Singing to a different beat

Sanctity and disability dovetail in constituting temporal (re)orientations. However, the intersection of sanctity and disability in female religious communities from the Middle Ages remains understudied. This essay contends that two late-medieval Netherlandish compilations of religious women’s biographies, written by women from the communities depicted, harness the non-normative temporalities of disabled sisters to knit readers and subjects together in time for the sake of a collective autohagiographical project. It charts how two blind sisters’ challenges to local standard time shore up that temporality, inviting ascetic imitation, before mapping how these temporal divergences, charged with associations of sanctity, orient sisters towards the final goal of the convent’s temporality. The essay concludes by considering the ethics of reading medieval texts for disability. By approaching disability and sanctity through collectively produced, female-authored texts, and triangulating theory, literary studies, and religious contexts, this discussion textures understandings of medieval disability as well as of medieval religion

Blindness · Singing · Early Modern Women Writers · Financial Crisis of the 21st Century · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity