Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts

Early Christianity and Its Literature #23

by Anna Rebecca Solevåg

An intersectional study of New Testament and noncanonical literature Anna Rebecca Solevåg explores how nonnormative bodies are presented in early Christian literature through the lens of disability studies. In a number of case studies, Solevåg shows how early Christians struggled to come to terms with issues relating to body, health, and dis/ability in the gospel stories, apocryphal narratives, Pauline letters, and patristic expositions. Solevåg uses the concepts of narrative prosthesis, gaze and stare, stigma, monster theory, and crip theory to examine early Christian material to reveal the multiple, polyphonous, contradictory ways in which nonnormative bodies appear.

206 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2018

Reviews

[Lanie Walkup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great intersectional approach to disability in the NT. Theory heavy but not inaccessible, and covers a broad range of literature and disabilities with a theory/method at the heart of each chapter. Scholars can glean much from just one chapter or reading the whole work.

[Stephen Bedard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fascinating look at early Christian texts and how they understood disabilities. The author uses some fresh interpretive lens that helps us to see texts in new ways.