Leah Pope Parker, PhD

Forthcoming

Co-edited with Stephanie Grace-Petinos and Alicia Spencer-Hall, Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages (forthcoming 2025 from Amsterdam University Press).

With Grace-Petinos and Spencer-Hall, “Introduction: Medieval Disability beyond the Sin-Sanctity Binary.”

“Healing the Unborn: Natal Disability and the Old English Life of St Margaret in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii.”

Medieval associations of St Margaret of Antioch with pregnancy and childbirth are well-documented, yet the hagiographical tradition associating her with preventing the birth of disabled children remains little remarked. This chapter examines London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A.iii, in which an Old English Life of St Margaret promotes the deliverance of medieval Christians’ souls through the ‘healing’ of disabled bodies. I argue that the manuscript and Margaret’s Life articulate a recognizable identity category akin, though not identical, to modern notions of disability. They also witness a ‘premodern eugenic logic’, a precursor to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of ‘eugenic logic’, revealing a desire to eliminate childhood disability, and thus also excise disabled children from the family, the community, and the world.

Forthcoming

“A Medieval Poetics of Neurodiversity: Prosodic Arrhythmias in Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Compleinte,’” Futures of Neurodiversity, ed. Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Ralph Savarese, M. Remi Yergeau, and Diana R. Paulin.

The futures of neurodiversity in part lie in its past. While several scholars of the European Middle Ages have begun tracing histories of disability, few have examined experiences grouped under the modern term “neurodiversity.” Such studies have focused almost exclusively on cognitive impairment and/or mental illness, rather than the concept of neurological diversity as psychic biodiversity. Nonetheless, the modern movement of neurodiversity can gain both power and momentum by excavating how neurodiversity offered varied “ways to move” in our collective past. In order to better understand the cultural contributions made by neurodiverse/neurodivergent individuals and by the presence of neurodiversity itself, this essay traces the poetic manifestations of neurodiverse thought in the poetry of one medieval person with documented neurodivergence: the fifteenth-century poet and London bureaucrat Thomas Hoccleve. Through a reading of the poetics of neurodiversity in Hoccleve’s “Compleinte,” this essay illuminates the contributions of neurodiversity in the production of poetry and thereby offers a novel means for both students and scholars of literary history to approach our objects of study.

2023

“Crip Eschatological Anticipation: The Body in The Grave.” Early Middle English 4:2 (2023 [volume year 2022]), 1–21.

The Grave, a late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century memento mori poem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, depicts the space of the grave, describing the resultant isolation, decay, and disablement of the interred corpse in the second person, so that the body being addressed is your—the reader’s—body. The poem’s slippery verb tenses confound the temporal relationship between the present moment of its addressee (“Ðu”) and the future experience of the grave they are told to anticipate, compounded by the addition in a later hand of the final three of its twenty-five lines. Attending to The Grave through the lens of critical disability studies illuminates how medieval concepts of disability intertwined with the temporalities of Christian eschatology, through a medieval variation on crip time that I call crip eschatological anticipation. This article asserts that The Grave collapses even a temporarily able-bodied present physicality with the disabling experience of the grave, requiring that every living reader of the poem anticipate the all-but-inevitably crip experience of interment and decay.

2022

“Æstel and Divine Law,” Notes & Queries n.s. 69:2 (June 2022), pp. 62–64.

2020

“The Proleptic Fantasy of Anglo-Saxon Crusade in a Manuscript for King Henry VI,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119:1 (Jan. 2020), pp. 89–120.