By establishing that medieval authoritative discourse such as religious and medical writings conflates femaleness, femininity, and disability, this project analyzes how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within English popular literature of the late Middle Ages. Reading fabliaux, romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, I propose what I call a "gendered model" for studying the linked social processes by which embodied differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant. I do so in order to expose the discursive production of "woman" as defective in both body and character in male-authored authoritative texts. This twinned deviance (which is both social and physical) surfaces in and frequently drives the narratives of literary texts that feature disabled female characters. As a result, the teleological urges of the narratives, which I interpret as "masculine," seek to limit the "feminine" gaps created by female bodily deviance. My project demonstrates that some narratives succeed in silencing feminine deviance, while others thwart such masculine drives by creating alternative narratives that critique common medieval notions of the disabled woman and thus reveal female disability as a potentially enabling power. Ultimately, I assert that, although disability's literary representations are not mimetic, they reveal the ways in which readers define the deviant and the normate. By examining literary depictions of femaleness, femininity, and disability, my study both uncovers medieval social anxieties about embodied Others and shows the value of a feminist disability perspective in the field of medieval disability studies.

Rather than view disability through a medical model that casts disability as a deficiency in need of a cure, my study draws from the larger field of disability studies, which has sought to reexamine disability through a social model that considers the discursive processes by which impairments become marked as deviant. In response to the lack of historical specificity in disability scholarship, however, Edward Wheatley has offered a medieval model for disability illuminating the Church's power to influence and even create social constructions of disability, termed the religious model. My gendered model builds upon Wheatley's work by positioning gender and disability as social processes intricately linked by the body in the medieval period. Whereas earlier projects neglect gender and literature in their considerations of medieval disability, my study directly fins these gaps by investigating how the linked social processes of gendering and disabling function within and even shape narrative. Consequently, in embracing Rosemarie Garland Thomson's feminist disability perspective, which seeks to "theorize disability in the ways that feminism has theorized gender," my study rethinks and rereads medieval female disability in writings as varied as those by Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Thomas Chestre, Robert Henryson, and Margery Kempe.