"Winner of the Catholic Media Book Award, History Category" Mary Dunn is associate professor of early modern Christianity at Saint Louis University. Her books include The Cruelest of All Mothers and Religious Intimacies.
An exploration of early modern accounts of sickness and disability-and what they tell us about our own approach to bodily difference
In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counternarratives to our contemporary assumptions, these early modern stories invite us to creatively imagine ways of living meaningfully with embodied difference today.
At the heart of Dunn's account are a range of historical sources: Jesuit stories of illness in New France, an account of Canada's first hospital, the hagiographic vita of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. In an early modern world that subscribed to a Christian view of salvation, both sickness and disability held significance for more than the body, opening opportunities for virtue, charity, and even redemption. Dunn demonstrates that when these reflections collide with modern thinking, the effect is a certain kind of freedom to reimagine what sickness and disability might mean to us.
Reminding us that the meanings we make of embodied difference are historically conditioned, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See makes a forceful case for the role of history in broadening our imagination. "An excellent demonstration of what is possible when one marshals the skills of a historian of religion to 'make room for the creative apperception of sickness and disability beyond the measure of the norm'."---Mark Brians, Reading Religion "Deeply researched and elegantly written, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See is at once an important contribution to the literature on early modern religion and a sustained meditation on big theoretical questions about method and theory in religious studies and history. Each chapter is a stunning case study-together they add up to a groundbreaking historical and historiographical work."-Robert A. Orsi, author of History and Presence "This exciting, innovative work pushes disability studies to be less biased toward present perspectives, while also challenging historians to take methodological risks in mining the archives for past constructions of illness. Dunn deftly finds that there are many ways to approach living with disability beyond trying to rectify it."-Jessica A. Boon, author of The Mystical Science of the Soul "I greatly enjoyed reading this compelling and finely honed book. Dunn writes beautifully and persuasively as she interprets what early modern texts say about French Canadians' approach to illness and disability in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In these nuanced, informed, and highly contextualized analyses, we hear the voice of an engaged and sensitive historian."-Emma Anderson, author of The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs
