the presence of slip-
pages that contradict dominant notions of gendered and disabled bod-
ies. As a result, such a form of writing is not dependent upon the sex of
the author since it is not a product of authorial intention. By keeping in
mind the discursively productive violence in Marie’s Lais and the ways in
which that violence relates to female (re)production, both textually and
bodily, I argue that Marie’s representation of disability, gender, and tex-
tual production in her lay Bisclavret simultaneously ref lects and challenges
medieval religious, medical, and social notions of the female reproductive
body as concomitant to the disabled body.
In Bisclavret, Marie recounts the tale of a well-respected nobleman
whom she calls Bisclavret, who just happens to turn into a werewolf for
three days every week, and his wife, who just happens to be terrified of
werewolves. After puzzling over her husband’s unexplained absences for
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some time, Bisclavret’s wife, suspicious that her husband may be cheat-
ing on her, seductively cajoles Bisclavret into revealing his secret. After
he tells her his secret, Bisclavret’s wife, terrified of having to sleep with
a werewolf, hides her husband’s clothing, his key back into his human
form, and runs off with a former love interest. Meanwhile, Bisclavret, in
his werewolf form, befriends the king and becomes a beloved pet of the
court. When he sees his wife sometime later, he viciously attacks her,
tearing her nose from her face. She faces further torture by the court,
which believes in the werewolf ’s rational abilities, until she confesses to
her crime and her husband’s clothing is returned. The king then exiles
the wife and many of her female offspring are born without noses.
In studies of the poem, scholars most frequently focus on Marie’s use
of lycanthropy both metaphorically and etymologically or the poem’s
portrayal of the fragility of the human–beast binary, noting that bestial
status is only a garment away.14 Often, scholars note that the narrator’s
explicit sympathy for the wolf-husband, despite beginning the poem with
a detail of the viciousness of werewolves, leads readers to discover that
the real beast in the tale is Bisclavret’s disloyal wife and that her mutilated
face serves as external evidence of her internal sinfulness. Some scholars,
however, choose to examine the poem more fully from the wife’s per-
spective, questioning why a female author would portray her only female
character in the lay as an unpardonable traitor. Kerry Shea, drawing on
Eve Sedgwick, finds that the text centers on the bonding of male char-
acters, particularly Bisclavret and the king, “at the expense of the only
woman in the text,” thus forcing the animal–human dichotomy setup at
the beginning of the poem to become male–female.15 Ultimately, Shea
affirms that Marie’s tale (and its Old-Norse redaction) demonstrates how
the male court must unify itself through the exiling of a woman. Some
scholars who focus on Marie’s sex, such as Paul Creamer, remain troubled
by a text written by a woman that features a narrator who voices overt
compassion for Bisclavret (and, in turn, the male court) and blatant cen-
sure of his wife and even accuse Marie of creating an “insidious woman-
hating universe.”16
While Shea and Creamer rightly expose the gender biases in the text,
neither considers whether Marie’s tale may hinge on such contradictions
in order to make visible that which is silenced when one remains “faith-
ful to a unified vision which sees and rejects the threat of Woman [or any
other marginalized figure or group].”17 Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner chal-
lenges scholarship that condemns Marie for the lay’s perceived misogyny
by postulating that the author’s negative depiction of the wife allows for
commentary on the existence of a dual nature (animal–human) within
men and women. By examining the situation from the wife’s point of
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view, Bruckner finds the wife’s intense fear of sleeping with her hus-
band “neither unwise nor unrealistic” particularly with respect to scrip-
tural, historical, and folkloric understandings of werewolves throughout
Europe in the Middle Ages.18 With this in mind, Bruckner questions tra-
ditional readings of the lay by asking, “Is Bisclavret simply a tale invented
to explain a line of noseless females? Should we read this ending straight
or can we discern a note of subtle irony in Marie’s tone, which prob-
lematizes the wife’s fate?”19 Bruckner ultimately contends that Marie
juxtaposes the general and the specific in order to demonstrate that all
humans, male and female, are “responsible for controlling the animal part
of [their] natures”: the specific example of Bisclavret’s logic and rational-
ity contrasts with the ferocity of the werewolves at the beginning of the
poem, whereas the specific case of the wife’s unruliness contrasts with the
possible virtuousness of her female progeny, whose variable noselessness
suggests that not all of the wife’s descendants have a share in their ances-
tor’s misconduct.20
Like Creamer and Shea, I acknowledge the apparent misogyny of
Marie’s tale: Marie’s narrator makes clear that the punishment Bisclavret
inf licts on his wife is justified. However, I also side with Bruckner in
detecting a paradoxical undercurrent in the tale that, I argue, exposes the
illusory nature of both the perfect body politic—the unified, all-male
court—and the perfect female body (which, ironically, must be rendered
imperfect in order for the male bonds of the court to survive). I contend
that the supernatural elements of the text produce this double meaning
through the vehicles of Bisclavret’s and his wife’s aberrant bodies.
Marie’s text follows Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis
by beginning with the “problem” of Bisclavret’s lycanthropy. She begins
the tale by describing the horrific nature of werewolves as a group:
Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage;

Tant cum il est en cele rage,
Hummes devure, grant mal fait,
Es granz forez converse e vait. (9–12)
[A werewolf is a savage beast;
While his fury is on him
He eats men, does much harm,
Goes deep in the forest to live.]
In her study of the history of the lycanthropic motif in ancient and

medieval folklore, scripture, legal discourse, and literature, Kathryn
Holten explains that the wolf often takes the form of an “evil beast”
that is untrustworthy, dangerous, and even taboo.21 The werewolf myth,
then, reiterates these connotations while also accentuating the thin line
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between humanity and beastliness: “The ability to change from man into
animal is only part of the terrifying power of the werewolf. The real vio-
lence of the metamorphosis is in the loss of humanity, the transformation
into not only the other, but the opposite.”22 As Holten observes, in his
loss of humanity, the werewolf loses his ability to communicate through
language, the most important identifying factor of humanity. Moreover,
Holten notes that the wolf was commonly associated with criminals, sex-
ual deviants, and even lepers, all of which, because of their physical aber-
rancies, were frequently exiled from their communities.23 Here, Holten
emphasizes the werewolf ’s Otherness, but she does not link explicitly
the werewolf ’s deviant form to disability. However, in the werewolf ’s
muteness and physically deviant body, he suggests the physically impaired
human. Jean Jorgenson further exposes the link between the werewolf and
the physically impaired, noting that a widespread ancient belief stipulated
“that eye contact with a wolf causes muteness.”24And, like the physically
impaired, Bisclavret takes on a feminized role throughout much of the
tale by being dominated by his wife and serving as a pet to the king.25 It is
only after the curing of his “ailment” that Bisclavret is able to recuperate
his masculine state and rejoin the masculine realm of the court.
Important to our understanding of Bisclavret’s lycanthropic status in
particular is the distinction between voluntary and involuntary were-
wolves. While voluntary werewolves choose to take on their bestial forms
at will, involuntary werewolves are victim to their lycanthropic states.
Holten explains that only involuntary werewolves possess the ability to
successfully repent and thus be restored to their human forms.26 With
his uncanny ability to convey his humanity and rationality despite his
muteness, Bisclavret undoubtedly falls under the category of an invol-
untary werewolf. The voluntary–involuntary distinction also recalls one
common medieval belief that congenital (or involuntary) impairments
did not necessarily suggest a person’s inward sinfulness.27 On the other
hand, physical impairments incurred later in life may have signified a
divine punishment for sinful behavior and could, consequently, be con-
sidered a voluntary impairment. In some saints’ lives, for example, unre-
pentant folks are actually punished with further impairments instead of
being cured.28
By beginning her tale with Bisclavret’s physically deviant body, Marie
sets up Bisclavret as a “problem” in need of a solution—or a deviant body
in need of restoration to a norm—a narrative structure quite similar to
those in other werewolf tales. Holten explains that many werewolf tales
require a “substitution” of one victim for another in order for the first
werewolf to be restored to his human form.29 In this case, Marie’s text
systematically animalizes Bisclavret’s wife, until her deviancy surpasses
9780230105119_05_ch03.indd 79 9/20/2010 1:15:42 PM

that of her husband. Through her betrayal of her husband by, first, hid-
ing his clothing and, second, seducing a former lover, Bisclavret’s wife
takes on the characteristics of the truly bestial, and she incurs the physi-
cal equivalent of her moral sins when Bisclavret bites off her nose. The
wife’s punishment uncannily resembles the effects of leprosy, as William
Sayers has found: “When she fails in her effort to keep her husband per-
manently exiled from the human state, she is appropriately punished by
banishment and a physical disfiguration, the loss of her nose to the wolf ’s
bite, strikingly similar to the effects of leprosy.”30 Medieval thought
often associated the leper, outcast from society due to his or her physical
deviance, with sexual transgression and moral corruption and frequently
cast leprosy as a divine punishment for sin.31 Due to her disfigurement,
Bisclavret’s wife not only would have an appearance similar to that of a
leper, whose face would be covered in open wounds, but also would be
subject to the same treatment: banishment from society. Holten adds that,
“on an etymological stratum, the Latin lupa, for she-wolf, was slang for
prostitute, and lupanda, the word for brothel. Lupa/lepra associations are
frequent and numerous enough to unify the traditional belief in were-
wolf metamorphosis with associations between the wolf and outlaws,
sexual abandon, and leprosy.”32 In his “supernatural” state, Bisclavret is
not merely a monster; he’s also feminized. It is only through the maiming
of his wife’s body that he can retrieve his masculinity. Bisclavret’s wife,
the voluntary wolf, thus supplants her husband, the involuntary wolf, and
aids in his restoration to his human body and the body of the court.
The punishment of Bisclavret’s wife aligns her, in both social and legal
understandings, with criminals, heretics, prostitutes, and other outcasts
often associated with unruly bodies. In fact, the removal of one’s nose was
a common punishment for adulterous women in medieval laws and for
traitors in the chanson de geste (song of heroic deeds), and, consequently,
in the logic of the tale, becomes a fitting fate for the wife.33 Marie her-
self refers to the punishment as particularly horrific, exclaiming, “Que li
peüst il faire pis? (What worse thing could he have done to her?)” (236). As
chapter 2 notes, the removal of a woman’s nose by force can be a particu-
larly debilitating punishment, for it not only mars a woman’s beauty, but
also serves as a sort of castration of a dominant woman. In his study of
blinding and castration as punishment in medieval law, Klaus van Eickels
finds that cutting off a woman’s nose corresponded to male castration:
“Cutting off the genitals was a punishment that could only be conve-
niently inf licted on men. The closest female equivalent consisted in [sic]
cutting off the nose. Based on the assumption that a woman—unlike a
man—could not force sexual intercourse but had to rely on her physical
attractiveness in order to procreate, disfiguring a woman’s face could be
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considered tantamount to castration.”34 With Bisclavret fully feminized

by his deviant physical state and his wife’s betrayal, Bisclavret’s wife takes
on an overtly masculine role that is only brought in check when her “phal-
lus” is removed. Pickens notes, “[T]here . . . lies in the lady’s mutilation
the suggestion that, in avenging himself, the werewolf deprives his wife
of a phallus–like appendage, a monstrously unnatural sign of her aggres-
sion and treachery—a horrific castration.”35 While it might seem that the
wife’s punishment defeminizes the lady because it renders her unattract-
ive, the loss of her nose actually reinstates the lady to her feminized state
and reiterates the “deformed” status of the female body in relation to the
male body. Shea affirms that the lady’s castration through the loss of her
nose only reaffirms the “no-thingness,” to borrow Luce Irigaray’s term,
of the female body: “[H]er ‘castration’ symbolized through her body is
in relation to the entire male social system which finds unity through
its alienation of her.”36 Because Bisclavret attacks his wife as a werewolf,
the necessity of his wife’s punishment to his rehabilitation becomes clear:
Bisclavret can only retrieve his masculinity, humanity, body, and eco-
nomic status after he demonstrates his ability to “violently, visually dis-
sociate himself from the sexual difference of Woman.”37
With Bisclavret restored to his former state and his wife exiled by the
male-dominated courtly community, it would seem that Marie’s narra-
tive has achieved closure, or filled the narrative gap that the werewolf ’s
deviance produced; however, the tale does not end in the literary present
of Bisclavret’s rehabilitation. Instead, the narrative projects its readers/
audience into an indeterminate future by focusing on the hereditary
nature of the lady’s disfigurement:
Enfanze en ad asez eü;

Puis unt esté bien cuneü
E del semblant e del visage:
Plusurs des femmes del lignage,
C’est veritez, senz new sunt neies
E sovent ierent esnasees. (309–14)
[She had several children
who were widely known
for their appearance:
several women of the family
were actually born without noses,
and lived out their lives noseless.]
Bisclavret’s wife, like Eve, passes on the mark of her punishment to her
female progeny. It is the lady’s improper actions, her resultant physical
difference, and her potential for producing deviant offspring that make
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her especially threatening to the masculine culture of the tale. As such,

she must be “alienated and branded both because of her visible difference
and her ability to reproduce beings like herself.”38 The fear that the lady
and her disfigured descendants generate underscores the inherent con-
nection between the female body, with its attendant (albeit stereotypic)
feminine qualities, and a woman’s ability to infinitely (re)produce physi-
cal deviance.
While it seems that Marie’s tale simply reiterates misogynistic notions
of femininity and the female anatomy, I propose that the tale’s ending
suggests a challenge to such notions. If we consider both Freeman’s and
Pickens’s claims that Marie’s writing expresses a “feminine” poetics, par-
ticularly in its ties to both female textual and sexual (re)production, we
can re-examine the seemingly antifemale realm of Bisclavret. As Pickens
suggests, bodily violence produces text in the lai. Indeed, it is the were-
wolf ’s ability to threaten violence against humans that generates the lai
itself. Moreover, due to Bisclavret’s inability to communicate his own
story through language, the king demands the lady be tortured, which
results in her retelling the events. Pickens explains, “What is most mean-
ingful in the violence wreaked upon the lady in Bisclavret, as her body is
violated by an executioner’s ministrations, is that it brings forth text, her
confession under torture.”39
Female textual production caused by violence is a common element in
Marie’s lais. Diana Faust finds that Marie’s female characters frequently
create narratives “because of masculine actions, usually violent ones,
inf licted upon the women.”40 Some of these narratives assume forms
beyond the written or spoken word, such as Laustic’s embroidered cloth
and Guigemar’s mural, when women either lose or are denied the ability
to write or speak. In a similar fashion, I contend that we can read the
end of the tale as an example of feminine text produced through vio-
lence. Though Bisclavret’s wife does not speak for the rest of the poem
after her torture, she remains able to communicate the infinitely sub-
versive power of feminine text through her offspring that bear the sign
of her story. Each daughter born noseless possesses a physical deviance
that is sure to generate narrative, the explanation for the origin of the
defect: “Presumably this speech act [the lady’s confession] will perpetu-
ate itself in repetitions, since her and her daughters’ wolf-like appear-
ances will require explanation.”41 The lady, thus, in her procreation of
noseless women, produces her own body as discursive and reproduces
other discursive bodies that speak a narrative of both femininity and
impairment.
Although Freeman calls the “text” produced by the lady’s female
descendants “a matrilineal narrative of dishonor,” I assert that the narrative
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does more than simply shame Bisclavret’s wife and condemn women in
general. According to Mitchell and Snyder, the gap created by a devi-
ant body produces narrative that seeks to close the gap, usually through
the cure, expulsion, or elimination of that body. However, the limitless
future that the end of the tale posits suggests that each subsequent gen-
eration of female descendants will endlessly repeat the lady’s narrative
history. Thus, the narrative cannot conclude; it must infinitely repeat. As
Judith Butler has explained in her study of gender, endless repetition does
not have to be repressive. On the contrary, it can be liberating in that
repetition leaves room for “mistakes,” or exceptions to the rule. These
exceptions allow space for subversion that calls attention to the arbitrary
and illusive nature of particular identities. Butler writes:
The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because
signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that
both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the produc-
tion of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place
within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be
located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules
governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alter-
native domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new possibilities for gender
that contest the rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms, then it is only within
the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes
possible.42
Specifically, Butler focuses on parody’s ability to make public the illusory

nature of gender identity. Here, the lady’s noseless descendants expose
the artifice of the “normal” body and, in particular, the “normal” female
body. Marie herself suggests the variations within repetition in her dis-
closure that some of the lady’s descendants were born with noses, some
without (312–14). While some bear the mark of their ancestor’s subversion
of gender norms and, in turn, the mark of physical deviance, others lack
any overt sign of that subversion and may be able to “pass,” thereby avoid-
ing the process of stigmatization that their other relatives must endure.43
The noseless daughters, then, represent the “necessary failures” produced
by the compulsory demands of gender and physical ability, whereas the
daughters with noses uphold those demands.44 Ultimately, the inevitable
deviancies within the repetition of the lady’s female lineage and, in turn,
her history expose the inauthenticity of both a copy and its supposed ori-
gin. Marie’s textual/sexual (re)production, then, simultaneously ref lects
and subverts medieval codes of gender and ablebodiedness, implying that
the notions of woman as castrated (or disabled) man and woman in need
of castration (or disabling) are merely artifice.
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The Female “Counter court” in Thomas Chestre’s

Sir Launfal
As my discussion of Bisclavret demonstrates, Marie’s tales often ref lect
negative social stereotypes in order to subvert them. Heather Arden
agrees, warning scholars against casting Marie’s “apparent failure
to directly challenge the social structures of her time, or her por-
trayal of the destructive qualities of some women” as representative
of a misogynistic view.45 Freeman adds that Marie’s use of villainous
female characters “might appear to stem from the clerkly misogyny
so prevalent in the medieval romance narrative,” but the author “in
fact uses the cliché to point out the dangers and the fallacies of such
facile stereotyping.”46 Another of Marie’s lais that depicts a “wicked”
female character but ultimately questions the oppressive social codes
that result in such misogynistic views of powerful women is Lanval.
In this tale, Lanval, one of King Arthur’s men, rejects the unfaith-
ful queen’s sexual advances. The queen then attacks his sexuality for
rejecting her:
‘Lanval,’ fete le, ‘bien le quit,

Vus n’amez gueres cel delit;
Asez le m’ad hum dit sovent
Que des femme n’avez talent’ (277–80).
[‘Lanval,’ she said, ‘I am sure
You don’t care for such pleasure;
People have often told me
That you have no interest in women.’]
In response, Lanval boasts that he has a female lover much more beauti-
ful than the queen, a move that breaks the vow of secrecy he has made
to his lover, who is a fairy. Lanval is brought to trial for insulting the
queen’s beauty, but his fairy lover shows up, proving her beauty to the
court. Lanval leaves the court with his lover, ultimately rejecting the
court for the fairy world. As this short summary suggests, Marie’s pro-
tagonist discards the court—a masculine space that unites itself through
the objectification of women like the queen—for an alternate space that
celebrates rather than excludes Otherness. As Sharon Kinoshita finds,
“In Lanval, [Marie] imagines an outside to the feudal order that relegates
women to the status of objects of exchange underpinning the patriar-
chal system.”47 Jacqueline Eccles objects to Kinoshita’s labeling of Marie’s
writing as feminist, but agrees that the poet’s “challenge to the social
make-up of her society certainly proves that she was more than conscious
of her power to effect change through her writing.”48 Marie’s Lanval,
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then, like Bisclavret, ref lects a subversion of the masculine courtly realm
through the use of sexually excessive female characters.
Though Lanval does not explicitly incorporate female physical impair-
ment in the way Bisclavret does, its fourteenth-century English redaction
Sir Launfal makes it central. Written by Thomas Chestre, of whom little
is known because he, like Marie, exists almost solely as a name in a poem
(he announces his authorship in line 1039), Sir Launfal is a version of the
Lanval tale, probably based on the Middle English Sir Landevale, a more
direct translation of Marie’s text, and the Old French Graelant, an ana-
logue of Marie’s tale.49 While Chestre makes several changes and addi-
tions to his sources, perhaps the most striking is the fairy lover Tryamour’s
blinding of Queen Gwenore. As in Bisclavret, a supernatural agent here
punishes an unruly woman through physical violence that results in per-
manent impairment. Chestre’s depiction of the punishment of a female
body by a supernatural figure, as my discussion below will demonstrate,
allows for unconscious slippages that reveal not only the ability of oppres-
sive societal strictures to produce powerful discourses on gender, class,
and ability, but also the inefficacy of the human system of justice at work
in Chestre’s tale and society.
As several scholars have noted, the changes Chestre makes to his sources
in both form and content ref lect the new middle-class consciousness char-
acteristic of the end of feudalism in the late fourteenth century. Chestre
uses the less aristocratic tail-rhyme form, the same form Chaucer paro-
dies in his “Tale of Sir Thopas;” incorporates popular folkloric elements
such as the fairy lover and the giant Sir Valentyne; and spends more time
developing Sir Launfal’s individual status as a romance hero by emphasiz-
ing his chivalric and economic successes and hardships. Although some
have concluded that Chestre’s “popular” version of the tale is inferior to
Marie’s (i.e., A.C. Spearing’s declaration that the poem is a “disaster”50),
Myra Tokes emphasizes that though Chestre’s tale makes use of a less
aristocratic poetic form than Marie’s, his version is certainly not “low
brow.”51 Myra Seaman calls Chestre’s retooling of the tale “Englishing”
and notes that scholars must consider Chestre’s particular sociohistorical
position when comparing his work to Marie’s.52 The tale clearly mocks
the courtly realm through its portrayals of King Artour as an inept and
passive figure and Gwenore as promiscuous, petty, and domineering and,
like Marie’s version, presents what we might call a “countercourt” in the
fairy world that Launfal ultimately chooses to join.53
Most important for my discussion here is Chestre’s emphasis on the
negative effects of having an “outsider” status in relation to Arthur’s
court, his much harsher depiction of Gwenore, and his inclusion of her
physical punishment by blinding. As my discussion will show, all three
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of these elements, which Chestre uniquely elaborates on or adds to his

version, are closely interrelated. Readers have often mentioned Chestre’s
accentuation of Launfal’s poverty and, thus, further exclusion from the
court. Spearing comments on the shame that Launfal must endure after
he falls out of favor at the court: Chestre portrays “not just poverty but a
descent from wealth, a social fall involving humiliation before others.”54
After Launfal leaves the court, he attempts to take up residence at the
mayor’s home. Because of his fall from royal favor, however, the mayor
can only offer Launfal a shed outside of his home (85–126).55 Launfal’s
movement from the court to the mayor’s home to finally a lowly shed
spatially demonstrates his fall from wealth. Launfal’s status as outside the
“normal” human realm is compounded when he realizes he cannot even
enter a church because of his poor dress (199–204). Launfal is only able to
reconcile his status as an outsider among other outsiders, the fairy women
of the forest. Here, in a space outside of the court, Launfal finds wealth,
love, and acceptance.
In addition to emphasizing Launfal’s status as an outsider, Chestre
marginalizes Gwenore by casting her as the tale’s villain. Haughty and
manipulative, Gwenore actively subverts her proper gendered role and
at times seems more powerful than her husband, whom Chestre casts as
passive. While Marie begins her tale with Arthur and his men forgetting
to give “femmes et tere” (17) to Lanval, Chestre states that Gwenore pur-
posefully leaves him out of the gift-giving ceremony at her wedding:
The Quene yaf yftes for the nones,

Golde and selver and precious stonys
Her curtasye to kythe.
Everych knight she gaf broche other ryng,
But Syr Launfal shce yaf nothyng—
That grevede hym many a sythe. (67–73)
Gwenore probably excludes Launfal because of his disdain for her. Chestre
tells us that Launfal and the other knights dislike the queen because of
her unfaithfulness to the king: “the lady bar los of swych word / That
sche hadde lemmannys under her lord” (46–7). Significant to our under-
standing of Chestre’s Gwenore as sexually excessive is her Irish heritage,
a detail Chestre reveals at the beginning of his poem. As Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen has noted, the need to produce a unified English identity in the
twelfth century led to the “monsterization” of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish
peoples. In other words, inhabitants of lands outside of what was consid-
ered England became associated with negative physical and social char-
acteristics. For instance, Cohen notes that, before and after the English
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conquest of Ireland, English writers often portrayed the Irish as sexu-

ally excessive and bloodthirsty barbarians or even likened them to were-
wolves.56 Though English rule in Ireland was waning at the time Chestre
was writing his romance, it is probable that such connotations still carried
weight in the popular medieval consciousness.
Due to Chestre’s harsh portrayal of Gwenore, her punishment, though
cruel, appears justified to many readers. Some argue that the blind-
ing operates on a metaphorical level. For instance, Spearing finds that
Gwenore’s blinding fulfills the tale’s emphasis on appearances, such as
Launfal’s appearance in front of others and the fairies’ bodies on display
throughout the poem.57 Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury agree that the
blinding appropriately punishes the queen’s sins despite its severity, for
it makes manifest Gwenore’s indiscretions.58 Other scholars contend that
the punishment suits the tale’s fixation on the law. Tokes notes that, as a
tale transforms into a more popular form, it often becomes focused on
guilt, the law, and the proper punishment of guilty parties. Thus, the tale’s
emphasis on Gwenore’s punishment ref lects the moral polarity common
in popular medieval romances.59 Dinah Hazell, in the only full-length
study devoted to the blinding episode, reads the punishment as a “pivotal
metaphor” to the overall tale that helps to expose the failures of the court
and its judicial systems in Chestre’s society.60 Hazell positions Gwenore’s
punishment—or, more aptly, Gwenore’s impaired body—as “the axis
of Chestre’s moral and social observations, and the absolute condemna-
tion of Arthurian society; rather than gratuitous violence or superf luous
appendage, the punishment of Gwennere recalls all of her sins and, by
implication, the weaknesses of Artour and his culture.”61 While I agree
with Hazell that the punishment is pivotal to Chestre’s tale, I find that
Hazell’s essay neglects to consider fully why the punishment of a female
body through blinding should serve as the central metaphor for Chestre’s
social commentary on the all-male realm of the royal (and legal) court.
If Chestre wanted to undercut the power of the court, then why is the
queen punished? Why not Artour? And, just why is Gwenore punished by
Tryamour, a supernatural figure, instead of by the court leaders?
One reason why Gwenore is punished with impairment instead of
Artour may be because Gwenore’s adulterous actions render him defec-
tive. Once “doughty” and generous (1, 28), Artour is now frequently con-
trolled by the whims of his adulterous wife. Though Artour himself is not
directly challenged, Laskaya and Salisbury contend that the tale’s contrast
of the marginal with the dominant succeeds in casting the courtly realm
as ineffectual and even “unmanly.”62 In this sense, we may view Artour
and his court as feminized, especially in relation to Gwenore’s unruliness,
which borders on overly masculine, and Launfal’s macho acts of knightly
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prowess. In particular, Launfal’s attack on and defeat of Sir Valentyne

and his knights directly criticizes the ethical values of nobles like Artour.
After being rewarded with money, a horse, and an assistant, Launfal wins a
prominent joust and garners the envy of Sir Valentyne, a Lombard knight
who stands at “fyftene feet” (512). At the request of Sir Valentyne, Launfal
travels to Lombardy and, with the help of his assistant Gyfre, slays the giant
and all of his lords (565–600, 610). Launfal’s annihilation of the Lombard
knights may be a not-so-subtle comment on the frequent lending of
money to nobles throughout Europe by Lombards. As noted in chapter 1,
Lombards, like Jews, were money lenders, a practice deemed unnatural by
Christian law. As such, medieval Christians sometimes viewed Lombards
derogatorily—both in character and in body. Moreover, because Jews
were associated with blindness, sexual promiscuity, femininity, and bodily
excess, Lombards could be subject to similar stereotypes.63 In this text, Sir
Valentyne’s giant body, a common medieval image that combines mascu-
line hypersexuality and feminine Otherness,64 aptly signifies—and perhaps
exaggerates—these stereotypes. Launfal’s destruction of the giant and his
knights criticizes the methods by which nobles obtain money and even
suggests that the middle class has the ability to achieve noble largesse by
wiping out those who fund the nobility. By asserting his masculinity over
the Lombards, Launfal further feminizes Artour and his men.
If the text already deems Artour ineffectual, then, as a consequence, the
body politic that he heads is rendered incomplete. Without a fully func-
tioning body, Artour and his kingdom are imperfect. As such, in the logic
of the text, it does not seem effective to punish Artour; impairing Artour
will only further impair the kingdom. On the other hand, Gwenore,
who has eschewed her femininity in favor of blatant masculinity, comes
to represent the force within the kingdom that must be extracted in order
to restore the kingdom to its proper status. As in Bisclavret, here an unruly
woman must be excluded in order to cement male unity.
Let us now consider why Gwenore is blinded in the first place. After
losing all of his fortunes, Launfal chances upon Dame Tryamour, a beau-
tiful fairy who offers her body and her money to Launfal as long as he
keeps their relationship secret. When Artour learns of Launfal’s new-
found wealth, he invites him back to the court to serve as a steward for
a feast. Gwenore soon sets her sights on procuring Launfal as her lover.
However, Launfal refuses her proposition, prompting Gwenore to accuse
him of not loving women and, by implication, loving other men:
Sche seyde, “Fy on the, thou coward!

Anhongeth worth thou hye and hard!
That thou ever were ybore!
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That thou lyvest, hyt ys pyté!

