Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England

Will Rogers received his PhD from Cornell University in 2014, where he concentrated on medieval studies and disability studies. He has published articles on Chaucer, Gower, and the early modern printings of Julian of Norwich's Revelations. He is the Tommy and Mary Barham Endowed Professor of English at University of Louisiana, Monroe.

[A] valuable contribution to the study of both premodern disability and aging, investigating the intersections among discourses on old age, narrative, and impairment. As Rogers observes, the Old Man, in Middle English literature, is almost never depicted without a staff, and most importantly, he is often a loquacious fellow, offering complaint and advice. While these connections between old age and narrative are not immediately surprising, Rogers’s subtle study reveals the insistent and repeated deployment of narrative by figures of masculine old age in order not only to acknowledge the debilities of aging, but also to harness elderly complaint as a prosthetic dis- course that compensates for seeming inability.

• Introduction: Staves and StanzasChapter 1: Crooked as a Staff: Narrative, History, and the Disabled Body in Parlement of Thre AgesChapter 2: A Reckoning with Age: Prosthetic Violence and the ReeveChapter 3: The Past is Prologue: Following the Trace of Master HoccleveChapter 4: Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower’s Supplemental RoleEpilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing