CURRENT BOOK PROJECT

Light of the Everlasting Life:

Disability and Salvation in Old English Literature

In early medieval England, the representation of disability had tremendous consequences for the most important promises of Christianity: the promises of resurrection and—hopefully—salvation in the afterlife. Light of the Everlasting Life argues that early medieval English eschatology (the theology of last things: death, resurrection, and the Last Judgment) depended upon representations of disability and bodily difference in order to convey otherwise nebulous promises: that the body would be resurrected, that one would be the same person in their resurrected body as in their earthly body, and that their resurrection body would allow them to experience the despairs of damnation or the joys of salvation in the everlasting life. I call this dependence spiritual prosthesis, a medieval update to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s ‘narrative prosthesis’; spiritual prosthesis describes the quite high-stakes dependence of medieval eschatological hope upon rhetorical and narrative uses of disability and bodily difference. By examining Old English literature in multiple genres, this study finds that the eschatological payoff of narratives not only relied on individually aberrant bodies, but often on networks of aberrant bodies, working in concert to construct eschatological promises; I call these networks systems of aberrance. These new ways of looking at disability and bodily difference in Old English texts and early medieval Christian thought will not only prompt scholars of the Middle Ages to rethink the importance of disability in the cultures of medieval Europe, but will also urge disability studies scholars to rethink the importance of the Middle Ages in the development of modern ways of thinking about and experiencing disability.

Light of the Everlasting Life reimagines the role of disability in Old English texts and early medieval Christian theology, with consequences for disability studies’ understanding of the legacy of the Middle Ages in how we think about and experience disability today.