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.

Examines the political and literary uses of the Trojan legend in the medieval period

England in the late fourteenth century witnessed a large-scale social revolt, a lingering and seemingly hopeless war with France, and fierce factional conflicts in royal politics and London civic government—struggles in which all parties sought to justify their actions by claiming historical precedent. How the Trojan legend figured in these claims—and in competing assertions of authorial legitimacy, nationhood, and rule in the later Middle Ages—is the complex nexus of history, myth, literature, and identity that Sylvia Federico explores in this ambitious book.

This book explores the mobility of merchants’ manuscripts—understood as written records in various forms—and their role in shaping and reflecting late medieval social structures. Focusing on merchants as key agents of manuscript circulation, it highlights their impact across fairs and markets in the Holy Roman Empire. Blending cultural and economic history, the chapters span fifteenth- and sixteenth-century case studies that challenge conventional periodization. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, the book traces manuscripts from production to dissemination and the formation of reading communities. It argues that the history of the premodern economy is incomplete without accounting for the movement of manuscripts as material and social objects.