Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages is Jenni Kuuliala's second monograph in the burgeoning field of medieval disability studies. As in her first book, Childhood Disability and Social Integration in the Middle Ages: Constructions of Impairments in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Canonization Processes (2016), Kuuliala deftly analyzes a substantial corpus of inquisitorial documents and hagiographic narratives. Reading narratives and testimonials from across Europe (France, Provence, Iberia, Italy, Central Europe, and Scandinavia are represented), Kuuliala fleshes out the trope of the “suffering saint,” yielding fresh insights into the ways individuals, communities, and the church instrumentalized the saint's exceptional suffering body.
Kuuliala opens Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages with a bold claim—“bodily infirmity and sanctity are inseparable in all medieval hagiography” (11)—and substantiates that claim with a combination of close textual readings and innovative critical or methodological approaches. In each of the book's four chapters Kuuliala approaches the question of “holy infirmity” by situating saints’ bodily states (or the representation thereof) relative to class, gender, age, marital status, and family or community relationships.
The first chapter, “Infirmitas Leading to Saintly Life,” focuses on married lay saints. Kuuliala argues that late medieval canonization hearings rarely present infirmity as an impetus to a religious life, but that married lay saints present a notable exception: she shows that bodily infirmities are frequently cited as having motivated a change in sexual relations within marriage, thereby allowing married people (especially women) to shift social roles, from spouse to saint.
In the second chapter, “Patientia and the Borders of Holy Infirmity,” Kuuliala explores how witnesses in canonization proceedings use descriptions of saintly patience to “highlight an aspect of sainthood that was important for their community” (60). Patience may take many forms, including restraint during disputes, fortitude in the face of ageing or infirmity, and facing the illness or death of family and friends with pious equanimity. By focusing on discourses regarding patient responses to infirmity, rather than on representations of infirmities per se, Kuuliala offers a novel perspective on how disability intersects with gender, social status, and local cultural norms.
Kuuliala next turns to saintly austerity, including ascetic practices that pose a risk to bodily health, in the chapter “Abstinence, Devotional Practices, and Social Control.” This chapter includes a compelling discussion of the role of medical practitioners, both as expert witnesses in canonization trials and as consultants called upon to help confessors dissuade the pious from excessive asceticism that could lead to self-harm. Kuuliala also considers the collective affective experiences these practices prompted within religious communities. Lastly, in “Holy Infirmity and the Devotees,” she offers a nuanced intersectional analysis of gendered difference in attitudes toward bodily suffering.
Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages is an outstanding study of disability, gender, and sanctity in thirteenth- through fifteenth-century Europe. It will be of particular interest to cultural, social, and literary historians, including to scholars with an interest in the history of emotions. In turning her attention to witness accounts of saints’ bodily infirmities, rather than to the miracle narratives that have been the object of so many other historical studies of medieval disability, Kuuliala makes an important contribution to our knowledge of medieval cultural constructs of bodily alterity.
