This special issue arose from a session entitled “Medieval
disability studies: challenges and commonalities” organised by
co-editor Yoav Tirosh and Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir at the
sixteenth research conference of the Nordic Network on
Disability Research (NNDR) held in Reykjavík, Iceland, in May 2023. The session
was one of many on disability in history and culture, which saw researchers
from a range of disciplines presenting on lived experiences and cultural
representations of disability and impairment found in sources originating from
the medieval times to the present day. We were excited to have the opportunity
to continue to develop this conversation through the publication of this special
edition. We are particularly appreciative of the guidance and support lent to us
throughout this process by outgoing journal editor Natalie Van Deusen.
Some of the authors of this special edition presented alongside us at NNDR
in Reykjavík, while others answered a call for papers and individual invitations.
Among the presenters at NNDR 2023 were a number of scholars and graduate
students—the present editors included—who had been involved with the
interdisciplinary project “Disability before Disability,” funded by the Icelandic
Research Fund and led by Dr. Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir at the University of
Iceland from 2017 to 2020. “Disability before Disability” brought together
researchers from Disability Studies, History, Archaeology, Medieval Icelandic
literature, Folklore and Ethnology, Museum Studies, and Archival Science to
explore constructions of disability in Iceland before the establishment of
disability as a modern legal, bureaucratic, and administrative concept (Crocker
et al.). Among the results of this project was the book Understanding Disability
Throughout History: Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Iceland from Settlement to 1936,
edited by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James Gordon Rice. The Centre for
Disability Studies at the University of Iceland continues promoting
interdisciplinary work between students of Humanities and Social Sciences, for
example through Stefan Celine Hardonk and Yoav Tirosh’s ongoing project on
the history of deafness in Iceland (Hardonk and Tirosh). We, the editors of this
special issue, are indebted to Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James Gordon
Rice for the valuable experience that they have given us as participants in
“Disability before Disability.” We were delighted when they agreed to write a
foreword to this volume.
In their foreword, Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James Gordon Rice
highlight that disability is an integral part of the human condition. Disability
studies and disability history’s relevance to all of society is an important quality
of this research. In 1989, Irving K. Zola encouraged a societal perception of the
needs and abilities of people as constantly changing (410). A model of
personhood which presumes that people be normative, able-bodied, non-dependent
wage earners is something that describes only a portion of the
normal human life cycle at best, as Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp would later
argue (198). Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell touch upon the universal
importance of challenging the devaluation of disabled bodies, writing that it
places in jeopardy “all bodies that exist within proximity to ‘deviance,’”
qualifying that, ultimately, no body escapes this relation (2006, 18). A
recognition of the near universality of disability should, Zola wrote, be
accompanied by an acknowledgement that all of its dimensions, including the
biomedical, are part of the social process by which the meanings of disability
are negotiated (420). Building on an understanding of disability as a social
process of universal relevance, Lennard Davis describes it as:
not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of
unfortunate people; it is part of a historically constructed discourse,
an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical
circumstances. Disability is not an object—a woman with a cane—but
a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and
lives in the world of the senses. (2)
The role played by historical circumstances that Davis touches upon here is
something of particular significance to this special issue. The articles published
will show that ideas about disability, as well as lived experiences of disability
and impairment, can be subject to environmental, cultural, and historical
variation. As Snyder and Mitchell point out, bodies, too, change over time, both
individually and historically (2013, 230). Inquiry into historical experiences of
disability is important, as it can destabilize our dominant ways of knowing
disability (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, 17). From the outset, the academic field of
disability studies has greatly enriched research across many disciplines on
historical accounts of disability and impairment. It is important—emphasized
by Joshua Eyler in the introduction to the edited volume Disability in the Middle
Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations—that any new theoretical framework
for understanding medieval disabilities should be built from the roots of
modern disability studies (4). From its inception, academics within disability
studies have widened understandings of the cultural and social factors which
influence experiences and conceptions of disability. As Simi Linton (2) writes,
the field has reframed disability as a designation having primarily social and
political significance.
