Lone Medievalist Prize for Scholarship

We are proud to award the 2024 Lone Medievalist Prize for Scholarship to Ninon Dubourg for the book Disabled Clerics in the Late Middle Ages, Un/suitable for divine service? This book, published in 2023 by Amsterdam University Press, builds on the petitions received by the Papal Chancery and the letters they sent in return during the Late Middle Ages. The main argument is that those documents attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. Indeed, they acknowledge the existence of physical and/or mental impairments, with the papacy issuing dispensations allowing some supplicants to adapt their clerical missions according to their abilities.

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Tory V. Pearman, Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur
We are proud to award the 2019 Lone Medievalist Prize for Scholarship to Tory V. Pearman for the book Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur. The book examines the intersection of disability and knighthood throughout Malory’s text, noting a dependence upon disability that produces a system of knighthood that relies on a repeating pattern of ability/disability: the bodies of knights must be broken, must bleed, and must eventually heal, only to replicate the pattern in a continuous loop. The (dis)abled body of the knight is thus transmitted across and through the text, emblematizing the Morte’s fixation on the wholeness and fragmentation of physical and social bodies. In this textual anxiety, clear demarcations between the body and its fluids, the sacred and profane, the masculine and feminine, the virginal and sexual, and the disabled and able-bodied blur. Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur was published in Routledge’s Medieval Literature and Culture Series in 2019.

Melissa Ridley Elmes’ article examines women’s wounds in Malory’s Arthuriad as a driving narrative force that calls attention to the public and universal nature of violence in the text, with emphasis on evaluating that violence from a gendered perspective. “Public Displays of Affliction” appeared in Modern Philology 112 (2019): 187-210.

Erin K. Wagner’s article argues that Reginald Pecock, though obsessed with the rectitude of his own work, stumbled into heresy (in the eyes of the medieval Church) by his scholastic engagement with the English vernacular. This study is important to understanding the development of the theological vernacular in England—and advances the current state of scholarship on Lollardy and heresy in the late Middle Ages, namely by continuing to complicate definitions of orthodoxy. This article is forthcoming this year in Studies in Philology.

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