This study has shown that the traditional models for studies of disability – the social and the medical – are not sufficient in an exploration of disability in Pre-Modern literature. A cultural model that takes into account the historical and social circumstances in which the impairment is experienced and represented has proven more helpful. For texts produced in the Middle Ages this model requires an understanding of the theological and legal systems operative during the period. A study such as the present must also take into account the roles of literary texts in Medieval society and the way that readers/listeners interacted with them. The task of recuperating the aesthetic and ethical milieus that produced the texts studied herein requires the examination of a wide range of written materials including histories, law codes, advice manuals, medical tracts as well as works now classified as fiction. A thorough analysis of how the disabled were portrayed in such works is a first and critical step toward a recuperation of the beliefs, traditions, taboos, and prejudices about physically-impaired individuals during this period. Furthermore, a study of how authors represent the disabled provides clues about how the impaired may have functioned in Medieval society and the ways in which they were distinguished, and at times, isolated from those perceived as fully-abled. Concepts about what constituted physical, as well as mental, normalcy effected the ways in which impaired individuals were perceived and the barriers that may have existed that prevented their full participation in society.

While the Spanish corpus includes a unique case of an autobiographical representation of disability – that of Teresa de Cartagena writing about her experience of deafness – such treatises are largely unavailable or impossible to authenticate for Medieval literary works. Without first-hand accounts of the lived experience of the disabled, trying to determine how and why individuals with impairments were portrayed in works from an early historical time frame is a complicated task. Among factors that must be taken into account is the imperative for many Medieval authors to base their arguments on accepted authoritative sources – philosophical, theological, and legal. The idea of attributable authorship, too, was not a hallmark of literature in the Medieval period.