Social dimensions of medieval disease and disability
By: edited by Sally Crawford, Christina Lee
Series: BAR international series -- 2668; BAR international series. Studies in early medicine -- 3; BAR international series -- 2668.; BAR international series -- 3.
Publisher: Archaeopress
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Oxford, England
Language: eng
Number of pages: 82
ISBN-13: 9781407313108
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Medieval Medicine
Description: The chronological and geographical focus of this volume is medieval northern Europe, from the 6th to the 15th centuries. The contributors examine the sometimes arbitrary social factors which resulted in people being deliberately, accidentally or temporarily categorised as "disabled" within their society, in ways that are peculiar to the medieval period. Health and disease are not static and unchanging; they are subject to cultural construction, manipulation and definition. Medieval ideas of healthy and unhealthy, as these papers show, were not necessarily - or even usually - comparable to modern approaches. Each of the papers represented in this volume assesses social constructs of health and ill-health in different guises within the medieval period -- Source other than Library of Congress.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: social dimensions of medieval disease and disability / Sally Crawford; title: The unhal and the semantics of Anglo Saxon disability / Fay Skevington; title: Invisible enemies: the role of epidemics in the shaping of historical events in the early medieval period / Christina Lee; title: The Madness of King Sigurðr: Narrating Insanity in an Old Norse Kings' Saga / Ármann Jakobsson; title: 'He was not an idiota from birth, nor is he now': false, temporary, and overturned charges of mental incapacity in 14th-century England / Wendy Turner; title: Disabling Masculinity: Manhood and Infertility in the High Middle Ages / Rachel Middlemass and Theresa Tyers; title: Speechless: speech and hearing impairments as problem of medieval normative texts - theological, natural-philosophical, legal / Irina Metzler; title: Leprosy, Lepers and Leper-houses: between Human Law and God's Law (6th-15th centuries) / Damien Jeanne.