A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages 9781350028746, 9781350028715

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LIST OF FIGURES

0.1 Christ heals a blind man (Maastricht Hours in French, 1400–25), fol. 135r. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_ms_17_f135r

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0.2 Healing of the blind man and raising of Lazarus (Spain, 1129–34). Metropolitan Art Museum, via Creative Commons. https://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471846

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0.3 Miracle at Mont St. Michel: pilgrims in motion (Luttrell Psalter, England, 1325–40), fol. 104v. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www. bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_f104v

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0.4 Vieillesse or Old Age (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, Lyon, France, c. 1487), fol. 10v. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_4425_f010v

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0.5 Agnès de Pontoise, a blind spinner, led by her sister to the shrine of Louis IX. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5716, fol. 633v. Public domain; Gallica Online. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8447303m/ f640.item

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0.6 Saints Cosmas and Damian perform a miraculous transplantation of a leg. Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, Spain, c. 1495. Public domain; Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_verger%27s_dream-_Saints_ Cosmas_and_Damian_performing_a_miraculous_cure_by_transplantation_ of_a_leg._Oil_painting_attributed_to_the_Master_of_Los_Balbases,_ ca._1495._WDL3251.png

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2.1 “Beggars and Cripples,” drawing by Hieronymus Bosch. Courtesy of Albertina Vienna, 2019. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/2/2e/Beggars_and_Cripples.jpg

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2.2 A crippled man in the margins of The History and Topography of Ireland by Gerald of Wales, c. 1250, London, British Library, Royal 13 B VIII, fol. 30v. © The British Library Board, reproduced under Creative Commons

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2.3 A double-amputee in the margins of the Romans Arthurien, 1250–70, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 95, fol. 297r. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2019

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3.1 Colored print with Christ as Man of Sorrows adored by a Carthusian. London, British Library, Egerton MS 1821, fol. 9v. Public domain; British Library Online. https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ ILLUMINBig.ASP?size=big&IllID=1073

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LIST OF FIGURES

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4.1 Four blind men being led by a sighted boy in a copy of The Romance of Alexander. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 264, fol. 74v. Image available online: http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=bodleian&manuscript =msbodl264

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5.1 Fifteenth-century German Expositiones evangeliorum representing Christ healing a deaf man and sticking his finger in the man’s ear. Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Claustroneoburgensis 4, fol. 114v. By permission of the Augustinian Canonry Klosterneuburg, Library. http://cdm.csbsju.edu/ digital/collection/HMMLClrMicr/id/16400/rec/1

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5.2 An unheeded marginal instruction to the illustrator in a copy of Jean Corbechon’s French translation of De proprietatibus rerum. Paris, BnF MS fr. 22532, fol. 102v. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

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7.1 Drawing: head, showing cells of brain ventricles, c. 1347. Wellcome Collection, via Creative Commons. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ xmg3rejh

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7.2 Detail of a miniature of the fool holding a stick and using a small animal to play as if it were bagpipes, and two men, one of whom is David, at the beginning of Psalm 52. From Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale, France, first quarter of the fifteenth century. London, British Library, Royal MS 15 D III, fol. 262. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=37773

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7.3 Gluttony, from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, c. 1630–c. 1375, part 1. British Library, Royal MS 6 E VII, fol. 195. Public domain; British Library Online. https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN. ASP?Size=mid&IllID=40344

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7.4 Detail of a historiated initial: a fool and a demon. Psalter and Hours, Use of Arras, France, c. 1300. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 15, fol. 96. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/ illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5804

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7.5 Illustration from a 1497 Latin translation of Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera Nauis (Ship of Fools), University of Edinburgh, Inc. 13, fol. 107r. University of Edinburgh, via Creative Commons. https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/ detail/UoEgal~2~2~42037~102996

