ABOUT THIS BOOK

From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record.

By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric’s saints’ lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability’s effects in literature. “Spiritual prosthesis” reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. “Systems of aberrance” emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant—including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies—form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Leah Pope Parker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi.

REVIEWS

“Light of the Everlasting Life will make an important contribution to disability studies by providing an extended study of disability in the early Middle Ages and in Old English literature. Additionally, the book brings much needed attention to the role of disability in hagiographical literature, theological considerations of the body and salvation, and the lives and experiences of Christians in the Old English period.”— Tory V. Pearman, Miami University

“In demonstrating the complex ways that anticipation of the resurrection, hope for salvation, and conceptions of the afterlife were undeniably dependent upon disabled embodiments, Light of the Everlasting Life offers a radically new understanding of disability within the contexts of pre-modern literature. The book’s vision is novel and much-needed, and Parker executes its goals beautifully, evidencing a broad and deep understanding of relevant scholarship on this truly interdisciplinary topic. Parker’s mastery of subtle nuances found in Old English language and literature also clearly comes through, as in the book’s numerous insightful etymologies that open up multiple fascinating readings at once.”— Lori Ann Garner, Rhodes College

TABLE OF CONTENTS