Introduction: breaking boundaries, building bridges / Joshua R. Eyler -- Disability and the suppression of historical identity: rediscovering the professional backgrounds of the blind residents of the Hôpital des Quinze-vingts / Mark P. O'Tool -- "O sweete venym queynte!": pregnancy and the disabled female body in The Merchant's tale / Tory Vandeventer Pearman -- Playing by ear: compensation, reclamation, and prosthesis in fourteenth-century song / Julie Singer -- Representations of disability in the thirteenth-century Miracles de Saint Louis / Hannah Skoda -- The exemplary blindness of Francis of Assisi / Scott Wells -- Experience, authority, and the mediation of deafness: Chaucer's Wife of Bath / Edna Edith Sayers -- Protecting or restraining? madness as a disability in late medieval France / Alexsandra Pfau -- Representations of disability: the medieval literary tradition of the fisher king / Kisha G. Tracy -- "Ther is moore mysshapen amonges thise beggeres": discourses of disability in Piers Plowman / Jennifer M. Gianfalla -- Kingly impairments in Anglo-Saxon literature: God's curse and God's blessing / Beth Tovey -- Difference and disability: on the logic of naming in the Icelandic sagas / John P. Sexton -- Henryson's textual and narrative prosthesis onto Chaucer's corpus: Cresseid's leprosy and her Schort conclusioun / Andrew Higl -- A medieval king "disabled" by an early modern construct: a contextual examination of Richard III / Abigail Elizabeth Comber -- Aging women and disability in early modern Spanish literature / Encarnación Juárez-Almendros