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Eliza Buhrer is a teaching associate professor at the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches classes on scientific and environmental ethics, medicine, and society, and a variety of other non-medieval topics to engineering students. Her background, however, is in medieval history, and prior to beginning her job at Mines, she taught medieval history at Seton Hall University and Loyola University New Orleans. Her publications have explored intersections between the histories of law, medicine, and disability in the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the history of intellectual disability, and she is currently working on a book on the cultural history of attention and distraction from Antiquity to the present. Richard H. Godden is an assistant professor in English specializing in Medieval Literature and Culture. His research and teaching interests include representations of disability and monstrosity in the Middle Ages, medieval romance, Chaucer, and digital humanities. His current book project, Material Subjects: An Ecology of Prosthesis in Medieval Literature and Culture, focuses on the material objects with which medieval bodies were so intimate, including not only the recognizable prosthetics (both mundane and miraculous) that served as replacement for missing appendages or as assistive devices such as eyeglasses and crutches, but also more common literary and cultural objects such as armor, clothing, and religious relics. He is also coeditor of the forthcoming essay collection, Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, and of The Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales. Aleksandra Pfau is an associate professor of History at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where she teaches medieval and early modern European history, including courses on law, medicine, and magic. Her book, Medieval Communities and the Mad: Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France, is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press. She is currently working on a number of projects related to her study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French legal documents, especially pardon letters. John P. Sexton is Associate Professor of English at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, with a focus on medieval English and Icelandic literature and culture. He has written, presented, and published on topics including English saints’ cults, physical injury and disability in the Middle Ages, Icelandic sagas, Chaucerian literature, the medieval practice of sanctuary, and the professional challenges facing medievalists. He is a cohost of the Saga Thing podcast and a founding member of The Lone Medievalist. Julie Singer is Associate Professor of French at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Boydell & Brewer 2011) and Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines,

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Madness, Metaphor (Boydell & Brewer, 2018). Other recent and forthcoming publications include articles on Boccaccio, Philippe de Mézières, and Jean Froissart. Alicia Spencer-Hall is an honorary research fellow at the School of Language, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London. She specializes in comparative analyses of medieval literature and modern critical theory. Alicia works in the field of medieval disability studies, exploring representations of chronic pain in the Middle Ages in terms of contemporary crip theory. She is a cofounder of the Medievalists with Disabilities network and is regularly invited to speak about experiences of chronic pain in both medieval and modern contexts. Alicia is also an expert in medieval hagiography, with her work foregrounding interrogations inflected by contemporary visual, media, and cultural studies. Her first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, came out in 2018, published by Amsterdam University Press. At present, she is finishing up work on her second book, Medieval Twitter, to be published by ARC Humanities. A companion piece to the chapter in the present volume, “Stopping the Clock(s): Precarious Times in the Academy,” which reflects upon the embodied experience of crip time as an academic, is forthcoming in Theorising Ableism in Academia, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh (UCL Press). Kisha G. Tracy is Associate Professor of English Studies and Co-Coordinator of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her main research interests include medieval memory and confession, medieval disability, and higher education pedagogy. Her book, Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature, came out in 2017, published by Palgrave. Edward Wheatley, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, has written and lectured extensively on disability in the Middle Ages. He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies for research for his book, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2010), which was the first monograph devoted to a single disability across medieval cultures. He has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), and The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd edn. (Routledge, 2010). His articles on disability have appeared in such journals as Comparative Drama, Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Editor biographies Joshua R. Eyler is Director of Faculty Development and Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi, USA. His books include How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (2018) and Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (2010). Jonathan Hsy is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, and his work explores the intersections of language, technology, and the body. Author of Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State University

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Press, 2013), Hsy is completing a book on life-writing by medieval authors who were blind or deaf. He has published in Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Disrupting the Digital Humanities (punctum books, 2018), Early Modern Women Journal, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Literature Compass, New Medieval Literatures, PMLA, Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Routledge, 2018), and postmedieval. Hsy codirects Global Chaucers, blogs at In the Middle, and has served on the Modern Language Association of America’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Tory V. Pearman is Associate Professor of English at Miami University Hamilton. She has published widely on medieval literature and culture, gender studies, and disability studies. She is the author of Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Disability and Knighthood in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Routledge, 2019).