Thou lovyst no woman, ne no woman the—
Thou were worthy forlore!” (685–90)
Angered by her retort, Launfal boasts of the beauty of his lover, breaking
his vow. Gwenore informs Artour of the insult to her beauty, and Launfal
is brought to trial and forced to produce Tryamour in order to prove his
boast. It is at the trial that Gwenore utters the oath that seals her fate:
“ ‘Yf he bryngeth a fayrer thynge, / Put out my eeyn gray!’ ” (809–10).
As Hazell suggests, Gwenore’s oath, while impulsive, becomes a legally
binding contract due to its placement in the text:
The stanza in which she makes her oath is preceded by the judges’ medial
verdict on Launfal, and followed by the setting of the date on which he
must make his wager. The queen interjects her oath between Launfal’s
pledge to produce his love or lose his head, the finding of his guar-
antors; her oath is therefore bound to Launfal’s wajowr (811), which is
agreed to by the court, and her “rash promise” is transformed into a legal
agreement.65
Gwenore, thus, sets the parameters of her own punishment in exact terms
and unknowingly seals her own fate.
Throughout the history of the medieval West, the use of blinding
as punishment has been linked to a demonstration of power over an
inferior person or group. Early Christians often suffered blinding as a
penalty for their beliefs, and the punishment became a symbol of mar-
tyrdom.66 In fact, many saints’ lives include episodes in which a saintly
figure endures blinding, such as when St. Lucy’s torturers tear out her
eyes. Other saints’ lives recount instances in which a saint’s relics pun-
ish a sinner with blinding. For instance, The Book of Sainte Foy reports
that the saint repeatedly punished a man with blinding in one eye when
he sinned and then restored his eyesight when he repented.67 In the
medieval world, kings used blinding as a punishment for crimes against
royal power, such as treason, attacks on the king’s person, and political
or religious apostasy.68 As Geneviève Bürhrer-Thierry’s study on the
social valence of blinding as punishment in the early medieval West
affirms, the use of blinding as punishment by a king or other powerful
leader began as a symbol of the leader’s abuse of power. In later centuries,
when a king subjected a criminal to blinding in place of death, blinding
became a signifier of a leader’s mercy: “If the punishment of blinding
[due to revolts against the king] took on a clearly political character, we
should note that it was directly tied to the person of the king. Only the
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king might commute the punishment; and blinding was no longer a

result of his fury but, on the contrary, an effect of his piety.”69 Blinding
as punishment was thus a political punishment that demonstrated a king’s
authority, power, and clemency.
If the blinder’s actions showcased his forceful, yet merciful, control
over his subjects, the newly impaired body of the victim was likewise a
powerful signifier. As Edward Wheatley has found, social understand-
ings of physical blindness often became comingled with stereotypical
notions of the Jews as metaphorically blind due to their purposeful
“inability” to “see” and accept Christian beliefs. As a result, the pub-
lic often considered both groups in physically deviant terms, linking
them to greed, sexual impropriety, sexual impotence, femininity, and
willful ignorance.70 Combined with the political significations that fol-
lowed blinding as punishment, visual impairment was a multilayered
construct rife with meaning and thus open to multiple interpretations.
Van Eickels adds that blinding was often linked to castration and, in
turn, emasculation, in medieval Norman and Anglo-Norman society
due to the “laws of William the Conqueror,” which decreed that lead-
ers should enact blinding and castration in lieu of death against traitors
and criminals convicted of sexual sins.71 Such laws were based on the
notion that a crime that threatened the body politic was similar to an
attack on the body of the king, and, consequently, was subject to a simi-
larly harsh punishment. Van Eickels notes that leaders frequently used
such punishments in order to assert their political and physical power
over their political enemies, effectively “unmanning” them.72 Blinding
and castration, as a result, became tightly linked, causing blindness to
be associated with sexual and political impotence and emasculation.
Though such bodily punishments were rare in later medieval England,
it is likely that their literary depictions would evoke the dense subtext of
both the punishment and the crime: the literary depiction of a punish-
ment like the blinding in Sir Launfal “would make a strong impression,
and the motif may also have carried connotations of the severity of the
crimes, particularly to folk who may have witnessed or recalled the
punishment.” 73
While Van Eickels’s study focuses on the use of blinding and/or cas-
tration as a punishment for crimes committed by men, Chestre’s tale
punishes Gwenore, a move that keeps intact the connections between
blinding and castration. Due to Chestre’s overt portrayal of Gwenore
as socially deviant and even overly masculine, her blinding, like the
mutilation of Bisclavret’s wife, suggests her castration, or the render-
ing impotent of the threat that her unruly behavior represents. Just as
the disfigurement of Bisclavret’s wife serves as a physical punishment
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for her sexual indiscretions, the blinding of Gwenore underscores her

sexual promiscuity. As Eve Salisbury observes, Gwenore’s punishment
ref lects her sexual sins: Chestre’s “Guenevere exhibits a threatening sex-
ual libido that challenges not only the legal parameters of marriage but
the entire social order,” and, despite her crime’s status as “a lesser offense
than rape,” Gwenore endures a punishment often reserved for rapists and
other sexual offenders.74
As I note above, legal authorities used blinding to punish not only
sexual criminals but also those who threaten the king or his kingdom.
Significantly, Gwenore’s “crimes” are both sexual and politically trai-
torous in nature. Because of her well-documented adultery, Gwenore
directly jeopardizes the legitimacy of Artour’s lineage and, as such, poses
a threat to the stability of the body politic, a crime akin to an assault
on the king’s body and, consequently, punishable by blinding. In Sir
Launfal, Gwenore’s inability to ensure the production of a legitimate
royal heir is perhaps her greatest offense. Gwenore’s adulterous tenden-
cies are part of a complex characterization of Guenevere in the Arthurian
literary tradition. By the time Chestre was writing, Guenevere’s literary
reputation as simultaneously promiscuous and childless caused her to be
depicted as “a lascivious daughter of Eve and the primary cause of the
fall of Camelot.” 75 Though she is sexually active with multiple part-
ners, Guenevere’s sexual escapades are almost always cast as unfruitful in
medieval romance. In her study of the adulterous body of the queen in
medieval French romance, Peggy McCracken notes that romances fig-
ure an adulterous queen’s barrenness in two ways: she is either physically
unable to produce children, or, following Georges Duby, she is meta-
phorically barren, for an adulterous coupling would result in an illegiti-
mate heir.76 McCracken explains, “Many romances represent kings who
father children outside of marriage, but the separation of marriage and
childbirth is impossible for the queen. Any child of the queen is a child
of her marriage, and an illegitimate child in the royal family subverts
the proper succession of the crown and opens the possibility of political
chaos.” 77 As a result, the “unproductive” womb of an adulterous queen
is always already barren whether or not the queen suffers from physi-
cal infertility. The bodies of Guenevere and her literary successors like
Gwenore thus simultaneously take on the mutually exclusive but equally
threatening conditions of infertility and the ability to bear illegitimate
offspring.
According to McCracken, the queen’s body operates doubly, as a
site of the potential disruption of political, marital, and social unity
and as a site of the immediate removal of that potential power to dis-
rupt. By rendering her adulterous, medieval romance takes away the
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potential political power of the queen to serve as the “inf luential office
of mother of the king’s heir” and replaces it with the passive position
of love-object between two men.78 I contend that this removal, how-
ever, does not erase the adulterous queen’s equally inf luential office of
mother of an illegitimate heir. McCracken finds that romance often
erases the latent power of a queen’s maternity and instead focuses on
her adulterous and, as a result, “unfruitful” couplings. Consequently,
the queen’s promiscuity supplants her important role as the producer
of rightful heirs: “As the condition of the queen’s fidelity subsumes the
goal of proper succession, reproductive sexuality, through which the
queen is empowered, is displaced by a transgressive sexuality, through
which she loses status and inf luence at the court.” 79 While McCracken
reads a queen’s physical and metaphorical “barrenness” as a stumbling
block to her potential power as a mother to a king’s sons, I contend
that such “conditions” are themselves quite powerful.80 In chapter
1, for example, I consider the ways in which barrenness—whether
it be the result of an impaired reproductive system or adultery—can
be simultaneously hindering and enabling in medieval literature and
that some female characters exploit the very discourses that produce
stereotypic notions of women for their own gain. In my discussion
of Chaucer’s May, I found that her purported disability, an illegiti-
mate pregnancy, actually granted her the power to disrupt medieval
notions of social, marital, and bodily unity, whose cohesion can only
be formed through the exclusion of the feminine. In the same way,
Gwenore’s simultaneous potential for failing to produce a legitimate
heir and actually producing an illegitimate heir threatens the political
and social unity of the court, a fear that surfaces in Launfal and his fel-
low knight’s complaints about the queen’s fidelity. Gwenore’s crimes,
then—her promiscuity, jealousy, and unruliness—become focalized in
her “unfruitful” womb, the site of her doubly transgressive capability.
Her punishment of blinding symbolically castrates the power that her
promiscuous sexuality represents.
Significantly, it is an outsider to the court that squelches the threat
that Gwenore poses. After Tryamour and her company of ladies
have paraded into the court and Tryamour’s superior beauty is con-
firmed, Tryamour blows into Gwenore’s eyes, blinding her: “Wyth
that Dame Tryamour to the queen geth, / And blew on her swych a
breth / That never eft might sche se” (1006–8). Tryamour’s interces-
sion into the court’s system of justice is noteworthy, for it was within
the legal parameters of the court that Gwenore made her oath; thus, the
court itself should administer the punishment. As many scholars have
noted, Tryamour’s position as the text’s “minister of justice” drastically
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undercuts the power of the court to enforce the law.81 For instance,
Hazell finds that the intrusion of a supernatural agent into human jus-
tice exposes the problems of the court not only in Chestre’s text, but
also in his time: “Launfal ref lects an ingrained wariness and suspicion
by the populace, formed over a long period of time and succession of
reigns. The tension between monarchical and feudal interests, corrup-
tion at all levels of judicial administration, and the threat of mistreat-
ment and exploitation undergirded an established antagonism towards
the king, his royal representatives, and local enforcement officials.”82
Citing Edward III’s notoriously “corrupt” legal officers and Richard
II’s “f lagrant misuse and abuse of the law,” which included the brib-
ing of judges, Hazell notes that Chestre and his audience would warily
regard judicial proceedings and officials.83
It is with the use of a supernatural agent that Chestre is most effectively
able to assess critically the monarchical system of justice. Tryamour, as a
member of the realm of the “countercourt,” is able to do what Chestre’s
human characters are not: punish Gwenore within the precise param-
eters of human law while simultaneously critiquing those parameters.
Tryamour’s intervention thus showcases the court’s incompetence and
its need for an alternative administrator of justice. The folkloric connec-
tion between blinding and fairies also makes Tryamour the ideal choice
as Gwenore’s punisher: according to folk tales, humans who catch sight
of the fairy world are frequently blinded, sometimes by the breath of a
fairy.84
Tryamour not only serves as the tale’s minister of justice, but also
as Gwenore’s opponent. Chestre clearly sets up the two as literary foils
when he emphasizes each woman’s “eeyn gray” (810, 935) and royal
ancestry (Gwenore is the daughter of an Irish king and Tryamour the
daughter of the Fairy King). Like Gwenore, Tryamour is beautiful and
aristocratically adorned: Chestre describes her majestic purple dress
(937–48), majestic horse, and saddle (949–60), and even her luxuri-
ous “pavyloun,” which is richly decorated with jewels and lush fabrics
(265–78). Though the two are clearly connected, they are also decid-
edly different. Chestre emphasizes Tryamour’s generosity, trouthe, and
kindness, which contrast starkly with Gwenore’s greediness, duplic-
ity, and cruelty. As I note above, Gwenore’s blinding is intricately tied
to her excessive sexuality. It would seem, then, that, since Tryamour
assumes the role as Gwenore’s antithesis, she should represent the pin-
nacle of medieval female sexuality, chastity. On the contrary, Tryamour
is as hypersexual as Gwenore. When Launfal enters her tent upon their
first meeting, she is naked to the waist, lounging in bed: “For hete her
clothes down sche dede / Almest to her gerdylstede / Than lay sche
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uncovert” (289–91). Tryamour’s suggestive positioning upon her bed

overtly displays her sexuality. Chestre even tells us that because of the
lovers’ “play” later that evening, “lytll they sclepte that nyght” (349).
Later, Tryamour again displays her unabashed sexuality when she enters
the court, drops her cloak, and allows the men to eye her: “Sche ded
of her mantyll on the f let, / That men schuld her beholde the bet, /
Wythoute a more sojoure” (979–81).
The difference between Gwenore’s and Tyramour’s sexuality lies
within the potential (re)productivity each possesses. While Gwenore’s
sexual liaisons are “unfruitful” because they are adulterous, Tryamour’s
sexuality is explicitly linked with productiveness. In exchange for his
love and keeping their affair secret, Tryamour will provide Launfal with
a bottomless purse:
“I wyll the yeve an alner

Ymad of sylk and of gold cler,
Wyth fayre ymages thre.
As oft thou puttest the hond therinne,
A mark of gold thou schalt wynne
In wat place that thou be.” (319–24)
Here, Chestre unequivocally equates Tryamour’s sexual reproduction

with monetary gain, thus, conf lating Tryamour’s productive purse and
her reproductive organs. As Laskaya and Salisbury note, Chestre makes
use of the traditional descending catalogue technique in his descriptions
of the fairy-women’s bodies in the tale.85 Conventionally, medieval poets
guided readers’ eyes over beautiful bodies (usually women) by using a
descending catalogue technique that begins with a description of the
head or face and descends to the feet. Frequently, writers like Chaucer
manipulated the technique in order to draw attention to particular body
parts. For instance, in the “Miller’s Tale,” the poet lingers on Alison’s
mid-section, emphasizing her belted purse (3250–1). While Chaucer’s
emphasis on Alison’s waist highlights her sexualized body, as some critics
like H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. have acknowledged, his description of the
purse itself may allude to the vagina, with its “tassled silk” and “latoun”
signifying pubic hair (3251).86 Tryamour’s “purse,” a bag as equally deco-
rative as Alison’s but endowed with the capacity to infinitely produce,
becomes an unambiguous contrast to Gwenore’s womb, whose potential
for producing illegitimate heirs has the power to destroy a kingdom’s
political and material riches.
Tryamour, thus, appears to effectively accentuate Gwenore’s wrong-
doings; to this end, Tryamour seems to aptly fulfill the position of the
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agent of Gwenore’s punishment. As Gwenore’s punisher, however,

Tryamour does more than simply undercut the power of the court and
its queen: she offers an alternative system of social, political, and sexual
values. That the human realm in Sir Launfal punishes Gwenore’s exces-
sive sexuality demonstrates the threat of uncontrolled female sexuality to
the stability of the human court. The tale, however, presents Tryamour’s
open sexuality as productive, generous, and even ethical. For example,
Launfal uses the funds from Tryamour’s purse to participate in the Seven
Corporal Acts of Mercy, or the physical acts of kindness one can do to
demonstrate Christian compassion, including feeding and clothing the
sick and the poor (421–32).87 Far from being destructive, Tryamour’s
sexuality becomes generative and restorative, even pious. Sir Launfal,
thus, proposes a female-centered countercourt that not only critiques
the human system of justice in both Chestre’s tale and culture, but also
recasts female sexuality (and thereby bodiliness) as an enabling force.88
Indeed, Launfal finds Tryamour’s countercourt so attractive that he
rejects the human realm in favor of residing with his lover, a detail unique
to Chestre’s version on the tale. Although Launfal may periodically reen-
ter the courtly sphere in order to joust with other knights, our narrator
asserts that he is rarely, if ever, seen or heard from:
Thus Launfal, wythouten fable,

That noble knight of the Rounde Table,
Was take ynto Fayrye;
Seththe saw hym yn thys lond noman,
Ne no more of hym telle y ne can,
For soothe wythoute lye. (1033–8)
The prominence of the Other and the other-world that the tale high-
lights in its beginnings is here re-emphasized as a worthwhile alterna-
tive to the conventional courtly sphere. In Chestre, Artour’s kingdom is
corrupt, unjust, and led by an equally inept king, whose failings become
personified in the impaired body of his blind wife. Chestre’s use of a
supernatural figure as Gwenore’s punisher allows for her action to rep-
resent both a critique the human system of justice and a proposal of an
alternative to that system. Here, two female bodies, one disabled, one
disabling, work together to demonstrate two drastically different inter-
pretations of the female body. The tale, thus, simultaneously asserts and
transgresses misogynistic views of female sexuality and the female body
that ultimately situate Tryamour’s fairy world as a liminal but powerful
space where social and political notions as well as concepts of bodily and
sexual norms are refigured and reassessed.
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Leprosy, Disability, and the Female Body in

Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid
Like Bisclavret and Sir Launfal, Robert Henryson’s late fifteenth century
Testament of Cresseid portrays the bodily punishment of an unruly woman
by supernatural forces. In this tale, Henryson reworks Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde, revealing what happens to the oft-disliked heroine after her love
affair with Diomede ends. Because Chaucer leaves Criseyde’s fate unre-
solved, Henryson attempts to bring her character to closure by “tying up”
the loose ends of her narrative. In this way, Henryson affixes to Chaucer’s
narrative a textual “limb,” or what we might call a “textual prosthetic,”
that seeks to effectively conclude Criseyde’s narrative.89 Thynne’s print-
ing of the tale as the “sixth book” to Chaucer’s poem underscores the
text’s status as a textual prosthetic, for it here becomes literally grafted on
to Chaucer’s corpus. Following Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative
prosthesis, Henryson’s poem hinges on the threat that Cresseid’s unruly
body (here marked by her sexual promiscuity) produces, and the narra-
tive thusly busies itself with limiting that threat. Henryson’s tale enforces
the antifeminism that Chaucer’s version of the tale leaves ambiguous by
depicting Cresseid as deserving of punishment and then describing how
she is stricken with leprosy by the gods. Interestingly, Henryson chooses
leprosy, a physically debilitating and deforming disease, as the answer
to prostheticizing Cresseid’s unruly behavior. Though scholars remain
divided on whether Henryson’s poem excuses or damns its heroine for
her inconstancy and sexual excessiveness, I side with Felicity Riddy in
contending that Cresseid’s bodily punishment highlights the instability
of a unified, masculine self and its need to constantly exclude the femi-
nine in order to produce the illusion of cohesiveness.90 However, I add
that the tale’s condemnation of Cresseid does not simply confine her to
“no-thingness,” but instead reveals the potential subversion of the dis-
abled female body’s ambivalence.
Henryson’s poem begins with the narrator, who suffers the torments
of unrequited love due to his old age, bemoaning the cold of Scotland in
April and turning to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to chase away the chill.
He then launches into a description of Cresseid’s fate after Diomede casts
her aside, leaving ambiguous whether the tale he recounts is his own or
is from the “uther quair” he takes from his study (62).91 After being dis-
missed by Diomede, Cresseid becomes a fallen woman, selling her body
in the “court commoun” (81). She then f lees to her father’s house, where
she laments her troubled state and blames her misfortune on Venus and
Cupid. She falls to the f loor in a swoon and dreams of being brought to
trial before seven gods (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Cynthia, Venus, Mercury,
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and Cupid) who must decide her fate. Saturn and Cynthia decide to pun-
ish her blasphemy with leprosy. When she awakens from her dream, she
finds that she has indeed contracted the disease. Exiled from her father’s
house and her community, she lives among the lepers, begging for char-
ity, which she receives from Troilus when he enters the town. Upon her
death, she writes her will, leaving a ring to Troilus. Troilus, saddened
by her death, makes a stone monument for her. The poem ends with the
narrator warning other women of Cresseid’s fate.
Most studies of the tale focus on whether Henryson condemns or
absolves his heroine, citing the narrator’s claims that he will “excuse”
Cresseid’s “womanheid, . . . wisdome and fairness” despite his depiction
of her punishment as just (91,92). As Lee Patterson has found, scholars
who view the poem as essentially pagan view Henryson’s treatment
of Cresseid as unsympathetic, whereas those who view the poem as
Christian argue that Cresseid develops spiritual insight and, in turn,
attains salvation.92 Feminist readings of the poem are similarly polar-
ized. For instance, Marion Wynne-Davies asserts that, through her
contraction of leprosy, Cresseid becomes a catalyst through which she
and other women can gain access to a female form of piety. Wynne-
Davies, thus, interprets Cresseid’s diseased body as a means through
which a particularly feminine discourse of spirituality becomes vali-
dated in the poem.93 On the other hand, Susan Aronstein’s reading of
the tale, which situates Henryson’s poem in the misogyny of the late
fifteenth century, counters any notion that Cresseid finds spiritual or
sexual redemption. Aronstein finds that Cresseid’s “redemption” places
her firmly within the limits of male authority; by having her blame
her female nature on her punishment, Aronstein argues, Henryson
“closes down the dangerous ambiguities” that Chaucer leaves open
in his depiction of the heroine.94 Riddy’s later contribution refuses to
choose sides on the issue, preferring to leave intact—and even make
central—the ambiguities of the poem. In my reading of the tale, I
follow Riddy in “attending to the poem’s discontinuities and inco-
herences” by focusing on the ambiguity that Cressied’s diseased body
produces and is produced by.95
In keeping with the theory of narrative prosthesis, the tale opens
with a description of a disabled body that is in need of restoration or
cure. Like Bisclavret’s werewolf and Sir Launfal’s ineffectual king and
outcast knight, Henryson’s poem begins by describing an incomplete
male body, the aged body of the narrator who is trying to keep warm
during the “doolie sessoun” (1). While he was once a virile youth in the
service of Venus, the narrator’s sexual prowess is now “doif and deid”
(33), despite his turning to several medical remedies (35–6). According
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to Riddy, the poem’s beginning emphasis on the narrator’s deteriorat-

ing body establishes the continual threat to the cohesive illusion of a
unified masculine identity.96 As I discuss in my introduction, medieval
medicine characterized male bodies as hot and dry and female bodies as
cold and wet. The poet’s emphasis on the heat of youth with its blood
“f lowing in ane rage” (32) and the “froist” (19) of old age demonstrates
the male body’s struggle to preserve its humoral balance. In medieval
medical texts, the two main culprits behind the male body’s loss of heat
are advanced age and excessive sexual intercourse with a woman. Like
old age, too much intercourse was thought to deplete a man’s moisture,
which could lead to disabilities such as blindness and even death.97 As
an older man and a former servant to Venus, the narrator is particu-
larly susceptible to losing his humoral balance, a key component of his
maleness.
The narrator’s imbalanced body, then, signifies an androgyny that
marks his body and his character as contradictory. Thus, Riddy does
not share the anxiety that many scholars have over his simultaneous par-
don and condemnation of Cresseid, noting that, instead of “appealing
to some conception of a stable, founding character,” readers “can pay
attention to the contradiction and ambivalence in the ways [in which
the narrator’s] language constructs Cresseid,” an ambiguity that Riddy
links to Kristeva’s notion of the abject, a term that Cresseid uses to
describe herself when she notes she is “clene excludit, as abject odious”
(133).98 Riddy observes that Cresseid’s leprous body makes manifest the
coming together of luxuria and vanitas. Described as “the f lour and A
per se / of Troy and Greece” that becomes “maculait” with “f leshlie
lust” and “giglotlike” behavior, Cresseid embodies the ambivalence of
abjection, the process by which the self asserts itself in opposition to
the Other (81–2, 84, 86). As chapter 1 mentions, boundaries between
the self and Other blur in the process of abjection. Excluding the Other
and marking it as polluted, then, assures the temporary cohesion of a
unified subject; I note that this cohesion is temporary, for, as Kristeva
insists, that which is excluded or repressed always resurfaces, threaten-
ing the self ’s illusion of stability.99 As Riddy suggests, the narrator pres-
ents his body and his identity as already endangered by something, and
that something becomes manifest in the constantly inconstant Cresseid
and her decaying yet redemptive f lesh. The threat to a unified mas-
culine identity in the poem, then, is the feminine: “The problem that
the poem is wrestling with is not a problem within femininity but
a problem within masculinity: its own uncleanness, which is coded
as feminine and rejected as polluting.”100 Corrupted masculinity, here
symbolized by the narrator’s failing body, becomes marked as feminine
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and must be expelled in order to shore up the illusion of cohesive mas-

culinity. Cresseid’s leprous body, as I will discuss in terms of disability
below, comes to embody this corruption. Though the abject body and
the disabled body are clearly connected, I contend that, in viewing
Cresseid’s body as disabled, rather than simply abject, we can better
investigate medieval representations of women, both disabled and able-
bodied.
Cresseid’s leprosy has been the topic of much academic study of the
poem. Early explorations of Henryson’s use of leprosy find that his depic-
tion of the disease is surprisingly realistic and detailed and that it closely
corresponds to contemporary discussions of the disease in biblical, medi-
cal, astrological, and legal discourses.101 Later studies, as I discuss above,
tease out whether Cresseid’s punishment is just or harsh and explore
whether it leads to the character’s spiritual growth or simply punishes her.
Though several scholars focus on the effects of the disease on Cresseid’s
body (such as Wynne-Davies, Aronstein, and Riddy), none views her
punishment through the lens of disability. This may be due to the uneasy
boundary between disease and disability in the field of disability stud-
ies in the humanities and at large. In fact, Irina Metzler consciously
chooses to exclude leprosy from her study on medieval disability “since
it falls into a category of its own, with its own symbolism, meaning and
aetiology.”102 Although I acknowledge that medieval leprosy has its own
rich cultural history, I have to stress that leprosy crosses over into other
physical impairments, particularly with reference to its social significance
and some of its causes. I tend to side with Susan Wendell, who contends
that the line between illness and disability is indistinct because many
illnesses may disable a person just as some disabilities may result in ill-
ness.103 Similarly, the symptoms of leprosy, including skin lesions, throat
deformities, erosion of the nasal cartilage, ulceration of the corneas, alo-
pecia, and contracted limbs, certainly impaired the aff licted physically,
and the effects of those symptoms on a person’s appearance were surely
socially disabling, as Henryson’s depiction of Cresseid demonstrates, and
the disease’s incurability would insure that such effects would be life-
long. Moreover, leprosy’s ties to sin and sexual impurity had a hand in
the social treatment of lepers like Cresseid. Like Wendell, I find that
“what matters most in identifying disability is identifying the difficulties
people face in surviving and contributing to their societies.”104 Cresseid’s
struggles in the poem—her exile from her home, her segregated dress,
and the loss of her worldly goods to name a few—classify her disease as
thoroughly disabling.
When Saturn and Cynthia decide to strike Cresseid “with seiknes
incurabill,” Cynthia recites Cresseid’s sentence over her sleeping body,
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describing both the physical and social effects that she will have to face:
“Fra heit of bodie I the now depryve,

And to thy seiknes sall be na recure
Bot in dolour thy dayis to indure.
Thy cristall ene mingit with blude I mak,
Thy voice sa cleir unplesand hoir, and hace,
Thy lustie lyre ovirspred with spottis blak,
And lumpis haw appeirand in thy face:
Quair thow cummis, ilk man sall f le the place.
This sall thow go begging fra hous to hous
With cop and clapper lyke ane lazarous.” (334–43)
Cynthia’s sentencing of Cresseid accurately describes the physical symp-

toms of the disease and the resultant social response others would have
to the leper woman. In the Middle Ages, the notion of leprosy could
indicate both the disease we know today as leprosy as well as skin lesions
of any kind; thus, the medieval category of leprosy was much wider than
our modern notion of the disease.105 Specific references to leprosy in
Leviticus locate the disease as a sign of ritual uncleanness and stipulate
that those suffering from it must be separated from the religious com-
munity (13:44–6 and 14). Biblical instantiations of the disease, however,
refer to any wound or laceration upon the skin. Leprosy seems to have
been most common in the high Middle Ages from around the eleventh
century through the fourteenth century. Scotland, however, had large
numbers of lepers until the eighteenth century, especially in the northern
part of the country.106 While some historians have claimed that the dis-
ease reached the status of an epidemic, exact numbers are impossible to
report. However, the high number of leprosaria in medieval Europe from
the twelfth century on suggests that the disease was quite common.107
Moreover, religious and legal exclusions of the leprous from the healthy
community indicate the disease’s frequency. The Third Lateran Council
of 1179 specified that lepers should be separated from the uninfected, as
we see with Cresseid, who must leave her father’s home and enter a leper
hospital.
As a result of these exclusions, medieval lepers not only suffered phys-
ical symptoms of their disease, but also became outcasts in their com-
munities. Though many studies of the disease in the medieval era insist
that lepers throughout Europe endured a process of exclusion deemed
the “Last Mass,” wherein they were stripped ceremoniously of their legal
identities, made to don a separate dress, and relegated to the “living
dead,” Carole Rawcliffe’s recent book finds these reports to be grossly
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exaggerated. Rawcliffe finds no evidence to support that the mass ever

occurred in England and only cites one “convincing case” from the
sixteenth century.108 However, studies by Saul Brody , R.I. Moore, and
Byron Lee Grigsby, which focus on the ritual’s stigmatization of the
medieval leper, continue to be cited by literary, historical, and anthro-
pological scholars despite the ritual’s dubiousness.109 As Rawcliffe notes,
whether or not the “Last Mass” really occurred, its “morbid spectacle”
certainly aroused the interests of authors and scholars of the past and
present.110 Henryson’s literary depiction of the leper Cresseid partici-
pates in some of the more negative discourses on the disease. Although
Cresseid does not endure a “Last Mass,” she does endure a process of
social exclusion that is similar: after being secreted away from her father’s
home in a hospital on the outskirts of town, Cresseid dons “ane mantill
and ane bawer hat, / With cop and clapper,” the traditional “uniform”
of the medieval leper (386–7). Segregated from her community by loca-
tion and dress, Cresseid now fully takes the form of the “ ‘unworthie
outwaill’ ” she complains of being after Diomede abandons her, and her
exclusion is complete (129).
Scholars have often linked Cresseid’s contraction of leprosy to her
supposed sexual sins as at “the court commoun” (77). Brody notes that
“Cresseid’s leprosy is a particularly suitable punishment for her promiscu-
ity. Not only does it ravage her beauty, but what is more, because leprosy
was commonly understood to be a venereal disease, a consequence of
lust, it makes her past sinfulness apparent to her and to all who see her.”111
Beryl Rowland has even hypothesized that Henryson may have stricken
his heroine with syphilis, a disease that shared symptoms with leprosy.112
Grigsby, however, refutes the possibility that Cresseid’s disease may have
been syphilis, noting that syphilis was not identified in Scotland as a
disease separate from leprosy until 1497, later than the assumed date of
Henryson’s tale.113 Although, as Grigsby notes, “medical and theological
communities interpreted [leprosy] through a moral filter that saw dis-
ease as a divine punishment sent to correct man’s sins,”114 Grigsby’s study
finds conclusions that specifically link leprosy to excessive sexuality to be
imprecise.115 While an increase in lust was viewed as a side effect of the
disease, no sources directly state that leprosy is caused by or contracted
through sexual intercourse. Thus, even though the disease was connected
to sex, the medieval public often saw leprosy not as a punishment for a
carnal sin, but as a punishment for such spiritual sins as envy, anger, or
greed. As a result, readers must keep in mind the disease’s connections to
sexual and spiritual sins while not emphasizing one over the other.
Although most scholars mention Cresseid’s promiscuity as the cause for
her punishment, the tale presents the reasons for Cresseid’s contraction of
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the disease as ambiguous. What is explicit is that the use of the gods as the
agents who mete out Cresseid’s punishment adds a moral underpinning to
the disease; she has surely done something wrong to deserve such a fate.
Henryson implies that her sexual actions are linked to her acquisition of
leprosy, but the gods clearly punish her for her blasphemy against Venus
and Cupid. Despite this contradiction, it is clear that Henryson associ-
ates Cresseid’s promiscuity and her leprosy. As noted above, the lupa/
lepra connection closely aligns the leper and the prostitute. Furthermore,
Henryson’s narrator laments his heroine’s fall from grace, specifically the
way in which her “feminitie” becomes “with f leschelie lust sa maculait”
(83, 84). The use of “maculait” directly recalls the “macules” of leprosy,
thus implying that her excessive sexuality is at least partly to blame for her
disease. Moreover, as also noted above, Cresseid finds herself an outcast
in her home community even before she becomes a leper, probably due to
her abandonment of Troilus and her rejection by Diomede: “ ‘[ . . . ] Quha
sall me now convoy, / Sen I fra Diomeid and nobill Troylus / Am clene
excludit, as abject odious?’ ” (131–133). She adds that the “seid of lufe”
that was upon her face is now sown with “froist,” foreshadowing the
nodules of leprosy that will soon appear on her face (144, 147). She even
admits that her promiscuity may be partly to blame for her illness: “My
mynd in f leschelie foull affectioun / Was inclynit to lustis lecherous: /
Fy fals Cresseid; O trew knicht Troylus!” (558–60). Brody observes that,
here, “[t]he nature of the malady brings home to Cresseid the justice of
what the gods do to her. She recognizes that her sickness is the result of
her lechery, not the gods’ capriciousness.”116
Brody’s insistence that Cresseid’s only sin is lechery is misleading,
however. As Grigsby observes, “[M]edieval authors connected a great
number of sins to leprosy. By reducing the number of sins to just one,
lechery, critics fail to take into account the varied meanings medieval
authors have tried to express.”117 Grigsby finds that the gods punish
Cresseid’s blasphemy against them, especially her insults against Cupid
and Venus. Mairi Ann Cullen agrees, noting “that it is simply the ‘wickit
langage’ of her complaint against the gods that is blasphemy” and not
her sexual behavior.118 Indeed, in the biblical tradition, leprosy was most
often the punishment for sins of sacrilege. Old Testament stories par-
ticularly identify leprosy as punishment for spiritual sins that transgress
divine hierarchy. For instance, in the book of Numbers, God punishes
Aaron and his wife Miriam for envying God’s relationship to Moses by
turning Miriam into a leper (12: 2–11). In the book of II Chronicles,
God strikes Uzziah with leprosy because he burns incense in the tem-
ple despite the fact that only priests have the authorization to do so
(26: 16–21). In both cases, God uses leprosy as a punishment for those
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who do not remain in their socially subscribed roles. Leprosy, further-

more, struck those who blasphemed or committed heresy or those who,
through greed, wished to move up in the social structure.119 Rawcliffe
adds that anxiety over verbal sacrilege manifested in tales of blasphemers
who, after swearing on a part of God’s body, bled from the same part and
in punishments for blasphemy, such as the branding of a blasphemer’s lips
in France, which could result in a malformed face not unlike the lep-
er’s.120 In effect, the disease revealed itself in those who dared to subvert
“natural” religious or social law. The outward marks of leprosy on the
body, thus, were thought to reveal the inward diseased soul and to iden-
tify the leper as sinful. Cresseid’s divine punishment with the disease
undoubtedly reveals her moral failings, but the particular sin remains
unclear: is it her desertion of Troilus, relationship with Diomede, par-
ticipation in prostitution, or insults to Cupid and Venus? Like Riddy, I
find it unnecessary to pinpoint one sin for which Cresseid is punished. It
is enough to know that she has sinned and that, in the tale, her sins are
clearly linked to her body, a body that is coded as inconstant and threat-
ening to masculine stability.
The use of the gods as the agents of her punishment makes unques-
tionable that her leprosy is meant to punish her for her sins. As Stearns
and Parr have found, the choice of Saturn and Cynthia as those who
decide her fate is particularly appropriate. According to Parr, the use of
the two gods together coincides with medieval astrological understand-
ings of the disease, noting that aff lictions of leprosy were thought to be
numerous when the moon is in Saturn.121 Cynthia’s “spottis blak” and
inconstant nature also make her a suitable choice as Cresseid’s punisher
(260). Saturn, with his sunken cheeks, droopy eyes, and cold tempera-
ture, has both the features and humoral balance of a leper. Furthermore,
Saturn’s melancholic complexion mirrors that which he imparts upon
Cresseid: “ ‘I change thy mirth into melancholy, / Quilk is the mother of
all pensivenes; / Thy moisture and they heit in cald and dry’ ” (316–18). In
addition to sharing physical symptoms of leprosy with Cresseid, Saturn’s
own physical deficiencies ref lect those of the narrator, whose youthful
heat is being overcome by the coldness of old age. Riddy asserts that
Saturn’s physical decline, plus the instability of Jupiter (171) and Phebus
(201), reinforces the threat that feminine heterogeneity poses to mascu-
line stability: “The male gods represent the symbolic order of prohibition
and law, and yet even in them the boundaries of masculinity are under
threat.”122 In order to expunge such a threat to masculine law, the gods
make Cresseid a social and legal outcast by striking her with leprosy.
Though religious, medical, and legal discourse excluded lepers from
healthy society and even marked them as morally and physically polluted,
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they remained a visible presence. In addition, lepers depended on the

