‘And she was so perfectly cured’: Curative Logics and Crip Futurity in Late Medieval Canonisation Processes

Scholars have tended to approach medieval understandings of disability and impairment through social or cultural models, or to develop various new models. Responding to Julie Singer’s challenge to reorient our focus away from models onto the role of impaired individuals in negotiating relationships between margins and centre, this article reads medieval canonisation depositions through the lens of Alison Kafer’s crip futurity, which offers the theoretical toolkit to unpick the dominant logics governing the medieval canonisation process. This study argues that canonisation processes imagine no future for impaired individuals outside the binary of cure or death. By examining testimony about a partial miraculous cure, it argues that disabled people could use the canonisation deposition as an opportunity to imagine alternative, crip, futures. This article is part of a Special Issue on Marginality and the Medieval Church that examines how categories of marginalisation were constructed, negotiated and resisted within the medieval church.