As the field of disability studies has grown over the last 40 years, there has been increasing critical interest in how current notions and attitudes toward the impaired were shaped historically. While the present study is not one of social history but rather of textual analysis of literary texts – as these will be broadly defined – its aim is to introduce a heretofore largely unexplored body of work within disability studies. I will examine a variety of texts produced in Medieval Spain to determine how individuals with physical impairments were presented. This study will establish two main paradigms for how the disabled are portrayed in works produced in Spain during the Middle Ages – the impaired individual was either perceived as having been punished by God for a sin he/she had committed or, conversely, as a potential recipient of divine reversal of impairment in response to prayer and sincere belief in a cure. In broad brushstrokes, these two extremes reflect the principle that if God could give He could also take away – you could be disgraced or graced by the same omnipotent divinity. But between these extremes this analysis also reveals a myriad of other, often contradictory, notions about disability as it appears in Medieval texts: as a measure for denying certain rights or privileges, a motive for charitable acts, or the opportunity to emulate the suffering of Christ, to name but a few.

My readings of a wide-range of texts from Pre-Modern Spain, far from being an esoteric exercise, adds to previous scholars’ efforts to unearth and understand how ideas of bodily difference were portrayed in the past. This may, in turn, further a better understanding of how our current concepts about the disabled, normalcy, and physical variety have developed. An examination of the disabled as they appear in Medieval texts is a useful tool to discover how and why writers portrayed impaired individuals as they did and what ideas about physical difference might have meant to their society at large.

From the outset of any study on disability, it should be noted that singling out the physically impaired for critical study is a fundamentally different exercise from approaches designed to recuperate under-represented minority groups in literature. Disability studies is not merely another attempt to be inclusive as is the goal of critical analyses based on notions of race, gender sexual orientation, etc.