Disabled Travel Writing in a Global Middle Ages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2026
This chapter surveys travel writing across medieval Afro-Eurasia, revealing how disabled and chronically ill authors adapt to ever-shifting circumstances of travel. This discussion traces how first-person reflections on mobility are shaped by divergent religiomedical frameworks (approaches to disability attending to historical religious and medical understandings of the body in any given cultural environment). From firsthand accounts to imagined journeys, travel enables writers to question social norms and envision alternate ways of living. Disability in motion not only disrupts daily routines and expectations but it also reshapes literary traditions, creating new forms of storytelling and new ways of thinking about illness, aging, and interdependence. Operating in a comparative and not a strictly chronological mode, this chapter discusses works by Muslim pilgrim-explorer Ibn Battuta and Chinese literati poets such as Bai Juyi and Shangguan Wan’er. It reintegrates European writers Margery Kempe and Teresa de Cartagena into this broader social context of transcontinental mobility.
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