SERIES PREFACE

As general editors of A Cultural History of Disability, we are based on either side of the Atlantic—in the Department of Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope  University, United Kingdom and in the School of Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University,  United Kingdom, and in the Department of English at George Washington University, USA—but we are unified by our work and interests in disability studies, with a particular emphasis on culture and cultural production. This being so, the genesis of the project was in cultural disability studies, from which grew discussions about history that led us in many fruitful directions (e.g., Longmore 1985; Davis 1995; Garland-Thomson 1997; Mitchell and Snyder 2000; Kudlick 2003; Snyder and Mitchell 2006; Burdett 2014a; Coogan 2014; Doat 2014; Tankard 2014; Rembis 2017). The name mentioned more than any other was that of Henri-Jacques Stiker, whose work was prominent in our thoughts at the proposal stage and as such resonates here. The method in his most famous book, A History of Disability, “ranges from close readings of literary texts as exemplary of dominant myths to discussions of the etymology of disability terminology to medical taxonomies of specific conditions and test cases to an examination of current legislative initiatives” (Mitchell 1999: vii). The real interest, as Stiker states in an interview published more than thirty years after the first edition of his book, is not “History with a capital H like trained historians do,” but “grand representations, systems of thought, the structures beyond history” (Kudlick 2016: 140). The spirit if not the letter of this method is adopted in A Cultural History of Disability, our focus being how disability has been portrayed in various aspects of culture and what these representations reveal about lingering and changing social attitudes and understandings. A Cultural History of Disability is indebted to contemporary disability activism and to other movements for social justice. As David Serlin writes in the introduction to an important anthology on the intersections of disability and masculinity, Within academic culture, tectonic disciplinary and intellectual shifts of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to the fields of ethnic studies and critical race theory, women’s and gender studies and men’s studies, LGBT studies and queer studies, and disability studies, and crip theory. Scholars in these fields have not always been in alignment, of course, but they do increasingly recognize each other as workers and activists in adjacent and overlapping fields of critical inquiry, cultural production, and social justice. (Serlin 2017: 8) Many chapters in A Cultural History of Disability are thus deeply and necessarily intersectional, attending to gender, race, sexuality, nation, and other axes of human difference. In the process, the project attends to multiple modalities of disability experience, past and present. In presenting such an interdisciplinary and theoretical project, we therefore depart from the kind of history of disability that, for example, focuses on the story of so-called special schools from the perspective of their governors

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(Burdett 2014b), or the history of major medical advances (Oshinsky 2005), in favour of one that delves into the underpinning social attitudes faced by disabled people beyond and long before such institutions or advances. We are keenly attuned as well to the many ways in which disability has been represented. A “system of representation,” according to Stuart Hall, “consists, not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them” (Hall 1997: 17). From this cultural studies perspective, a cultural history of disability is attuned to how disabled people have been caught up in systems of representation that, over the centuries (and with real, material effects), have variously contained, disciplined, marginalized, or normalized them. A cultural history of disability also, however, traces the ways in which disabled people themselves have authored or contested representations, shifting or altering the complex relations of power that determine the meanings of disability experience. In formal terms, A Cultural History of Disability is a six-volume work on renderings of disability from Antiquity to the twenty-first century. The set of volumes is interdisciplinary insofar as it engages scholars with interests in disability studies, education, history, literature, cultural studies, drama, art, and several other related fields and disciplines. Each volume covers one of six historical periods: Antiquity (500 BCE–800 CE); the Middle Ages (800–1450); the Renaissance (1450–1650); the long eighteenth century (1650– 1789); the long nineteenth century (1789–1914); and the modern age (1914–2000+). These individual volumes are edited by accomplished scholars who provide an outline of the major ideas and themes concerning disability in their given historical period. The internal structure of the six volumes is notable. Following the period-specific introduction, each volume comprises eight chapters whose principal titles correspond throughout the set. This means that many themes can be traced across all six volumes— and thus across all six historical periods. The overarching themes of the eight chapters in each volume are tentatively listed as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health issues. All of these themes are manifestly problematic, on account of the terminology and apparent focus on impairment rather than disablement or disability, not to mention categorization that swerves from the fact that many disabled people have multiple impairments. Accordingly, many of the volume editors and chapter contributors have creatively and critically worked with and beyond these problematics. The eight-part categorization across time is ultimately extended not in a positivistic but in an analytical mode, offering not sameness but a critical difference across the historical periods under review. “Learning difficulties,” for example, materialize quite differently under modes of industrial or neoliberal capitalism (with their demands for a particular kind of productivity and speed) than they do in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, when “learning” and education were stratified more obviously according to caste or gender. Deaf people have not always conceptualized themselves as having a distinct language or inhabiting a “minority” identity; such a conceptualization clearly requires particular historical conditions that have only begun to germinate in the past three or four centuries. These two examples illustrate that, if somewhat simplistic, the overarching themes of the project assist readers who are keen to understand more about how disabled people are represented in culture and how ideas and attitudes have both resonated and changed down the centuries. Historical changes in ideas and attitudes have been at times merely adaptations of a more general pattern; they have, however, at other times been more akin to what are often understood as “paradigm shifts,” which fundamentally alter or reinvent the conditions in

