This book is first in its field to analyze how disability and gender both thematically and formally operate within late medieval popular literature. Reading romance, conduct manuals, and spiritual autobiography, it proposes a 'gendered model' for exploring the processes by which differences like gender and disability get coded as deviant.

Medieval Authoritative Discourse and the Disabled Female Body The Topos of Reproduction in Dame Sirith and the Merchant's Tale Excessive Wives and Bodily Punishment in the Book of the Knight and the Wife of Bath's Prologue Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid Disability and the Procreative Body in the Book of Margery Kempe

TORY VANDEVENTER PEARMAN is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton, USA. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Essays in Medieval Studies and The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability.