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Travail Narratives: Damage and Displacement in Medieval Travel Literature

Abstract

This dissertation redefines the role of damage in narratives about travelers, poetic tropes about traveling body parts, and even the traveling “bodies” of medieval manuscripts by examining the relationship between travel and physical hardship central to medieval travel narratives and the concept of travel in the medieval vernacular. Recasting damage as a productive force in the travel experience highlights its ability to disrupt the normalizing impulses of cultures that privilege able-bodiedness and opens up new conceptions of travel that do not depend on bodily wholeness to develop characters, significance, or storylines in travel literature. This study employs a disability studies approach coupled with theories of incorporation and materiality to interrogate the traveling body’s ability to disrupt its own movement in ways that augment rather than impede narrative development. This approach lends a new cultural agency to texts as disparate as the legends of the dog-headed Saint Christopher, works by Dante and Chaucer that employ the trope of the traveling heart, and medieval mystery plays that construct simulated pilgrimages for their audiences.

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