healthy for survival. As noted above, leper hospitals were common,
especially in urban areas. The existence of such hospitals functioned as
a way for the general public to actively participate in acts of charity. As
Catherine Peyroux notes, the leprous “remained a relentless presence in
the social life of the West as participants in the sub-economies of institu-
tionalized religious public charity.”123 The religious could donate money
by placing coins in the hospitals’ alms-boxes. In addition, many lepers
begged for alms in public, sounding their bells and clappers in an effort
to warn the well of their advance. Thus, though actively excluded, the
leprous were an integral part of a religious economy in which the act of
charity was exchanged for salvation.
As a result of this spiritual economy, lepers, though excluded and
marginalized—in fact, because of their exclusion and marginaliza-
tion—became sites of access to salvation through charity. Additionally,
through their ties to Lazarus (though Lazarus is never directly identi-
fied as leprous), lepers became associated not only with wretchedness
and poverty, but also with the promise of divine redemption. The leper
figure was further linked to Christ in the depictions of his miracu-
lous cure of a leper in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (8: 2–4, 1: 40–45,
5: 12–16). The leper’s associations with the divine, either as physi-
cal evidence of God’s punishment for sins or as the object of Christ’s
miraculous cures, mark him or her as a particularly effective player in
the spiritual economy. As suggested earlier, the Old Testament links
leprosy to God through the disease’s status as a divine punishment. The
New Testament connects leprosy to Christ through stories of Jesus’
ability to cure the illness, while later associations of lepers to Lazarus
mark them as figures full of the promise of divine redemption. Later,
the leper himself or herself begins to represent a Christ-like figure.
The book of Isaiah associates Christ with the leprous, noting that his
wounds will heal the sins of humankind (53). In addition, the leper’s
poverty, exclusion from the community, and “wretched” condition
mark him or her as meek and defenseless, qualities that further establish
the leper as Christ-like. Medieval hagiographers often employed this
construction of the leper as a figure in need of divine charity in order
to demonstrate the saintliness of their subjects. Most frequently, medi-
eval hagiographies employ the motif of the leper’s kiss, through which
a saint elicits miraculous cure by kissing a leper. Though male saints
partook of this act, by the late Middle Ages, female saints and mystics,
including Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, and Margery Kempe,
participated in a piety that was much more bodily than many of their
male counterparts, and this piety included caring for and even kissing
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lepers.124 As stated earlier, Wynne-Davies affirms that Cresseid’s dis-

ease allows for a female discourse on spirituality to exist in Henryson’s
seemingly misogynistic tale. According to Wynne-Davies, Cresseid’s
contraction of leprosy may cause her to suffer, but “the destruction of
her f lesh appears to offer the possibility of redemption to others of her
sex.”125 Indeed, Cresseid beseeches the “ladyis of Troy and Greece” to
“ane mirror mak” of her and realize that their “roising reid to rotting
sall retour” (452, 457, 464), offering up her diseased body as tangible
reminder of earthly impermanence.
The one who is able to find redemption through Cresseid, however,
is not a woman at all but Troilus, Henryson’s paragon of true knight-
hood. Upon returning to Troy from the war, Troilus happens upon
Cresseid and her “companie” of lepers, who beg the soldier give his
“ ‘almous’ ” to them (491, 494). Without recognizing Cresseid, Troilus
has “pietie” on the group and decides to “tuik heid” of “their cry
nobill” (496, 495). It is only after Cresseid looks up at Troilus that
he conjures up “the sweit visage” of his “fair Cresseid” (503, 504)
and tosses “ane purs of gold” into the leper Cresseid’s skirts (521), as
both an act of “knichtlie pietie” and a “memoriall / Of fair Cresseid”
(519–20). Henryson here makes a clear distinction between the leper
woman before Troilus and the “fair Cresseid,” Troilus’s one-time love.
In Troilus’s conjuring up his lover’s face at the sight of the leper’s, the
ambivalence that Cresseid embodies comes together; as Riddy states,
“loathing of and desire for the feminine can be seen to collapse into
one another.”126 Cresseid’s rotting body of the present and her beauty
of the past work together to solidify not only Troilus’ manly prow-
ess, but also his spiritual salvation. While his thoughts of his past love
“kendliet all his bodie in ane fyre; / With hait fewir” (513–14), the
humoral properties of a youthful, healthy man, his gift of alms to the
leper Cresseid demonstrates his charity and, thus, his worthiness of sal-
vation. The means through which Troilus is able to access both of these
elements is Cresseid’s disabled body. Riddy puts it quite simply: “in
order for him to do what he does, Cresseid has to be where and what
she is.”127 Her body, disabled by her disease and human reactions to it,
both sparks Troilus’s thoughts of his past love and prompts his generous
act of charity. The exile of Cresseid, consequently, serves to stabilize
Troilus’s reputation as powerful, “ ‘gentill and fre’ ” (536), and, most of
all, “ ‘trew’ ” (546).
Though Troilus recognizes or at least remembers his former lover,
Cresseid only learns of his identity from a fellow leper.128 Most who
read this scene take it at face value: Cresseid simply does not recognize
Troilus. However, viewing the scene through the lens of disability
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allows us to question whether Cresseid’s inability to recognize Troilus

is due to a resulting impairment caused by her disease. Even today,
many victims of leprosy suffer eye ailments that might obscure their
vision or lead to blindness. Because leprosy affects the nerves around
the eyes, some lepers are unable to blink. Rawcliffe explains, “[T]he
eyes [of a leper] may deteriorate so badly through corneal ulceration
(caused by an inability to blink) as to induce blindness.”129 Moreover,
medieval accounts of the disease frequently describe lepers’ eyes as
“ulcerated and rheumy.”130 Henryson’s account of Cresseid’s illness
stresses the ocular effects of the disease, for, when Cynthia pronounces
her sentence on Cresseid, the goddess exclaims, “Thy cristall ene min-
git with blude I mak” (337). Moreover, Henryson alludes to the wide,
unblinking stare of the leper in the recognition scene between Troilus
and Cresseid:
Than upon him scho kest up baith hir ene,

And with ane blenk it come into his thocht
That he sumtyme hir face befoir had sene,
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir noct;
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling. (498–504, emphasis mine)
Henryson’s repetition of “blenk” recalls the commonly known side effect

of leprosy, the inability to blink. When Cresseid, the leper, turns up
her eyes to Troilus, it is with “ane blenk” that he remembers his lover
Cresseid; however, Henryson leaves the reader ambiguous about who is
doing the blinking. Does he blink and remember his former love, or does
Cresseid blink, causing him to remember her? It is probable that Troilus
is the one who blinks here, and Cresseid is unable to. Troilus’s memory of
the “amorous blenking / Of fair Cresseid” supports this reading because
it keeps intact the distinction already established between Cresseid, the
leper, and Cresseid, the lover, in this scene. It is not implausible, then,
that Cresseid does not recognize Troilus because her vision is obscured
or completely gone.
Cresseid’s obscured vision echoes the larger trope of impaired female
bodies in the poem. Part of Cresseid’s blasphemy is that her insult to
Venus deems her “the blind goddess” (142). Indeed, Cupid’s anger at
Cresseid centers on this particular insult:
“I say this by yone wretchit Cresseid,

The quhilk throw me was sum tyme f lour of lufe,
Me and my mother strklie can reprufe,
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Saying of hir greit infelicitie

I was the cause, and my mother Venus,
Ane blind goddess hir cald that mict not se,
With sclander and defame injurious.” (278–84)
While tradition usually stipulates that Cupid is blind, here the female
goddess of love takes on the mark of the impairment.131 Venus’s descrip-
tion, though it does not stipulate that the goddess is blind, focuses on her
inconstancy, a trait she shares with Cresseid. While Venus’s body, with
its humoral balance shifting for “hait” to “cauld” signifies the weakness
of the female body and the humoral status caused by leprosy itself, it is
the inconstancy that shows in her face that is most important for our
discussion:
Bot in hir face semit greit variance,

Quhyles perfyte treuth and quhyles inconstance
Under smyling scho was dissimulait,
Provocative with blenkis amorous,
And suddenly changit and alterait,
Angrie as ony serpent vennemous,
Richt pungitive with wordis odious;
Thus variant scho was, quha list tak keip:
With ane eye lauch, and with the uther weip. (222–31)
Henryson uses the term “blenkis amorous” to describe Venus’s coy

glances, foreshadowing the “amorous blenking” that Troilus will
remember of his former lover when he meets the leper Cresseid’s
unblinking stare. Furthermore, Venus’s laughing and weeping eyes
aptly illustrate the inconstancy of the goddess and “blind” love, while
calling the reader’s attention to Venus’s alleged physical blindness
and hinting towards Cresseid’s visual deficiency in the recognition
scene.
Henryson connects Cynthia, the other goddess in the poem, to
Cresseid as well by focusing on her pale color and the “spottis blak”
that cover her (260). Cresseid, “With bylis blak ovirspred in hir vis-
age, / And hir fair colour faidit and alterait,” closely resembles Cynthia
(395–6), and it is Cynthia herself who pronounces that Cresseid’s face
should be covered in “spottis blak” like her own (339). As I note above,
it is apt that Cynthia is partnered with Saturn to decide Cresseid’s fate,
for Saturn’s melancholic nature suits leprosy and medieval astrology dic-
tates that when the moon is in Saturn, the aff liction of leprosy is com-
mon. Moreover, the moon’s cyclical f luctuations and her reputation for
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inf luencing the fickleness of lovers align her with Cresseid’s character-
istic inconstancy. Cynthia’s monthly cycles, in addition, implicitly sug-
gest the female menstrual cycle. The etymologies of moon, month, and
menses show the connections among the terms; the classical Latin mensis
indicates month and/or moon, which ref lects the links between the time
period of a woman’s cycle and the rotation of the moon. Medieval medi-
cine purported that the moon inf luenced the start and f low of the female
menses. As I discuss in my introduction and chapter 1, contradictory
medical and cultural understandings of menstrual f luid often character-
ized the menses as important to reproduction yet harmful to the male
body. A commentator in Pseudo-Albert’s Women’s Secrets expresses the
male fear of menstruation and its ties to the moon: “The menstrual f low
varies with the different quarters of the moon, and thus women can tell
the state of the moon by their menses. Some women know how subtly
to inf lict a wound on men when they have sexual intercourse with them
in the last state of the moon, and from this wound many incurable ill-
nesses arise if remedies are not taken immediately.”132 One common
assumption was that excessive sexual intercourse with a woman could
cause blindness in men.
Menstrual f luid was thought to cause bodily injury to men not only
through its excretion during sexual intercourse but also through its emis-
sion from the eyes, which could then travel through the air and infect
susceptible victims, especially babies.133 Helen Rodnite Lemay explains
that Aristotelian notions of menstrual f luid as poisonous, noting that the
eyes and the object of the eyes can be infected: “If the object of the eyes
is clean, such as a polished mirror or the eye of another person, it is
immediately infected by the menstruous eye, because this eye infects the
air, and then this air infects the adjacent air, and the infection continues
to travel until it reaches the looking glass,” causing the formation of a
mark on the glass.134 Cynthia, who Henryson explains is merely a mir-
ror of her brother’s light (258–9), finds herself speckled in black spots.
Similarly, Cresseid, who beseeches women to make a “mirror” of her
(457), finds her face filled with the mark of her infection only after she
examines herself in “ane polesit glas” (348). Even more telling, however,
is Cynthia’s decision to make bloody Cresseid’s “cristall ene” (337). The
bloody f lux in Cresseid’s eyes not only illustrates a common symptom of
leprosy, but also recalls the fundamental element that renders the female
body “defective”: menstrual f luid. Furthermore, as Rawcliffe explains,
many popular and some medical understandings of the dissemination of
leprosy ref lected the notion of menstrual f luid’s emission from the eyes,
and claimed that those who inhaled the air emitted from the mouths,
noses, or eyes of the leprous may fall sick.135 Cresseid’s bloody eyes echo
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the double-bind of the female body: they are at once disabled and capable
of disabling others.
Menstrual f luid, the element by which a female body is deemed dis-
abled in medieval medical and scriptural discourse, is also a prime exam-
ple of the abject since it is excreted by the body and therefore deemed as
not part of the self. Thus, menstrual f luid signals the intrinsic connec-
tions between the female body, the disabled body, and the abject body.
The disabling effects of Cresseid’s leprosy, which, as we see above, are
linked to menstruation in the text, mark her as thoroughly abject; she is
the exiled, the rejected, the Other. Though Henryson opens his poem
with the weakening body of the narrator, the three female characters soon
supplant him, as all the three are connected to disability in some way.
Ultimately, what threatens the tale’s failing male bodies— exemplified
by the narrator and Saturn—is the potential for instability in body and
identity. The inconstancy that endangers this stability gets coded as femi-
ninity; the leprous Cresseid becomes the embodiment of this dangerous
femininity.
Riddy suggests that Cresseid’s disease renders her completely exiled,
leaving no room for the potential jouissance that Kristeva asserts the
abject can achieve. She interprets the final scene of the poem, Cresseid’s
death and Troilus’s erection of a monument in her honor, as her “last
exclusion,” for, in Cresseid’s “dissolution,” Troilus attempts to safeguard
his own.136 What Riddy excludes, however, is the disruptive power of
Cresseid’s grotesque body. In a carnivalesque inversion of patriarchal
authority, Cresseid is able to make her own will, a right medieval lepers
generally lost. As Jana Mathews asserts, Cresseid’s writing of her will
is an act of speech that defies authoritative discourse. Because medieval
law rendered the leper legally dead, Mathews theorizes, “the law simul-
taneously released him from legal subjectivity.”137 Consequently, “[t]
his legal gap allows Cresseid to exist outside the law—to carve a space
for herself in the narrative that is completely divorced from the feudal
court system and set within her own prescribed (and self-controlled)
boundaries.”138 In the “counter-space” of Cresseid’s will, she is able to
overturn the (masculine) authority that deems her “no-thing”: “She
manipulates established law in order to create a new law that in turn
enables her to inscribe on herself an identity that no one can repress or
eradicate.”139 In her will, Cresseid leaves her body to the “wormis and
taids,” her clothing to the lepers, a ruby ring, a memento of her past
love, to Troilus, and her spirit to Diana (577–88). In bequeathing her
spirit to Diana, Cresseid not only validates “marginalized space[s]”140 by
selecting “woddis and wellis” (588), over a courtly or heavenly location,
but also honors the very goddess who had a hand in her sentence of
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leprosy. Taken in this sense, it seems Cresseid may now view her disease
as a reward rather than a punishment.
The question that we are left with, as a result, is whether the incon-
stant Cresseid ever really learns her lesson. Has the punishment that the
gods inf lict upon her actually tamed her unruly body? It seems that
Henryson’s narrator has his doubts. He ends the poem with a warning to
women who decide to make a “mirrour” out of his heroine:
Now, worthie wemen, in this ballet schort,

Maid for your worschip and instructioun,
Of cheritie, I monische and exhort,
Ming not your lufe with fals deceptioun:
Beir in your mynd this schort conclusioun
Of fair Cresseid, as I have said befoir.
Sen scho is deid I speik of hir no moir. (610–16)
By repeating the lesson Cresseid’s punishment was intended to teach,

the narrator implies that the punishment may not have “taken.” This
address to the “worthie wemen” of his audience is the third reference to
them in the poem. Cresseid mentions them when urging them to use her
as an example of earthly impermanence (452), and Troilus’s epitaph to
Cresseid reads, “ ‘Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troy the toun, / Sumtyme
countit the f lour of womanheid, / Under this stane, lait lipper, lyis deid’ ”
(607–9). The repetition of address to this section of Henryson’s audience
reveals an anxiety about the instability of these “worthie wemen” to his
poem itself. They are first advised to look to Cresseid’s decaying body
as not only an example to f leeting beauty, but also as an example of the
punishment they may receive for “bad” behavior. Next, Troilus’s epitaph
calls attention to Cresseid’s status as a dead “lipper” for much the same
effect. Lastly, the narrator’s warning cautions them to not live a life of
“fals deceptioun” like Cresseid. Though the narrative excludes her in
every way possible, it also continues to conjure her up in an attempt to
shore up masculine identity: Cresseid’s body must be repeatedly invoked
in order for it to be excluded. That the narrative continues to address
these “wemen” suggests the potential for transgression that Cresseid’s
body represents. Perhaps the poem’s female audience members are the
inhabitants of Cresseid’s “counter-space,” a marginalized realm of voices
that, though excluded, has the potential to exploit male “instructioun”
for its own ends.
In reading Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid
through the lens of the gendered model of disability, one can find a
similar surge of Other voices that ultimately challenge and refigure
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commonly held notions of what it means to be female, feminine, and/

or disabled in the Middle Ages. These voices—or counternarratives—
are made perceptible only by locating the unconscious slippages that
arise from the supernatural elements in each text. These slippages
create a dissonance that not only produces counternarratives within
the texts, but also allow for critical readings that contradict dominant
medieval discourses of gender and ablebodiedness. Like Cresseid and
her female audience members, perhaps feminist disability scholars have
the potential to challenge the very notions of deviancy upon which
“masculine” narrative drives—both literary and critical—are based, if
only we take the time to listen.
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9780230105119_05_ch03.indd 112 9/20/2010 1:15:47 PM
CHAPTER 4
EMBODIED TRANSCENDENCE:
DISABILITY AND THE PROCREATIVE
BODY IN THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE
I n continuing my exploration of female disability in medieval litera-

ture, I turn next to a consideration of the portrayal of disability and
its importance to narrative structure in the fifteenth-century Book of
Margery Kempe. The Book is a sprawling account of the spiritual journey
of Margery Kempe, a wife and mother from the English city of Lynn,
and has been the object of fervent scholarly attention. Now considered
an important part of the medieval canon, the Book and its author occupy
an uneasy position within medieval studies. Scholars have considered the
text’s rambling structure as evidence of its artlessness as well as proof of
a thoroughly vernacular and even feminine form of writing, while some
have labeled Kempe a madwoman or cited her shortcomings as a vision-
ary in relation to contemporary Julian of Norwich.1 Feminist medieval
scholars, who have done much to bring Kempe and her Book to the fore-
front, hold similarly vexed views of the mystic and her work, finding
her to transgress or uphold patriarchal authority through her spiritual
actions.2
One constant in studies of Kempe, however, is a concentration on how
her gender affects both her spirituality and her text. Due to her status as
a wife and mother to fourteen children as well as her penchant for bodily
displays of devotion such as her violent fits of tears, Kempe’s body figures
prominently throughout her text. Though much scholarship on the Book
has focused on the corporeality of Kempe’s spirituality—and, in turn, its
feminine nature—including studies that emphasize her piety’s bodiliness
or lack thereof, none has discussed both her practices of piety and the
Book’s narrative structure through the lens of disability.3 In this chapter, I
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will examine the ways in which bodily difference prompts the narrative
as well as how representations of physical aberrancies figure into Kempe’s
journey throughout the text, particularly with reference to how such
bodily differences intersect with Kempe’s gendered status.
I will show that an understanding of the female body as physically and
thereby socially defective conditions Kempe’s representation and perfor-
mance of her spirituality. By examining Kempe’s body through a gen-
dered notion of disability, I will be able to more thoroughly engage and
question the social and political constructions of Kempe’s very physical
experience of spirituality. As this chapter will demonstrate, female bodily
difference is linked to sexual and textual (re)production throughout the
Book. Kempe’s disabilities prompt the writing of her text, allow her to
imitate Christ and his mother, and redefine the experiences of her body,
specifically her reproductive and maternal abilities, in spiritual terms.
Ultimately, I will argue that Kempe exploits the discourses of femaleness,
femininity, and disability in order to produce her text and further her
spiritual goals, particularly through a recasting of her own female bodily
experiences not as disabling, but rather spiritually enabling.
Autobiography and Disability: Kempe’s Body and Book

Kempe’s body, which is presented as aberrant from the outset of the text,
is uniquely tied to the Book’s own troubled production. Karma Lochrie’s
important study of the Book concludes that Kempe’s text participates
in a process through which the mystic’s bodily experience becomes a
discourse, or the written text that articulates such bodily experience.
Lochrie begins with the medieval theological separation between f lesh
and spirit, noting that the female body becomes aligned with the f lesh,
or excess. Combined with medical notions of the “leaky” female body,
femaleness becomes associated with an attack on the boundaries of the
sealed (male) body: “Woman, then, occupies the border between body
and soul, the fissure through which a constant assault on the body may
be conducted. She is a painful reminder of inf lux alienating body from
soul.”4 The greatest defense a woman could take against the danger-
ous nature of her own body was to remain “sealed” bodily as a vir-
gin or physically as an anchoress, thereby keeping the dual boundaries
between the f lesh and the spirit intact. Mystical discourse, however,
causes those boundaries to collapse by bringing together into language
bodily acts, such as imitatio Christi, that draw on the powers of the f lesh
and spirit. Because of Kempe’s gendered status, the medieval position-
ing of Woman as f leshly grants her a unique position from which to
create her Book and, thus, translate her body into text: “By occupying
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DI S A B I L I T Y A N D T H E P RO C R E AT I V E B O DY 115
and exploiting her position as f lesh, the woman writer has recourse to a
power derived from the taboo which defines her and which she breaks
with her speech.”5 As Lochrie finds, Kempe’s disruptive actions, such as
her boisterous laughter and her violent tears, open “fissures” in the text;
in other words, the “ruptures” of Kempe’s body lead to rapture.6
Though Lochrie does not employ the language of disability, it is
clear in her study that the intimate connection between Kempe and
her Book relies on bodily difference. As with many other medieval
women-religious, it is after a bout of physical and mental suffering that
Kempe comes to desire a spiritual life. Moreover, Kempe begins to
have violent, physical reactions to images of Christ. As Caroline Walker
Bynum has explained, praying for or even causing their own physi-
cal distress allowed women to participate in an act of imitatio Christi,
to become the suffering body of Christ. Bynum notes that a desire to
incur an illness or surround oneself with those who are ill is a highly
gendered characteristic of religious women in the later Middle Ages:
“[F]or the late Middle Ages, there is clear evidence that behavior and
occurrences that both we and medieval people see as ‘illnesses’ are less
likely to be described as something ‘to be cured’ when they happen
to women than when they happen to men. Women’s illness was ‘to be
endured,’ not ‘cured.’ Patient suffering of disease was a major way of
gaining sanctity for females but not for males.” 7 The “incurability” of
illness in women-religious, instead of disabling such women, works
to enable them by allowing their suffering to simulate the suffering
of Christ.8 For instance, Julian of Norwich prays for bodily illness in
order to experience physical and mental suffering similar to Christ’s,
and it is only after she is stricken with her illness, which leaves her
paralyzed from the waist down, that she has a series of visions of Christ’s
Passion.9
Like Julian’s religious visions, Kempe’s spiritual life begins with
bodily illness. After the birth of her first child, Kempe suffers such
a “sekenesse” that she fears for her life and calls for a confessor in
order to reveal to him a past sin that she had never admitted.10 When
she attempts to reveal her indiscretion, her confessor “gan scharply
to undyrnemyn hir,” and she “went owt of hir mede and was won-
dryly vexid and labowryd with spyritys half yer, wekys and odde days”
(1:54). Because of her violent physical reaction to her illness—seeing
visions of devils, biting her hand, clawing her skin, and having suicidal
thoughts—Kempe’s household had to forcibly restrain her. After she
has suffered through her illness, Kempe sees Christ at her bedside “in
the lyknesse of a man, most semly, most bewtyvows, and most amyable
that evyr mygth be seen with mannys eye” (55) The vision stabilizes
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Kempe’s “wyttys” and “resoun as wel as evyr sche was beforn,” and
she soon regains control of the buttery keys from her husband, despite
protests from her servants (56).
Later in the text, after visiting the sites of Christ’s Passion, Kempe
begins to have violent, physical reactions to images of Christ. These fits,
which I will discuss in detail below, cause her to fall down as she “wal-
wyd and wrestyd with hir body, spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed
with a lowed voys as thow hir hert schulde a brostyn asundyr” (28:163).
When she returns to Lynn, her neighbors react to the fits by trying to
explain them away, calling them an illness, demonic possession, or the
side effects of too much wine (165). Notably, “[s]um seyde that sche had
the fallyng evyl [epilepsy] for sche, with the crying, wrestyd hir body,
turnyng fro the o syde into the other, and wex al blew and al blow, as it
had ben colowr of leed” (44: 143).
Just as the inhabitants of Lynn attempt to rationalize their neighbor’s
crying fits, scholars have often attempted to explain Kempe’s early ill-
ness, and later bodily reactions to Christ, generally through medical lan-
guage. Early interpretations by scholars such as Herbert Thurston and
David Knowles often categorize her as a hysteric, and some, such as Sigrid
Undset, label her a psychopath.11 Despite attempts by feminist medieval
scholars to close down anachronistic connections between medieval
mysticism and modern interpretations of hysteria and other psychobio-
logical diseases, some critics continue to “medicalize” Kempe. The mod-
ern English translation of the text even includes a lengthy footnote that
recounts a “modern diagnosis” of Kempe that identifies her as having “a
hysterical personality organization.”12 Richard Lawes, though he rejects
hysteria as a diagnosis for Kempe, identifies her crying fits as bouts of
temporal lobe epilepsy.13 Moreover, some recent feminist readings of the
text label Kempe’s first bout of illness as a medieval account of the condi-
tion we now call postpartum depression.14
Though it is quite clear that Kempe suffers physical and mental
aff lictions that disrupt her life and her text, I resist “diagnosing” her
actions through modern medical or psychological views. I follow Bynum
in observing that medieval notions of the body’s physical and mental
responses to spirituality “are far more diverse than those implied by
modern concepts” of psychobiological illnesses such as hysteria.15 While
I do not wish to apply modern medical or psychiatric categorizations
to a premodern text, I do hope to demonstrate that within the text’s
fifteenth-century context, Kempe is indeed disabled by her physical
and mental aberrancies and that these aberrancies profoundly shape the
production and structure of her text. Furthermore, I hope to show that
Kempe’s bodily differences and the resultant disabling that she endures
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are inextricable from medieval notions of the female body and its per-
ceived defectiveness both in its physical and moral makeup.
Just as Kempe’s body defies clear-cut definition, so too does the
structure of her Book. The Book’s structure and production prove to be
cumbersome, driven as they are by Kempe’s memories, twenty years
after her experiences. Due to Kempe’s illiteracy,16 she has to dictate her
story to three male scribes in order to get it written down, facing fre-
quent obstacles along the way. The first scribe dies before finishing the
text, but his corrupt form of German and English proves unreadable to
the next scribe, a priest. A third scribe attempts to decipher the text, but
is unable to, so Kempe takes the text back to the priest, who, through
divine intervention, is finally able to read and transcribe the text. The
priest informs his readers of the rambling and unwieldy structure of the
book, noting that “[t]hys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr
other as it wer don, but lych as the mater cam to the creatur in mend
whan it schuld be wretyn” (Proem: 49). Wendy Harding finds that,
in collaborating with a scribe, Kempe creates with her text a dialogic
writing that blurs the boundaries between illiteracy and literacy, the
bodily and the spiritual.17 Considered the first autobiographical text
written in English, a hagiography of an exemplary woman’s journey to
a spiritual life, and an elaborate fiction by a savvy author who exploits
the “conventions of sacred biography and devotional prose [ . . . ] as a
means of scrutinizing the very foundations of community,” Kempe’s
Book certainly has resisted easy classification.18 Instead of selecting one
category or the other, I acknowledge the dangers of adopting an either/
or understanding of the text’s genre. Calling the Book an autobiography
is inherently problematic, as autobiographical writing as we define it
today did not exist in the Middle Ages. However, Kempe’s text, shaped
as it is by her memories (as well as other hagiographies, mystical trea-
tises, and devotional texts), does represent her responses to her everyday
activities, a textual impulse that may be considered “autobiographical.”
Relegating the text to the status of a hagiography or a fiction erases
such impulses, vacating Margery Kempe the historical woman from
the text. Each choice seeks to limit the text, which does not neatly fit
one category, and to close Kempe within a stable subject position as
autobiographical writer, hagiographic exemplar, or creator of the fic-
tional character Margery. Thus, like Julian Yates, I consider the Book
a hybrid text that includes elements of autobiography. This consider-
ation does not intend to present Kempe as a stable subject, but to draw
attention to “details in the text which, while they contribute to the
hagiographical impulse, enforce an awareness of Margery’s social and
material position.”19
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As my project has suggested, female physical difference is often both

a producer and a product of medieval narrative. Following Mitchell
and Snyder, I have argued that, in medieval literature, the physical dif-
ference—or social difference rooted in the defectiveness of the female
body—of a female character frequently produces narrative. Usually, the
narrative drive of the text attempts to limit the deviance caused by an
unruly body by curing or even eliminating characters with physical
abnormalities. In some cases, female characters use their excessive bodies
to enable their own desires. I would like to suggest that Kempe’s text itself
is a product of her physical differences and that she exploits them in an
effort to enable her own spiritual goals. If, as Lochrie contends, Kempe’s
Book is the product of a translation of her body into discourse—that,
literally, her body becomes her text and her text becomes her body—and
her body, in its excessiveness, resists normalization, then what effects do
her physical aberrancies have on the production and structure of her text?
If fictional narrative remains profoundly dependent on difference, which
can take the form of disability, then how does disability affect the narra-
tive of a text with autobiographical tendencies?
Lawes’s recent essay on psychobiological disorders and autobiographi-
cal urges of some medieval writers including Kempe is useful to our
consideration of disability and textual production in the Book. Though I
resist Lawes’s move to diagnose Kempe as an epileptic, I find helpful his
contention that bodily disorder “may have been a stimulus to autobio-
graphicality itself,” even in the Middle Ages.20 Ultimately, Lawes finds
that an individual’s singularity, especially in conjunction with a bodily
disorder, may create a split “between an individual’s inner experience
and the cultural expectations of the outer world,” a split I have considered
in terms of the social process of disabling throughout this project.21 In
other words, Kempe’s very distinct behavior, which often goes against
accepted expectations for worldly and spiritual women, and her atypical
bodily sufferings, set her apart from conventional social roles for medi-
eval women, thus creating a rift between Kempe’s personal experience
(what Goffman calls the actual identity) and what her society expects
of her behavior and body (what Goffman calls the virtual identity).22
This rift results in the stigmatization or disabling of Kempe. Lawes sug-
gests that such individuals attempt to fill this split through a narrative
“explanation” of the deviancy, an explanation that manifests itself in
autobiographical writings: “Uncertainty about the nature of perplexing
experiences, perhaps uncertainty of one’s identity, may generate a strong
autobiographical impulse, and a need to recount one’s story, to persuade
others of its value, explore it, make sense of it and psychologically ‘digest’
it.”23 Lawes points to both the Book’s impulse to justify Kempe’s behavior
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to male authorities and Kempe’s own self-scrutiny of her actions in her

