Leah Pope Parker’s engaging and thought-provoking study Light of the Everlasting Life makes multiple contributions to Old English literary criticism, premodern disability studies, and the interdisciplinary field of Medieval Studies. This book’s major contribution to understanding disability in the field of Old English literary and cultural studies is adapting David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s influential theory of disability as “narrative prosthesis” in literary works (the much-cited use of disability as an “opportunistic trope” of representation in literary narratives, where disability serves as a metaphor to a storytelling end) to posit the concept of “spiritual prosthesis.” In this book, spiritual prosthesis refers to the widespread cultural and theological reliance upon tropes of disability—and embodied difference more generally—to express hope within an eschatological framework (i.e., religious modes of thinking about human end times, salvation, and everlasting life). Pervasive metaphors of disability, such as blindness, are “not simply rhetorical shortcuts” in Old English texts but rather played a key role in “a vast conceptual network for understanding and explaining the most important aspects of Christian eschatological hope” (4-5). Parker’s study focuses primarily on vernacular texts from the “long tenth century” (28), including varied contexts and genres in pre-Conquest Britain with some forays into post-Conquest contexts such as the scribe known as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester. The book’s historical and geographical focus marks a welcome addition to the field of premodern literary and cultural disability studies, as this is the first disability-focused monograph to primarily discuss Old English literary texts throughout.
Parker’s book interweaves close readings of Old English texts (as well as related materials in Latin and early medieval vernacular languages) with insights from contemporary critical disability studies and activist-oriented modes of crip theory. This study makes the exciting move of attending to early medieval forms of crip eschatology, a term that emerges as especially fitting for early medieval England since the word crip claims Germanic origins that even predate the Old English word crypel (11). It is worth noting that this book does not lapse into any uncritical anachronism in its use of the term “crip,” nor does it frame medieval forms of disability discourse as fully liberatory. Parker importantly observes that any given person in early medieval England may not have self-identified as “disabled” much less as “crip,” but they nonetheless “could have called themselves or someone they knew ‘crypel,’ a word that participated in a larger conceptual system regarding the body” (11). Within this broader historical and cultural framework, this book’s aim of “[c]laiming crip for our medieval predecessors provides present-day communities with a history [of disability] long denied and honors those crip ancestors’ place in our histories” (11) and “crip worldviews...have a long history, even if they have gone unnamed” (12). Alongside this kind of close engagement with contemporary crip theory and literary studies, Parker’s readings of Old English materials admirably draw upon disability-oriented scholarship as wide-ranging as archaeology, history of medicine, and linguistics.
The secondary strand of this book, which is emphasized in the book’s latter chapters, attends to how early medieval spiritualizing literary narratives mobilize “systems of aberrance [that] bring together intersecting marked embodiments” (7). Such “systems of aberrance” encompass forms of embodied variance or deviance that extend far beyond the most legible kinds of modern-day categories of disability we might name today (such as blindness, deafness, or paralysis). Parker’s intentionally provocative readings of early medieval aberrance refer broadly to positive or negative conceptions of bodyminds “including and beyond disability” that invite “the crip prospect of disablement,” including those deemed “animalistic...monstrous...religiously marginalized...racialized, gendered, dead, or resurrected, as well as disabled,” among many other conditions (148). This fresh analytical approach to the Old English corpus is challenging (in a good way), urging modern disability scholars to recognize just how flexibly and pervasively medieval European Christians centered disability in their thinking about embodiment writ large. Indeed, an important point that this book makes throughout its chapters is how readily early medieval Christian contexts counter modern-day assumptions that disability “functioned exclusively as a basis for oppression,” and that “Christian eschatology has always already been cripped, with crip at is center” (13).
The first chapter, “King Alfred’s Vision,” sets the tone for the chapters to follow. It focuses on King Alfred the Great, persuasively positing that this historical figure can be understood as disabled (due to chronic conditions and progressive visual impairment among other factors), and “the pervasive specter of blindness alongside sight” (39) conceptually and rhetorically shapes many of the works translated by the king himself. Parker offers informative readings of eagum ures modes [“eyes of our mind”] (59), a phrase that shows how early medieval English people understood the mind and physical body as co-constructed in fully corporeal terms. The reading of the “spiritually prosthetic effect of metaphors about sight and blindness” (65) via the Alfred Jewel as a material art object is generative, adding further dimensionality to the key disability studies term of “prosthesis” via art-historical context and material culture studies, effectively concluding that the art object “is both a material and a spiritual prosthesis” (69).
