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.

The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability. In these cases, the Papal Chancery bore the responsibility for determining if disabled people were suitable to serve as clerics, with all the rights and duties of divine services. Whilst some petitioners were allowed to enter the clergy, or – in the case of currently serving churchmen – to stay more or less active in their work, others were compelled to resign their position and leave the clergy entirely. Petitions and papal letters lie at intersection of authorized, institutional policy and practical sources chronicling the lived experiences of disabled people in the Middle Ages. As such, they constitute an excellent analytical laboratory in which to study medieval disability in its relation to the papacy as an institution, alongside the impact of official ecclesiastical judgments on disabled lives.