conversations with Christ as evidence of the urge to “explain away” her
idiosyncrasies. Kempe’s incessant retelling of her experiences to scribes,
priests, neighbors, and Christ is thus an attempt to bridge the gap between
her inner self and the outer world created by her bodily aberrancies.
Contemporary studies of autobiography, or “life writing,”24 and dis-
ability agree that the body not only affects but also prompts writing about
the self. In his study of the ethics of life writing, Paul John Eakin notes
that life writing establishes the writer’s identity as content (what a person
does) and as act (the story a person tells). Moreover, life writing estab-
lishes individuals as persons worthy of study. These narrations, Eakin
observes, “function as the mark not only of the free person but of the
normal person as well.”25 Thus, such “master discourses” have the power
to marginalize those who do not fit into the narrative or cannot, because
of impairment, write their own narratives. On the other hand, life writ-
ing by marginalized groups such as those with disabilities has the power
to “resist and reform dehumanizing models of self and life story that
society would impose on [them].”26 Arthur Frank agrees, finding that life
writing by those with disabilities has the power to expose “how socially
constructed and legitimated master narratives of identity can demoral-
ize people” and “resist assimilation . . . to such narratives.”27 Ultimately,
Frank claims that “life writing about illness and disability upsets the con-
ventional identities assigned to these groups.”28
The work of Eakin and Frank is helpful to our understanding of the
role of Kempe’s body in the production of her Book. Kempe’s text cer-
tainly seeks to produce and maintain her identity as a spiritual woman.
Unlike modern autobiography, however, the Book makes clear that its
purpose is to glorify the works of Christ, not Margery Kempe: “this
lytyl tretys schal tretyn sumdeel in parcel of hys wonderful werkys, how
mercifully, how benyngly, and how charytefully he meved and stered a
sinful caytyf unto hys love” (Proem: 41). Throughout the text, Kempe
uses her own body to demonstrate Christ’s works. For example, her tears
become a mimesis of his Passion, the ultimate “work” Christ did for
humanity. In addition, as we will discuss in more detail later, her physi-
cal care of the impaired becomes, for Kempe, a way to display her love
for Christ. However, Kempe herself frequently threatens to overshadow
Christ throughout her Book. For instance, Windeatt finds that Kempe’s
conversations with Christ, which Kempe purports to be most remarkable
“are often among the least individual or lively parts of her work in both
style and content, while other parts of her text may seem individual at
the expense of authentic spiritual understanding.”29 And, while the text’s
intended purpose may have been largely devotional, Caroyln Dinshaw
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adds that “the book is filled with incidental, everyday detail that now
supplies much of its richness and fascination.”30 Consequently, although
the Book intends to demonstrate the “wonderful werkys” of Christ, it
simultaneously succeeds in showcasing the singularity of Kempe. If we
consider Kempe’s Book in relation to related hagiographies such as the lives
of contemporaries like St. Bridget, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and Mary
of Oignies and past saints like St. Margaret and St. Mary Magdalene,
then it becomes clear that at least one reason for its production may have
been to establish Kempe’s exemplarity and thus bring about her own
canonization.
In addition to establishing her identity as a spiritual woman, Kempe’s
text also succeeds in upsetting received notions of what it meant to be a
wife, mother, and/or woman-religious in the later Middle Ages. In this
way, we may view Kempe’s text as a “counternarrative” to the “master
discourse” of the Church, which sought to keep the bodies of spiritual
women “sealed” through physical enclosure (the anchorhold) and bodily
confinement (virginity) and to keep worldly women such as wives and
mothers confined to their roles by remaining subject to their husbands.
Again, Kempe’s body plays a key role in the creation of this counternarra-
tive. At the beginning of the third chapter of her Book, Kempe describes
her feelings of disgust for participating in sexual intercourse with her
husband, John. After hearing a sweet melody from heaven, “sche had
nevyr desyr to komown f leschly with hyre husbonde, for the dette of
matrimony was so abhominabyl to hir that sche had levar, hir thowt, etyn
or drynkyn the wose, the mukke in the chanel, than to consentyn to any
f leschly comownyng , saf only for obedyens” (3: 62). Her husband, how-
ever, is unwilling to have a chaste marriage with his wife at this point.
Later, when he attempts to have “knowlach of her as he was wone befor,”
Kempe cries out for Christ’s help, and John is suddenly struck with a
paralysis that takes away his ability to touch her (8: 82). Finally, Kempe
is able to finagle a business deal with John: she will pay his debts if he
will allow her to remain chaste in their marriage (11: 89). Here, Kempe
gains control over her body and her husband and upsets her conventional
wifely role by evading her part in the conjugal debt. Despite remaining
married to her husband and having had fourteen children, Kempe also
begins dressing in white as a sign of her virginity and devotion to Christ,
a decision that generates protest from her Lynn neighbors and Church
authorities. Covering the same body that gave birth to fourteen children
in white clothing makes tangible the profound contradiction of her spiri-
tual status as a woman both in and outside of the world.
Kempe’s text not only narrates a counterstory for laywomen who wish
to lead spiritual lives, but also creates a counterstory about disability that
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casts it not as evidence of an inward sinful nature, but as a tool for spiri-
tual growth. As noted above, her first major bout of disabling illness
instigates her conversion to a spiritual life. Her conversion does not hap-
pen right away—Kempe attempts to remain completely in the world by
continuing to dress ostentatiously and starting and failing at two busi-
nesses—but she soon learns the error of her ways and chooses to lead a
spiritual life. Kempe’s early foray into a religious life depends upon doing
bodily penance such as fasting and wearing a hair shirt. By denying or
even causing injury to her body, Kempe is able to take part in the same
kind of suffering that Christ endured on the cross. This bodily form of
piety, often viewed as an orthodox practice for women, fits within spiri-
tual practices of other female saints and mystics from the later medieval
period who relied on the body as a means through which to access the
divine.31 Later, however, Christ allows her to stop fasting and even take
off her hair shirt, granting her “an hayr in thin hert that schal lyke me
mych bettyr than alle the hayres in the world” (4:71). This progression
from bodily to more spiritual acts of piety, including enduring the slan-
der of her enemies, continues throughout the Book, but Kempe is never
fully separated from her body. As Sarah Salih notes, “Contemplation may
be her ideal, but her life and piety remain firmly located in the material
world.”32 Even though her later acquirement of fits of tears corresponds
to the more spiritual piety that Kempe’s Christ seems to prefer, the cry-
ing fits are intensely physical. Salih contends that Kempe reinterprets the
bodily, feminine piety accepted as orthodox in England with the more
spiritual practices she picks up abroad, ultimately reshaping those bodily
practices to uphold the spiritual.
Kempe’s fits of tears represent her most direct way of using bodily
sufferings that many deem disabling in order to advance her spiritual
goals. Kempe first acquires the fits when she is abroad, visiting the sites
of Christ’s Passion. It is upon Mount Calvary, the site of Christ’s cru-
cifixion, that Kempe has her first fit of tears: “sche fel down that sche
mygth not stondyn ne knelyn, but walwyd and wrestyd with hir body,
spredyng hir armys abrode, and cryed with a lowede voys as thow hir hert
schulde a brostyn asundyr, for in the cite of hir sowle sche saw verily and
freschly how owyr Lord was crucifyed” (28: 163). This fit of tears, “the
first cry that evyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon,” soon becomes a sort
of “aff liction” that strikes Kempe whenever she is reminded of Christ’s
suffering (163). Upon returning to Lynn, Kempe brings her gift of tears
back with her, as if they were a “souvenir” or even a “pilgrim badge.”33
While Kempe’s tears fit within a common female response to the sites of
Christ’s Passion, Salih notes that it was “less usual” for women “to carry
that reaction back home again.”34
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When her neighbors witness her tears, it is clear that they do not
understand nor approve of their neighbor’s newfound spiritual expres-
sion. As I note above, witnesses to her fits often try to explain away
their origin: “For summe seyd it was a wikkyd spirit vexed hir; sum
syed it was a sekenes; sum seyd sche had dronkyn to mech wyn; sum
bannyd hir; sum wished sche had ben in the havyn; sum wolde sche
had ben in the se in a bottumles boyt; and so ich man as hym thowte”
(28:165). The drive to medicalize Kempe’s fits strikes even those in posi-
tions of authority. For instance, when a famous friar visits Lynn, he
prohibits Kempe from attending his sermons due to her intense sobbing.
Despite entreaties from “a good preyste” and a few friends, the friar
refuses to let Kempe back into the church unless she blames her fits not
on a gift from God, but on “a cardiakyl, er sum other sekenesse” (61:
290). Though she denies she has a “sekenesse,” Kempe admits that she
is unable to control the timing and intensity of her fits, noting that they
would occur “sumtyme in the church, sumtyme in the stret, sumtym
in the chawmbre, sumtyme in the felde [ . . . ] for sche knew nevyr tyme
ne owyr whan thi schulde come” (28: 165). When she tries to control
their intensity, their force only becomes greater: “And the mor that sche
wolde labowryn to kepe it in er to put it awey, mech the mor schulde
sche cryen and the mor lowder” (166). The excessiveness of Kempe’s
tears causes her community to shun and even abuse her, spitting at her
for her “sekenes” and comparing her roars and tears to the howling of
a dog. Furthermore, those who had enjoyed her company before “put
hir awey and bodyn hir that sche schulde not come in her placys for the
schrewyd talys that thei herd of hir” (44: 220). Although some accept
Kempe’s tears as an impairment—a difference that they do not consider
“normal,” but passively tolerate—most participate in the social process
of disabling Kempe by deeming her bodily impairment (what Metzler
calls a non-negotiable reality) as evidence of her deficiency. The public’s
often intolerant response to her physical difference ref lects Wheatley’s
notion of the religious model; her physical problems are often explained
as evidence of Kempe’s sexual promiscuity, her failure to conform to
her gendered social roles as wife and mother, and her alleged heretical
practices. Kempe’s cries, then, are often interpreted as outward physical
manifestations of inward sinfulness. The very physical quality of her fits,
her inability to control their timing and their intensity, and the negative
reactions of her neighbors closely align Kempe’s crying fits with a physi-
cal disability. Demonstrating the late-medieval distrust of the sincerity
of those with physical disabilities, two priests decide to “test” the valid-
ity of Kempe’s crying fits. Far from the city’s center, she succumbs to
a crying fit, proving that her condition is not self-motivated (83: 360).
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The two priests, like some others throughout her Book, accept Kempe’s
impairment as a divine test.
Due to the slander and bodily weakness (57: 276) that her crying fits
cause, it is clear that her tears are both socially and physically disabling.
However, Kempe casts her tears, which so many view as an annoyance,
as spiritually enabling throughout her Book. Kempe clearly places her
fits of crying within a tradition of accepted medieval piety, pointing
throughout her Book to her own connections to other saints and mys-
tics who shared a similar gift of uncontrollable tears, including Mary
of Oignies and Angela of Foligno. Her second scribe, deterred by his
own doubts about her weeping, finally accepts the fits as evidence of
her holiness after reading about Mary of Oignies: “Than he levyd wel
that the good woman, whech he had beforn lityl affeccyon to, myth not
restreyn hir wepyng, hir sobbyng ne hir crying, which felt meche more
plente of grace than evyr dede he, wythowtyn any comparison” (62:
294). Kempe gathers even more support of her weeping from her con-
temporary, Julian of Norwich, who asserts that “ ‘whan God visyteth a
creatur wyth terys of contrisyon, devosyon, er compassion, he may and
owyth to levyn that the Holy Gost is in hys sowle’ ” (18: 122). Julian adds
that the slander Kempe receives due to her weeping actually increases her
merit in the eyes of God, “ ‘for the more despyte, schame, and repref that
ye have in the world, the mor is yowr meryte in the sygth of God’ ” (122).
Julian’s endorsement of Kempe’s fits of tears not only provides sanction
by a respected religious authority, but also reveals the spiritual value of
the abuse Kempe receives from the social disabling her fits cause. In a
vision, St. Jerome echoes Julian’s sentiments, acknowledging the power
of Kempe’s weeping to save others and noting its status as “ ‘a synguler
and special yyft that God hath yovyn the—a welle of teerys, the whech
schal nevyr man take fro the’ ” (41: 210).
In addition to allowing Kempe to place herself among an esteemed
company of religious women, her roars and sobs are also able to articulate
emotions that do not easily fit into the parameters of language. Dhira
Mahoney asserts that “her tears are beyond language; her sobs substitute
for the words she cannot find. But they are also, at the same time, them-
selves language.”35 In contrast to the written language of the Church,
Kempe’s tears are a “public language, an individual expression of separ-
ateness through bodily action in defiance of the prohibitions of custom
and the ecclesiastical system.”36 Kempe’s crying fits not only give her a
means through which to express her spiritual emotions, but also allow
others to “read” the message her body articulates. Responses to her tears
abroad are strikingly benign when compared with those she receives at
home. As Harding suggests, “In Rome and Jerusalem, for example, her
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bodily discourse crossed the boundaries imposed by language, and her

tears, cries, and writhings meet with acceptance and sympathy.”37 Kempe
recalls several situations in which language becomes a barrier throughout
her travels. For example, when she meets the maidservant of St. Bridget
of Sweden in Rome, she is unable to converse with her without a trans-
lator (39: 203). When visiting Dame Margaret Florentyne, “neithyr of
hem cown wel understand other but be syngnys er tokenys and in fewe
comown wordys” until, miraculously, Kempe is able to express in Italian
her impoverished state (38: 201). Despite a few instances in which Kempe
is able to converse with those who do not know her language through
divine intervention (33: 185; 38: 201; and 40: 207–8), she usually com-
municates with others through “syngnys er tokenys.” Soon, her white
clothing and her fits of tears become “syngyns” that others can under-
stand. After one particularly physical fit of crying, some women are
moved to love her “meche the mor. And therfor thei, desiring to make
hir solas and comfort aftyr hir gostly labowr—be syngys and tokenys,
for sche undirstod not her speche—preyid hir, and in a maner compellyd
hir, to comyn hom to hem, willyng that sche schulde not gon fro hem”
(41: 209). While abroad, Kempe’s fits of tears, which are, on one hand,
beyond language, become a powerful body language that compels much
needed charity from others, usually in the form of food and shelter.
Kempe’s tears, however, do not simply function as a means through
which she receives spiritual favor and personal charity, for they simulta-
neously act as a catalyst to the conversion and spiritual growth of others.
What is significant about Kempe’s crying fits is that they almost always
occur in public. After Kempe suffers her first fit of tears, the Virgin
appears before her and assures her that her tears are “gifts” from her son
meant to cause “the world [to] wondryn of the” (29: 171). Christ goes on
to inform Kempe that her tears are as much for others as they are for her,
explaining, “ ‘Dowtyr, I schal makyn al the werld to wondryn of the,
and many man and many woman schal spekyn of me for lofe of the and
worshepyn me in the’ ” (172). Later, when Kempe begs Christ to allow
her to cry in private, Christ explains that the purposes for her tears are
fivefold: they allow Kempe to express her obedience to Christ, strike fear
in the sinful hearts of others, demonstrate the Virgin’s grief, turn others
toward redemption, and will reduce Kempe’s physical pain upon death
(77: 332–6).
Clearly, Kempe’s public crying fits affect others. The Book reports that
witnesses to Kempe’s tears often wonder or even stare at her with “gret
merveyl” (45: 223), and some are moved to convert or deepen their reli-
gious faith. One man in particular, Thomas Marchale, becomes so moved
by Kempe’s tears that he begins to weep his own tears of contrition (223).
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Marchale thanks Kempe for helping him to remedy his “mysgovernyd”

life by calling “hym fully to be a good man” (223). Later, a visiting priest
asks to speak with Kempe. In the presence of him and his mother, Kempe
begins weeping violently in reaction to a scriptural account of Christ’s
own weeping. The priest and his mother, strangers to Lynn and there-
fore unaccustomed to Kempe’s weeping, are taken aback by her reaction.
Nevertheless, instead of reacting with the usual animosity of her neigh-
bors, the priest and his mother “joyyd and wer ryth mery in owr Lord”
(58: 279). In fact, the priest is so moved by Kempe that he becomes her
trusted friend, reading her spiritual texts and supporting “hir wepyng and
hir crying” despite incurring the anger of others in the town (280). The
priest’s relationship with Kempe not only bolsters her understanding of
religious texts, but also leads to the “gret encres of hys cunnyng and his
meryte” and, finally, his own benefice (280).
Moreover, Kempe uses her tears to benefit others in need, weeping
not only for her own sins, but also the sins of others: “Sumtyme sche
wept another owr for the sowlys in purgatory; another owr for hem that
weryn in myschefe, in poverte, er in any disese; another owr for Jewys,
Sarazinys, and alle false heretikys” (57: 276–7). As Mahoney suggests,
Kempe’s tears represent a “direct line to God” that “interlocks” her tears
and prayers.38 Throughout her life, Kempe is called to the sickbeds and
deathbeds of others and asked to pray or weep for their souls, “for thow
thei lovyd not hir wepyng ne hir crying in her lyfetyme, thei desiryed
that sche schulde bothyn wepyn and cryin whan thei schulde dyen, and
so sche dede” (72: 321). On one particular occasion, Kempe’s neighbors
find themselves pleading for her tears when a fire erupts in Lynne, burn-
ing down the Trinity Guildhall. Upset by the scene before her, Kempe
begins to alternately cry and pray. The people of Lynne, afraid for their
lives, “suffyr hir to cryen and wepyn as mech as evyr sche wolde, and
no man wolde byddyn hir cesyn, but rather preyn hir of contynuacyon,
ful trusting and belevyng that thorw hir crying and wepyng owr Lord
wolde takyn hem to mercy” (67: 307). In between sobs, Kempe prays for
“sum reyn or sum wedyr” to put out the fire (308). Soon, the town is hit
with a snowstorm, which helps to contain the fire. At many points in the
Book, then, even Kempe’s detractors must acknowledge the latent power
of her tears.
In addition to recasting an “aff liction” that may be disabling as power-
ful, Kempe’s text allows her to make tangible the Word of God through
the aberrancies of her own body. Again, I turn to contemporary scholar-
ship on life writing and its connection to the body. If, as Eakin and Frank
suggest, the material condition of one’s body prompts life writing, it is
also true that writing about the self makes the body material. Sidonie
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Smith asserts that the materiality of the body is essential to life writing:
“If the materiality of our bodies makes it possible for us to tell stories
about ourselves, to make selves in the telling, the very stories that we
tell in turn become the lives that we live and the material bodies that we
are.”39 In her consideration of autobiographies by writers with autism,
Smith questions how a differently embodied subjectivity might affect
narrative practices and finds that, often, writers with disabilities write to
recover their bodies as well as their memories, thereby forging a connec-
tion between the body, its memories, and the narration of those memo-
ries. The link between the body and memory becomes manifest in life
writing, for “acts of remembering and telling reform and rematerialize
the embodied subject of narration.”40
Kempe’s Book, which her scribe makes clear is driven by her memo-
ries, not only documents her own memories and body, but also creates a
record that serves as a remembrance of Christ’s suffering. Kempe’s body
serves as the primary conduit through which this act of simultaneous
remembrance occurs. As noted above, the impetus to Kempe’s first fit
of tears is a visit to the sites of Christ’s Passion that causes her to envi-
sion Christ’s suffering as if it were occurring directly before her. At the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a group of friars explains to the pilgrims
the various acts of torture that Christ endured, which causes Kempe
to begin weeping: “And the forseyd creatur wept and sobbyd so plen-
tyvowsly as thow sche had seyn owyr Lord wyth hir bodyly ey sufferyng
hys Passyon at that time. Before hir in hyr sowle sche saw hym verily
be contemplacyon, and that cawsyd hir to have compassyon” (28: 162).
Here, Christ’s suffering springs up from the past into Kempe’s present.
She makes public his suffering by enacting it with her own body through
her violent fit of tears, which causes her to writhe and twist upon the
ground and spread “hir armys abrode” in her own performance of the
crucifixion (163). As Christ makes clear, Kempe’s tears forge a direct
connection between the two of them: “I schal make the buxom to my
wil, that thu schalt criyn whan I wil, and wher I wil, bothyn lowed and
stille, for I teld the, dowtyr, thu art myn and I am thyn , and so schalt
thu be wythowtyn ende” (77: 333). As Beckwith has suggested, Kempe’s
fits of tears, which align Kempe with Christ in a “maximal identifica-
tion,” restore the historic moment of Christ’s death to Kempe’s present
and continue to “reproduce and repeat that mimesis at every utterance.”41
Thus, each time Kempe weeps, she conjures anew the historic moment of
the Passion. Kempe’s performance of Christ’s Passion and her description
of that performance in her Book simultaneously create a remembrance
of Christ’s death, one bodily and the other textual: “By approximating
herself to Christ, misrecognizing herself in him, by living a life that is
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itself a mimesis and remembrance of the Passion, the female mystic may
gain access to the Word, or to those more human expedients, words.”42
Consequently, Kempe’s tears bring the body of Christ from religious text
into her own body, thereby causing her own body to function as text.
The text of her body and of Christ’s then both prompt the recording of
and get recorded by the text of her Book.
Later in the text, as Beckwith has found, Christ directly connects
Kempe’s tears with the written words of her Book, noting that her work
on completing her Book is just as pleasing to him as her tears, for, just as
by her tears many renewed their faith in Christ, “be this boke many a
man schal be turnyd to me and belevyn therin” (88: 379).43 Beckwith
surmises, “Kempe’s text, then, describes first a form of mimesis of Christ
which makes of her body a text, and a form of internalized devotion
that makes her written text itself the resource of sacramentality. Such an
exchange can only operate through the symbol of Christ’s body, which is
both body and word.”44 In this way, Kempe’s tears, which produce both
her bodily identification with Christ and the text of her Book, function as
a remembering and a re-membering of Christ’s body.
Kempe’s tears also operate as a means through which Kempe may
experience her own Passion and thus expand her own spiritual gains.
Throughout her Book, Kempe casts the verbal abuse she endures from
others as comparable to the torments Christ suffered during his arrest and
crucifixion. During a period of arrests and trials for Lollardy, Kempe suf-
fers much slander. Women shake their distaffs at her and call her a heretic,
and “men of the cuntre” insult the life that she leads, commanding her to
“go spynne and carde as other women don” (53: 258). Kempe responds
to her attackers by comparing the insults she receives to the blows Christ
received:
“I suffir not so mech sorwe as I wolde do for owr Lordys lofe, for I suffir
but schreweyd wordys, and owr merciful Lord Crist Jhesu, worshepyed be
hys name, suffyrd hard strokys, bittyr scorgyngys, and schamful deth at
the last for me and for al mankynde, blyssed most he be, And therfor it is
ryth nowt that I suffir, in regarde to that he suffyrd.” (53: 259)
Though Kempe notes that her form of suffering is not as extreme as

Christ’s, it is clear that she draws a connection between physical blows
and verbal abuse. She later admits that the insults that she receives in
response to her tears “etyn” and “knawyn” at her body (62: 297) and
that they may even help to lessen her own sins. She states, “ ‘I pray God
that al maner of wikkydnes that any man schal seyn of me in this world
may stonde into remissyon of my synnys’ ” (63: 297). Christ even assures
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her that the more verbal abuse she endures, the brighter she appears in
God’s eyes. After reacting to a particularly moving sermon with a fit of
tears, Christ explains, “ ‘Dowtyr, this plesith me righ wel, for the mor
schame and mor despite that thu hast for my lofe, the mor joy schalt thu
have wyth me in hevyn, and it is rithful that it be so’ ” (78: 338). While
the physical act of violently weeping allows Kempe to perform and recall
Christ’s Passion, the negative responses she endures in reaction to her
crying fits allow her to participate in her own Passion, one in which her
spiritual merit is increased with every insult. The social disabling that
occurs as a result of her bodily difference, then, actually succeeds in fur-
thering her spiritual goals.
Kempe’s “Welle of Teerys” and Medical Notions

of the Female Body
In addition to prompting the production of her text and leading to the
enhancement of her singularity, Kempe’s bodily deviance is closely linked
to medieval understandings of the female body that interpret it as defec-
tive. As my introduction outlines, medieval medical discourses construe
the female body as a defective male body due to its colder, moister nature
and its reproductive organs, which are often viewed as unformed, and
therefore imperfect, male organs. In addition, biblical and religious writ-
ings frequently link the “wicked” nature of women—their tendency to
give in to temptations and then lead men into sin—to their differently
sexed bodies. Because of their supposedly defective bodies and characters,
women are closely connected to those with physical impairments in lit-
erature throughout the Middle Ages, for, like those with impairments, a
woman’s defective body was thought to provide evidence of her internal
sinful nature. As I note above, women with spiritual aspirations had to go
to great lengths to prove their spiritual worth, particularly by protecting
their chastity and demonstrating their control over their bodily desires.
Kempe, because she is a married mother in the world and unable to “seal”
herself away in an anchorhold, struggles to present herself as spiritually
devout; thus, she strives to procure a chaste marriage with her husband
and dresses herself in white to represent her bodily purity, usually gen-
erating protests from those around her. Kempe’s fits of tears fall in line
with medieval assumptions about the nature of the female body and show
that Kempe may have exploited those assumptions to further her own
spiritual ends.
Medieval medical associations of the female body with moisture
required the female body to seek out ways in which to purge excess
moisture. Generally, medical texts assume that menstruation fulfills this
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need, allowing the female body to cleanse itself of excess wastes caused
by its moist humor. Because of the moist and cold natures of women,
the female body needed to balance itself by extracting heat from the
male body during intercourse. Excessive intercourse with women, which
depleted male bodies of a special life-giving f luid called spiritus, could
lead men to blindness or even death.45 However, religious or devotional
texts often construed the excessive moisture of the female body as a
direct way in which a woman could enact imitatio Christi. As Elizabeth
Robertson demonstrates, medieval medical texts often underscore the
similarities among bodily f luids such as blood, tears, milk, semen, and
other f luids that the body exudes. For instance, Galenic notions of blood
stipulate that superiorly purified blood becomes semen, whereas men-
strual blood becomes milk.46 The intimate connection between breast
milk and blood allowed women to identify themselves within the bleed-
ing body of Christ, whose blood was often depicted as nourishment to
his children. Bynum notes that particularly later medieval literary and
artistic images of men and women drinking from the breast or side of
Christ “stressed blood more than milk as the food of the soul.”47 Bynum
finds that miracles surrounding female saints often focus on exuding f lu-
ids that cured, comforted, or even nourished others: “Thus, the female
body was seen as powerful in its holy or miraculous exuding, whether of
breast milk or of blood or of oil.”48 Kempe’s tears, involuntarily exuding
eff luvia that express her spiritual emotions and take the form of prayers
used to aid in the spiritual comfort of others, fall within the tradition of
other miraculous female bodily emissions.
Kempe’s miraculous and uncontrollable tears fulfill two distinct
purposes: they allow her body to purge its excess moisture and provide
Kempe with a means through which to become the suffering body of
Christ. Robertson contends
[A religious woman’s] experience . . . was defined by Aristotelian ideas of

her need for completion—for heat—and for the purging of excess mois-
ture. In addition, the biological parity between blood, sweat, tears, milk,
and urine meant that a woman’s contemplation of Christ’s blood was con-
templation of her own blood, and further that her tears were equivalent
to Christ’s blood. The suffering body of Christ thus allowed a woman not
only to pity Christ but to identify in him her own perceived suffering
body; moreover, union with his suffering body would allow her to realize
her perceived biological needs.49
Kempe’s tears are thus grounded in a medical understanding of the female

body as defective. At the same time, however, Kempe’s tears allow her
unmediated access to God as well as the opportunity to become his body
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through imitatio Christi. Kempe’s most vivid account of her vision of the
Passion sequence draws direct parallels between her uncontrollable f low
of tears and Christ’s bleeding body. Robertson has found that Julian of
Norwich’s descriptions of her visions of the Passion sequence emphasize
the feminine aspects of Christ in a way that is conditioned by medical
understandings of the female body. For instance, Julian’s emphasis on
blood imagery connects Christ’s bleeding body to the excessively moist
female body, which allows Julian to access the divine through her own
body: “Christ’s blood is linked with all kinds of moisture, all redemptive
of feminine excess. . . . Excess moisture is thus redemptive, and thereby
so is femininity itself.”50 Though Robertson does not consider Kempe’s
versions of the Passion in detail, she does assert that medieval medical
views affect the visions, noting, “Told by theory that she can only expe-
rience God through the body, Margery recounts extreme bodily expe-
riences in her quest for union with God. Told that she has too much
moisture, Margery cries excessively. . . . The very excesses of her writing,
her extremes of tears and sensual expressiveness, suggest a destabiliza-
tion of those assumptions.”51 Kempe’s visions of Christ’s Passion, which
only occur at two points in her text, not only connect Christ’s body
with the female body, but also unite Christ’s suffering with the bodily
effects of Kempe’s fits of tears. The supposed defective qualities of the
female body—its excessive moisture and need to purge that excess—thus
become redeemed and even exalted in its union with Christ’s body.
Kempe’s first vision of the Passion occurs upon Mount Calvary and
prompts her first fit of tears:
Sche had so very contemplacyon in the sygth of her sowle as yf Crist had
hangyn befor hir bodily eye in hys manhode. And whan thorw dispen-
sacyon of the hy mercy of owyr Sovereyn Savyowr, Crist Jhesu, it was
grawntyd this creatur to beholdyn so verily hys precyows tendyr body—
alto-rent and toryn wyth scorgys, mor ful of wowndys than evyr a duf-
fehows of holys, hangyng upon the cros wyth the corown of thorn upon
hys hevyd, hys blysful handys, hys tendyr fete nayled to the hard tre, the
reverys of blood f lowing owt plentevowsly of every member, the gresly
and grevows wownde in hys precyows side schedyng owt blood and watyr
for hir lofe and salvacyon—than sche fel down and cryde wyth lowde
voys, wondyrfully turnyng and wresting hir body on every side, spredyng
hir armys abroade as yyf sche schulde a dyde and not cowed kepyn hir fro
crying and these bodily mevyngys, for the fyer of lofe that brent so fer-
vently in hir sowle wyth pur pyte and compassyon. (28: 166–7)
Kempe here focuses on the fissured status of Christ’s body; it is torn

to pieces, shredded by scourges. Kempe calls upon Richard Rolle’s
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description of Christ’s wounded body as similar to a dove-cote, or full

of holes. In his Meditations of the Passion, Rolle writes, “swet Jhesu, thy
body is like to a duf house, for a duf house is ful of holys: so is thy body
ful of woundes. And as a dove ursued of an hauk, yf she mow cache
an hool of hir hous she is siker ynowe, so, swete Jhesu, in temptacioun
they woundes ben best refuyt to us.”52 In Christ’s wounds, Rolle affirms,
believers can find refuge. Kempe’s allusion to Rolle allows her to contend
that Christ’s fissured f lesh provides a means through which Kempe can
unite with Christ, become his body, and find salvation. Kempe is able to
identify with Christ because, like her body, Christ’s body exudes exces-
sive moisture: rivers of blood stream down all of his limbs, and blood and
water emit from a wound in his side. This moisture, Kempe emphasizes,
is redemptive, for it is “for hir lofe and salvacyon.” If Christ’s fissured,
moist f lesh can effect salvation, then so too is it possible for Kempe’s body
to have salvific properties.
Kempe’s second extended meditation on the Passion sequence occurs
much later in the text during a church service. She describes coming to
the site of Christ’s crucifixion, where she sees
. . . the Jewys wyth gret violens rendyn of owr Lordys precyows body a
cloth of sylke, the which was clevyn and hardyd so sadly and streitly to
owr Lordys body wyth hys precyows blood, that it drow awey al the hyde
and al the skyn of hys blissyd body and renewyd hys preciows wowndys,
and mad the blod to renne down al abowtyn on every side. Than that
precyows body aperyd to hir sight as rawe as a thing that wer newe f layn
owt of the skyn, ful petows and reful to beholdyn. And so had sche a newe
sorwe that sche wept and cryid ryth sor. (80: 347)
Kempe’s emphasis on the newly reopened wounds, which ooze and bleed
down his body, cause Christ’s body to appear merely as f lesh dripping
with blood, his skin “f layn” as if he were animal just brought home
from the hunt. The image fully feminizes Christ by equating him with
f lesh, even meat. Like the female body, Kempe’s crucified Christ emits
excessive moisture and becomes food meant for the nourishment of oth-
ers. Kempe confesses that images of wounded animals cause her to think
upon Christ’s wounds, which, in turn, causes her to collapse into a fit of
tears: “[ . . . ] yf sche sey a man had a wownde er a best whethyr it wer, er
yyf a man bett a childe before hir, er smet an hors er another best wyth
a whippe, [ . . . ], hir thowt sche saw owyr Lord be betyn er wowndyd”
(28: 164). She also finds in her own body a direct link to Christ, for just
as his wounded body becomes a spectacle in her mind, her body becomes
a spectacle for those around her. While gushes of blood spill down the
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sides of Christ’s body, Kempe immediately weeps, tears streaming down

her cheeks, so “that myche of the pepil in the chirche wondryd on hir
body” (80: 348).
Next, Kempe sees Christ’s tormentors lift up the cross and place it
into the earth. The movement makes Christ’s body tremble and quake,
“and alle the joyntys of that blissful body brostyn and wentyn asundyr,
and hys precyows wowndys ronnyn down wyth reverys of blod on every
side. And so sche had everymor cawse of mor wepyng and sorwyng” (80:
348–9). Here, the bones holding Christ’s body together burst apart, and
his f lesh disintegrates into rivers of f lowing blood. Christ thus becomes
pure moisture, while Kempe simultaneously melts into an effusion of
tears. Kempe finds herself in Christ’s body then becomes his body. “The
crucified body of Christ becomes Margery Kempe’s mystical primer,”
Lochrie observes, “teaching her how to read his love, mercy, and grace
in his humiliation and disfigurement.”53 At the same time, however, I
contend that Kempe’s physical reactions to Christ’s body make her a text
to be read by others that seeks to achieve redemption through her own
bodily differences and the reactions of others to those differences.
Rewriting Pregnancy and Childbirth: Kempe’s Fits of

