(tbp) Disability and religious practices

Disabled people (suffering from illness, old age, and/or physical impairments) faced many daily personal challenges that affected their ability to integrate and participate fully in medieval Christian culture. This chapter aims to show that it is possible, thanks to gracious papal letters and other textual evidence, to shed light on the private devotion(s) and common experience(s) of disabled people, particularly in the context of a refocusing of certain forms of piety on the individual (twelfth-fifteenth centuries). I therefore propose to start my analysis with the most 'social' practices, i.e. those integrated into the community context around the accessibility of liturgical and performative spaces, and the adaptability of worship and the reception of sacraments, and then move on to more private devotions that can be thought of as more personal and direct contact with God, around the commutation of vows and the adaptation of eating habits.