SERIES PREFACE

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which human beings are located or rescript the underlying assumptions that give rise to how we apprehend the world. The concept of a paradigm shift comes—perhaps paradoxically for a cultural history of disability—from the history of science; Thomas S. Kuhn famously used the term to describe what happens when advocates for new scientific approaches or models (those Kuhn termed “young Turks”) overturn what they perceive as the outdated views of those who came before them (Hamilton 1997: 78). As Peter Hamilton explains, however, where other systems of representation or “aesthetic domains of painting, literature or photography differ from sciences is their essentially multi-paradigmatic as opposed to uni-paradigmatic nature” (Hamilton 1997: 80). Paradigm shifts in the history of disability have thus been about pluralizing the ways in which disabled experiences might be apprehended or have been apprehended over the centuries. For example, the activist invention of “disability identity” itself, in the twentieth century, could arguably be understood as an example of a paradigm shift that generated completely new vocabularies, multiplying the ways in which we might understand the embodied experience of disability. From this multi-paradigmatic perspective on embodiment, we can recognize that disablement on an attitudinal level involves a historical and changeable metanarrative to which people who have impairments are keyed in social encounters (Bolt 2014). Tracing these multiple paradigms across and through the cultural patterns of history, as well as noting the discontinuities between periods, can greatly enhance our critical understandings of the present. In turn, the new vocabularies of contemporary activism can enhance our critical understandings of the past. Indeed, only with the activist vocabularies of the present have we been able to conceive of disability as something that might have a cultural history worthy of being studied and debated. A Cultural History of Disability demonstrates particular interest in the etymology of disability terminology (in keeping with the method exemplified by Stiker). In English, “disability” as a term appears to date from at least the sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Adams, Reiss, and Serlin 2015: 6). The political scientist Deborah A. Stone linked the term to the needs of an emergent capitalist order, which newly demanded “able-bodied” workers, but which also needed to differentiate between those who would be sorted into what she identified as a “work-based” system and those who would be placed in a “needs-based” system. For its own consolidation, the emergent capitalist order needed to prioritize the former and stigmatize the latter, and Stone argues that “the disabled state” was charged (from the time “disability” circulated widely as a term) with the sorting, prioritizing, and stigmatizing (Stone 1984). Of course, various other examples of disability terminology have circulated both before and after the period Stone surveys. Often those other terms—freak, retard, idiot, and even handicapped, which until recently in English was dominant in many locations—have served to reinforce deep stigmas against disabled people and to valorize able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. At other times, various terms for what might now be understood through a disability analytic have functioned quite differently, and the early volumes of this series provide thorough considerations of the languages of disability that were available, say, in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Contemporary activists have put forward disability as an identity and as the preferred term in many locations, as against “handicap” and so many other discarded terms, both the negative and the seemingly positive terms Simi Linton calls “nice words” (terms activists generally perceive as patronizing, like differently abled or physically challenged) (Linton 1998: 14). For decades, in ways similar to the world-transformative reclamations in the queer movement, activists have also played with the ways in which formerly derogative words such as crip might be resignified in culturally generative ways