The early work of UK disability studies academics initially built upon an
understanding of disability with roots in disability activism of the 1970s and
1980s. This model of understanding disability—known as the social creationist
model, the British social model, or the “strong social model”—distinguished
itself from the medical and biological understandings of disability that had been
influential in academia, medicine, and social care. Inspired by the work of
activist groups such as The Union of the Physically Impaired Against
Segregation (UPIAS), early proponents of the British social model of disability
drew a distinction between “disability” and “impairment.” In 1975, UPIAS had
described disability as “something imposed on top of our impairments, by the
way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in
society” (cited in Shakespeare 2013, 215). Oliver (11) writes that whereas
previous definitions of disability were “ultimately reducible to the individual
and attributable to biological pathology,” the distinction made between
disability and impairment as it is set out by UPIAS “locates the causes of
disability squarely within society and social organisation.” Tom Shakespeare
(2013, 215) notes that other understandings of disability were nevertheless
present in the early movement, but would not be as impactful in academic and
activist spheres. As he summarises, the British social model of disability has
been influential within academia, opening up new lines of enquiry such as
discrimination, the relationship between disability and industrial capitalism,
and cultural representations (Shakespeare 2014, 13, 49). It enabled the focus to
be widened from studying individuals to exposing broader social and cultural
processes. While the British model both preceded and influenced the US
“cultural model,” the latter would go further in developing analysis of cultural
imagery and language. Proponents of the US “cultural model,” such as Snyder
and Mitchell (2006), have chosen to use the term “disability” in a different way
from the proponents of the British social model. Drawing on earlier scholarship
by Sally French and Linton, they describe disability as a “site of
phenomenological value that is not purely synonymous with the processes of
social disablement” (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, 20). They write that such an
emphasis “does not hide the degree to which social obstacles and biological
capacities may impinge upon our lives, but rather suggests that the result of
those differences comes to bear significantly on the ways disabled people
experience their environments and their bodies.” The definition of disability,
they write, “must incorporate both the outer and inner reaches of culture and
experience as a combination of profoundly social and biological sources.”
Historical investigations of disability have the potential not only to
challenge our ways of knowing disability, but also our perceptions of the past
(Metzler 2006, 9; Crocker, Tirosh and Jakobsson 12). Disability history, as Daniel
Blackie and Alexia Moncrieff write, goes beyond simply lending intellectual
support to the disability rights movement or “uncovering the hidden history of
disabled people.” It also seeks to promote “a thorough reappraisal of history
more generally—one that recognises the central role changing perceptions and
experiences of bodily and cognitive difference have played in shaping all our
shared pasts” (5).
In recent decades, especially since the 1980s and 1990s, researchers across
diverse fields have drawn increasing attention to experiences of disability in the
past, and the role it played in historical cultures and contexts (see e.g., Stiker;
Longmore). In the US in particular, early research on disability in history was
connected to the disability civil rights and social justice movements of the
preceding two decades (Kudlick 542–43). Although the early years of
anglophone disability history research saw a focus on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century America, scholars have since shown an increasing interest in
embodied difference before 1800, and in other regions of the world (Blackie and
Moncrieff 11). This can be seen in the context of a wider—and much welcome—development within disability studies whereby the field has spread beyond the
UK, North America, and the Nordic countries (Ingstad and Whyte; Connell;
Grech and Soldatic; Abay and Soldatic). The varied cross-cultural
understandings that are being made available as a result of this expansion of
the field provided some inspiration for the aforementioned “Disability before
Disability” project (Sigurjónsdóttir and Rice 2022b, 2).
Within medieval studies, early work on disability includes Irina Metzler’s
research on what she terms “physical impairment” in medieval Europe (2006;
2013) and Edward Wheatley’s research on blindness in medieval England and
France (2005; 2010). Also noteworthy is Brendan Gleeson’s 1998 geographic
study of disability, which includes analysis of the experience of disabled
peasants in rural England during the Middle Ages. Metzler’s research in
particular sought to disrupt the image of the European Middle Ages as the so-called
“Dark Ages.” Responding to disability histories’ glancing over the period,
she offered a robust selection of case studies and contemporary attitudes
towards disability that did not play along with the stereotypical notion of long-lasting
societal oppression. Metzler thus set the tone to what came later,
although her adoption of the limiting social model has since been deprioritized.
Applying concepts which have been conceived in a modern setting to historical
material will always bring challenges, and this has been acknowledged by
disability historians (Eyler 6; Turner 17). How scholars working with material
from diverse historical societies apply ideas from modern disability studies is
subject to much variation. Blackie and Moncrieff (3) posit that a broad
commitment to a socio-cultural approach to bodily and cognitive non-normativity—rather
than a strict adherence to any particular model—has
underpinned disability history from its foundation. Some scholars dealing with
medieval sources on disability, such as Metzler (2006) and Gleeson (20), have
found it useful to retain the distinction between disability and impairment
emphasized by disability scholars associated with the British social model,
which has the benefits that it does not automatically assume that all medieval
impaired people were treated as disabled by their contemporaries, and that it
allows for a distinction between physical impairment and illness (Metzler 2006,
1). Eyler (8), meanwhile, has proposed removing the term “impairment” from
the discussion and thinking instead of disability in the Middle Ages as
something that is constructed by both embodied difference and social
perception. Also noteworthy is that there was no proper Old Norse word that
could be translated as “disability,” with the word ómagi, for example, indicating
a temporary or permanent inability to provide for oneself, in a manner that
might include non-disabled widows who have not remarried but exclude blind
heads of households (Crocker, Tirosh, and Ármann Jakobsson; Patzuk-Russell
and Tirosh; Crocker).
In recent years, investigations into disability and impairment in sources
from various historical periods have increased considerably (Blackie and
Moncrieff). The past decade has seen the launch of book series on historical
disability including the University of Illinois Press’ “Disability Histories,”
Manchester University Press’ “Disability History,” and Bloomsbury’s series “A
Cultural History of Disability.” As a bibliography compiled by Christopher
Crocker demonstrates, the subject area of medieval Icelandic literature—which
bears relevance to all the articles in this edition—has seen much fruitful
discussion on the subject of disability over the past three decades.
Research on
disability in medieval Icelandic literature from a disability studies perspective
was initiated by Knut Brynhildsvoll (1993), Annette Lassen (2001; 2003), and
notably Edna Edith Sayers (1994; 2001; 2004). Among recent publications on
disability in the medieval North—with roots in the “Disability before Disability”
project—is a 2021 special edition of the journal Mirator, edited by Christopher
Crocker and including articles by Sharon Choe, Meg Morrow, Christine Ekholst,
Sean Lawing, Judith Higman, and Crocker and Ármann Jakobsson. Further
research has since been published on disability in religious medieval Icelandic
texts (Patzuk-Russell and Tirosh; Van Deusen). Discussions about disability in
historical sources are in a constant state of development, and we are aware that
the articles published in the current special issue represent a part of a much
wider discussion. As this issue was being compiled, we had the pleasure to be
introduced to the work of researchers working with historical sources on
disability across diverse disciplines and cultural contexts—some of whom
presented their research at the History thematic stream of NNDR’s seventeenth
research conference in Helsinki in May 2025. We express our gratitude to those
who presented their work, and to Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and Stefan Celine
Hardonk for coordinating the stream with us.
This special issue contains six peer-reviewed articles, in which researchers
present material from a diverse range of sources to shine light on both lived
experience of impairment and disability, and cultural attitudes towards bodies
presented as non-conforming. Just as the subject matter varies, there is also
diversity in the ways in which ideas from disability studies have informed these
research articles. Although there is substantial variation in the nature of the
source material analysed by the authors of this special issue, all of these
analyses make use of material from medieval Iceland. They draw upon sources
such as human remains from archaeological excavations, Eddic poetry,
Icelandic family sagas [Íslendingasögur], kings’ sagas [konungasögur], romance
sagas [riddarasögur], and Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar, a contemporary saga
[samtíðarsaga] with overt hagiographic overtones (Van Deusen, this issue). Some
studies, meanwhile, concern the effects of medieval source material on later
narrative and literary culture.
