Issues relating to disability and war remain largely overlooked by military and disability historians. This exclusion is all the more striking since there was hardly a more likely place for receiving permanent injury than a battle, and we can barely imagine a worse place for disabled people than a battlefield. This volume aims to shed new light on a topic pertaining to multiple fields of research: social history, technical medical history, disability history, military history, and the Genesis of the Modern State.

This book gathers specialists of premodern history to bring together new research from a variety of disciplines—history, archaeology, literature, and modern medicine—and working with diverse sources, such as account books, biographies, poems, romance texts, Icelandic sagas, petitions and pardon letters, post-battle records, prostheses, skeletons and funerary treatments, chronicles, and theoretical treatises.

Ninon Dubourg is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow based at the University of Cologne. She studies physical and mental disability, as well as old age, among lay and clerical individuals in late medieval Europe.

Christophe Masson is a Permanent Researcher for the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) in Belgium. His work addresses the social, cultural, institutional, and technical dimensions of late medieval warfare. 

Table des matières :

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction. « Disability and War: Becoming, Surviving, Managing » by Ninon Dubourg and Christophe Masson

Chapter 1. « The Recidivists: Healed Cranial Trauma from Conflicts in the Late Medieval Period » by Christopher J. Knüsel

Chapter 2. « Disability and Trauma in Battle in the Medieval Icelandic Sagas » by Yoav Tirosh

Chapter 3. « Hungry for Love: Disabling the Knightly Body and Mind through Starvation in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur » by Kristina Hildebrand

Chapter 4. « A Vulnerable Military Masculinity: Soldiers and Disability in Late Medieval Pardon Letters (France, England, and the Low Countries) » by Quentin Verreycken

Chapter 5. « Traumatic Repercussions: Warfare and Disability in the French Countryside » by Aleksandra Pfau

Chapter 6. « Investigating the Lifecycle of the Medieval English Soldier: Disability, Mental Trauma, and Medicine in Connection with War in Late Medieval English Records » by Wendy J. Turner

Chapter 7. “’What pain I suffered at that time, anyone can well imagine…’: Experiences of War, Injury, and Pain in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland » byBianca Frohne

Chapter 8. « Mechanism/Organism: The Premodern Iron Hand as Conceptual Interface » by John Gagné

Chapter 9. « After Combat: War Wounds, Soldiers’ Benefits, and Dynastic Policies in the Burgundian–Habsburg Armies (1363–1506) » by Michael Depreter

Select Bibliography

Index

Informations pratiques :

Disability and War in the Late Middle Ages. Becoming, Surviving, Managing, éd. Ninon Dubourg, Christophe Masson, Leeds, ARC Humanities Press, 2025 ; 1 vol., 256 p. (War and Conflict in Premodern Societies). ISBN : 978-1-80270-164-7. Prix : GBP 119,00.

Source : ARC Humanities Press