Tears and the Procreative Body
Though Kempe does not reveal that she has carried fourteen children until
she is brought to trial in Leicester in Chapter 48, her status as a mother is
clear throughout her text (48: 235). Kempe’s allusions to pregnancy and
childcare, such as her insertion into the births of Mary and Christ and her
frequent references and comparisons to St. Margaret, the patron saint of
pregnant women, figure prominently throughout her Book. Liz Herbert
McAvoy’s recent work claims that Kempe’s text relies on the use of ideo-
logical and experiential representations of maternity in order to enact her
own specific spiritual piety.54 Similarly, Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth notes
that despite a “repression” of direct references to Kempe’s own children,
her life and Book repeatedly turn to images of pregnancy, childbirth,
and mothering. The text’s use of such maternal imagery reveals what
Hellwarth calls the text’s “reproductive unconscious,” or a textual drive
to resolve the tensions between the procreative female body and the ideal
virginal body.55 I add to Hellwarth’s reading an emphasis on the connec-
tions between disability and the reproductive female body in medieval
religious and medical discourse. I contend that, in Kempe’s Book, a textual
desire to work out the discrepancy between the procreative and virginal
body comes together with its drive to close the gap created by Kempe’s
deviant body, the difference that prompts the telling and recording of her
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story. Consequently, Kempe’s bodily differences are inherently linked to

her reproductive organs, and the narrative desires of her text attempt to
negotiate those differences. As I note in chapter 1, considering female
infertility and reproductive ability through a gendered model for dis-
ability allows for a reading of reproductive inability as a form of disability
since medieval medical, biblical, and religious discourses predicate the
physical and moral imperfection of women on the perceived defective-
ness of the female reproductive system. The pregnant woman, with her
monstrously changing body and her potential for producing monsters,
clearly connects to other abject figures whose bodily differences threaten
the boundary between self and Other. The abject nature of the pregnant
or birthing woman, moreover, holds the potential for jouissance, a pow-
erfully disruptive celebration of the breakdown of boundaries and the
proliferation of excess.
Kempe’s text clearly reveals both the disabling and potentially power-
ful qualities of pregnancy and childbirth. The beginning of Kempe’s text
highlights pregnancy’s disabling effects. After marrying and giving birth
to her first child, Kempe suffers a bout of physical and mental illness. In
fact, her illness begins not after the child is born, but just after concep-
tion and throughout her pregnancy: “And aftyr that sche had conceived,
sche was labowrd wyth grett accessys tyl the child was born and than,
what for labowr sche had in chyldyng and for sekeness goyng beforn,
sche dyspered of hyr lyfe wenyng sche mygth not levyn” (1: 52). Kempe
thus explains that she suffered a terrible sickness after conception; that
sickness, in conjunction with the pain she experiences in labor, leads
her to fear that she may be close to death. Indeed, Kempe’s fears are
not unfounded; pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous endeavors in
the Middle Ages, and painful labors, birth-related illnesses and compli-
cations, and even deaths were common.56 Furthermore, some medieval
devotional texts for women, such as Hali Meidenhad and Fasiculus Morum,
stress the uncomfortable and often painful physical side effects of preg-
nancy and childbirth, clearly casting pregnancy as a debilitating condi-
tion. Kempe confesses to the physically disabling effects of pregnancy
and birth when Christ asks her to travel to Norwich soon after the birth
of one of her children. Kempe hesitates, complaining of feeling “ ‘feynt
and feble,’ ” and Christ promises to give her strength to make the jour-
ney (17: 113). Later, Kempe’s nursing the health of a woman suffering a
similar response to childbirth evokes Kempe’s own early struggles while
also emphasizing the very real potential complications of carrying and
delivering children (75: 327–9). Highlighting the difficulties of Kempe’s
first pregnancy sets the tone for the reader’s interpretation of her later
pregnancies. Thus, though Kempe does not mention another pregnancy
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in such detail, readers may assume that she continued to experience dif-
ficulties with her thirteen other children. Having given birth to four-
teen children, Kempe spends ten-and-a-half years of her life pregnant, an
extensive amount of time to endure the disabilities of pregnancy.
In addition to causing physically disabling symptoms that hindered a
woman’s day-to-day activities, pregnancy also had the potential to hin-
der the spiritual progress of a woman bent on living a religious life. The
sexual ideal for spiritual women was not compatible with the procre-
ative female body. Pregnancy and the act of childbirth clearly dismantle
the “sealed” body of the virgin, whose “seal” keeps its fissured f lesh
together and its f leshliness from leaching out and corrupting itself and
others. In fact, sermons and devotional literature distinctly oppose the
ideal, virginal, and painless birth of the Virgin Mary to the imperfect,
carnal, and painful births of Eve and her “daughters.” As a result, Monica
Potkay and Regula Evitt explain, “Medieval culture delimits the value
of the female body in ways that make it virtually impossible for f lesh-
and-blood women to combine motherhood and sainthood.”57 Though
there are records of mothers who turn to a spiritual life, those who are
successful and earn respect and canonization, such as St. Elizabeth, often
abandon their own children and family.
The opening scene of Kempe’s Book identifies the uneasy links
between childbirth and sinfulness. After explaining her painful “labowr,”
Kempe recalls the wicked visions of devils she endures, stating that she
“labowryed wyth spyritys” (1: 54). The use of the verb “labowr” for both
instances aligns the experience of childbirth with her devilish visions
and temptations. McAvoy finds that the devilish figures personify the
supposed sexual nature of Kempe’s unconfessed sin, which, in turn, may
allude to notions of filth and sin undergirding pregnancy: “Both literally
in her childbirth labour, and in her struggle with mental and physical col-
lapse, Margery labours to the point of death. In this way, birth and death
become inextricably linked [ . . . ], and as a re-enactment of the punish-
ment imposed upon Eve [ . . . ], motherhood necessarily carries with it
the punitive subtext of damnation.”58 Hellwarth adds that “the image of
‘labowyrd with spyritys’ suggests both a sinful birth (that is, giving birth
to the devil) and an otherworldly labor.”59 The devils, whose mouths are
agape with f lames, recall the “the physical experience of birth,” insinu-
ating a “dilated cervix” as well as the resultant burning pain.60 Later,
we will see how Kempe continues using this verb to evoke the tensions
inherent in her attempts to lead a spiritual life while very much a part of
the secular world.
Indeed, Kempe’s constant struggles throughout her text center on
the public’s failure to resolve her status as a married mother with her
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unabashed displays of virginity, such as wearing white clothing. Kempe

seems to fully understand the hindrances of being a mother to her spiri-
tual goals. In a conversation with Christ, he reveals his knowledge that
she is pregnant, asserting, “ ‘Dowtyr, thow art wyth childe;’ ” (21: 131).
Kempe grudgingly confirms his statement and worries about how to care
for her child now that she has embarked on her spiritual life. Christ com-
forts her, assuring her that he “ ‘schal ordeyn for an kepar’ ” for her child
(131). In addition to demonstrating the very real logistical problem of
finding childcare, this scene reveals the anxiety Kempe feels about her
own inability to reconcile her sexual and spiritual statuses. Full of appre-
hension, she admits her unworthiness of her special relationship with
Christ because of her marital status: “ ‘Lord, I am not worthy to heryn
the spekyn, and thus to comown wyth myn husband. Nerthelesse it is to
me gret peyn and gret dysese. [ . . . ]. [For] this maner of levyng longyth to
thy holy maydens’ ” (131). Christ gently reassures Kempe that he “ ‘lofe[s]
wyfes’ ” as well as maidens and that he wants her to “ ‘bryng me forth
mor frwte’ ” (131). Despite Christ’s special sanctioning of Kempe’s preg-
nancies, her potential for carrying children remains a problem for those
unable to resolve her marital status and her spiritual goals. Upon her
return to England after traveling overseas (and after her procurement of
a chaste marriage), a monk accuses Kempe of having just had a child. He
asks her “wher sche had don hir chylde, the which was begotyn and born
whil sche was owte, as he had herd seyde” (43: 216). Kempe responds to
the accusation by retorting, “ ‘Ser, the same childe that God hath sent me
I have browt hom, for God knowyth I dede nevyr sithyn I went owte
wherthorw I schulde have a childe’ ” (216). The monk, however, has
trouble believing that Kempe has not borne a child and, consequently,
finds discomfort in her decision to wear white clothing.61 Despite the fact
that the monk later asks to serve as her spiritual guide, it is clear that the
disjunction between Kempe’s sexual and maternal status and her desire
to display her chastity in her clothing (i.e., a disjunction between her
actual and virtual identities) encumbers the monk’s acceptance of her
spiritual nature. God eventually advises Kempe not to accept the monk
as her guide.
Although Kempe’s pregnancies present hindrances to her physical
health and spiritual progress, her Book ultimately presents pregnancy
as spiritually enabling through its revisions—or counternarratives—of
the experience of birth. As Hellwarth contends, Kempe “shows through
[mothering] metaphors a desire to simultaneously excuse herself from and
control and liberate women’s procreative bodies generally. She draws to
the center her procreative body, and she rewrites its history” by inject-
ing herself into the sacred history of Christ’s birth and Passion as well as
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Mary’s experience of motherhood.62 I agree with Hope Phyllis Weissman

that Kempe connects her fits of crying, those very bodily reactions that
mark her as different and often lead to her social disabling, to the expe-
rience of birth, thus forging a link between herself and the Virgin that
relies on their shared maternal experiences.63 In other words, Kempe’s
tears allow her to imitate not only Christ, but also his mother. In fact, her
imitatio Mariae is perhaps more pronounced and thus more central to her
body and text than her imitatio Christi, for it allows her to recast her own
painful experiences of childbirth as painless and spiritual.
Kempe’s connection to Mary begins quite early in her Book, particu-
larly in a vision in which Kempe serves as midwife to St. Anne and
St. Elizabeth and as Jesus’s caretaker after Mary gives birth (6: 75–8).
The two pregnancies that Kempe attends are devoid of the pain and ill-
ness that Kempe herself has recently suffered, while the Virgin’s birth
is completely passed over. Kempe further connects her own procreative
body to Mary’s in her fits of tears. Descriptions of Kempe’s fits of crying
in her Book frequently align her cries, roarings, and writhings with the
physical experience of childbirth. Indeed, her f lailing body and loud cries
closely resemble a woman in the throes of labor, while the weakness she
feels afterwards mimics the feebleness she describes after the birth of one
of her children. Kempe’s fits of tears, however, allow her to participate
in an act of birth that does not result in the very dangerous and even
fatal effects of childbirth. Kempe herself calls her fits a “gostly labowr,”
a phrase that recalls Mary of Oignies’s classification of her own cries as
similar to those of a woman giving birth (28: 166).64 Like the “Passion”
that Kempe endures due to the harsh reactions of others to her fits of tears,
Kempe’s “birthing” through her tears is a spiritual one. Kempe thus not
only recasts birth as a painless experience in her retelling of the labors of
Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth, but also re-enacts her own experiences with
childbirth, turning what were for her physically debilitating and poten-
tially fatal experiences into a highly spiritual one. Despite her inclusion
of the spiritual in the very physical act of childbirth, Kempe never lets the
two collapse. Instead, she maintains a tension between the physical and
the spiritual—the same tension we see throughout her Book—using her
bodily deviance to call forth the spiritual, but never allowing one to take
over the other completely.65
Other late-medieval mystical writings explore the link between the
work of childbirth and Christ’s Passion, casting Jesus as a mother-figure
who gives life to and nurtures his children.66 Notably, Julian of Norwich
contends that, in taking on and dying in human form, Christ gives birth
to humankind; consequently, Christ’s death is a labor that births human-
kind, situating him as the means through which people can embrace, not
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transcend, their human form: “for in oure moder Cryst we profit and
encrese, and in mercy he reformyth us and restoryth, and by the vertu of
his passion and his deth and his uprysyng onyd us to oure substannce.”67
In comparison, however, Kempe’s fits of tears figure herself, not Christ,
as the one giving birth, and the “child” that Kempe gives birth to through
her tears is Christ. Thus, Kempe’s fits of tears not only allow her to per-
form Christ’s Passion, to become Christ, but also to give birth to him,
locating Kempe’s “ ‘gostly labowr’ as a simultaneous identification and
parturition” with and of Christ.68 Through her fits of tears, then, Kempe
is at once Christ and Christ’s mother.
Kempe further forges the connection that she finds between Christ’s
Passion and his birth when she follows up her second vision of the Passion
with a description of her reaction to attending a church service during
Purification Day. As Kempe observes the service, she begins to waver
“on eche side as it had ben a dronkyn woman, wepyng and sobbyng so
sor that unethe sche myth stondyn on hir feet for the fervor of lofe and
devocyon that God putte in hir sowle” (82: 358). Kempe next reveals that
seeing any women being purified after childbirth would result in her rec-
ollection of the Virgin’s purification, thus causing her to eschew “erdly
thowtys and erdly syghtys, and sett al togedyr in gostly syghtys, whech
wer so delectabyl and so devowt that sche myth not in the tyme of fervor
wythstondyn hir wepyng, hir sobbyng, ne hir crying, and therfor suffyrd
sche ful mech wondering, many a jape and many a scorne” (358). The
very bodily act of childbirth, which is so polluting that it requires puri-
fication by the Church, gets supplanted by Mary’s spiritual experience
of birth, which, in turn, causes Kempe’s own body to respond in such a
way as to allow her to reenact birth and death in spiritual terms.69 Kempe
ends this chapter by directly linking her fits of tears to her own spiritual
fertility, describing herself during her brief periods without the ability to
weep as “bareyn.” Her crying fits, once the source of anxiety and tor-
ment, are now cast as the cause of her happiness and spiritual expression:
“And than, whan sche was so bareyn, sche cowed fynde no joye ne no
comforte in mete ne drynke ne dalyans, but evyr was hevy in her and in
cuntenawnce tyl God wolde send hem to hir ageyn, and than was sche
mery anow,” noting that “sche thowt that sche cowed preyin” only when
she could weep (359–60).
As I note above, Kempe’s enacting of imitatio Christi creates a bodily
remembrance of Christ that is read through the actions of Kempe’s body.
Readers of Kempe’s Book, therefore, recall Christ’s body through their
reading of Kempe’s. In the same way and at the same time, Kempe’s fits
of tears allow her to imitate and thus remember/re-member Mary’s body
by performing the Virgin’s grief at her son’s death, a violent and physical
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grief that, according to established doctrine, took the place of the physi-
cal suffering that Mary did not endure during childbirth.70 In her second
vision of the crucifixion, Kempe stands with Mary, clearly imitating her
weeping, sobbing, and crying (80: 350). At last, she kneels next to Mary
and says, “ ‘I prey yow, Lady, cesyth of yowr sorwyng, for yowr sone
is ded and owt of peyne, for me thynkyth ye han sorwyd anow. And,
Lady, I wil sorwe for yow, for yowr sorwe is my sorwe’ ” (350). Here,
Kempe willingly takes on the Virgin’s sorrow, using her tears to become
Christ’s mother, and her fits of tears clearly exploit the more physical
and emotional accounts of the Virgin’s response to her son’s death and
their connections to the Virgin birth. Weissman contends that Kempe’s
tears on Calvary allow her “to achieve a participation, both existential
and metaphysical, in the act of the Virgin Birth” that rewrites the “sin
of female sexuality, which labor in childbirth punishes” by recasting
her experiences of birth in spiritual terms.71 As a result, Kempe moves
“beyond Eve’s biological maternity to achieve a maternity suprasexual
and faultlessly pure.” 72
In her rewriting of the physical experience of childbirth, Kempe
also replaces the pain of earthly childbirth with the spiritual, effec-
tively becoming the spiritual mother to Christian men and women that
Christ requests she be: “[T]hu makyst every Cristen man and woman
thi childe in thi sowle for the tyme, and woldist han as muche grace
for hem as for thin owyn childeryn” (86: 140). In an essay that exam-
ines Kempe’s “transvaluation” of the bodily into the spiritual, Michael
Campbell surmises that Kempe’s reassessment of the social roles of wife
and mother makes her sensuality pure by tempering domestic, material
roles with the spiritual.73 While Campbell’s essay mainly focuses on
Kempe’s use of comparative syntax to highlight the rhetorical elements
of her transvaluation, it offers an interpretation of maternal separation
that is valuable to our reading of Kempe’s earthly and spiritual mater-
nity. Campbell notes that death is inherent in birth; consequently, “for
the mother, the pain of childbearing includes the realization that birth
necessitates parting. The ultimate end and purpose of motherhood is
[sic] loss.” 74 This notion of inevitable separation—both in the act of
birth and in the act of death—allows Kempe to more closely align her-
self with Mary, whose grief at her son’s death invokes the pain she did
not experience in his birth. Kempe, thus, through the pain of mater-
nal separation, is able to transvaluate her own material experience of
maternity to Mary’s spiritual maternity.
Kempe’s own explanation of God’s command for procreation,
“crescite et multiplicamini,” or “be fruitful and multiply,” ref lects her
transvaluation of the act of bearing children from the bodily to the
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spiritual: “ ‘Ser, thes wordys ben not undirstondyn only of begetyng of

children bodily, but also be purchasing of vertu, whech is frute gostly, as
be heryng of the wordys of God, be good exampyl yevyng, be mekenes
and paciens, charite and chastite, and swech other, for pacyens is more
worthy than myraclys werkyng’ ” (51: 244). Kempe’s interpretation dif-
ferentiates between bodily and spiritual fruit, explaining that God finds
the two equally pleasing. Furthermore, the production of “frute gostly”
leads to the proliferation of other Christian believers. Kempe’s words
here, which represent her interpretation of the words of God, are a spiri-
tual fruit that leads others to follow her: “And owr Lord, of hys mercy
evyr he mad sum men to lovyn hir and supportyn hir” (244). Kempe’s
supporters become her spiritual children, folks who often refer to her as
“Mother,” care for her and receive care in return, and accept spiritual
advice from her.75 The transvaluation from bodily to spiritual mother
that Kempe undergoes, however, depends on her body. In imitating
Christ and Mary through her fits of tears, Kempe revises the definition
of the procreative body, moving it from the physical to the spiritual
realm. By aligning herself with Mary, Kempe recasts herself as a spiritual
mother who simultaneously brings others to Christ while also advancing
her own spiritual status.
The Labor of Spiritual Motherhood: Kempe’s Care for

the Impaired
Significantly, Kempe’s interactions with the physically and mentally
impaired throughout her Book expressly articulate her capability as a
spiritual mother. Primarily, Kempe provides charity and care to those
with impairments, nurturing them with company, food, and even medi-
cal attention and thus demonstrating her motherly affection. Moreover,
her treatment of such impaired figures succeeds in further demonstrating
her singular spiritual reputation, both in the eyes of Christ and others. It
is not only Kempe’s deviant body, then, that enables her spiritual growth;
she also exploits others with embodied differences in her quest for spiri-
tual development.
One of the most prominent disabled characters of Kempe’s text is
Richard, a poor Irish man with a hunched back who serves as a guide
and source of comfort during Kempe’s travels in Venice. Recently aban-
doned by her fellow English pilgrims, Kempe bemoans her lonely state,
and Christ assures her that her travels will be completed safely. Suddenly,
Kempe turns to the side and spots Richard, “a powyr man” with “a gret
cowche on hys bake” (30: 175), and she remembers that her confessor
prophesied that a “ ‘broke-bakkyd man’ ” would lead her to safety after
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her “ ‘owyn felawsep hath forsakyn’ ” her (176). Kempe asks Richard to
guide her to Rome, and despite his protestations of not having a weapon
to protect her, he finally agrees when she assures him that Christ will look
after them and she will compensate him for his efforts. Richard appears
when Kempe is most vulnerable and marginalized. Her English com-
panions have deserted her, annoyed by her newly acquired fits of tears.
Kempe, thus, finds company with a fellow outsider, one that she makes
clear is not only impaired, but also from a foreign country. Richard’s
economic status marks him as marginalized, as well. Kempe makes refer-
ence to his tattered coat twice, and he must leave her each day in order to
make his living as a beggar.
While Richard perhaps “mothers” Kempe by providing her comfort
“every evyn and morwyn,” his appearance leads up to an expression
of Kempe’s spiritual maternity. While walking with him in the forest,
Kempe encounters two Grey Friars and a woman carrying a chest that
holds a doll in the shape of Christ. At each stop along their journey, the
woman takes out the doll and allows “worshepful wyfys” to hold it in
their laps, dress it, and kiss it as if the doll were “God hymselfe” (30:
177). While watching the women “mother” the Christ doll, Kempe is
taken by a fit of tears and “hy meditacyons in the byrth and the child-
hode of Crist” (177–8). The passing of the Christ doll among the wives
connects the women, forming a female community that unites both
Christian devotion and the experience of motherhood.76 Kempe’s reac-
tion, her fit of tears, calls forth Christ’s birth and death as well as her
own experiences of giving birth, thereby bringing together earthly and
spiritual motherhood. As Hellwarth explains, “Margery is unified with
these women by an event, Christ’s birth, and its subsequent reenact-
ment. The text here places the ritual of these women coddling and kiss-
ing the Christ doll as akin to the real birth and childhood of Christ.” 77
And, though the other wives participate in caring for the doll, Kempe
clearly signifies the mother “who weeps, sobs, and loudly cries out in
a rehearsal of birth and delivery.” 78 Hellwarth adds that the ending of
the chapter continues to assert Kempe’s status as spiritual mother to
the Christ doll, for the other women, overwhelmed by her physical
response, serve as midwives to Kempe, helping her into “a good soft
bed” and comforting her “as thei myth” (178).79 Richard’s appearance
at the opening of this section is apt. His arrival, which occurs soon after
Kempe acquires her fits of tears from which she suffers physical debility
and social ostracism, draws attention to embodied difference in general
and Kempe’s own marginalized status in particular. His acceptance of
her companionship throughout her travels abroad emphasizes her con-
tinued exclusion from her home community and her acceptance by
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other “outsiders,” such as the Saracens (30: 174) and a group of impov-
erished travelers (Book II, 6: 407). Furthermore, their mutual comfort-
ing of one another establishes the importance of providing care for
others who are marginalized.80 Consequently, though Richard’s care
for Kempe sets him up as a maternal figure, Kempe soon supersedes
him, demonstrating her capacity to mother Christ. As a result, charity,
embodied difference, and maternity become closely connected in this
scene. The doll, a representation of Christ, foreshadows the spiritual
children that Kempe will care for throughout the rest of her text. If to
care for the doll is to care for Christ, then to provide charity and com-
fort to others is also to serve Christ. As we will see, many of the figures
Kempe provides care for are impaired.
P. H. Cullum’s study of acts of charity in Kempe’s Book notes that,
in Kempe’s time, performing the Seven Works of Mercy for the less
fortunate “would be equivalent to doing them for Christ.” 81 The figure
receiving the aid, then, takes the form of Christ, and doing for others
becomes a way to directly serve Christ. These works were divided into
Spiritual Works, such as prayer and forgiveness, and Corporal Works,
such as feeding and clothing the poor and sick. Although Kempe par-
ticipates in the Corporal Works, she clearly subordinates the physical
to the spiritual. As a result, she spends the length of her Book attempt-
ing to transcend the physical, a feat that, as we have seen, proves dif-
ficult, if not impossible, for Kempe to achieve. Because bodily acts of
charity were more accessible to laypeople (particularly laywomen) than
spiritual acts, Kempe often fuses bodily works with the spiritual, such
as when she provides physical care to Mary in the spiritual realm of
her vision. Cullum writes, “Margery’s marked preference in doing the
Works of Mercy was to do them spiritually and directly to the person
of Christ or his mother.”82 In order to accomplish this, Kempe often
casts her care of the impaired as a way to directly care for Christ, and,
frequently, the care she offers mimics that of the work of earthly moth-
ers. As McAvoy explains, the Spiritual Works of Mercy undoubtedly
inf luenced notions of maternal duties: “To bring a child to maturity, a
mother would spend much of her time teaching life and domestic skills,
preaching to a child about dangers and modes of behavior, chastising
misdemeanours, consoling when hurt or unwell, offering the benefit of
experience, exercising patience, and praying for their safe delivery into
adulthood.”83
Though Kempe offers much care to the sick and injured throughout
her Book, I will focus on the few cases that occur just before her second
vision of the Passion. Significantly, the scenes in which she provides care
for others in this section of the Book reference disability more overtly
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than any others. I begin with Kempe’s desire to kiss lepers, which occurs
in Chapter 74. Christ sends Kempe a vision of his Passion that causes her
to be unable “to beheldyn a lazer er another seke man, specialy yyf he
had any wowndys aperyng on hym. So sche cryid and so sche wept as
yyf sche had sen owr Lord Jhesu Crist wyth hys wowndys bledyng” (74:
325–6). As I note in chapter 3, medieval discourses on the leprous were
ambivalent, marking those with the disease as either sinful or Christ-like.
Kempe here draws upon the common association of the leper as a Christ-
like figure. In particular, the leper’s wounds recall the wounds Christ
incurred during his Passion. Consequently, Kempe begins “to lovyn that
sche had most hatyd befortyme, for ther was nothyng mor lothful ne mor
abhomynabyl to hir, whil sche was in the yeyrs of worldly prosperite,
than to seen er beheldyn a lazer” (326). Kempe draws a clear distinction
between her spiritual state at present and when she was more concerned
with earthly matters. Her new love for the leprous body, then, signi-
fies her spiritual progress; what was once disgusting is now desirable.
Though Kempe identifies lepers with Christ, her text reveals conf licting
discourses on the leprous. Fearing for her chastity, Kempe’s confessor
insists that she only kiss leperwomen, an order that recalls both Kempe’s
and the leper’s alleged sexual sins. Kempe must, in fact, counsel one of
the women who is struggling to remain a virgin, for she “was laborwryd
wyth many fowle and horibyl thowtys” (327). The woman’s horrible
thoughts echo those Kempe suffered after failing to confess her sin at the
beginning of the Book as well as those that haunt her after acquiring her
chaste marriage (59: 281–2). Deviant female sexuality, thus, remains an
undercurrent in the text’s depiction of the leperwomen, and it mandates
Kempe’s interactions with them.
Despite such conf licting discourses, Kempe primarily associates the
leper-figure with Christ, which causes her to want to “halsyn and kys-
syn” lepers “for the lofe of Jhesu” (74: 326). Thus, as with the Christ doll
above, Kempe embraces and kisses the women, who function as substi-
tutes for Christ. Moreover, Kempe offers comfort and counsel to the
women, a form of care that further highlights her maternal affection for
the women. Mostly, Kempe’s tenderness for the leperwomen showcases
her spiritual singularity, however. Medieval hagiographies often employ
the motif of the leper’s kiss, through which a saint elicits miraculous
cure by kissing a leper. Catherine Peyroux traces the evolution of the
leper’s kiss in saints’ lives from the fourth to the fourteenth century. She
finds that early saints’ lives posit the kiss as a purely curative function
that demonstrates the saint’s ability to perform miraculous cures. Later
depictions of saints kissing lepers serve to demonstrate the saint’s humil-
ity and self-mortification; in effect, the leper’s kiss becomes redemptive
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to the saint.84 Kempe’s use of the leper’s kiss in her text clearly seeks
to emphasize her singularity. Her actions clearly do not cure the leper
women; instead, they reinforce her own ability to debase herself and,
through such debasement, to receive spiritual reward. Kempe clarifies
that before her conversion she found lepers to be “lothful” and “abho-
mynabyl” (326). By debasing herself through the act of kissing those
with bodies that elicit repulsion and disgust, Kempe emphasizes her own
humility and singularity; the kiss, consequently, benefits Kempe more
than the leperwomen.
In the chapter immediately following her kissing of the leperwomen,
Kempe cares for a woman who suffers from physical and mental anguish
after the birth of her child. As I note above, the scene undoubtedly
evokes Kempe’s own struggles after her first child’s birth. While in the
church of St. Margaret (who is, notably, the patron saint of pregnant
women), the woman’s husband confesses to Kempe, “ ‘[My wife] know-
yth not me, ne non of hir neyborwys. Sche roryth and cryith so that sche
makith folk evyl afeerd. Sche wyl bothe smytyn and bityn, and therfor
is sche manykyld on hir wristys’ ” (75: 328). Just like Kempe, the wom-
an’s violent actions to herself and others necessitate physical restraint.
Kempe accompanies the husband to his home and meets with his wife.
Immediately, the woman finds a deep connection to Kempe, noting that
her presence is a source of great comfort, for she sees “ ‘fayr awngelys
abowte’ ” her (328). The woman, however, finds no such solace in any-
one else. When others approach her, she, seeing “develys abowte hem,”
cries and bares her teeth “as sche wolde etyn hem” (328). As with Kempe
above, the woman’s demonic visions and her own gaping mouth con-
jure the sinfulness inherent in patristic understandings of pregnancy and
childbirth. Moreover, the description of the woman’s actions and her
neighbors’ reactions to them closely resemble the physical distress and
social disabling that both Kempe’s own experience after her first child’s
birth and her fits of tears cause. In addition to seeing visions of devils,
the woman
[ . . . ] roryd and cryid so, bothe nyth and day for the most part, that
men wolde not suffyr hir to dwellyn amongys hem, sche was so tediows
to hem. Than was sche had to the forthest ende of the town, into a
chambyr, that the pepil schulde not heryn hir cryin. And ther was sche
bowndyn handys and feet wyth chenys of yron, that sche schulde smytyn
nobody. (328)
The woman’s roaring and crying recalls Kempe’s fits of tears, for they
cause her neighbors to wish that she would not live among them. Similar
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to Kempe, then, the woman is excluded by her own community so that

they will not have to “heryn hir cryin.”
As with the troubled leperwoman Kempe counsels, there is a clear
connection between the woman and Kempe. This doubling allows
Kempe to rewrite her own difficult experience with childbirth. Instead
of suffering herself, Kempe eases the woman’s suffering, visiting her at
least twice a day, coaxing her to speak instead of cry. In addition, Kempe
prays for the woman’s recovery every day, until, finally, “God yaf hir hir
witte and hir mende ayen” so that she could be “browt to chirche and
purified” (75: 329). Like Kempe, the woman recovers from her ailments
through divine intervention. However, whereas Christ intervenes for
Kempe, the most instrumental figure in the woman’s cure is Kempe
herself. Kempe, thus, rewrites her initial experience, placing herself as
mother- and Christ-figure to the woman in need. Rather than play-
ing the role as patient, the mother who suffers the physical and mental
anguish of childbirth, Kempe steps in as divine physician, the mother
who is able to nurse her spiritual child back to health. The scribe even
intervenes at the end of the chapter, underscoring the importance of
Kempe’s actions. He calls the cure “a ryth gret myrakyl, for he that
wrot this boke had nevyr befor that tyme sey man ne woman, as hym
thowt, so fer owt of hirself as this woman was, ne so evyl to rewlyn ne
goveryn, and sithyn he sey hir sad and sobyr anow” (329). Casting the
woman’s recovery as a miraculous cure heightens Kempe’s singular sta-
tus, highlighting her spiritual prowess by including miraculous cure to
her list of spiritual abilities while also challenging dominant discourses
on women’s bodies as aberrant.
Kempe’s next chapter continues the trend of presenting herself as spiri-
tual mother through her physical care for the impaired. In this chapter,
Kempe must return to her husband’s home (they had been living apart
so as to preserve their chaste marriage) to care for him after he becomes
an invalid due to a fall. Kempe’s neighbors conclude that if John were to
die, she would be responsible for his death, “for-as-meche as sche myth
a kept hym and dede not” (76: 330). Kempe, fearing the town’s slander,
prays that God will keep John alive for at least a year, so as not to give
credence to the town’s claims. God agrees, noting that he has “ ‘wrowt
a gret myrakyl’ ” in keeping him alive for her and adding that she must
“ ‘take hym hom and kepe hym for my lofe’ ” (331). Kempe worries that
the physical care of her husband will not please the Lord as much as her
spiritual works, such as prayer and contemplation, but God assures her
that she “ ‘schalt have as meche mede for to kepyn hym and helpyn hym
in hys need at hom as yyf [she] wer in chirche to makyn [her] prayers’ ”
(331). God asserts that Kempe’s care for her husband is equal to her care
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for him. At this, Kempe takes on the role of full-time caregiver for her
husband.
Kempe’s care for her husband most directly mirrors that of a mother’s
physical care for her child. While Kempe embraces, prays for and coun-
sels the leperwomen and the wife, she must feed John, wash him and his
clothing, and clean up his excrement, all the while managing the house-
hold. Kempe depicts John as a child, noting his “childisch” mental state,
which causes him to lose control over his bodily functions “as a childe”
(76: 332). Moreover, Kempe twice uses the term “labowr” to describe
the difficulty of having to care for him as if to connect the hard work of
caring for John with the pains of childbirth (332). Such labor, she claims,
impedes her from taking part in spiritual activities, such as “hir contem-
placyon,” so “that many tymys sche schuld an yrkyd hir labowr” (332).
Instead of loathing the physical work of caring for John’s body, however,
she casts it as a punishment for her earlier lust for the same body, thinking
on the “many delectably thowtys, f leschly lustys, and inordinate lovys to
hys persone” she had in her younger years (332). Caring for John, then,
becomes a way for Kempe to redeem her earlier deviant sexuality and
serve Christ simultaneously: “And therfor sche was glad to be ponischyd
wyth the same persone and toke it mech the more esily and servyd him
and helpyd hym, as hir thowt, as sche wolde a don Crist himself ” (332).
As with the debased bodies of the leperwomen and the woman who has
just given birth, Kempe uses her husband’s abject body to bring her closer
to the divine, again exploiting the body of an impaired figure in order
to increase her spiritual merit and redefine her earthly status as mother
in spiritual terms.
It is significant that each of these scenes that describes Kempe’s encoun-
ters with impaired figures occurs in succession just before her second
vision of Christ’s Passion. Moreover, the two chapters after Kempe cares
for John and just before the Passion sequence center on Kempe’s tears, her
own physical condition that elicits both socially disabling and spiritually
enabling effects. In Chapter 77, as I note above, Kempe doubts the power
of her tears, begging Christ to take them away from her. Christ, however,
assures her that her tears are meant to cause others to repent for their sins
and devote their lives to him (77: 332–6). The following chapter describes
a series of fits of tears that Kempe falls into during a Palm Sunday ser-
vice. Her violent sobs cause the rest of the congregation to wonder and
curse at her actions, “supposing that sche had feyned hirself for to cryin”
(78: 338). Christ promises Kempe that her tears are pleasing to him and
that they will save many others. He states that he intends Kempe to be
“a merowr mongys hem, for to han gret sorwe, that thei schulde takyn
exampil by the for to have sum litil sorwe in her hertys for her synnys,
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that thei myth therthorw be savyd” (338–9). If Kempe’s is here to be a

