What can disability teach us about knowledge, art, and community? Jonathan Hsy explores this question through medieval writings, bringing their authors' voices into conversation with crip theory and activist-oriented disability studies. Discussing major European writers Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve, John Gower, and Teresa de Cartagena – alongside non-European authors Ibn Battuta, Bai Juyi, and Shangguan Wan'er – Hsy reveals the remarkable global variety of disability life writing in the period. Across genres – spiritual visions, lyric poetry, and travel narratives – medieval authors craft inventive ways to theorize their own experiences of blindness, deafness, mobility, aging, and mental and chronic illness. Challenging social stigma and systems of marginalization, these writers offer – Hsy shows – compelling insights into language, time, gender, and bodies in perpetual transformation. Their voices from the past remain urgent today, teaching us about the dynamic relationship between mind, body, and spirit, and the power of storytelling to create social change.

‘Disabled Storytellers in the Global Middle Ages offers a groundbreaking exploration of disability advocacy in the Middle Ages. Timely in its concerns and global in scope, it is distinguished by its intersectional methodology and expansive reach. As the first study to focus on medieval narratives by disabled authors, it marks a significant contribution to both literary scholarship and disability studies.'

Diane Watt - Professor of English Literature, University of Surrey

‘Hsy's manuscript reshapes medieval literature through the perspectives and prism of disability, offering transformative insights into lived experience, community, and care in the Middle Ages. Bridging past and present with scholarly rigor and a poetic intimacy, this text makes significant contributions to both Disability Studies and literary history.'

Brenda Jo Brueggemann - Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing and Professor, English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Connecticut

‘Jonathan Hsy's Disabled Storytellers is a superb work of critical dialogism.  It establishes relations between medieval life writing and crip disability culture, sets up bridges between the different historical periods, and overall puts forward a fresh way of interpreting world literature from the conjoined perspectives of medievalism and disability studies. A tour de force.'

Ato Quayson - Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English, Stanford University

‘This is a thoughtful and accessible study that draws together and explores the lived experiences of medieval writers with disabilities to foster transhistorical and global crip community. The book lives up to disability justice and activist calls for ‘Nothing about us without us!' I look forward to including this work in my teaching; I recommend it highly.'

Elizabeth B. Bearden - Nancy C. Hoefs Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

‘There is so much to praise here. Jonathan Hsy's book brings Critical Disability Studies to medieval literature in newly adventurous ways. offering liberating models for current times.

Christopher Baswell - Professor Emeritus of English at Barnard College and Columbia University

‘Jonathan Hsy fuses past and present in vivid first-person life writing tales by medieval communities of the blind, deaf, halt, sick, and lame. Placing medieval stories of bodily infirmity in the framework of contemporary disability identity and justice, stretching from the Plague to the Pandemic, Hsy crafts these lost stories with eloquence, sensitivity, and detail to show us at once the persisting endurance of disability experience and the reframing of these bodily conditions that modern liberal societies now offer us.'

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - Professor Emerita of English and Bioethics, Emory University