E-raamat: Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages: Un/suitable for Divine Service?

1. This work proposes an history of disabled people experiences, theorized as "lived disability" that allows us to rethink the place of the (disabled) body in the Christian thoughts. 2. It is based on a rich documentation, often underestimated to make social and cultural history. It offers us an insight on medieval discourses on disabilities, wrote by disabled people themselves and rewrote by the pontifical institution to adapt the ecclesiastical rules to the petitioners' requests. 3. This work offers a sensitive history of the clerics' bodies. Even if we have a lot of knowledge about clerics in theory, it is sometimes hard to distinguish the written words from the "real" experiences, and, then, we often lack of understanding the medieval clerics' "real life". The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability. In these cases, the Papal Chancery bore the responsibility for determining if disabled people were suitable to serve as clerics, with all the rights and duties of divine services. Whilst some petitioners were allowed to enter the clergy, or – in the case of currently serving churchmen – to stay more or less active in their work, others were compelled to resign their position and leave the clergy entirely. Petitions and papal letters lie at intersection of authorized, institutional policy and practical sources chronicling the lived experiences of disabled people in the Middle Ages. As such, they constitute an excellent analytical laboratory in which to study medieval disability in its relation to the papacy as an institution, alongside the impact of official ecclesiastical judgments on disabled lives.