Crip Eschatological Anticipation: The Body in The Grave

The Grave , a late twelfth-/early thirteenth-century memento mori poem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, depicts the space of the grave, describing the resultant isolation, decay, and disablement of the interred corpse in the second person, so that the body being addressed is your —the reader’s—body. The poem’s slippery verb tenses confound the temporal relationship between the present moment of its addressee (“Ðu”) and the future experience of the grave they are told to anticipate, compounded by the addition in a later hand of the final three of its twenty-five lines. Attending to The Grave through the lens of critical disability studies illuminates how medieval concepts of disability intertwined with the temporalities of Christian eschatology, through a medieval variation on crip time that I call crip eschatological anticipation. This article asserts that The Grave collapses even a temporarily able-bodied present physicality with the disabling experience of the grave, requiring that every living reader of the poem anticipate the all-but-inevitably crip experience of interment and decay.