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(McRuer 2006; Bolt 2014). Disability terminology, although sometimes overlooked, thus reveals much about changing ideas and attitudes. Languages besides English have of course similarly been the staging grounds for vibrant conversations about disability terminology. Many Spanish speakers roundly reject minusválido (literally, less valid) or discapacitado/a; some activists and artists, particularly in Spain, have put forward the preferred term persona con diversidad funcional (person with functional diversity). Although the revision of these terms has had a more uneven reception across Latin America, the very existence of such debates testifies to ongoing and vibrant conversations about language—critical debates that resonate in Japan (Valentine 2002) and India (Rao 2001). The anthropologist Julie Livingston uses “debility” for her important work on Botswana, since no word in the languages spoken there translates easily into “disability,” even though a concept is needed for encompassing a range of “experiences of chronic illness and senescence, as well as disability per se” (Livingston 2006: 113). The international and historical scope of these debates is immense. What we begin to explain here is that A Cultural History of Disability is not meant to provide readers with the history of disability. The history of disability is in fact, from one perspective, the history of humanity, and as such too vast for any collection, no matter how extensive, illustrative, or indicative of key periods and moments. From another perspective, what we think we understand in our own moment as “disability” varies immensely across time and space, which is why this set of volumes ultimately presents multiple and variegated histories of disability. The cultural history of disability thus is not something we could or would endeavor to document, not even with the esteemed editors and authors we have gathered to conduct this research. Rather, what we offer here is a cultural history that leads readers down various and sometimes intersecting paths. The cultural history this set of volumes presents is an interdisciplinary one that is driven by an appreciation of disability studies and thus disability theory, recognizing that disability as an analytic—like a feminist or queer analytic—can be brought to bear on many different topics and cultural contexts, even if other time periods have conceptualized bodies and minds using very different language from our own. David Bolt and Robert McRuer, General Editors

REFERENCES Adams, Rachel, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (2015), “Disability,” in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (eds.), Keywords in Disability Studies, 5–11, New York: New York University Press. Bolt, David (2014), The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Burdett, Emmeline (2014a), “‘Beings in Another Galaxy’: Historians, the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme, and the Question of Opposition,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 38–49, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Burdett, Emmeline (2014b), “Disability History: Voices and Sources, London Metropolitan Archives,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8 (1): 97–103. Coogan, Tom (2014), “The ‘Hunchback’: Across Cultures and Time,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 71–9, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

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Davis, Lennard J. (1995), Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, New York and London: Verso. Doat, David (2014), “Evolution and Human Uniqueness: Prehistory, Disability, and the Unexpected Anthropology of Charles Darwin,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 15–25, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Stuart (1997), “The Work of Representation,” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, 13–74, London: Sage Publications. Hamilton, Peter (1997), “Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography,” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, 75–150, London: Sage Publications. Kudlick, Catherine (2016), “An Interview with Henri-Jacques Stiker, Doyen of French Disability Studies,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 10 (2): 139–54. Kudlick, Catherine (2003), “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review, 108 (3): 763–93. Linton, Simi (1998), Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York: New York University Press. Livingston, Julie (2006), “Insights from an African History of Disability,” Radical History Review, 94: 111–26. Longmore, Paul (1985), “The Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of Disabled People,” Reviews in American History, 13 (4): 581–7. McRuer, Robert (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, David T. (1999), “Foreword,” in Henri-Jacques Stiker (ed.), A History of Disability, vii–xiv, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Oshinsky, David M. (2005), Polio: An American Story. The Crusade That Mobilized the Nation against the 20th Century’s Most Feared Disease, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Shridevi (2001), “‘A Little Inconvenience’: Perspectives of Bengali Families of Children with Disabilities on Labelling and Inclusion,” Disability and Society, 16 (4): 531–48. Rembis, Mike (2017), “A Secret Worth Knowing: Living Mad Lives in the Shadow of the Asylum,” Centre for Culture and Disability Studies YouTube Channel, May 10, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Ls5BgJ2x8U0 (accessed May 17, 2017). Serlin, David (2017), “Introduction,” in Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent, Jr. (eds.), Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, 1–21, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell (2006), Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Deborah A. (1984), The Disabled State, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Tankard, A. (2014), “Killer Consumptive in the Wild West: the Posthumous Decline of Doc Holliday” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 26–37, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Valentine, James (2002), “Naming and Narrating Disability in Japan,” in Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (eds.), Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, 213–27, London and New York: Continuum.