mirror to others, perhaps the impaired figures she encounters are mir-
rors for her, allowing her to find in them and rewrite her own sins. This
section of chapters sets up Kempe’s ability to serve Christ through her
spiritual mothering of impaired figures, establishes the divine merit of
Kempe’s own physical aff liction, and ends with a detailed depiction of
Kempe’s performance of the birth and death of Christ through her fits
of tears. At the center of this section, then, is Kempe’s ability to use the
disabled body—whether that of others or her own—to both connect to
and represent herself as the body of Christ. Vital to this process is Kempe’s
own deviant body, the body that allows her to redefine her own physical
differences in spiritual terms.
In the second book of Kempe’s text, her dual roles as earthly and
spiritual mother come together in her experiences with the disfiguring
leprosy-like illness of her own son, the only one of her (bodily) children
that she describes in detail. Book II, which shows Kempe eschewing
the physical for the spiritual with much greater success than any other
section of her Book, begins with Kempe’s admonishments for her son to
leave the dangers of the material world and join her in a spiritual life of
contemplation. Her son refuses, and Kempe charges him, “ ‘Now sithyn
thu wil not leevyn the world at my cownsel, I charge the, at my blis-
syng, kepe this body klene at the lest fro womanys feleschep tyl thu take
a wyfe aftyr the lawe of the Chriche. And yyf thu do not, I pray God
chastise the and ponysch the therfor’ ” (Book II, 1: 386). At first glance,
Kempe’s counsel resembles a threat. Indeed, her son ignores his mother’s
advice, travels overseas, and falls “into the synne of letchery,” which soon
results in disease: “Sone aftyr hys colowr chawngeyd, hys face wex ful
of whelys and bloberys, as it had been a lepyr” (386). In an act that mir-
rors the social exclusion enacted upon lepers in medieval society, the
young man’s own master throws him out and others f lee his company
because of his supposed leprosy (386).85 As with the other impaired fig-
ures that Kempe counsels and cares for, her son’s aff liction recalls some
of her own past indiscretions. Like Kempe, her son begins his adult life
in the secular world, later choosing to live a more religious life after
experiencing a debilitating condition. Moreover, Kempe’s son commits
sexual sins, which bring to mind Kempe’s past struggles with her sexual-
ity. Consequently, it is significant that Kempe connects her son’s illness
to female sexuality—she warns him of partaking in “womanys feleschep”
out of wedlock.
That Kempe’s son is physically punished for his sinful acts after his
mother’s warning causes her son and her neighbors to suspect that she
has used her spiritual powers to harm her child. Kempe, however, stands
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her ground, asserting that her son must seek out grace for himself. Soon,
he sees the error of his ways: “he cam to hys modyr, tellyng hir of hys
mysgovernawns, promittyng he schulde be obedient to God and to hir,
and to amende hys defawte thorw the help of God” (387). Kempe, con-
vinced of her son’s sincerity and “not foryetyng the frute of hir wombe,”
prays for her son’s spiritual and bodily recovery (387). Her son is soon
cured, marries, and has a child of his own. When she sees him a few years
later, his outward and inward conditions are completely changed; he now
wears modest clothing, lives a virtuous life, and even goes on pilgrimages
to the Holy Land.
This episode with her son brings together Kempe’s status as an earthly
and spiritual mother. As McAvoy explains, “Representing herself as
both clichéd nagging mother, and as divine agent, she simultaneously
places herself back within the domestic sphere whilst inserting herself
into sacred history. She is at once Margery the earthly mother, para-
bolic parent of Christ’s own exemplary narrative, and spiritual mother to
the entire world—in essence, the neo-Virgin Mary.”86 It is notable that
Kempe’s son can only access Christ’s forgiveness through his mother, and
she must first forgive her son before she will call upon Christ. In this
way, McAvoy observes, Kempe exhibits both maternal and Marian abili-
ties and “stands in for the Virgin Mary and becomes her son’s mediator
for divine forgiveness. Thus Margery’s son’s contrition is a triumph for
Margery’s worldly and spiritual maternity,” demonstrating her simulta-
neous status as “dutiful earthly mother and privileged Mother of God.”87
As with the impaired figures discussed above, through her son’s aff licted
body, Margery’s spiritual works shine.
As if to demonstrate her movement from physical to spiritual piety,
Kempe’s fits of tears fall away in Book II, supplanted by prayer, a con-
templative act that, as I note above, is connected to her tears, but dem-
onstrates a more sophisticated spiritual response (in the logic of the
Book) because it eschews the body. Kempe’s adoption of the masculine
language of prayer over her feminine, bodily fits of tears seems to indi-
cate Kempe’s surrender of her body to patriarchal discourse. Kempe,
however, continues to keep ambiguous any distinction between the
bodily and the spiritual. In the prayer that ends her Book, Kempe men-
tions her fits of tears, asking God to grant her “ ‘a welle of teerys’ ” that
will continue to “ ‘encresyn [her] lofe to the and moryn [her] meryte
in hevyn, and helpyn and profityn [her] evyn-Cristen sowlys, lyvys or
dedys’ ” (10: 422–3). Kempe, in addition, mentions her role as earthly
and spiritual mother when she implores God to show mercy on “ ‘alle
[her] childeryn, gostly and bodily,’ ” especially those who are ill, lep-
rous, bedridden, and imprisoned (425). Ultimately, Kempe’s prayer
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sums up her Book’s desire to recast her position as a woman thoroughly

immersed in the earthly and the bodily, a “ ‘woman that was takyn
in the vowtre,’ ” as a woman able to stand with God, “ ‘ded to alle
the joyis of this world, and qwyk and greedy to hy contemplacyon’ ”
(427). Despite her aspirations for completely letting go of the bodily,
Kempe continues to bring her experiences of femaleness, particularly
maternity, to the forefront of her Book. As Harding notes, “Rather than
writing the word, as the clerks do, [Kempe] give[s] birth to it, enunciat-
ing divine truths in the kinetic language of the maternal order.” 88 In
her final act of mothering, Kempe produces her Book, a text born of,
through, and upon her body.
As I have shown, both the production of Kempe’s text and the per-
formance of her spirituality depend upon her gendered body, a body
deemed defective by male authorities. Such understandings of her
body condition her very notions of what it means to be a spiritual
woman in the later Middle Ages. However, instead of renouncing her
body, Kempe turns to it, using it to demonstrate her singular status.
By rewriting her own experiences with her body and casting them as
painless and spiritual, Kempe redeems the female procreative body,
positing it as a site of spiritual excess, not deficiency. At the end of her
book on feminism and disability, Susan Wendell calls for a redefinition
of the pain of disability, one that would allow people with disabilities
to transcend the body, not in a way that would devalue the body by
creating a mind–body hierarchy, but in a way that would allow for a
revaluation of the suffering body. Wendell explains, “I think of [tran-
scendence of the body] as a reinterpretation of bodily sensations so as
not to be overwhelmed or victimized by them.” 89 One way in which
Wendell re-imagines her own chronic pain is by accepting that she
cannot change it; this allows her mind to focus on other, more impor-
tant aspects of her life. By observing the pain of the body and disen-
gaging from it, Wendell argues that she has awakened to “a changed
identity, to a very different sense of myself, even as I have come to
identify myself less with what is occurring in my body.” 90 If scholars
of the body adjust their focus from bodily pleasure and awareness, they
will be able to better theorize all kinds of bodies by exploring “how to
live with the suffering body, with that which cannot be noticed with-
out pain, and that which cannot be celebrated without ambivalence.” 91
The Book of Margery Kempe demonstrates this ambivalence by keep-
ing in tension medical and patristic understandings of her body with
her body’s potential for spiritual growth. Kempe’s rewriting of her
own bodily experiences of birth and her fits of tears suggests that the
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disabled body can be a medium for spiritual empowerment. By con-

sidering Kempe through a gendered lens of disability, we can read her
redefinitions of her embodied difference as an attempt to transcend her
body in a way that does not simply subordinate the female body, but
actually allows Kempe to realize her body’s possibilities.
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9780230105119_06_ch04.indd 150 9/20/2010 1:16:00 PM
CONCLUSION
I n her book Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, the first com-
prehensive analysis of disability studies as an academic discipline, Simi
Linton specifically prescribes the humanities as needing a disability stud-
ies perspective. In fact, she asserts that a disability perspective is central
to the curriculum of the humanities. In particular, Linton claims that the
study of disability within the humanities may help widen the limited and
often pathologized perceptions of disability within the social and applied
sciences: “What is absent from the [sciences] curriculum is the voice of
the disabled subject and the study of disability as idea, as abstract concept,
and it is in the humanities that these gaps are most apparent. It is there that
the meanings attributed to disability and the process of meaning-making
could be examined.”1 Despite the ubiquity of representations of disability
in literature, art, and history, the humanities fields are all guilty of often
failing to critically consider it; consequently, Linton claims, “[d]isability
has become . . . like a guest invited to a party but never introduced.”2
Linton notes that fields uniquely suited to examining questions of dis-
ability such as women’s studies, queer studies, and various organizations
studying race and/or ethnicity have been slow to include disability in
their scholarship. However, the incorporation of a disability perspec-
tive into these fields has the ability to open new lines of thinking about
social and cultural diversity such as ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual-
ity because disability shares similar theoretical tenets with these iden-
tity categories.3 Moreover, studies of the representation of disability can
lead to a social and political theorization of disability that would move
from considering disability in relation to pathology and instead consider
it in terms of its social production. Studying disability’s representation
allows for a critical re-viewing of “the vast realm of meaning-making
that occurs in metaphoric and symbolic uses of disability. These devices
need to be analyzed in an array of cultural products to understand their
meanings and their functions, and to subvert their power.”4 Linton notes
that some literary scholars have already begun this important work,
9780230105119_07_con.indd 151 9/20/2010 1:16:07 PM

including Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland Thomson (and, I would

add David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder and Ato Quayson),5 but that oth-
ers must continue “to trace the patterns in the use of metaphors and in
symbolic uses of disability to determine where and how they emerge,
and how the function in various genres, cultures, and historical periods.
Gender, race, and class analyses of these representations should be integral
to this endeavor.”6
Throughout this project, I have attempted to take up Linton’s chal-
lenges and “claim disability” within medieval literary studies. By focus-
ing on the representation of disabled women, this project seeks to fill
a number of the gaps Linton finds within humanities scholarship and
challenges other scholars both within and without medieval studies to
realize and analyze the power that representations of gendered disability
have to expose particular social anxieties about such bodied differences.
Rather than attempt to provide a history of the experience of disability,
this project has explored the cultural production of disability in many
different kinds of medieval literature, a social process that, I argue, has a
history and is as important to our understanding of medieval disability
as are purely historical studies. At the same time, by uncovering how the
trope of the disabled woman can disrupt and even create narrative, my
project insists that “normal” and “deviant” identity categories are not
always mutually exclusive or hierarchical.
Like Linton, I stress here the importance of integrating disability
studies into other fields of inquiry, particularly the bringing together of
feminist and disability discourses. As a result, this study injects gender
into studies of disability. This is not to make gender and disability (or
any other related identity category such as ethnicity, race, or sexuality)
interchangeable, but to highlight the shared social processes by which
these embodied identity categories become intelligible or unintelligible
at particular sociohistorical moments. The disabled figure in literature,
as I have demonstrated throughout this study, often takes on the status
of Other, and that status gets coded as abject, feminine, liminal, and
ambiguous. As feminists have already shown, the continual exclusion of
the Other in the hopes of shoring up notions of a masculine, unified self
demonstrates the illusory quality of that unified self. Bringing disabil-
ity into this formulation destabilizes any notion of a static bodily norm,
forcing us to recognize who gets silenced and excluded by notions of
normalcy. By focusing on how the “twinned deviance” of gender and
disability operates in literature, I seek to upset traditional notions of tele-
ological narrative drives in similar ways.
Throughout this project, I have historicized gender and disability
as objects of a related and complex social process by first noting their
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CONCLUSION 153
conf lation in medieval male-authored authoritative discourse. As these

writings attempt to explain the “secrets” and posit static notions of the
body, they inadvertently create master narratives of the body that mark
those who may deviate from such narratives, such as women or the dis-
abled, as deviant. In the Middle Ages, I have shown, this social process
has its roots in male-authored religious and medical discourses that posi-
tion women’s bodies as having the most hidden—and perhaps the most
dangerous— secrets of all. The merging of such discourses creates not
only the illusions of bodily normalcy and deviancy, but also of bodily
authority and docility. As objects of this authority, docile bodies such as
women with disabilities are thus acted upon through a process of exclu-
sion that attempts to solidify illusory notions of identity.
As my study of Middle English fabliaux suggests, the figure of the dis-
abled woman can further destabilize an already volatile text whose use of
humor turns traditional social hierarchies upside down. While male dis-
abilities open the texts I discuss, an aberrant female body soon supplants
the male’s, demonstrating the female body’s always already disabled posi-
tioning. By uncovering the fabliaux’s use of a topos of reproduction that
undermines boundaries of identity, I reveal the interconnections between
the procreative female body and the disabled body, a link that the remain-
der of the project turns to. The disabled woman’s body, which aligns with
and magnifies the grotesque, expands the fabliaux’s inherent moments of
carnivalesque subversion. Though the narrative force of each text would
seem to demand a closure of the difference each woman introduces, the
women resist and even exceed such closure through their bodily insta-
bilities. As a result, the added instability of the disabled woman allows
a physical difference typically conceived as a hindrance to produce an
enabling power.
In my study of literature that depicts punishments that result in physi-
cal impairments, I sketch out the double-bind implicit in the bringing
together of gender and disability: while socially unruly women are con-
sidered deviant in both body and character, ideal feminine behaviors
are also associated with disability. As I demonstrate, in the hopes of
closing the gap that social unruliness creates, these texts cast the “mis-
behavior” of women as rooted in their defective bodies and then punish
such behaviors with physical impairment. While this tactic sometimes
succeeds, in other cases, the newly acquired physical impairment only
serves to spur on alternative narratives that question common assump-
tions about gender and disability. Texts that include supernatural ele-
ments are particularly inclined to produce such alternative narratives,
for their use of the supernatural creates an opening out of the text that
allows for a critique of discursive power relations, whether legal, social,
9780230105119_07_con.indd 153 9/20/2010 1:16:07 PM

or literary. Despite narrative drives toward resolution, I find that the

trope of female disability, in its production by and of discourse, results
in the continuous deferral of closure. This continuous deferral provides
a wealth of counternarratives to standard assumptions about femaleness,
femininity, and disability and opens up new ways of thinking about such
social categories in the Middle Ages.
Lastly, my contention that Margery Kempe’s spiritual autobiography
provides a means through which to narrate a counterstory of gender and
disability reveals the woman-religious’s struggle to establish her spiri-
tual nature in light of conf licting discourses on her procreative body.
The autobiographical elements of Kempe’s text suggest that discourse’s
dependency on disability is not only the result of textual drives, but also
of a personal drive to repair a rift between an individual’s actual and vir-
tual identity. In other words, bodily difference necessitates self-narration.
Kempe’s self-narration, thus, shapes and is shaped by her bodily differ-
ences, which are embedded in a medical understanding of her body that
roots her physical and moral deficiencies in her femaleness. By recast-
ing the experience of maternity in spiritual terms, Kempe positions
the procreative female body as evidence of spiritual excess, not its lack.
Ultimately, my study of gender and disability in spiritual autobiography
demonstrates that bodily difference is not only textually produced, but
also produces text that can expose the illusory quality of the fictions that
code such difference as deviant.
Like the disabled female characters I study, this project resists any
easy closure or neat conclusions. And, just as their unruly figures intrude
upon, dismantle, and even create narratives, this project seeks to inter-
vene not only in general studies of the body and identity, but also in
medieval disability studies, a field that, as I explain in my introduction, is
just now defining itself to the larger field of medieval studies. Perhaps this
study can engender a “double vision” for medieval scholars of disability,
one that concedes a discipline’s need for definitions but also remembers
the fictive nature of such absolutes. Thus, instead of providing a defini-
tive answer to the question of female disability in medieval literature, I
hope that this project, a body of work that narrates my own counterstory
of gender and disability, will provoke new lines of inquiry that question
what it means to have and represent embodied differences like gender and
disability—both in the Middle Ages and today.
9780230105119_07_con.indd 154 9/20/2010 1:16:07 PM

NOTES
Introduction
1. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, eds. Linda Lomperis
and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993),
viii. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast:
The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987) and The Resurrection of the Body (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).
2. See Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Hybridity,
Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles, The
New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Stephen F. Kruger, The
Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Irina Metzler, Disability in
Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment in the High Middle
Ages, c.1100–c.1400 ( New York: Routledge, 2006); Edna Edith
Sayers (formerly Lois Bragg), Oedipus borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old
Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2004); and
Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of
Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002) :
351–82 and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a
Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
3. See Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
4. Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other
Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 39. For
more on disability studies, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge
and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and “What
Is Disability Studies?” PMLA 120:2 (2005): 518–22; Disability Studies:
Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and
Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: MLA, 2002). David Mitchell
and Sharon Snyder discuss disability in a specifically literary sense in
Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001).
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156 NOTES
5. Erving Goffman Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
6. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (1966; reprint London: Ark, 1984).
7. Metzler, p. 21.
8. Linton, p. 8.
9. Susan Wendall, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 66.
10. Wendell, p. 66.
11. Wendell, p.184.
12. Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks, esp. pp. 10–13.
13. “Since bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin, the Lord saying to
the sick man whom he had healed: ‘Go and sin no more, lest some worse
thing happen to thee’ ( John 5:14), we declare in the present decree and
strictly command that when physicians of the body are called to the bed-
side of the sick, before all else they admonish them to call for the physi-
cian of souls, so that after spiritual health has been restored to them, the
application of bodily medicine may be of greater benefit, for the cause
being removed, the effect will pass away.” Quoted in “The Medieval
Catholic Tradition,” Darrel W. Amundsen, in Caring and Curing: Health
and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, eds. Ronald L. Numbers
and Darrel W. Amundsen (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 88–9.
14. I borrow this phrase from Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist
Literary Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32.
15. Earlier works that emphasize sinfulness and bodily difference in the
medieval period include Saul Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy
in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); and
Robert I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance
in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1987).
16. Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks, p. 9.
17. Metzler, p. 66.
18. Nancy Siraisi notes that “by the middle years of the twelfth century, the
process that provided western European medicine with a rich, special-
ized literature, renowned centers of learning, and f lourishing tradition of
practice [ . . . ] was already well advanced. The essential groundwork for
late medieval and Renaissance medical culture had already been laid.”
Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction
to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1990), p. 16.
19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage, 1979), p. 136.
20. Wendell, p. 119.
22. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race,
and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 25; and Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine,
“Nurturance, Sexuality, and Women With Disabilities: The Example
9780230105119_08_not.indd 156 9/20/2010 1:16:17 PM

NOTES 157
of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York:

Routledge, 1997), p. 249.
23. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 16.
24. These views do not suggest a single tradition but a constellation of
notions regarding the female body. See Hippocrates, On Intercourse and
Pregnancy: An English Translation of On Semen and the Development of the
Child, trans. Tage U.H. Ellinger (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952);
Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1956); and Claudius Galen, On the Natural Faculties,
trans. Arthur John Block (London: Heinemann, 1963). See also Monica
Green’s introduction in The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s
Medicine, ed. and trans. by Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 1–62; and Danielle Jacquart and Claude
Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew
Adamson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
25. See, for example, Galen, “On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body,”
in Woman Defamed, Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts,
ed. Alcuin Blamires, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
p. 41[41–2].
26. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
27. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of
Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), p. 186.
28. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth, The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and
Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 2.
29. Park, 186. Hellwarth cites differing understandings of the female body
as presented in the Trotula, noting that it directly problematizes Laqueur’s
model: “For example, there is a description of and a remedy for a pro-
lapsed uterus in Trotula. One imagines that a prolapsed uterus might be
the closest a woman could come to ‘turning into a man,’ and yet it is
clear from this document that in the practical world of women, it was
not experienced as such” (p. 2).
30. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine,
Science, and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p. 9. See also Cadden’s later essay, “Western Medicine and Natural
Philosophy,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, eds. Vern L. Bullough and
James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 51–80.
31. Cadden, Meanings, p. 277.
32. Monica Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on
Medieval Women’s Medicine,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
History: Sexuality and Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed.
Philip M. Soergel, (AMS Press, 2005), pp. 1–46; and Helen King, “The
Mathematics of Sex: One to Two, or Two to One?,” ed. Philip M.
Soergel, pp. 47–58.
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158 NOTES
33. Aristotle: Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 97.
34. Galen asserts that “just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals,
so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman” and even
describes the female body as a “mutilated” and “less perfect” male body
(pp. 41–2).
35. Aristotle, p. 175.
36. Plato, “The Timaeus,” Plato, vol. 7, trans. R.C. Bury (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 251. Plato’s Timaeus would have been
available in a Latin version in the early Middle Ages.
37. Plato, p. 251.
38. Soranus writes, “Although the uterus is not an animal (as it appeared
to some people), it is, nevertheless, similar in certain respects, having a
sense of touch, so that it is contracted by cooling agents but relaxed by
loosening ones” (p. 9).
39. For example, a commentator in Women’s Secrets suggests that if one should
encounter a woman suffering from the wandering womb, “one should
tie her tightly at her thighs and place some foul-smelling substance at her
nose, such as manure or even the smoke from human hair from the soles of
brute animals.” See Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets, trans. Helen
Rodnite Lemay (Albany: New York State University Press, 1992), p. 134.
This late thirteenth-century text, also known as Secrets of Women and De
secretis mulierum, was written by an unknown follower of Albertus Magnus.
40. Pseudo-Albertus, p. 132.
41. For centuries, readers attributed the Trotula to an eleventh-century
woman named Trotula from Salerno Italy. The text, which has circulated
in many forms, took the woman’s name as its title. Some scholars doubt
it is female-authored; see especially John F. Benton’s “Trotula, Women’s
Problems, and the Professionalization of Medicine in the Middle Ages,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. Benton argues a group
of men authored the text. Beryl Rowland translated one manuscript,
MS Sloane 2463, arguing that it represents the Latin Trotula that would
have been read by a medieval audience, but Rowland does not reference
other versions of the text. Monica Green classifies Rowland’s source as
another gynecological text, not the source of the Trotula. In all, Green
finds five versions of the Latin Trotula. The Trotula itself is divided into
three books: “Book on the Conditions of Women,” “On Treatments
for Women,” and “On Women’s Cosmetics,” each of which has roots in
classical medical theories, but to differing degrees. See Beryl Rowland,
Medieval Women’s Guide to Health (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 1981), and Monica Green, Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West
(Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk: St. Edmundsbury, 2000).
42. “Book on the Conditions of Women,” in The Trotula, p. 73.
43. Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A
Cultural History of Menstruation, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988), p. 47.
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NOTES 159
44. Cadden, Meanings, p. 178.

45. Monica Green, “The Transmission of Ancient Theories of Physiology
and Disease through the Early Middle Ages,” doctoral disseration,
Princeton University, 1985.
46. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, et al.
(Cambridge,UK, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 242.
47. The Etymologies, p. 242.
48. St. Jerome, “Adversus Jovinianum,” in The Principal Works of St. Jerome:
Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H. Fremantle
(Oxford: James Parker, 1893); and St. Augustine, De Bono Conjugali, De
Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001).
49. Monica Green finds references to a woman’s “f lowers” in several trans-
lations of the Trotula, indicating that “f lowers” was most likely a ver-
nacular term for menstruation. She writes, “[T]he term ‘f lower’ ( flos)
had been used systematically throughout the Treatise on the Diseases of
Women (the ‘rough draft’ of Conditions of Women, which had employed
frequent colloquialisms), and at least fourteen of the twenty-two dif-
ferent vernacular translations of the Trotula (including Dutch, English,
French, German, Hebrew, and Italian) employ the equivalent of ‘f low-
ers’ when translating the Latin menses” (p. 21). Hildegard of Bingen also
makes reference to a woman’s f lowers in Causae et Curae, ed. Paul Kaiser
(Basel: Baler Hildegard-Geselleschaft, 1980), p. 105.
50. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
51. Specifically, biblical views on menstruation include the exclusion of a
menstruating woman from her group, her church, and her husband’s bed
in Leviticus 15.19–33; the punishment of Eve in Genesis 3.16; and the
power of menstrual f luid to taint other objects in Genesis 31.35, Isaiah
30.22, and Esther 14.16. See Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, pp. 37–8.
52. Green, The Trotula, p. 22. See also Delaney, Lupton, and Toth.
53. Hilegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columbia Hart and Jane
Bishop (New York: Paulist Press 1990), p. 83.
54. I write “primarily male-authored” texts here because, while scholars
used to perceive the Trotula as a woman-authored text, Monica Green
has recently refuted such claims. Although it is possible that Trota
authored one of the text’s chapters, “Treatments for Women,” the other
two chapters are most likely male-authored. Because Trota was a well
known female Salernitan doctor, her name became associated with all
three of the texts. See Green’s introduction in The Trotula, pp. 1–62.
55. Metzler, p. 66.
56. Chaucer mentions Galen in the “Knight’s Tale” (431), the “Parson’s
Tale” (831), and the Book of the Duchess (572) and Trotula in the “Wife of
Bath’s Prologue” (677).
57. See, for example, Nussbaum, esp. pp. 23–57; and Garland Thomson,
Extraordinary Bodies.
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160 NOTES
58. Nussbaum, p. 255.

59. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 27.
60. In addition to Wendell and Garland Thomson, Michelle Fine and
Adrienne Asch have done much work on disabled women; however,
their work focuses on contemporary women. See especially their col-
lection Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988).
61. Gallop, pp. 21–40.
62. Wendell, p. 11.
63. Garland Thomson, “Feminist Theory, the Body, and the Disabled
Figure,” in Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York:
Routledge, 1997), p. 281 [279–91].
64. It should be noted that Butler’s Bodies That Matter explores the compul-
sory production of the body’s materiality, an insight I embrace through-
out this project. Despite the work scholarship like Butler’s does to
rehabilitate notions of bodily difference, I must acknowledge, along with
Wendell and Garland Thomson, that such an approach often obscures or
ignores the physical suffering of a bodily difference like disability. I hope
to expose not only the cultural fictions that produce “the body” as a
construct, but also highlight the very material experiences of one whose
Otherness is embodied. In other words, I seek to bring the weightiness
of the body back to “the body.” See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
65. Garland Thomson, “Feminist Theory,” p. 284, 286.
66. Garland Thomson, “Re-shaping, Re-thinking, Re-defining: Feminist
Disability Studies,” in Barbara Waxman Fiduccia Papers for Women and Girls
With Disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for Women Policy Studies,
2001), pp. 1–24.
67. I use Garland Thomson’s normate, or “the constructed identity of those
who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they
assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it
grants them,” to draw attention to the constructed nature of those who
consider themselves “normal” by comparing themselves to those with
embodied differences (Extraordinary Bodies, p. 9).
68. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1978).
69. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, pp. 10–12.
70. See Mitchell and Snyder.
Chapter 1
1. For more on antifeminism in fabliaux, see Joseph Bédier, Les Fabliaux
(Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1893); Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux (Copenhagen:
Ejnar Munksgaard, 1957); Phillippe Ménard, Les Fabliaux: Contes á rire
du moyen âge (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983). Ménard
directly counters Bédier’s claim that all medieval fabliaux portray women
9780230105119_08_not.indd 160 9/20/2010 1:16:18 PM

NOTES 161
negatively, but he does concede that the texts demonstrate particular dis-
dain for especially sexual women.
2. For the text and translation, see Carter Revard, “Four Fabliaux from
London, British Library Ms Harley 2253, Translated into English
Verse,” Chaucer Review 40.2 (2005): p. 118 [111–40]. For more on this
particular fabliau, see Barbara Nolan, “Anthologizing Ribaldry: Five
Anglo-Norman Fabliaux,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes,
Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo,
MI: TEAMS, 2000), pp. 289–327; and Thomas Corbin Kennedy, Anglo-
Norman Poems About Love, Women, and Sex from British Museum MS Harley
2253, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1973.
3. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body
(London: Verso, 1995), p. 42.
4. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 21.
5. Quayson, p. 21, author’s emphasis.
6. Quayson, pp. 21–2, author’s emphasis
7. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability
and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2000), p. 53.
8. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
See also Mitchell and Snyder, pp. 7–8, 53.
9. Mitchell and Snyder, p. 53.
10. David T. Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of
Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon
Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
(New York: MLA, 2002), p. 24 [15–29].
11. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical
Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–c.1400 ( New York: Routledge,
2006). Metzler dismisses literary representations of characters with
physical impairments as simply “parod[ies] of the courtly beauty ideal”
and not comments on those with physical impairments (p. 53). I argue,
however, that we cannot divorce social commentary from such literary
representations, for the satire inherent in parody is social commentary.
12. See Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics
of Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October
2002): 351–82.
15. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, p. 25.
17. Karma Lochrie, Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 24. Lochrie
notes that scholars of sexuality after Foucault consider the Middle
Ages as a monolithic model against which the “modern” is measured
(pp. 1–2).
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162 NOTES
18. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval

Britain: On Difficult Middles, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave,
2006), p. 17.
19. Cohen, Hybridity. Cohen writes, “[B]y the end of the twelfth century,
England envisioned itself as under siege at its borders by bellicose Welsh
and Scots, and at its center by homicidal Jews” (p. 12). The standards
used to define British Others as such were “inextricably somatic differ-
entiations” (p. 13).
20. See The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (New
York: Penguin, 1983), especially Chapters 22 and 23.
21. Following Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, I here consider monsters “figures
[that] embody the medialities precise language could not well express.
Refusing the chaste solitude of singular categories, they [intermix]
and [confound] all that [is] supposed to be held apart” (Hybridity,
pp. 2–3). Such figures assume “forms seemingly beyond the borders of
the humanly possible” (p. 3).
22. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 70–1.
23. Stiker, p. 72.
24. Cohen, Hybridity, p. 6.
25. Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
26. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 77.
27. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).
28. See my introduction for a discussion of common medieval taboos con-
cerning menstrual blood.
29. Disability scholars like Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine have
already noted that contemporary disabled women often face blatant
discrimination in regards to their status as sexual beings and moth-
ers. Doctors may refuse to prescribe birth control or educate dis-
abled women on sexually transmitted diseases, while legal and child
care authorities frequently prevent or hinder disabled women in the
process of adoption, child custody cases, and applications for foster
care (p. 248). Moreover, as Tanya Titchkosky has shown, medical
discourse can construct mothers who knowingly give birth to dis-
abled children as “not only derelict in their duty, but monstrously
mistaken in their choices.” While these contemporary concerns for
disabled women are indeed valid and should be investigated further,
my focus here remains on the literary construction of women’s repro-
duction in medieval fabliaux. See Adrienne Asch and Michelle Fine,
“Nurturance, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities: The Example
of Women and Literature,” The Disability Studies Reader (New York:
Routledge, 1997), pp. 241–59; and Tanya Titchkosky, “Clenched
Subjectivity: Disability, Women, and Medical Discourse,” Disability
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NOTES 163
Studies Quarterly 25.3 (2005), Education Research Complete, March 23,

2007, http://search.ebscohost.com.
30. Rosi Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines,” in Writing on the
Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia
Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), p. 64 [59–79], emphasis in original.
31. Titchkosky, “Clenched Subjectivity.”
32. Margaret Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable
Self (London: Sage, 2002) p. 31.
33. Shildrick, p. 32.
34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968) p. 25, 26.
35. Bakhtin, p. 10.
36. Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque
Subversion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) p. 20.
37. Lindley, p. 22.
38. Bakhtin, p. 19.
39. Bakhtin, p. 318.
40. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in
Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. 131
[124–42].
41. Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Writing on
the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), p. 325 [318–59].
42. Russo, pp. 325–6.
43. Russo, p. 333.
45. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia
46. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 38.
47. “Dame Sirith,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) p. 35, l. 190
[29–52]. All subsequent citations will come from this edition and will be
cited by line number.
48. Eve Salisbury, “Introduction,” in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, p. 11.
The “weeping bitch” motif dates back to such classical sources as Aesop’s
Fables. See Eldegard DuBruck, “Aesop’s Weeping Puppy: Late-Medieval
Migrations of a Narrative Motif,” The Early Drama, Art, and Music
Review 22.1 (1999): 1–10 for a study of the motif ’s uses in late-medieval
dramas.
49. Salisbury, “Introduction,” pp. 11–12.
50. Salisbury, “Introduction,” pp. 11–12; and “Dame Sirith,” 46n1.
51. Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social
Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973) details the rich tradition of
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164 NOTES
anticlerical satire available to writers in Middle English. This anticleri-

cal satire often depicts clergymen as gluttonous, greedy, and excessively
sexual.
52. “Dame Sirith,” p. 51n306.
53. See Metzler, pp. 133–8.
54. Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews,” pp. 363–5. For more on faked disabilities, see
Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), pp. 62–3.
55. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 2nd edn, ed. A. V. C.
Schmidt (London: Everyman 1995), p. 2, l. 22, p. 100, ll. 121–2.
56. Stiker, pp. 65–89 and Metzler.
57. P. H. Cullum, “Spiritual and Bodily Works of Mercy,” in A Companion
to the Book of Margery Kempe, eds. John H. Arnold and Katherine J.
Lewis (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 180 [177–93].
59. Bakhtin, p. 240
61. Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigurations
of the Bio/Logical Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998),
p. 236.
62. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus
Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen Rodnite
Lemay (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 129.
64. Lovesickness as a physical illness dates back to antiquity. Its symptoms
include physical wasting, paleness, lack of appetite, and insomnia. See
Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The “Viaticum” and
Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)
for a cultural history of the disease.
65. Mitchell and Snyder, pp. 53–4.
66. I consider Dame Sirith to be the title character, for the MS begins with a
French incipit: Ci commence le fablel et al cointise de dame siriz. See Salisbury,
“Introduction,” p. 46.
67. While some medieval dramas do have a character speak the epilogue,
usually this task goes to an exemplary character such as God in several of
the cycle plays, Anima in Wisdom, and the Bishop in the Croxton Play of
the Sacrament.
68. Thomas Hahn, “Introduction to The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame
Ragnelle,” originally published in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1995) March 26, 2007, http://www.
lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/ragintro.htm. For more information on
the performance of the loathly lady, see Louise Olga Fradenburg, City,
Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 252–4.
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NOTES 165
71. Bettina Bildhauer, “Bloodsuckers: The Construction of Female Sexuality in