Cecilia Collins’ article, “Hearth and Home in Medieval Iceland:
Understanding Chronic Respiratory Infection, Environment and the Vulnerable
Child,” reflects upon the prevalence of otitis media and sinusitis at four
medieval Icelandic archaeological sites in the context of understanding the
extent of resulting hearing loss in past communities. In “Is There a Doctor on
Vopnafjord? Disability, Health, and Embodied Difference in Vápnfirðinga saga,”
Yoav Tirosh’s study of the Icelandic family saga Vápnfirðinga saga approaches
disability, health, and embodied difference as an organizing theme for the
entire narrative. Expanding upon his previous work with Crocker on health in
the sagas, Tirosh offers an analysis of this somewhat neglected text through the
fruitful prism of embodied difference. Meg Morrow’s article “‘Blautr erum
bergis fótar borr’: Disabled Masculinity and Irregular Phalli in the
Íslendingasögur,” contextualizes and examines descriptions of irregular male
genitalia found in Icelandic family sagas Brennu-Njáls saga, Grettis saga, and Egils
saga Skallagrímssonar. Natalie Van Deusen’s analysis of a contemporary saga in
“Mental Distress and Pseudo-Hagiography in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar”
discusses the text as a source for an understanding of psychological disability
in medieval Iceland and argues that the saga’s presentation of mental difference
is an aspect in which it may be characterized as pseudo-hagiographic in nature.
In “‘Little Glory Will It Bring You to Break My Short Bones’: Dvergar and
Dwarfism in Icelandic Medieval Narrative,” Alice Bower contemplates the
connections made between supernatural dvergar and humans with dwarfism in
Icelandic narratives, and how these links developed over the medieval period
and into the age of folklore collection. Sharon Choe’s article, “The Politics of
Sacrifice: Liberation, Deformity, and Odin in The Book of Ahania,” considers
representations of the body in the illuminated books of the artist-engraver and
poet William Blake, with consideration to the influence of the Edda in Blake’s
syncretic worldview and practice. In particular, the central sacrifice scene is re-contextualized
within eighteenth-century Northern antiquarianism.
In addition to these research articles, this special issue also features both a
foreword by Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James Gordon Rice and a piece
that we requested from independent scholar Sebastian Thoma. We hope that
these pieces can offer yet further levels of context to this special issue, with
clear relevance to a contemporary readership. Drawing on his own experience,
Thoma provides an overview of the challenges that people with hearing loss can
face in an academic environment, and proceeds to discuss what can be done to
make courses, conferences, and scholarly work more inclusive of Deaf and hard-of-hearing
people. We had asked Hanna Björg Sigurjónsdóttir and James Gordon
Rice, both of whom have had a profound influence on our personal careers and
on the broader research of disability studies in Iceland, to author their foreword
to highlight the need for further collaboration between the sometimes walled
off fields of Social Sciences and the Humanities.
It is our hope that this special issue will add to the body of theoretical and
case study observations available to those wishing to study disability in
medieval times and medievalism. Moreover, we believe that scholarship on
disability—in past as well as present contexts—can be a valuable contribution
to societal discourse beyond academia. Critical disability studies, which has
informed the research published in this issue, cannot be conceived as an
academic exercise without political commitment (Goodley 192). Critical
disability studies perspectives are relevant to our modern political climate, with
recent research drawing attention to the impact of ableist ideas and language
on political discourse, both in the US and further afield (Harnish; Goodley and
Lawthom). As the medieval Norse world continues to play a role in right-wing
extremist discourse (Kaplan; Höfig; Van Nahl), it is imperative that academic
research on these sources continues to bring into focus the diversity of human
experience to which they attest.