Christopher Baswell (Barnard College and Columbia University), Arthurian Immobilities: Disabled Kings and Nobles in the Lancelot Prose Cycle. Co-sponsored by the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies and Houghton Library.

Abstract: While the lived reality of disability in the Middle Ages was surely a wretched one, at the same time we encounter persistent associations between disabled and royal or aristocratic bodies in medieval culture, its imagery, and narratives.  Nowhere is this truer than in the Arthurian world, at whose core there lies a powerful but immobile figure, the Rich Fisher King.  In this talk, Baswell will discuss this linkage through Arthurian texts and illustrated manuscripts, especially the vast Lancelot Prose Cycle.  The Rich Fisher King, largely absent in this text, is nonetheless shadowed by a complex penumbra of disabled knights and kings.