Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

Kristina L. Richardson is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Münster and Bonn in Germany.

• Introduction; 1. Physical Blights in Islamic Thought; 2. Drug Overdose, Disability and Male Friendship in Fifteenth-Century Mamluk Cairo; 3. Recollecting and Reconfiguring Afflicted Male Bodies in Fifteenth-Century Literary Anthologies; 4. The Science of Men: Hadith Transmitters and Their Marked Bodies; 5. The Blight of Male Baldness in Sixteenth-Century Mecca; Epilogue.

Richardson has written an original and highly learned first book that reveals much about the cultural construction of difference and disability and about scholarly friendships and communities that shaped that culture.