Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages

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The relationship between the textual and physical representations of the disabled or impaired body and morality is an intriguing and complex area to explore in medieval literary and dramatic culture. In medieval thought, since the body and soul were seen as inextricably linked, different sins were thought to take their own physiological effects upon the body. While sexual sin, for instance, was thought to cause leprosy, the sin of avarice was thought to cause premature ageing. Yet, physical disability or impairment, and other bodily transgressions, as cultural constructs, were not always negatively received in society. Affliction could be a means of grace rather than punishment, and there is evidence that monks even prayed for physical and mental affliction to regain a state of purity. In order to explore how disability, impairment and bodily transgression is represented in the context of sinfulness and the ageing body, this paper will use a moral spectrum of characters as well as historical evidence.