Medieval Science and Fiction,” in Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous
Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Liz Herbert McAvoy and
Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 106 [104–15].
72. Juliette Dor, “The Sheela-na-Gig: An Incongruous Sign of Sexual
Purity,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, et. al (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 33–55, notes that the image may
have been used to encourage virginity by eliciting fear of the female
body. For more on the vagina dentata, see David Williams, Deformed
Discourse: The Function of the Monster In Mediaeval Thought and Literature,
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1996), pp. 164–8.
75. While scholars have noted the links between January’s wealth and
lecherousness and his status as a Lombard, none has directly con-
nected his Lombard origins to marginalization and disability. Of
course, January would not have been marginalized in his home coun-
try where the tale takes place; however, to Chaucer’s English audience,
January would assume the status of the marginal. The Lombard con-
nection to disability—particularly blindness—stems from the associa-
tion of Jews with blindness and the subsequent linkage of Lombards
to Jews. Chaucer draws deliberate attention to January’s Lombard roots
by clearly demonstrating January’s age and wealth, two qualities that
his probable source text, an account of the fruit-tree deception in the
late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth-century Italian Novellino tales, omits.
See “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales, ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (New York: Humanities
Press, 1958), pp. 341–52. For more on the link between Jews and blind-
ness, see Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews.” For January as Lombard, see Paul
Olson, “The Merchant’s Lombard Knight,” Texas Studies in Language and
Literature III (1961): 263; and Emerson Brown, Jr., “The Merchant’s Tale:
Why Was January Born ‘Of Pavye’?” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71.4
(1970): 654–58.
76. Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Merchant’s Tale,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd
edn, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987) l. 1245. All
subsequent citations from this text will come from this edition and will
be cited parenthetically by line number.
77. The “Miller’s Tale” similarly critiques the unnatural coupling of a young
woman and an old man when the narrator denounces John, the carpen-
ter, for not marrying “his simylitude” (l. 3228). The narrator suggests
that this decision will lead to John’s downfall: “Men sholde wedden after
hire estaat, / For youthe and elde is often at debaat. / But sith that
he was fallen in the snare, / He moste endure, as oother folk, his care
(3229–32).
78. Carole Everest, “Sight and Sexual Performance in the Merchant’s Tale,”
in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in The Canterbury Tales
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166 NOTES
and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Woodbridge, England:

D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 91–103.
79. Everest, “Sight,” p. 92.
81. Everest, “Sight,” p. 92, 101.
82. “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogue, pp. 341–52.
83. Everest, “Sight,” pp. 92–5.
85. Cynthia Kraman writes, “[The tale] takes up the received idea that
the body of woman is possessable and available, that it can be secured
and shut away for personal enjoyment as one does to f lowers by build-
ing a garden with a wall, a door , a lock, and inevitable ‘clycket.’ ” See
“Communities of Otherness in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale,” in Medieval
Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1997), p. 40 [138–54].
86. “Hali Meidenhad,” in Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from
the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. and trans. Bella Millett and
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 30–33.
87. Soranus, Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 54.
88. “Book on the Condition of Women,” in The Trotula: A Medieval
Compendium of Women’s Medicine, trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia:
U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), p. 95, 97. Psuedo-Albertus Magnus’s Women’s
Secrets presents a similar argument, but advises that one should give the
desired unnatural substances to the pregnant women because “her appe-
tite would weaken and kill the fetus” if it is not satiated (p. 141).
89. For more on pica in the “Merchant’s Tale,” see Carol Everest, “Pears and
Pregnancy in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ ” in Food in the Middle Ages: A
Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York: Garland, 1995),
pp. 161–75.
90. See Milton Miller, “The Heir in the Merchant’s Tale,” Philological
Quarterly 29 (1950): 439, and Carol Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle’: Pleasure
and Procreation in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale,’ ” in Sovereign Lady: Essays
on Medieval Women in Middle English Literature, ed. Muriel Whitaker (New
York: Garland, 1995), pp. 63–84.
91. Everest, “ ‘Paradys or Helle,’ ” p. 64, 66.
92. Emerson Brown finds that conception cannot occur because of January’s
sudden disruption of their activity. Peter Beidler, though he admits that
Brown’s essay calls readers to question their quick assumption that the
affair results in May’s pregnancy, finds Brown’s conclusions ultimately
unconvincing, citing that it is too difficult to determine whether the
union was completed or interrupted. Everest, whose study focuses on
the “two seed” theory of medieval medical texts, concludes that the
union must be fruitful due to the fertility of both Damian and May. See
Emerson Brown, “Hortus Inclonclusus: The Significance of Priapus and
Pyramus and Thisbe in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 4 (1970):
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NOTES 167
33; Peter G. Biedler, “The Climax in the Merchant’s Tale, The Chaucer
Review 6 (1971): 39; and Everest, “Paradys or Helle.”
93. Hali Meidenhad, pp. 30–1.
94. Jacques Gélis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early
Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Boston, MA: Northeastern
95. Pseudo-Albertus, pp. 67–8. Gélis notes, “Midwives maintained that cer-
tain molas were capable of walking about the chamber when born, that
there were f lying molas which could hang from the ceiling, and that
others tried to hide and even to re-enter the womb they had just left”
(p. 259).
96. Soranus writes that in order for a woman to bear well-shaped chil-
dren, she must “be sober during coitus because in drunkenness the soul
becomes the victim of strange fantasies; this furthermore because the
offspring bears some resemblance to the mother as well [as the father],
not only in body but in soul” (p. 38). Furthermore, Pseudo-Albertus
Magnus reports that “irregular” sexual positions that deviated from the
missionary position could cause deformed children (p. 114).
97. See “The Merchant’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues, pp. 341–52.
Chapter 2
1. I use the terms “unruly” and “excessive” throughout this chapter and the
rest of the project to describe female characters whose behavior embod-
ies the sins commonly attributed to women by medieval authoritative
discourse, including “vanity, greed, promiscuity, gluttony, drunken-
ness, bad temper, [and] fickleness.” In contrast, a “good” woman “loves
and serves her husband and brings up her children.” See Shulamith
Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London:
Methuen, 1983), p. 3.
2. In this chapter, I use the phrases “violence against women” and “domes-
tic violence” to describe bodily force used by medieval men against
women in order to teach them proper wifely conduct. I acknowledge, as
Barbara Hanawalt has shown, that “the medieval use of castigation and
correction did not imply ‘violence’ ” as we define it today and did not
match our contemporary definitions of domestic abuse. See Barbara A.
Hanawalt, “Violence in the Domestic Milieu of Late Medieval England,”
in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2000), p. 199 [197–214].
3. Anna Roberts, “Introduction,” Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts,
ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 20
[1–21].
4. Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English
Breton Lays,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts eds. Eve Salisbury,
Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2002), p. 74 [73–93]. Specifically, Salisbury focuses on
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168 NOTES
late medieval literature that asserts a relationship to the Breton lay and
depicts violence against women, including Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale
and the Franklin’s Tale.
5. Angela Jane Weisl, “ ‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence Against Women in the
Canterbury Tales,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, p. 117
[115–36].
6. Marilynn Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic
Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 31.
7. Desmond, p. 31
8. Hanawalt, p. 202n14.
9. As paterfamilias, the medieval husband and father acted as master over his
wife, children, and household. As a result, the husband could “correct” and
“castigate” the members of his household through bodily violence. See Eve
Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Introduction,”
in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, pp. 2–9 [1–30]. Though this use of
violence was legal, distinctions between standard and excessive castigation
did exist. Take, for example, the case of Eleanor Brownynge, who was
granted a divorce because of her husband’s numerous threats to stab her
with a dagger. See Shannon McSheffrey, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval
London (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMS, 1995), pp. 82–3.
10. Desmond, p. 30, 28.
11. Hanawalt, p. 205.
12. James A. Brundage, “Domestic Violence in Classical Canon Law,”
Violence in Medieval Society, p. 184 [183–95].
13. Brundage, p. 187.
14. Brundage, p. 195.
15. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark, “Medieval Conduct: Texts,
Theories, and Practices,”in Medieval Conduct, eds. Kathleen Ashley and
Robert L. A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
p. x [ix–xx].
16. Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for
Women (Hamden, CT: Shoe String, 1983), p. 13.
17. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the
Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 31.
18. Anna Dronzek, “Gendered Theories of Education in Fifteenth-Century
Conduct Books,” in Medieval Conduct, p. 136 [135–59].
19. Dronzek, pp. 141–2.
20. Dronzek, p. 143.
21. Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
22. Dronzek, p. 146. Dronzek explains that corporal punishment was com-
mon in the education of young schoolboys, citing images of physical
discipline in the schoolroom and Edward IV’s household rule that young
men should incur their beatings in privacy (pp. 144–5).
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NOTES 169
24. Chevalier Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower,
trans. William Caxton, ed. M. Y. Offord (London: Oxford University
Press, 1971), p. 3. Offord notes that Caxton remains faithful to his French
source, almost to a fault: “The translation itself, though often so literal
as to sound quite un-English, is in general fairly accurate” (p. xxvii).
Offord’s edition is the standard source used by scholars studying The
Book of the Knight; therefore, it is the one I use here. All subsequent
quotations come from this edition and are cited parenthetically by page
number.
25. Offord, “Introduction,” The Book of the Knight of the Tower, p. xxxviii.
27. Mark Addison Amos, “The Gentrification of Eve: Sexuality, Speech, and
Self-regulation in Noble Conduct Literature,” in The Word Made Flesh:
Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture (Hampshire:
Aldershot, 2005), p. 24 [19–36].
28. Caroline Walker Bynum cites Mary of Oignies as one example of the
many women who were “[i]ntensely literal in their imitatio Christi [and
desired] to fuse with the physical body of Christ that they consumed.
After succumbing to her desire for food following an illness, Oignies
injured “herself in the form of Christ’s wounds.” She followed her act of
self-harm with further fasting to continue her imitation of Christ’s suf-
fering. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of
Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987),
p. 119.
29. See The Book of the Knight, pp. 10–12, 12–14 for examples of rewards for
fasting and pp. 22–3, 28–9, and 35–7 for examples of punishments for
feasting.
30. Amos, p. 25.
31. Amos, p. 25.
32. The husband’s actions stride the line between violence against a woman
by a male figure and violence against a woman by a supernatural agent.
Though the husband does injure his wife, the attack is accidental since
he directs his strike against the male guest, which then unexpectedly
blinds the wife. The wife’s accidental blinding, then, may serve as a
divine message to the husband that reveals his wife’s unruliness; her
external deficiency may symbolize her internal sinfulness. In chapter 3,
I will more thoroughly explore disabling violence against women by
divine agents.
33. Bornstein, p. 47.
34. Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 65–89. See also,
Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), especially pp. 60–70.
35. For my discussion of the position of disabled people in the spiritual econ-
omy, see chapter 1, pp. 31–2 and chapter 3, pp.104–5.
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170 NOTES
36. Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of

Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002):
363–7 [351–82].
37. Amos, p. 23.
38. Amos, p. 23
39. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968), p. 281.
42. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 3.
43. Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” in
Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her
Sect, eds. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 26–7 [22–39].
44. Bornstein, p. 67.
45. Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s
Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993).
See especially pp. 163–84.
46. All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed.
Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1987) and are cited
parenthetically by line number.
47. Juliette Dor, “The Wife of Bath’s ‘Wandrynge by the Weye’ and
Conduct Literature for Women,” in Drama, Narrative, and Poetry in
the Canterbury Tales (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mir, 2003),
pp. 139–55.
48. One recent exception is a forthcoming article by Mikee Delony that
reads Alisoun’s deafness as linked to her sexuality. Please see Mikee
Delony, “Alisoun’s Aging, Hearing-Impaired Female Body: Gazing at
the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” in Social Dynamics of
Medieval Disability, eds. Wendy Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, forthcoming), pp. 313–45.
49. Melvin Storm, “Alisoun’s Ear,” Modern Language Quarterly 2.3 (1981):
219–26.
50. Edna Edith Sayers, “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of
Deafness: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” in Disability in the Middle Ages:
Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua R. Eyler (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2010), p. 84 [81–92]. Sayers’s essay is another important recent
study of the Wife and deafness.
51. I write “presumed childlessness” because it is not clear whether Alisoun
has had children; she simply does not state definitively in her prologue
if she is a mother, and Chaucer the narrator does not mention any chil-
dren in the “General Prologue”. Most scholars insist she is not a mother,
but some assert that she could be. Carruthers goes as far as to label all
such inquiries useless (p. 221n31). I prefer to leave the “problem” of her
children ambiguous. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important
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NOTES 171
to remember that, while she may have had the ability to have children
earlier in her life, it is safe to assume that she is unable to at the moment
of her prologue due to her age. See chapter 1 for more on age, infertility,
and disability, pp. 25–6 and p. 33.
52. Priscilla Martin, “Two Misfits: The Nun and The Wife,” in Chaucer’s
Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1990), pp. 30–9.
53. Martin, p. 39.
54. “Explanatory Notes,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 818–9n468.
55. “Explanatory Notes,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 870n604, 870n613, and
870n619.
56. Qtd. in Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal
Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 78, 80.
Soranus: “ipse adfecte tentigine virorum similem appetentiam sumunt et in ven-
eram coacte veniunt.” Avicenna: “Quandoque oritur in ore matrices caro addita et
quandoque apparet super mulierem res que est sicut virga commouens sub coitu. Et
quandoque aduenit ei vt faciat cum mulieribus simile quod fit eis cum quibus.”
57. Lochrie, p. 89.
58. Lochrie, p. 89, 91.
59. See St. Jerome, “Adversus Jovinianum,” in The Principal Works of St.
Jerome: Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, trans. W. H.
Fremantle (Oxford: James Parker, 1893), and St. Augustine, De Bono
Conjugali, De Sancta Virginitate, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
60. Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque
Subversion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 47; emphasis
mine.
61. See, for example, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender
(Berkeley University of California Press, 1992), pp. 26–57.
62. See Jill Mann, “Antifeminism,” in Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge, UK:
D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 39–69; and Carolyn Dinshaw, “ ‘Glose/bele
chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators,” in Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 113–31. Mann cites
the “double structure” of Alisoun’s speech: in it, readers can see both
the complaints of disgruntled wives and the “bullying” of husbands (pp.
60–9). Dinshaw deems Alisoun’s use of patristic writings as “mimesis”
with the aims to reform patriarchal law (pp. 115–17).
63. See, for example, Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick, “Sexual Politics
in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ and ‘Tale’: The Rhetorics of Domestic
Violence and Rape,” in Readerly/Writerly Texts: Essays on Literature, Literary
Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy 11.1/2 (2004) and 12.1/2 (2005): 155–62.
64. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “ ‘Of His Love Dangerous to Me’: Liberations,
Subversion, and Domestic Violence in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and
Tale,” in The Wife of Bath ed. Peter G. Beidler (Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 1996), p. 280 [273–89].
65. Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ ” p. 76.
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172 NOTES
66. Hansen, “ ‘Of His Love Dangerous to Me,’ ” p. 278.

67. Desmond, p. 31.
68. Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ ” p. 77.
69. “Explanatory Notes,” The Riverside Chaucer, p. 871n677.
70. See pp. 12–14.
71. Hansen, “Of His Love Dangerous to Me,’ ” p. 279.
72. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical
Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (New York: Routledge,
2006), p. 102.
73. Storm, p. 221.
74. Storm, p. 220.
75. Storm, p. 222.
76. Storm, p. 223–4.
77. Storm, p. 222.
78. See Dinshaw and Mann. See also David Aers, Chaucer, Langlund
and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 86; and
Priscilla Martin, “The Women in the Books,” in Chaucer’s Women:
Nuns, Wives, and Amazons, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1990), pp. 189–217.
79. Additionally, Martin notes that Alisoun rightly “senses a gap between
the meaning of Christ’s words, which she always takes as binding, and
the interpretation she has been taught” (p. 212). Martin contends that
Alisoun consistently remains accurate when she quotes of the word of
God; therefore, she does not totally dismiss authority, but instead uses it
in conjunction with her own experience (pp. 216–17).
80. See, for example, Helen Cooper, “The Shape-shiftings of the Wife of
Bath, 1395–1670,” in Chaucer Traditions, Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer,
eds. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
81. Despite scholars’ usual assumption that Jankin is dead at the time of
Alisoun’s prologue, she never actually says that he is. A prayer for God to
“blesse his soule” (827) only suggests that he may be dead, leading schol-
ars like Arthur Lindley to question whether he is alive or dead at the time
of her pilgrimage. Whether we accept Jankin’s death does not change the
fact that Alisoun is traveling alone to Canterbury. See Aruther Lindley,
“ ‘Vanysshed Was This Daunce, He Nyste Where’: Alisoun’s Absence in
the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” ELH 59:1 (1992): 3 [1–21].
82. Jacobus de Voragine, “The Golden Legend: St. Thomas Becket,”in Internet
Medieval Sourcebook. December 10, 2006. Fordham University Center for
Medieval Studies. November 2007, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/
goldenlegend/GL-vol2-thomasbecket.html.
83. Jacobus de Voragine.
84. Metzler, p. 102.
85. Metzler states that documentation of treatments and aides for hearing
loss in medical texts occur most often in the cases of hearing loss caused
by disease (p.102).
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NOTES 173
Chapter 3
1. In the prologue to her Lais, Marie states that she writes for a “nobles reis”
(noble king) who is most likely Henry II (l. 43). All French citations from
Marie de France come from Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner
(Paris: Libraírie Honoré Champion, 1981) and will be cited parenthetically
by line number. English translations of Marie de France are from The Lais
of Marie de France, trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante (Grand Rapids:
Baker Books, 1978) and correspond to the French citations in line number.
2. Recently, scholars have attributed the Vie seinte Audree to Marie. See
June Hall McCash, “La vie seinte Audree: A Fourth Text by Marie de
France?” Speculum 77.3 ( July 2002), 744–77.
3. Stephen G. Nichols, “Working Late: Marie de France and the Value of
Poetry,” in Women in French Literature: A Collection of Essays, ed. Michel
Guggenheim (Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1988), p. 10 [7–16].
4. Nichols, p. 9.
5. Diana M. Faust, “Women Narrators in the Lais of Marie de France,” in
Women in French Literature: A Collection of Essays, p. 18 [17–27].
6. Faust, p. 18.
7. Nichols notes that Marie’s writing reveals the drastic changes in culture
brought about by the Norman Conquest in England, particularly “how
the new aristocratic centers of power, the royal and seigneurial courts,
replaced the Church as patrons for a new literature in the vernacular”
(p. 10). I borrow the term “hybrid” from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen when
describing Anglo-Norman culture in order to denote the complicated
intermixing of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples after the Norman
Conquest. This intermixture did not easily produce a stable “English”
identity. As Cohen notes, the term “hybrid” signifies “a fusion and a
disjunction; a conjoining of differences that cannot simply harmonize”
(p. 2, author’s emphasis). While we may at first consider groups such as
the Normans, Anglo-Saxons, and English as constant and unchanging,
Cohen explains that these groups “were heterogenous solidarities that
altered over time, both in composition and self-definition” (p. 4). The
imposition of an invading culture upon the conquered, intermarriage
between native and invading peoples, and the formation of new col-
lective identities necessarily leads to an upheaval in notions of collec-
tive culture and values. See Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in
Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
8. Nichols, p. 15.
9. Nichols, p. 15.
10. Michelle A. Freeman, “Marie de France’s Poetics of Silence: The
Implications for a Feminine Translatio,” PMLA 99 (1984): 860–83.
11. Freeman, “Poetics of Silence,” p. 865.
12. Rupert T. Pickens, “Marie de France and the Body Poetic,” in Gender
and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1996), p. 135 [135–71].
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174 NOTES
13. Pickens, p. 35.

14. On lycanthropy: Jean Jorgenson, “The Lycanthropy Metaphor in
Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” Selecta: Journal of the Pacific Northwest
Council on Foreign Languages 15 (1994): 24–30, and Kathryn I. Holten,
“Metamorphosis and Language in the Lay of Bisclavret,” in In Quest
of Marie de France: A Twelfth-Century Poet, ed. Chantal A. Maréchal
(Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 193–211. On the human–
beast binary, see Freeman, and Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, “Of Men
and Beasts in Bisclavret,” Romanic Review 81:3 (1991): 251–69.
15. Kerry Shea, “Male Bonding, Female Body: The Absenting of Woman
in’Bisclaretz ljóð,’ ” in Cold Counsel: Women in Old Norse Literature and
Mythology: A Collection of Essays, eds. Sarah M. Anderson and Karen
Swenson (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 245 [245–59].
16. Paul Creamer, “Woman-hating in Marie de France’s Bisclavret,” The
Romanic Review 93:3 (2002): 259 [259–74].
17. Shea, p. 256.
18. Bruckner, p. 251. See Holten for a detailed history of werewolves in the
Middle Ages.
19. Bruckner, p. 252.
20. Bruckner, p. 266–7.
21. Holten, p. 191.
22. Holten, p. 195.
23. Holten, p. 199. R. I. Moore has famously documented the links
between lepers, criminals, and even non-Christians in his The
Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
Though acts of persecution may not be as linear or uniform as Moore
makes them seem, groups of Others, such as lepers, Jews, and prosti-
tutes were segregated from mainstream society either through dress or
geographical location. See also William Sayers, “Bisclavret in Marie
de France: A Reply,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981): 81–2
[259–74].
24. Jorgenson, p. 24.
25. Shea, p. 248. Pickens adds that the pronouns used to describe Bisclavret
highlight his ambiguously gendered state. Because beste is grammatically
feminine, the pronouns used to refer to Bisclavret are also feminine.
Only the wise man who acknowledges the beast’s rationality uses a mas-
culine pronoun when referring to him. See Pickens, pp. 138–9.
26. Holten, p. 196.
27. Often, congenital defects were thought to visually demonstrate the sins
of parents. See Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About
Physical Impairment during the high Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London:
Routledge, 2006), pp. 154–5.
28. For example, St. Foy, after curing a man named Guibert’s blindness,
re-blinded him in one eye when he “relapsed” into sin. See Metzler,
p. 195.
29. Holten, p.199.
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NOTES 175
30. Sayers, p. 82.

31. Saul Brody examines the links between sin and leprosy in The Disease
of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1974). See pp. 99–105, for a more detailed discussion of the medi-
eval understandings of leprosy.
32. Holten, p. 199; and Sayers, p. 81. Sayers cites evidence of these associa-
tions throughout the Middle Ages.
33. Sayers, p. 81.
34. Klaus van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as
Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,”
in Violence Vulnerability, and Embodiment: Gender and History, eds.
Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005),
p. 104n5.
35. Pickens, pp. 139–40. See also Jean-Charles Huchet, “Nom de femme et
écriture féminine au Moyen Age: Les Lais de Marie de France,” Poétique
48 (1981): 407–30.
36. Shea, p. 254.
37. Shea, p. 254.
38. Shea, p. 256.
39. Pickens, p. 145.
40. Faust, p. 21.
41. Freeman, p. 298.
42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1991), p. 185; the emphasis is Butler’s.
43. I use the term “pass” in Erving Goffman’s sense. Goffman notes that
those with “stigmatizing aff lictions” that are not readily visible (which
can be racial, physical, or behavioral) may be able to “pass” as “normal.”
Those who “pass,” however, are frequently concerned with the threat of
being “discredited” and, as a result, stigmatized by others. See Erving
Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1963), pp. 73–91.
44. Butler, 185.
45. Heather Arden, “The Lais of Marie de France and Carol Gilligans’s
Theory of the Psychology of Women,” in In Quest of Marie de France,
p. 214 [212–24].
46. Freeman, p. 289.
47. Sharon Kinoshita, “Cherchez la femme: Feminist Criticism and Marie de
France’s Lai de Lanval,” Romance Notes 34.3 (1994): 272 [263–73].
48. Jacqueline Eccles, “Feminist Criticism and the Lay of Lanval: A Reply,”
Romance Notes 38.3 (1998): 282 [281–5].
49. The earliest source for Chestre’s tale is Marie de France’s Lanval. His
primary source is most likely the Middle English Sir Landevale, a version
of Marie’s lai. The Old French Graelant is another possible source for
Chestre’s rendering of the tale. See Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, “Sir
Launfal: Introduction,” in The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo,
MI: Medieval Institute, 1995), pp. 201–2.
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176 NOTES
50. A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in
Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p. 106.
51. Myra Tokes, “Lanval to Sir Launfal: A Story Becomes Popular,” in The
Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, Eds. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert
(London: Longman, 2000), p. 59 [56–77].
52. Myra Seaman, “Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal and the Englishing of
Medieval Romance,” Medieval Perspectives 15 (2000): 105–19.
53. I borrow this term from Shearle Furnish, “Civilization and Savagery in
Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal,” Medieval Perspectives 3 (1988): 137–149.
54. Spearing, p. 113.
55. All citations for Chestre are from “Sir Launfal,” The Middle English Breton
Lays, and are cited parenthetically by line number.
56. Cohen, Hybridity, pp. 86–90.
57. Spearing, pp. 97–119.
58. Laskaya and Salisbury, pp. 201–2.
59. Tokes, p. 75.
60. Dinah Hazell, “The Blinding of Gwennere: Thomas Chestre as Social
Critic,” in Arthurian Literature XX, ed. Keith Busby (Cambridge, UK: DS
Brewer, 2003), p. 123 [123–44].
61. Hazell, p. 124.
62. Laskaya and Salisbury, p. 201.
63. See Chapter One, p. 92n75.
64. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
65. Hazell, pp. 124–5.
66. Geneviève Bürhrer-Thierry, “ ‘Just Anger’ or ‘Vengeful Anger’?: The
Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West,” in Anger’s Past: The
Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, Ed. Barbara H. Rosenwein
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 76 [75–91].
67. See The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheinghorn (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 50–1.
68. Bürhrer-Thierry notes that these crimes fall under the notion of the
lèse-majesté, or crime against the state or king. She cites several examples,
including the blinding of those involved in the Thuringian revolt of 786
and Charles the Bald’s blinding of his son for rebellion in 873 (pp. 80–7).
Klaus van Eickels cites numerous examples from Anglo-Norman
England, including William II’s blinding and castrating William of Eu
for treason (p. 100).
69. Bürhrer-Thierry, pp. 78–9.
70. Edward Wheatley, “ ‘Blind’ Jews and Blind Christians: Metaphorics of
Marginalization in Medieval Europe,” Exemplaria 14.2 (October 2002):
351–82; and Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a
Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
71. van Eickels, pp. 94–5.
72. van Eickels, pp. 94–108.
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NOTES 177
73. Hazell, p. 141.

74. Eve Salisbury, “Chaucer’s ‘Wife,’ the Law, and the Middle English
Breton Lays,” in Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, eds. Eve Salisbury,
Georgiana Donavin, and Merrall Llewelyn Price. Gainesville: University
of Florida Press, 2002), pp. 73–93. Salisbury notes that lawmaker Henry
Bracton includes blinding in his list of punishments for rape “since in
Bracton’s view the rapist’s eyes were also culpable” (p. 81).
75. Salisbury, p. 81.
76. Peggy McCracken, The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual
Transgression in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 27. Duby states, “[A]dultery, though con-
summated, was barren” (qtd. in McCracken, p. 27).
77. McCracken, The Romance of Adultery, p. 27.
78. McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in
French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature,
p. 40 [38–64].
79. McCracken, “The Body Politic,” p. 40.
80. Chestre does not mention that Gwenore has children, nor does he state
whether Gwenore is infertile. Thus, I read her “barrenness” as poten-
tially physical and definitely metaphorical: her adulterous couplings
would be “unfruitful” because they would result in an illegitimate child.
In other words, I am not claiming that Gwenore is physically unable to
have children, but I am acknowledging that that literary tradition cer-
tainly haunts the text.
81. See Furnish, p. 145.
82. Hazell, p. 135.
83. Hazell, p. 135.
84. Hazell, p. 140. See also E.S. Hartland, The Science of Fairy Tales: An
Inquiry into Fairy Mythology, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1925),
pp. 62–9.
85. Laskaya and Salisbury, p. 202n n292–300.
86. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism,
and the Difference ‘It’ Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale.”
ELH 61.3 (1994): 484 [473–99].
87. See David Carlson, “The Middle English Lanval, the Corporal Works of
Mercy, and Bibliotheque Nationale, Nouv. Acq. FR 1104,” Neophilologus
72 (1988): 97–106.
88. That the productive sexuality of Tryamour can only exist within a
supernatural realm further reveals the connection between femininity
and disability in Chestre’s text and society.
89. I borrow this term from Andrew Higl, “Double Prosthesis onto the
Corpus of Chaucer,” Chaucer After 1400: Makers, Editors, and Readers
(42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan
University), May 12, 2007. Higl’s notion of textual prosthesis is dis-
tinct from Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis. While narrative
prosthesis is a function of narrative meant to “normalize” the difference
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178 NOTES
disability creates, textual prosthesis refers to a secondary work of lit-

erature by another author that has been “grafted” onto an author’s cor-
pus with intent to remedy a problem set forth in the author’s original
work.
90. Felicity Riddy, “ ‘Abject Odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s
Testament of Cresseid,” in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek
Pearsall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 280–96.
91. All citations from Henryson are from “The Testament of Cresseid,”
The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick (Kalamazoo, MI:
Medieval Institute, 1997) and are cited parenthetically by line number.
92. Lee W. Patterson, “Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid.”
Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696–714. See Mairi Ann Cullen,
“Cresseid Excused: A Re-reading of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,”
Studies in Scottish Literature 20 (1985): 137–59 for a reading in defense of
Cresseid’s redemption.
93. Marion Wynne-Davies, “ ‘Spottis Blak’: Disease and the Female Body
in the Testament of Cresseid,” Poetica 38 (1993): 32–52.
94. Susan Aronstein, “Cresseid Reading Cresseid: Redemption and
Translation in Henryson’s Testament,” Scottish Literary Journal 21:2 (1994):
6 [5–22].
95. Riddy, p. 286.
96. Riddy, p. 291.
97. See chapter 1, pp. 37–9.
98. Riddy, pp. 291–2.
99. See chapter 1, pp. 24–5.
100. Riddy, p. 292.
101. Marshall Stearns finds that Henryson’s accurate representation of the
disease and Scotland’s large number of lepers suggest that the poet may
have had first-hand exposure to lepers. He even reports that Henryson’s
description of Cresseid’s symptoms prompted nineteenth-century
physician J. Y. Simpson to conclude that a form of the disease, Greek
elephantiasis, existed in medieval Scotland. Johnstone Parr adds that
Henryson’s apparent astrological understanding of the disease implies
that he was well versed in medical lore on the disease. See Marshall W.
Stearns, “Henryson and the Leper Cresseid,” Modern Language Notes
59:4 (1944): 265–9; and Johnstone Parr, “Cresseid’s Leprosy Again,”
Modern Language Notes 60:7 (1945): 487–91.
102. Metzler, p. 6.
103. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), 20.
105. See Susan Zimmerman, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38:3 (2008): 558–97 for a cogent
analysis of medieval notions of leprosy.
106. Stearns, p. 265.
107. Catherine Peyroux suggests that there are 395 documented leper houses
in Northern and Eastern France and at least 270 in England from the
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NOTES 179
twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. See Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,”

