Gregory Carrier
I would like to thank the Medieval Academy of America for this award of the Inclusivity and Diversity Research Grant in support of my doctoral dissertation on the life and thought of Herman of Reichenau, a severely disabled scholar from the eleventh century. Scholars have thoroughly examined Herman’s significant contributions to eleventh-century intellectual thought; Herman’s disability and what he and his contemporaries thought of it has not received the same level of attention. The grant will support a summer visit to Reichenau Abbey, particularly the additional expenses I incur as a deaf-blind scholar. At the abbey where Herman spent his adult life, I plan to examine how disability was viewed on the island in the eleventh century. I plan to pay particular attention to the Church of St Georg, a tenth-century church near the abbey containing a fresco cycle depicting Christ’s various healings of disabled people in the Gospels. Herman and the other abbey residents would have been familiar with this church and its frescoes, which hints at a broader religious and social context of ideas about disability in southern Germany during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and thus contribute to the growing diversity of research undertaken in medieval studies.
