The Disabled Female Body and the Spirit: A Comprehensive Study of Justitia Sengers and her Commentary on the 69th Psalm

In 1586, a Lutheran religious commentary was published out of a printing press in Magdeburg, Germany, and was titled Trostbüchlein: Uber den Neun und Sechtzigsten Psalm (Little Book of Comfort over the Sixty-Ninth Psalm). The author signed their name at the end of the foreword as Justitia Sengers. Justitia Sengers described herself in the foreword as a young woman from Braunschweig, Germany, and congenitally blind. Her text was well-received, which resulted in a reprint of the text in 1593 out of a printing press in Hamburg, this time under another title, Des Heiligen Geistes Beschreibung vom Leiden und Sterben (The Holy Spirit's Description of the Suffering and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ), whose subtitle would now explicitly name Justitia Sengers as the young blind woman who authored the text. It would continue to be a popular text and would be circulated and reprinted into the 1610’s, nearly thirty years after its initial print, under this new title. This religious commentary, while popular and widely circulated during its time, is severely understudied. This thesis is therefore a microhistory, with Justitia’s text at the center of the study. The main purpose of this thesis is to better understand the gendered, disabled, and religious aspects of the text, as well as the society and historical world from which it originated. The main avenues through which this is achieved is via interdisciplinary methodologies, literature analysis, and case studies of the known female owners, handlers, circulators, and (re)publishers of the text. This thesis therefore offers important insights into sixteenth and seventeenth-century gender, disability, and popular religion in the Lower Saxony region of Germany, as well as new insights into Justitia Sengers and her “Little Book of Comfort.”