Jonathan Hsy – författare

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.

The Middle Ages was an era of dynamic social transformation, and notions of disability in medieval culture reflected how norms and forms of embodiment interacted with gender, class, and race, among other dimensions of human difference. Ideas of disability in courtly romance, saints’ lives, chronicles, sagas, secular lyrics, dramas, and pageants demonstrate the nuanced, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between cultural constructions of disability and the lived experience of impairment.An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, literature, visual art, cultural studies, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages explores themes and topics such as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.

The Middle Ages was an era of dynamic social transformation, and notions of disability in medieval culture reflected how norms and forms of embodiment interacted with gender, class, and race, among other dimensions of human difference. Ideas of disability in courtly romance, saints’ lives, chronicles, sagas, secular lyrics, dramas, and pageants demonstrate the nuanced, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between cultural constructions of disability and the lived experience of impairment.An essential resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, literature, visual art, cultural studies, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages explores themes and topics such as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health.

How do marginalized communities across the globe use the medieval past to combat racism, educate the public, and create a just world? Jonathan Hsy advances urgent academic and public conversations about race and appropriations of the medieval past in popular culture and the arts. Examining poetry, fiction, journalism, and performances, Hsy shows how cultural icons such as Frederick Douglass, Wong Chin Foo, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Sui Sin Far reinvented medieval traditions to promote social change. Contemporary Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and multiracial artists embrace diverse pasts to build better futures. “Makes the crucial move of tying medievalism studies readings to social and racial justice work explicitly … innovative and greatly needed in the field.” Seeta Chaganti, author of Strange Footing“A major accomplishment that belongs on the shelves of every person who believes in antiracism.” Geraldine Heng, author of The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages