Travel Accounts in Manuscript and Print

Nafde, A

doi:10.1017/9781108642897.008

Travel Accounts in Manuscript and Print

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Aditi Nafde ORCiD

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Abstract

This chapter surveys heterogenous lived experiences of disability throughout medieval Afro-Eurasian travel networks, examining examples from approximately the seventh through fifteenth centuries CE. It uses a broadly comparative approach to ‘religiomedical’ modes of understanding disability, illness, and other conditions, which situate the analysis of lived experience within local sociocultural understandings of the body (namely religious frameworks or historical forms of medical knowledge). Surveying disparate medieval first-person accounts of temporary or lifelong disability across Asia, Africa, and Europe, this chapter attends to disability as an adaptive practice and a venue for world transformation: an opening up of possibility, and an intellectual and artistic resource for people in motion.