Issues relating to disability and war remain largely overlooked by military and disability historians. This exclusion is all the more striking since there was hardly a more likely place for receiving permanent injury than a battle, and we can barely imagine a worse place for disabled people than a battlefield. This volume aims to shed new light on a topic pertaining to multiple fields of research: social history, technical medical history, disability history, military history, and the Genesis of the Modern State.

This book gathers specialists of premodern history to bring together new research from a variety of disciplines—history, archaeology, literature, and modern medicine—and working with diverse sources, such as account books, biographies, poems, romance texts, Icelandic sagas, petitions and pardon letters, post-battle records, prostheses, skeletons and funerary treatments, chronicles, and theoretical treatises.

List of Illustrations

Preface

"Disability and War: Becoming, Surviving, Managing—An Introduction" by Ninon Dubourg and Christophe Masson

Chapter 1. "The Recidivists: Healed Cranial Trauma from Conflicts in the Late Medieval Period" by Christopher J. Knüsel

Chapter 2. "Disability and Trauma in Battle in the Medieval Icelandic Sagas" by Yoav Tirosh

Chapter 3. "Hungry for Love: Disabling the Knightly Body and Mind through Starvation in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur" by Kristina Hildebrand

Chapter 4. "A Vulnerable Military Masculinity: Soldiers and Disability in Late Medieval Pardon Letters (France, England, and the Low Countries)" by Quentin Verreycken

Chapter 5. "Traumatic Repercussions: Warfare and Disability in the French Countryside" by Aleksandra Pfau

Chapter 6. "Investigating the Lifecycle of the Medieval English Soldier: Disability, Mental Trauma, and Medicine in Connection with War in Late Medieval English Records" by Wendy J. Turner

Chapter 7. “'What pain I suffered at that time, anyone can well imagine...': Experiences of War, Injury, and Pain in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland" by Bianca Frohne

Chapter 8. "Mechanism/Organism: The Premodern Iron Hand as Conceptual Interface" by John Gagné

Chapter 9. "After Combat: War Wounds, Soldiers’ Benefits, and Dynastic Policies in the Burgundian–Habsburg Armies (1363–1506)" by Michael Depreter

Select Bibliography

Index