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parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Leah Pope Parker
@parkerchronicle.bsky.social
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Baker of hand pies. Scholar of medieval literature and disability: www.leahpopeparker.com She/they. Views: own. Cat: Æthelthryth. Book: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12571891 Banner: close-up of swirling shades of yellow in oil paint, vaguely floral.
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parkerchronicle.bsky.social
It’s hand pie season! Thus: pepperoni pizza hand pies.
Two golden pastries with slashes revealing pizza sauce and toasty cheese.
October 29, 2025 at 12:15 AM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
You can see Shannon’s work on my index in the #OpenAccess ebook (doi.org/10.3998/mpub...) and pictured here. Seriously, how do you make a useful index entry on “disability” in a book that’s entirely about disability?? I highly recommend hiring a professional to figure that out for your book.
Index page of Light of the Everlasting Life from “Christus medicus trope” to “dumbness/muteness (see speech, impaired).” The entry under “disability” reads “disability: defined, 10–11, 13; intersections with gender, 7–8, 193–94, 195; intersections with queerness, 8–9; intersections with race and ethnicity, 7–8, 148–49, 183–84; as marker of identity, 20, 21–23, 31, 126, 128; medieval conceptualization of, overview, 11, 14–15; scholarship on medieval, 15–17; social/cultural vs. medical model for, 10, 86n44. See also embodied difference; entries at crip.”
September 3, 2025 at 1:37 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Remember how parents used to take pictures of kids with newspapers when History™️ was on the front page? Very proof-of-life vibes?

Here’s proof of how alive and thrilled Æthelthryth is on the day a box of my book arrived! Happy birthday to me!

doi.org/10.3998/mpub... #MedievalSky #DisabilitySky
An open box of neatly stacked copies of Light of the Everlasting Life. A brown tabby cat sits next to the box, looking at the camera, thoroughly unimpressed.
August 7, 2025 at 4:04 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Took my early copy of the book on a walkabout to Winchester Cathedral, built partly on top of the Old Minster, home of St Swithun’s crutch-covered shrine from ch 2. Also where the cover portrait of St Æthelthryth was made! doi.org/10.3998/mpub... #MedievalSky #DisabilitySky @uofmpress.bsky.social
The top half of the cover of Light of the Everlasting Life, showing part of the portrait of Æthelthryth, with Winchester Cathedral in the blurry background. It is a very hot, sunny day, and people are enjoying the cathedral grounds. Part of the first page of chapter two in Light of the Everlasting Life, held open in front of the stone outline marking the Winchester Old Minster’s foundations in grass. The text reads: Two St. Swithun’s Crutches Healing Miracle Narratives and the Relics of Disability Near the end of his late-tenth-century homily on St. Swithun, Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 955-ca. 1010) describes a practice that does not appear in any of his Latin sources: cure seekers leaving crutches as votive offerings at the shrine of St. Swithun at Winchester. [Look, the picture also includes most of the subsequent block quotation, but the AC is out on this train back to London and I have been in this forced sauna situation too long to be able to handle figuring out eths and thorns on my phone. It’s the line about the Old Minster being all bedecked in crutches and stools of people who’ve been healed and they couldn’t even hang half of them up.]
July 13, 2025 at 5:24 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
It’s a real physical book! Æthelthryth seems to enjoy seeing her patron saint adorning the advance copy. Cats and saints front and center! doi.org/10.3998/mpub...
#MedievalSky #SkyStorians #DisabilitySky
A brown tabby cat curls belly up on carpet next to a physical copy of Light of the Everlasting Life. A light-skinned person with curled light brown hair that is just entering the awkward stage of growing out an undercut smiles and excitedly scrunches up their shoulders while looking at the back of Light of the Everlasting Life.
June 27, 2025 at 10:34 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Look at this beautiful book cover. That shiny lady? That’s Saint Æthelthryth. Heck yes I named my cat after her.
A book cover depicting an illuminated manuscript miniature on parchment, predominantly using gold, blue, and peach. In a floriate rectangular frame, St. Æthelthryth stands wearing draped robes of peach and gold with a golden veil and aureole, holding two golden lilies and a golden book, and surrounded by golden Latin text announcing this as the image of St. Æthelthryth. The beige parchment background extends to the edges of the cover, bordered by pairs of ruled lines. At the top of the image is the title of the book, Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, followed by the author’s name, Leah Pope Parker.
May 29, 2025 at 9:31 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Come for the crip ancestors (including disabled saints!), stay for the generative juxtaposition of medieval Christianity and Buddhism. #medievalsky #disability #cripsky
The cover image for Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages is a fragmentary wooden corpus of Christ on a blue-grey background—see the editors’ intro for discussion of this artwork!
April 30, 2025 at 2:58 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Finally finished reading through my proofs! A favorite passage from ch. 6.
Citation: Me, pp. 214-15 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky
“It is not controversial to say that there is no Christian salvation without the Crucifixion. It is less common, however, to highlight what should be an obvious corollary: there is no salvation without injurious impairment, and the presence of impairment evokes the specter of disability, even if the body in question—Christ’s—may not warrant the label of disability. Early medieval English Christians did not read Christ as disabled, or any medieval parallel thereof, but they did put his wounded body in conversation with other forms of bodily fragmentation, injury, and even disability in order to collectively construct an eschatological imaginary of the embodied afterlife.” “The conceptualization of Christ’s body in conversation with impairment and disability makes his body crip.”
April 4, 2025 at 8:16 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
I love a lot of lines in chapter 5, “Cynewulf’s Wounds,” that make little sense out of context, probably including this one.
Citation: Me, p. 199 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky
“The text stands in for the poet’s body, the dispersal and reassembly of runes cripping the path to the afterlife body. The runes perform disabling and prosthetic roles, containing both the certainty of fragmentation in the grave and the promise of the Resurrection.”
April 2, 2025 at 7:54 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Back at it: I remember writing this line in a Madison cafe for the dissertation version, but it’s still my favorite in chapter 4.
Citation: Me, p. 158 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #MedievalSky #Skystorians
“The potential consequence of being eaten, for Matthew, are undoubtedly unappealing: the eschatological hope for bodily resurrection would be alimentarily converted into scatological waste.”
March 29, 2025 at 6:15 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Favorite line from ch.4 (after the cat joke that shall remain secret). About the portrait of St. Æthelthryth in the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold. Citation: Me, p. 138 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians
“If the artist carved a deeper line here with the intention of depicting the scar, then in doing so he took on the role of the leech Cynefrith, inscribing a mark into the saint’s neck; the pale pigment of the saint’s skin parted before the artist’s tools like flesh before the physician’s blade.”
March 9, 2025 at 10:22 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Chapter 2 has some bangers if I do say so myself. Citation: Me, p. 81 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians
“In Ælfric’s Swithun, the dependencies of the faith are evident in the dependencies of the narrative, but that narrative has real—and crip—eschatological consequences. The crutches and stools hung around Swithun’s shrine, quotidian relics of disability, reveal the importance of the impaired body for the construction of Swithun as a saint. The saint’s life leans on representations of disabled bodies to convey its doctrinal message and provide instruction to the faithful. The literal crutch left by an anonymous cure seeker thus becomes a figural, spiritual crutch for the figurehead of Christian doctrine. As spiritual prostheses, these crutches bear up the most important message of the Christian church, one of few doctrinal beliefs that have remained constant throughout the multimillennial history of Christianity; the relics of disability prosthesize the promise of salvation.”
March 8, 2025 at 7:41 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
Hit some bumps in progress this week, but finally found my favorite moment in chapter one. Citation: Me, p. 71 of Light of the Everlasting Life, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians
“To adapt Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase, these were metaphors that Alfred and the West Saxons lived by in the crip eschatology of early medieval England. They reflected and shaped everyday experiences of the world, associating sinfulness and impairment with stigmatizing effects, even while also naturalizing vision impairment as an inherent part of earthly embodiment. The {sight is salvation} metaphor became a frequent shorthand for eschatological matters in Alfredian texts, one that maintained complex ties to both embodied experience and concerns for salvation. Despite its ubiquity, {sight is salvation} was not at all a dead metaphor, but rather one that continually drew on experiences of sightedness and blindness in order to retain its effectiveness.”
March 7, 2025 at 5:14 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
The winning line from the intro, over an eight-way tie for second place. Citation: Me, p. 12 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social
#CripSky #Disability #MedievalSky #Skystorians
“Even though the Old English texts I study here are by no means activist, in a modern sense, I would assert the importance of these histories for activist movements, to recognize the eschatological inflection of crip experiences that many culturally Christian and English-speaking communities have inherited. Invoking our medieval crip ancestors reminds us of the community we have had, much longer than we have had a name. Our crip ancestors did not fight quite the same fights for independence, self-determination, and human rights, and so they were not activists in the modern sense. Nevertheless, they existed, and their persistence earns them a place in the histories we write about disability, Christianity, and the European Middle Ages.”
March 3, 2025 at 11:52 PM
parkerchronicle.bsky.social
I started with the conclusion (it’s short!) and I like this sentence. Citation: Me, p. 248 of Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature, forthcoming in August from @uofmpress.bsky.social

#BookSky #CripSky #DisabilitySky #MedievalSky #Skystorians
Image of proof text, with the following sentence boxed in pink pen: “Characterizing the role of disability in early medieval eschatology facilitates our recognition—as scholars of the Middle Ages, as members of the disability community, as humans experiencing our bodies through cultural traditions deeply preoccupied with disability—of the part played by Christianity in a long history of conceptualizing disability through eschatological hopes and fears.”
March 3, 2025 at 3:02 PM