Monks, Nuns, and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, eds. Sharon
Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2000), p. 175 n12 [172–88].
108. Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2006), pp. 19–21, 20. See also François-Olivier Touati, Maladie et
société au Moyen Age: La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province
ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (Brussels: De Boeck
Université, 1998) for a challenge to common notions of medieval
leprosy.
109. See Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature; Moore,
The Formation of a Persecuting Society; and Byron Lee Grigsby, Pestilence
in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge,
2004).
110. Rawcliffe, p. 20.
111. Brody, p. 177.
112. Beryl Rowland, “ ‘The Seiknes Incurabill’ in Henryson’s Testament of
Cresseid,” English Language Notes (1964): 175–77.
113. Grigsby, p. 98.
114. Grigsby, p. 39.
115. Brody notes that leprosy was specifically linked to sexual excess in
medieval literature, but that this connection was complex; it in no way
specified that the disease was sexually transmitted or that frequent sex
caused it.
116. Brody, p. 177.
117. Grigsby, p. 101. For more on leprosy, sin, and salvation, see Nicole
Bériou and François-Olivier Touati, Voluntate Dei leprosus: Le lépreux
entre conversion et exclusion aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Spoleto: Centro
Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medievo, 1991).
118. Cullen, p. 152.
119. Grigsby, pp. 44–51.
120. Rawcliffe, p. 101n247.
121. Parr, p. 488.
122. Riddy, p. 292.
123. Peyroux, p. 176.
124. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:
The Religious Significance of Food to Women (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1987).
125. Wynne-Davies, p. 34.
126. Riddy, p. 291.
127. Riddy, p. 293.
128. See Jane Adamson, “The Curious Incident of the Recognition in
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid,” Parergon 27 (1980): 17–25, for a dis-
cussion of the intricacies of the recognition scene in the poem.
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180 NOTES
131. As Howard Patch notes, Lady Fortune is most often blindfolded in order
“to show that she has no regard for merit.” Fortune’s blindness may have
transferred onto Venus because the two were often associated with one
another in medieval literature as early as the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies. By the end of the fourteenth century, the two goddesses were
often interchangeable. See The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature
(New York: Octagon, 1967), p. 40, 90–8. Catherine Attwood exam-
ines the effect of literary depictions of Fortune on late medieval narrative
in Fortune la contrefaite: L’Envers de l’écriture médiévale (Paris: Champion,
2007).
132. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus. Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-
Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Helen
Rodnite Lemay (Albany: New York State University Press, 1992),
p. 89.
133. See, for example, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, p. 131.
134. Helen Rodnite Lemay, “Introduction,” Women’s Secrets, p. 48.
135. Rawcliffe, pp. 93–5. See also Zimmerman for connections between
menstrual blood and leprosy.
136. Riddy, p. 293.
137. Jana Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid,”
The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 63 [40–66].
138. Mathews, p. 63.
Chapter 4
1. For a summary of criticisms on the text’s structure, see Maureen Fries,
“Margery Kempe,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe,
ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), pp. 227–9; for a summary of criticisms on Kempe, see Nancy F.
Partner, “Reading the Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991):
31–33 [30–66]; for the text’s structure as proof of an oral, feminine
form of writing, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, “ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’:
Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Women’s
Writing 9.2 (2002): 159–76. For Kempe as a madwoman, see Richard
Lawes, “The Madness of Margery Kempe,” in The Medieval Mystical
Tradition in England, vol. 6, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, UK:
Brewer, 1999), pp. 147–67; for Kempe as inferior to Julian of Norwich,
see David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (London: Burns and
Oates, 1961), p. 139.
2. For Kempe as transgressive, see Elizabeth Petroff, Body and Soul:
Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), pp. 152–7; McAvoy, “ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ ”; and Janet
Wilson, “Margery and Alison: Women on Top,” in Margery Kempe:
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NOTES 181
A Book of Essays (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 223–37. For Kempe
as ultimately upholding male authority, see Sarah Beckwith, “A Very
Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in
Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1996), pp. 195–215.
3. Works that focus on Kempe’s bodiliness are numerous. See,for instance,
Beckwith “A Very Material Mysticism”; Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe
and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyvania Press,
1991); Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe,” in
Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, pp. 168–87; McAvoy,
“ ‘Aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ ”; and Sarah Salih, “Margery’s Bodies: Piety,
Work, and Penance,” in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, eds.
John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer,
2004), pp. 161–76.
4. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, p. 21.
6. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 174–5.
7. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), p. 199.
8. It should be noted that depictions of the suffering female body are espe-
cially graphic in female saints’ lives, wherein women undergo unthink-
able torture, and their battered bodies are publically displayed in order
to demonstrate their sanctity and underscore the promise of resurrec-
tion. Metzler notes that unlike laypeople, whose impairments would
be cured upon death, saints would retain the scars of their injuries in
the afterlife as signs of their spirituality. See Irina Metzler, Disability in
Medieval Europe: Thinking About Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.
1100–1400 (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 56–7, 63.
9. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing
(London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 44–5.
10. The Book of Margery Kempe, annotated ed., ed. Barry Windeatt
(Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 1:52. All subsequent citations
are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by chapter and page
number.
11. See Herbert Thurston, “Margery the Astonishing,” The Month (1936):
446–56; Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition; and Sigrid Undset,
“Margery Kempe of Lynn,” Men, Women, and Places, trans. Arthur G.
Chater (London: Cassell and Company, 1939), p. 93 [81–104]. See also
Nancy P. Stork, who diagnoses Kempe with Tourette’s syndrome, “Did
Margery Kempe Suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome?,” Mediaeval Studies 59
(1997): 261–300.
12. The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (London: Penguin,
1994), p. 300n24.
13. Richard Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse
in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas Hoccleve,” in
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182 NOTES
Writing Women Religious: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late

Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiana Whitehead
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), pp. 217–44.
14. See Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The ‘Book’ and the World of
Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Monica
Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt, “Revaluing the Female Body,
Reconceiving Motherhood: Mysticism and the Maternal in Julian of
Norwich and Margery Kempe,” in Minding the Body: Women and Literature
in the Middle Ages, 800–1500 (New York: Twayne, 1997), pp. 166–88.
15. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 5.
16. It is important to note that medieval literacy was very different from our
modern notion, which pairs reading and writing. Medieval literacy, on
the other hand, was concerned with the ability to read Latin. Medieval
laywomen, in particular, rarely came into contact with the written
word. As Lochrie notes, we must consider Kempe’s illiteracy within this
context. Lochrie contends, however, that Kempe’s Book demonstrates
her exposure to Latin texts and rests it firmly within a Latin tradition.
Thus, Kempe’s illiteracy may not be a clear-cut as we have believed. See
Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 97–127.
17. Harding, “Body into Text,” pp. 168–87. For the Book as autobiogra-
phy, see Janel M. Mueller, “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: Female
Spirituality, Self hood, and Authorship in the Book of Margery Kempe,”
in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical
Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1986), pp. 155–72; and Sidonie Smith, “The Book of Margery Kempe:
This Creature’s Unsealed Life,” in A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography:
Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana
18. Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 4.
19. Julian Yates, “Mystic Self: Margery Kempe and the Mirror of Narrative,”
Comitatus 26 (1995): p. 85n22 [75–93].
20. Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and Autobiographical Impulse,” p. 239.
22. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), p. 3, 19.
24. Life writing is the term used by scholars of autobiographical forms of
writing to describe narratives of personal information, such as diaries,
life stories, interviews, and personal web sites and blogs.
25. Paul John Eakin, “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing,”
in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2004), p. 6 [1–18].
26. Eakin, p. 11.
27. Arthur W. Frank, “Moral Non-fiction: Life Writing and Children’s
Disability,” The Ethics of Life Writing, p. 177 [174–94].
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NOTES 183
28. Frank, p. 178.

29. Windeatt, “Introduction,” p. 23.
30. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 224
[222–239].
31. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; and Bynum, Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
(New York: Zone Books, 1991); Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh; and
Claire Marshall, “The Politics of Self-Mutilation: Forms of Female
Devotion in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Body in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Culture, eds. Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 11–22.
32. Salih, p. 167.
33. Salih, p. 173.
34. Salih, p. 173.
35. Dhira B. Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over
Language,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire
(New York: Garland, 1992), p. 40 [37–50].
36. Mahoney, p. 40.
37. Harding, “Body into Text,” p. 182.
38. Mahoney, p. 41, 43.
39. Sidonie A. Smith, “Material Selves: Bodies, Memory, and
Autobiographical Narrating,” in Narrative and Consciousness: Literature,
Psychology, and the Brain, eds. Gary D. Fireman, Ted E. McVay, Jr. and
Owen J. Flanagan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 93–4
[86–114].
40. Smith, 108.
41. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity Culture and Society in Late Medieval
Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 82.
42. Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” p. 212.
43. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, pp. 92–3.
44. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, p. 93.
45. See Chapter One, pp. 76–8.
46. Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and
Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s
Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature,
pp. 142–67.
49. Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women,” p. 149.
52. Richard Rolle, “Meditations on the Passion,” in Richard Rolle: Prose and
Verse, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Oxford: EETS, 1988), p. 74.
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184 NOTES
54. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian
of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004),
pp. 28–63.
55. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth The Reproductive Unconscious in Medieval and
Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 43–60.
56. Hellwarth, pp. 45–7.
57. Potkay and Evitt, p. 168.
58. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 37.
59. Hellwarth, p. 47.
61. Scholars are also undecided on whether Kempe has had a child. While
most accept that she has not given birth, some, like Laura Howes, con-
tend that she has indeed delivered a child, her fourteenth. Though this
argument is intriguing, for the purposes of this chapter, the existence of
the child is not important; what is important is that Kempe’s spiritual
status is threatened by the possibility of her having given birth. See Laura
Howes, “On the Birth of Margery Kempe’s Last Child,” Modern Philology
90.2 (1992): 220–5.
63. Hope Phyllis Weissman, “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica
Compassio in the Late Middle Ages,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and Its
Contexts 700–1600, eds. Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth Kirk (Norman,
OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 201–17. Weissman redeems Kempe from
anachronistic accusations of hysteria by examining her actions in terms
of her reproductive system, arguing that Kempe’s identification with the
Virgin centers on the shared experiences of their wombs.
64. See also Chapter 28, p. 166n2259.
65. The Book features several instances in which Kempe’s fits of tears are
clearly linked to pregnancy and childbirth. Some notable instances
include her admission that the sight of male children brings on her tears
(35:190–1) and her uncontrollable weeping for Christ’s Passion when she
sees a mother nursing her son (39:202).
66. See Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
67. Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich:
Parts One and Two, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978), long text, p. 586.
68. Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” p. 209.
69. In much the same way, Kempe’s witnessing of weddings causes her to
think of the marriage of Mary and Joseph as well as the “gostly joynyng
of mannys sowle to Jhesu Crist” (82: 358). In both cases, Kempe rede-
fines an experience from material life, recasting it as spiritual.
70. While biblical and some patristic accounts of the Virgin’s grief assert
that she remained stoic due to her steadfast belief in the Resurrection,
other devotional, literary, and artistic descriptions, which derive from
Eastern accounts of the Virgin, describe her loud and tormented sorrow
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NOTES 185
upon losing her son. See Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, pp. 179–91.
Lochrie reports that the Virgin’s stoic or boisterous grief remained in
debate throughout the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. This
contrast threatened to undermine the Virgin’s perfection, for sorrow at
her son’s death may indicate a doubt in the Resurrection. Despite this
danger, representations of Mary’s sorrow abound.
71. Weissman, p. 211, 215.
72. Weissman, p. 215.
73. Michael S. Campbell, “ ‘All My Children, Spiritual and Bodily’: Love
Transformed in The Book of Margery Kempe,” The Journal of the Association
for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Arts 1.1 (1995): 59–69.
74. Campbell, p. 65.
75. One such spiritual child is an English man who comes across Kempe while
she is in Rome. Kempe accepts the man as her son as well as Christ’s,
demonstrating that to be mothered by Kempe is to be mothered by Christ.
Later, Kempe offers comfort to the man as they travel out of Rome, and he
is “wel comfortyd wyth hyr wordys, for he trustyd meche in hir felyngys,
and mad hir as good cher be the wey as yyf he had ben hir owyn sone,
born of hir body” (42: 212). Kempe’s words, her “gostly frute,” become
the means through which she expresses maternal love to the man.
76. It should be noted that McAvoy calls attention to the importance of
Kempe’s fears of rape just before this scene: “Here the outpouring of
maternal feeling of the women and of herself—albeit ostensibly directed
at a doll—is juxtaposed as a counterbalance to the specifically male-
identified violence of female rape, and it is significant that the Grey
Friars and Richard are completely excluded from the female and mater-
nal ritual performed by these women.” The female community that
these women create thus serves as an “alternative” to the male threat of
sexual violence. See McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, p. 56.
80. Kempe takes over as comforter to Richard after she gives away his money
to the poor. When he responds angrily to her actions, she comforts him
by promising that God will provide her the means to pay him back,
which she does (37: 199).
81. P. H. Cullum, “Spiritual and Bodily Works of Mercy,” in A Companion
to the Book of Margery Kempe, p. 178 [177–93].
82. Cullum, p. 188.
84. Catherine Peyroux, “The Leper’s Kiss,” in Monks, Nuns, and Outcasts:
Religion in Medieval Society, eds. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 172–88.
85. Though the disease is not specifically identified as leprosy, the text
directly describes it in similar terms. Keeping in mind the wider medi-
eval categorization of leprosy, any person whose disease manifested itself
9780230105119_08_not.indd 185 9/20/2010 1:16:23 PM

186 NOTES
in marks or blisters upon the skin would be considered and treated as a

leper.
88. Harding, “Medieval Women’s Unwritten Discourse on Motherhood,”
Women’s Studies 21 (1992): p. 207 [197–209].
89. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body (New York: Routledge, 1996),
p. 173.
Conclusion
1. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), p. 87.
2. Linton, p. 88.
3. Linton, pp. 90–92.
4. Linton, p. 125.
5. See Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body
(London: Verso, 1995); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary
Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997); David Mitchell and Sharon
Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Ato Quayson,
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007).
6. Linton, p. 129.
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22.4 (2002): 194–212.
———. “A River Runs Through It: Disability, Homosexuality, Queered/
Disabled Discourse, and the Isle of Blandie in Bérinus” Exemplaria 19.3 (Fall
2007): 386–401.
———. Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster In Mediaeval
Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.
Wills, David. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Wilson, Janet. “Margery and Alison: Women on Top.” Margery Kempe: A Book of
Essays. McEntire. 223–37.
Wynne-Davies, Marion. “ ‘Spottis Blak’: Disease and the Female Body in the
Testament of Cresseid.” Poetica 38 (1993): 32–52.
Yates, Julian. “Mystic Self: Margery Kempe and the Mirror of Narrative.”
Comitatus 26 (1995): 75–93.
Zimmerman, Susan. “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary.” The Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies 38.3 (2008): 558–87.
9780230105119_09_bib.indd 200 9/20/2010 1:16:31 PM

INDEX
abjection, 15, 23, 24–5, 26, 98–9, 44, 98, 108, 129; and Jews, 21,
109, 133, 145, 152 88, 90, 165n; and leprosy, 106;
actual identity, 2, 57, 118, 135, 154 and Lombards, 36–37, 88, 165n;
Amos, Mark Addison, 51–2, 54, 57, as metaphor, 21, 37, 42, 43, 67,
169n 169n; and Venus, 107
Ancrene Wisse, 49 The Bluest Eye, 21
Angela of Foligno, 104, 123 Book of Margery Kempe, see Kempe,
St. Anne, 136 Margery
Arden, Heather, 84, 175n Book of Sainte Foy, 89, 176n
Aristotle, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 108, 129, Book of the Knight of the Tower, see
158n Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry
Aronstein, Susan, 97, 99, 178n Bornstein, Diane, 48, 168n
Asch, Adrienne and Michelle Fine, Bragg, Lois, see Sayers, Edna Edith
156n, 160n, 162n Braidotti, Rosi, 25, 163n
Ashley, Kathleen and Robert L.A. St. Bridget, 120, 124
Clark, 48, 168n Brody, Saul, 101, 102, 156n, 175n,
Atkinson, Clarissa, 48, 168n 179n
St. Augustine, 10 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, 77–8,
Averroes, 9 174n
Avicenna, 9, 56n, 62 Brundage, James A., 47, 168n
Bürhrer-Thierry, Geneviève, 89–90,
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26–9, 32, 36, 39, 176n
54–5, 56, 170n Butler, Judith, 83, 160n
Beckwith, Sarah, 126, 127, 181n Bynum, Caroline Walker, 1, 52, 115,
The Bell Jar, 21 116, 129, 155n, 169n, 181n,
blinding: and castration, 80–1, 90–1; 183n, 184n
and crimes against royal power,
89–90, 91, 176n; and fairies, Cadden, Joan, 7–8, 9, 157n
93; as punishment, 53, 87, Campbell, Michael, 138, 185n
89, 90, 169n, 174n, 177n; and carnival, 26–7, 29, 34, 44
sexuality, 91, 92, 93; as symbol carnivalesque (literature), 26–30, 34,
of martyrdom, 89 55, 56, 58, 109, 153
blindness: and Christianity, 67; caused Carruthers, Mary, 60, 170n
by excessive intercourse, 37–38, Catherine of Siena, 104
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 201 9/20/2010 1:32:48 PM

202 IN DEX
Caxton, William, 50, 169n dirt, 25, 28

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11; Book of disability: as difference, 3–4;
the Duchess, 159n; “General defining, 3–4, 12; and disease,
Prologue,” 60–1, 69, 170n; 99; and female body, 2, 5, 7–11,
“Knight’s Tale,” 159n; 12, 24, 36, 63, 96–111, 114–17,
“Merchant’s Tale,” 15, 19, 128–9, 152; and femininity, 1–2,
35–44, 165n, 166n; “Miller’s 5, 7, 11–12, 16, 45, 50, 55, 57,
Tale,” 39, 94, 165n; “Parson’s 153, 155–4, 177n; and gendered
Tale,” 159n; “Tale of Sir model, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 11–15, 40,
Thopas,” 85; Troilus and 63, 110–11, 133; vs. impairment,
Criseyde, 96, 97; “Wife of Bath’s 3, 4, 122; literary representations
Prologue,” 14, 15–6, 39, 45–6, of, 2, 5, 13–15, 21–2, 151–2,
60–71, 159n; “Wife of Bath’s 161n; and medical model, 3; and
Tale,” 65, 66, 69, 71, 167–8n ‘medicalisation’ of late Middle
Chestre, Thomas, 85; Sir Launfal, 16, Ages, 6–7, 11; and poverty, 54;
73, 84–96, 97, 110 and religious model, 4, 5, 122–3;
Chevalier a la Corbeille, 19 and social model, 2–3; and
childbirth, see pregnancy spiritual economy, 31–2, 103–5;
Christine de Pizan, 48 see also impairment
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 15, 23, 24–5, disability studies, 151–3; feminist,
26, 86–7, 155n, 162n, 173n 1–2, 11–14, history of, 2–3;
conduct literature, 46, 47–8, 60; and medieval, 4–7, 152, 154
gendered pedagogy, 48–9 docile bodies, 6, 153
counternarrative, 14, 16, 17, 111, 120, domestic violence, 46–7, 65, 167n, 168n
135, 154 Dor, Juliette, 60, 170n
Creamer, Paul, 77, 78, 174n Douglas, Mary, 2–3, 25, 162n
Cullen, Mairi Ann, 102, 178n Dronzek, Anna, 48–50, 51, 168n
Cullum, P.H., 32, 141, 185n Duby, Georges, 91, 177n
Cynthia (goddess), 96–7, 99–100, 103,
106, 107–8 Eakin, Paul John, 119, 125, 182n
Eccles, Jacqueline, 84, 175n
Dame Sirith, 15, 19, 28–35, 40, 42, St. Elizabeth (biblical), 136
43, 44 St. Elizabeth of Hungary, 120, 134
Davis, Lennard J., 20, 22, 28, 152, 155n Eve, 9–11, 12, 46, 47, 81, 91, 134, 138
deafness, 67; and Bible, 67; congenital Everest, Carol, 37–8, 39, 41, 42, 166n
vs. acquired, 67, 70; curability extimité, 24, 25
of, 69–70; as metaphor, 61, 67–8;
as punishment, 61, 65–6; see also Farmer, Sharon, 164n, 169n
Chaucer, Geoffrey, “Wife of Fasiculus Morum, 133
Bath’s Prologue” Faust, Diana, 74–5, 82, 173n
Delony, Mikee, 170n female body: as dangerous, 24,
descending catalogue, 94 35–6, 39, 52, 61–2, 114, 153;
Desmond, Marilyn, 46–7, 66, 168n as disabled, see disability, and
Diana (goddess), 109 female body; medical notions of,
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 64, 119–20, 171n, 7–11, 128–32; as site of spiritual
172n, 183n excess, 17, 128–32, 148, 154
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 202 9/20/2010 1:32:48 PM

IN DEX 203
female countercourt, 84–95 impairment, 3–4, 122; authenticity

Fiedler, Leslie, 13, 160n of, 30–1, 34, 42, 70, 164n; as
Foucault, Michel, 156n, 161n punishment, 15–17, 45–71,
Fourth Lateran Council, 4, 156n 73–111; see also disability
Frank, Arthur, 119, 125, 182n infertility, see pregnancy
Freeman, Michelle, 75, 76, 82, 84, 174n Interludium de clerico et puella, 28
Irigaray, Luce, 81
Galen, 7–11, 129, 157n, 158n, 159n Irish: and marginalization, 139–40;
Gallop, Jane, 156n monsterization of, 23, 86–7
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 7, Isidore of Seville, 10
12–13, 14, 28, 152, 160n
Geoffroy de La Tour-Landry, 14, 45; Jacobus de Voragine, 69, 172n
Book of the Knight of the Tower, 14, St. Jerome, 10, 63, 64, 123
15–16, 45–6, 50–60, 69, 71, 169n Jews: bodily stereotypes of, 88, 90,
giants, 23, 24, 85, 88 162n; exclusion of, 174n; see also
Goffman, Erving, 2, 57, 118, 175n blindness
“The Good Wife Taught Her jouissance, 26, 109, 133
Daughter,” 48 Julian of Norwich, 113, 115, 123,
The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, 60 130, 136, 180n
Green, Monica, 8, 10, 157n, 158n, 159n
Grigsby, Byron Lee, 101, 102, 179n Kempe, Margery, 32; and
grotesque: body (general), 23–8, 44, autobiography, 117–28, 154, 182n;
55 109, 153; and disability, 23–8, Book of, 17, 113–49, 154; and care
30, 153; female body, 27–8, for impaired, 139–48; and imitatio
32–3, 36, 44, 52, 54, 56, 58; Christi, 114–15, 129–30, 136, 137;
realism, 27 and imitatio Mariae, 136–9, 147;
Guenevere: in literary tradition, 91 and lepers, 104–5, 142–3, 146;
medical diagnosis of, 116–17, 118;
Hali Meidenhad, 40–1, 42, 49, 133 and motherhood, 113, 134, 135–6,
Hallissy, Margaret, 60, 170n 138, 139–49; and pregnancy and
Hanawalt, Barbara, 47, 167n childbirth, 132–9, 140, 143–4, 145,
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 66, 67, 171n 184n; and sex, 120, 122, 134–5,
Harding, Wendy, 117, 123–4, 148, 138, 142, 145, 146; and spiritual
181n piety, 113–14, 120–1, 132, 147–9;
Hazell, Dinah, 87, 89, 93, 176n and tears, 119, 121–8, 129–32,
Hellwarth, Jennifer Wynne, 7, 132, 136–9, 140, 143, 145–6, 147, 184n
134, 135, 140, 184n King, Helen, 8, 157n
Henryson, Robert, 96, 178n; Kinoshita, Sharon, 84, 175n
Testament of Cresseid, 16–17, 73, Knowles, David, 116, 180n
96–111 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 24, 25, 26, 98,
Hildegard of Bingen: Causae et Curae, 109, 162n
159n; Scivias, 11
Hippocrates, 7, 157n lameness, 30–1, 69
Holten, Kathryn, 78–9, 80, 174n Laqueur, Thomas, 7–8, 11, 157n
Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, 54 Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury, 87,
“How a Wise Man Taught His Son,” 48 94, 175n; see also Salisbury, Eve
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 203 9/20/2010 1:32:48 PM

204 IN DEX
Lawes, Richard, 116, 118, 180n 128, 135, 142; see also domestic
Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall, 94, 177n violence
Lemay, Helen Rodnite, 108, 180n St. Margaret, 120, 132, 143
leprosy: and Bible, 100, 102–3; and Martin, Priscilla, 61, 171n, 172n
charity, 97, 104–5; and Christ, St. Mary Magdalene, 120
104, 142; as disability, 99; and Mary of Oignies, 120, 123, 136, 169n
exclusion, 79, 80, 100, 146, 174n materiality of metaphor, 68
; Last Mass, 100–1; leper’s kiss, Mathews, Jana, 109, 180n
104–5, 142–3; leprosaria, 100, McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 132, 134, 141,
104, 178n; lupa/lepra associations, 147, 180n, 185n
80, 102; medieval notions of, 100, McCracken, Peggy, 91, 92, 177n
108, 185–6n; as punishment, 80, menopause, 25, 33, 40, 61
101–3, 110, 146–7; and salvation, menstrual blood, 10, 128–9; and
104, 105, 179n; and sin, 80, 101, Bible, 10, 159n; and disability,
102–3, 142, 146–7, 175n, 179n; 11, 25, 108, 109; and eyes,
symptoms of, 99–100, 103, 106, 33, 108; and moon, 108; as
178n; and vision, 105–6; see also poisonous, 10–11, 33, 108
Henryson, Robert, Testament of Metzler, Irina, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 21, 31,
Cresseid 67, 70, 99, 122, 155n, 161n,
life writing, 17, 119–20, 125–6, 182n 172n, 174n, 181n
Lindley, Arthur, 26–7, 64, 65, 163n, Miller, Milton, 41, 42, 166n
172n miraculous cure (of impairment), 32,
loathly lady, 34, 69, 164n 44, 69–70, 104, 142, 144
Lochrie, Karma, 22, 62, 114, 115, Mitchell, David, 68, 161n; see also
118, 132, 161n, 181n, 182n, 185n Mitchell, David and Sharon
Lombards: bodily stereotypes of, Snider
36–7, 88, 165n; see also Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder,
blindness 14, 15, 20–1, 33, 36, 49, 59, 61,
Lomperis, Linda and Sarah Stanbury, 69, 76, 78, 83, 96, 118, 152,
1, 155n 155n, 161n, 177n
lovesickness, 19, 33, 164n monsters, 23, 80, 86, 162n; and
lycanthropy, 77, 78, 174n; see also disability, 23–8; female, 36;
werewolves monsterization, 15, 23, 86–7; and
pregnancy, 23–8, 43, 133
Mahoney, Dhira, 123, 125, 183n Moore, Robert I., 101, 156n, 174n
Mandeville’s Travels, 23
Mann, Jill, 64, 163–4n, 171n narrative prosthesis, 14, 15–16, 20–3,
Marie de France, 74; Bisclavret, 16, 73, 49, 61, 69, 76, 78, 96, 97, 177–8n
74–83, 85, 88, 90, 96, 97, 110; Nichols, Stephen, 74, 75, 173n
Fables, 74; and female textual normalcy, 3, 20–3, 152–3
production, 82; Guigemar, 74; Norman Conquest, 23, 173n
Lanval, 84–5; and misogyny, normate, 13, 160n
77–8, 82; narrative style, 74–6; nose: and castration, 56–7, 80–1; as
St. Patrick’s Purgatory, 74 phallic symbol, 56; removal of as
marriage, 46–7; and hierarchy, 54–6, disabling, 57, 80
58, 91; and sex, 63–4, 66, 120, Nussbaum, Felicity, 12, 156n, 159n
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 204 9/20/2010 1:32:48 PM

IN DEX 205
Offord, M. Y., 50–1, 169n Roberts, Anna, 46, 167n

Otherness, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 15, 20, Robertson, Elizabeth, 49, 129, 130,
23, 24–5, 28, 34, 79, 84, 88, 168n, 183n
95, 98, 109, 152, 160n, 162n, Rolle, Richard, 130–1, 183n
174n Russo, Mary, 27–8, 163n
Rowland, Beryl, 101, 158n, 179n
Park, Katharine, 7, 157n
parody, 44, 83, 161n Salih, Sarah, 121, 181n
Parr, Johnstone, 103, 178n Salisbury, Eve, 29, 30, 46, 66, 91,
passing, 83, 175n 163n, 167n, 177n
paterfamilias, 47, 168n Saturn, 96–7, 99, 103, 107, 109
Patterson, Lee, 97, 178n Sayers, Edna Edith, 155n, 170n
Peyroux, Catherine, 104, 142, 178–9n, Seaman, Myra, 85, 176n
185n Sedgwick, Eve, 77
pica, 41, 42 Seven Corporal Works of Mercy, 32,
Pickens, Rupert, 75, 76, 81, 82, 95, 141
173n, 174n Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy,
Piers Plowman, 31 32, 141
Plato, 8, 158n Shea, Kerry, 77, 78, 81, 174n
Pliny, 10 sheela-na-gig, 36, 72n
Potkay, Monica and Regula Evitt, Shildrick, Margaret, 26, 163n
134, 182n Sir Gawain, 24
pregnancy: and abjection, 24–5; and Smith, Sidonie, 125–6, 182n, 183n
disability, 25–6, 35–44, 133–4, Soranus, 7, 8–9, 10, 41, 62, 157n,
162–3n; infertility, 25–6, 33, 158n, 167n, 171n
61, 91–2, 177n; and legitimacy, Spearing, A. C., 85, 86, 87, 176n
41, 42, 91–2; medicalization spiritus, 36, 38, 129
of, 41; and monstrosity, 25; and Stearns, Marshall W., 103, 178n
monstrous births, 25, 42–3, Storm, Melvin, 60, 61, 67–8, 170n
167n; see also, Kempe, Margery; stigma, 2–3, 57, 83, 118, 175n
grotesque, female body Stiker, Henri-Jacques, 23–4, 31, 54,
Price, Janet and Margaret Shildrick, 155n, 162n, 169n
33, 164n; see also Shildrick, Summa Parisiensis, 47
Margaret
prosthesis, 20, 45, 62; see also narrative TAB, 33
prosthesis; textual prosthesis textual prosthetic, 96, 177–8n
Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, 9, 10, 33, Third Lateran Council, 100
158n, 164n, 180n St. Thomas á Becket, 69
Thurston, Herbert, 116, 181n
Quayson, Ato, 20, 152, 161n Titchkosky, Tanya, 25, 162–3n
queynte, 38–9; lengua queynte, 62 Tokes, Myra, 85, 87, 176n
Trotula, 9, 10, 11, 41, 67, 157n,
Rawcliffe, Carole, 100–1, 103, 106, 158n, 159n
108, 179n
Riddy, Felicity, 96, 97–8, 99, 103, Undset, Sigrid, 116, 181n
105, 109, 179n usury, 88
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 205 9/20/2010 1:32:49 PM

206 IN DEX
vagina, 7, 35–6, 39, 40, 94; and 174n; voluntary vs. involuntary,
mouth, 52, 58–9 79; see also Marie de France;
vagina dentata, 36, 165n lycanthropy
Van Eickels, Klaus, 80, 90, 175n, Wheatley, Edward, 4, 5–6, 21, 31,
176n 90, 122, 155n, 161n, 165n, 170n,
Venus, 96, 97–8, 102, 103, 106–7: and 176n
Fortune, 180n Wills, David, 20, 161n
virtual identity, 2, 57, 118, 135, 154 Windeatt, Barry, 119, 181n, 183n
womb, 8–9; ragadia, 62; suffocation, 9;
weeping bitch motif, 28–9, 163n wandering, 8–9, 158n
Weisl, Angela, 46, 168n Wynne-Davies, Marion, 97, 99, 105,
Weissman, Hope Phyllis, 136, 138, 178n
184n
Wendell, Susan, 3, 6, 12, 99, 148, Yates, Julian, 117, 182n
156n, 160n
werewolves: and deviancy, 79, 86–7; Zemon Davis, Natalie, 27, 163n
historical notions of, 77–8, Zimmerman, Susan, 178n, 180n
9780230105119_10_ind.indd 206 9/20/2010 1:32:49 PM

Women and Disability in Medieval Literature

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Women and Disability in Medieval Literature

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The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the

Religious Literature Southern Low Countries

Creating Community with Food and Drink in Queering Medieval Genres

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd ii 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork,

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd iii 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd iv 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd v 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd vi 9/20/2010 3:25:40 PM

Tory Vandeventer Pearman

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd vii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd viii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd ix 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

Introduction: Medieval Authoritative Discourse and

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xi 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

T he personal and professional assistance of many people has shaped

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xiii 9/20/2010 3:25:41 PM

portions are reprinted with kind permission respectively from Ashgate

9780230105119_01_prexiv.indd xiv 9/20/2010 3:25:42 PM

MEDIEVAL AUTHORITATIVE DISCOURSE AND

A s a good amount of academic scholarship in the field of medieval

9780230105119_02_int.indd 1 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

sociocultural production of gender and bodily ability, is essential to any

9780230105119_02_int.indd 2 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

perspective to stigmatization, contends that responses to embodied dif-

9780230105119_02_int.indd 3 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

representations of disability in a society in which no identifiable defi-

9780230105119_02_int.indd 4 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

ignores medieval discourses—religious, medical, and literary—that do

9780230105119_02_int.indd 5 9/20/2010 2:50:26 PM

modern notion of science as unquestionable proof. First of all, there was

9780230105119_02_int.indd 6 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

of such bodies to biological sexual difference and its cultural interpre-

The Female Body as Disabled in

9780230105119_02_int.indd 7 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

it sel f i n opposition to Laqueur’s, does not uncover an essentialist

9780230105119_02_int.indd 8 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

nature.38 Moreover, Galen writes of womb suffocation, a defect of the

9780230105119_02_int.indd 9 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

subjugated to Adam. Moreover, subsequent writings link Eve’s implica-

9780230105119_02_int.indd 10 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

Hildegard, though she employs the “f lower” metaphor when describ-

The Gendered Model: Toward a Medieval Feminist

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refer to biblical and spiritual discourses on Eve in their discussions. Felicity

challenge existing social relations; [ . . . ] resist interpretation of certain

9780230105119_02_int.indd 12 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

Despite the similarities between the two fields, however, Garland

9780230105119_02_int.indd 13 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

As Garland Thomson suggests, the plot depends upon the difference

9780230105119_02_int.indd 14 9/20/2010 2:50:27 PM

9780230105119_02_int.indd 15 9/20/2010 2:50:28 PM

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masculine narrative drive). However, I assert that Cresseid’s punishment

9780230105119_02_int.indd 17 9/20/2010 2:50:28 PM

(DIS)PLEASURE AND (DIS)ABILITY:

T he antifeminism of many medieval fabliaux presents women as

9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 19 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

Disability and Text: Narrative Prosthesis and

9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 20 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

According to Mitchell and Snyder, literature’s pervasive reliance on

9780230105119_03_ch01.indd 21 9/20/2010 1:15:19 PM

or personal interactions.”13 Thus, it is imperative that disability scholars