The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest levels of the medieval Church. These documents 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. A disease, impairment, or old age could prevent both secular and regular clerics from fulfilling the duties of their divine office. Such conditions can, thus, be understood as forms of disability. In these...
The petitions received and the letters sent by the Papal Chancery during the Late Middle Ages attest to the recognition of disability at the highest l...
From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, with its attendant privileges and responsibilities. The questions of whom hospitals should serve and why they should do so have recurred — and been invested with moral weight — in successive centuries, though similarities between medieval and modern debates on the subject have often been overlooked. Hospitals’ legal status as religious institutions could be tendentious and therefore had to be vigorously defended in order to protect...
From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the development of European hospitals was shaped by their claim to the legal status of religious institutions, w...