The book’s subsequent chapters prove rewarding each in their own ways, and a brief overview can provide a sense of this study’s wide scope. Chapter 2, “St. Swithun’s Crutches,” examines spiritual prosthesis in narrative form through accounts of healing miracles. Chapter 3, “St. Æthelthryth’s Scar,” explores “the interpretability of dead bodies marked as crip” (32), relating how the posthumous healing of a neck tumor on the body of a saintly noble abbess which early medieval narrators use to illustrate the promise of the restored Christian body after Resurrection. Chapter 4, “St. Andrew’s Blood,” considers the “aberrant bodies” of cannibals and the torture of the protagonist in the poetic saint’s life of Andreas. Parker illustrates how the wide divergence of bodies creates a “complex assemblage of physicalities” (149) with intricate spiritual and theological implications. One point that I find particularly compelling in this chapter is how Parker connects the early disability historian Edith Edna Sayers’ use of the term “aberrance” to Latinate connotations of “error” (wandering, deviance, 151); this framing offers a useful paradigm shift for how Old English disability can be discussed. Chapter 5, “Cynewulf’s Wounds,” examines four poems with runic signatures in the Exeter Book attending to embodied variance across saints, non-Christians, demons, and even the body of the poet himself, tracing how the poet constructs “his own individual crip eschatological hope” (33). Chapter 6, “The Body of Christ,” anticipates the afterlife itself through the treatment of the Apocalypse, Resurrection, and Last Judgment in the Old English poem Christ in Judgment. One aspect of this study that I find so remarkable is accessible quality of the writing. Parker offers clear modern English translations for all the quotations in Old English or Latin, and the book defines key terms for readers who may be unacquainted with disability studies or crip theory. All of these factors make this study an admirably approachable entry point into this field, and it is a work that I will bring into my future classrooms.
From my vantage point as a disability historian who is most familiar with later Middle English cultural contexts, there are just a few aspects of Chapter 6 that struck me as somewhat underdeveloped—at least in comparison to the book’s other chapters. This chapter’s consideration of expansive embodiments beyond what we could typically recognize as disability could have benefited from closer engagement with existing medieval scholarship on race as well as animality; one noticeable missed opportunity to interrogate the racial implications of whiteness as it relates to disability, for instance, emerges through a footnote on pp. 221-22. Although recognition of scholarship on race in Old English studies is acknowledged through footnotes naming Haruko Momma (221-22) and Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade (28), such scholarship receives no engagement in the main text. Foundational works on spirituality, rhetoric, and embodiment in medieval studies such as Cord J. Whitaker’s Black Metaphors (2019) or Wan-Chuan Kao’s White Before Whiteness (2024) are noticeably absent as well (this being said, Whitaker and Kao focus primarily on later Middle English works and contexts). In any case, this book’s commitment to understanding disability in a capacious and intersectional mode marks one important step forward for Old English disability studies—and this is a key feature of this work that cannot be underemphasized. The conclusion makes a much-needed acknowledgment of contemporary liberatory theology of disability through the influential work of Nancy L Eiesland (248-49), and this study of Christian theology in an Old English historical and cultural context is definitively “not the final word” on any these topics (249) but rather a generous invitation for future scholarship.
There is much to admire in this book, and readers of the work will find themselves asking many new questions about disability, spirituality, and the ethics of literary scholarship. Some readers may find themselves sitting with the deep unresolved tensions that arise in recognizing that crip eschatology “was by no means an affirming or liberatory worldview” and that it was often “harshly ableist or even proto-eugenicist” (14). In a similar vein, early medieval imaginations of the perfect “whole” body after Resurrection (as contemplated by St. Augustine; 25) invite readers to contemplate, in the words of disabled theologian Julia Watts Belser, “what place we hold for disability in our imagined futures” (qtd. 17). Parker’s close readings of Old English texts are situated in nuanced historical contexts with profound theological heft, and this impressive book will quickly become a touchstone in all future work in Old English disability studies.