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This essay describes a course on the topic of premodern disability, and it argues that Piers Plowman was instrumental in helping students recognize the capaciousness, interpretive complexity, and ethical significance of disability as a category both in the medieval past and today. Reading excerpts from the C text, students studied the poem’s varied representations of impairment, and they explored how these resonate with modern paradigms such as Jasbir Puar’s theory of debility and the framework of neurodiversity. Ultimately, Piers Plowman’s use of personification proved to be an especially powerful tool in helping students understand disability as a form of personhood.
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