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Introduction Disabilities in Motion JONATHAN HSY, TORY V. PEARMAN, AND JOSHUA R. EYLER

0.1. MARKING DISABILITY: SIN AND CURE? How do we know disability when we encounter it? What are its markers? The cover image of this book, a detail from an image in a fourteenth-century Latin surgery manual most likely produced in what is now southern France, depicts people on their way to consult a physician (Montpellier, Museé Atger, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Medicine, MS 89ter, fol. 95 recto). One man, whose limbs appear limp, is being supported by another; a different man, depicted with an enlarged foot and lower right leg, moves with crutches under each arm. The man using crutches exploits one technological adaptation for permanently or temporarily impaired mobility (if this person were depicted using a walking stick instead, the device might alternatively activate a different set of associations: blindness, impaired vision, mobility affected by advancing age, or some combination thereof). The man being supported by another could be experiencing paralysis, sickness, or any number of physical or mental conditions that might motivate him and friends, family, or caretakers to seek medical expertise. Any of the people portrayed in this scene could exhibit forms of disability that might not be perceived on first encounter or are difficult to render recognizable through visual media. Speech, hearing, mental, and motor capacities as well as experiences of chronic pain or illness can change over the lifespan of any individual, with inevitable shifts in bodily capacity occurring in the process of human aging. Attending carefully to the visual rhetorics of this medieval surgical manual opens up ways to find disability beyond seemingly self-evident external markers, and the illustration itself leaves open the question of what disability is supposed to “mean” to a contemporary audience. Some of the most iconic scenes of disability in medieval culture derive not from medical manuals, but rather from accounts of miraculous cure derived from the Gospels; such portrayals—in textual iterations and in the visual arts—often grapple with the question of whether disability is inevitably understood as a mark of sin or if it serves another purpose, such as displaying the healing powers of the divine. In John 1:9–2, Jesus restores the sight of a man born blind from birth—represented in medieval art through external markers of blindness such as closed eyes (or pupils otherwise not depicted), a walking stick, or a guide dog—and before curing the blind man in the biblical account, Jesus clarifies that neither the man nor his parents sinned to cause the man’s blindness (Figure 0.1 and Figure 0.2). In Mark 7:31–7, the divine touch of Jesus cures a deaf– mute, opening up the man’s ears and mouth and enabling him to speak (Jesus speaks the Aramaic command “Ephphatha!” meaning “Be opened!” in Mark 7:34).

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DISABILITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES

FIGURE 0.1  Christ heals a blind man (Maastricht Hours in French, 1400–25), fol. 135r. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_ms_17_ f135r.

FIGURE 0.2  Healing of the blind man and raising of Lazarus (Spain, 1129–34). Metropolitan Art Museum, via Creative Commons. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search/471846.

INTRODUCTION

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In secular texts such as chivalric romance, the healing of wounds signals the healer’s virtue (whether the healer is a hermit, knight, or maiden), and in saints’ lives and religious writings, the curing of various disabilities (such as blindness, deafness, and paralysis) serves to valorize the sanctity of the miracle worker. A rich array of medieval texts depict pilgrims seeking healing at shrines of holy saints, and assistive devices such as crutches, walking sticks, or hand-trestles feature prominently in visual art to mark conditions for which one might desire cure; in the illustrated fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter produced in England, assistive devices denote impaired mobility, blindness, and lameness (Figure 0.3). In the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), a group of pilgrims diverse in gender, age, health, physical appearance, social class, and regional background gather to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury (where a medieval traveler could seek healing or give thanks for prior recovery). The Wife of Bath is “somdel deef” or hard of hearing (Chaucer 2008: line 446), the Cook’s shin features a “mormal” or open sore (Chaucer 2008: line 386), the Summoner’s face is “fyr-reed” (firered) with markers of an incurable skin condition that frightens children (Chaucer 2008: lines 623–8), the Pardoner’s high voice and beardlessness imply an uncertain gender or sexuality (Chaucer 2008: lines 687–91), and the pilgrims have divergent motivations for travel: some might seek healing, but the vast majority of them seem comfortable in their bodies as they are. Through a wide array of textual and artistic representations, medieval culture asked how and why bodies get marked as impaired or divergent from social conventions, and medieval people found ways to explore whether sin and cure are the only ways of understanding disability itself (Hsy 2017). Appreciating the fullness and complexity of disability in the Middle Ages means confronting long-lived assumptions that disability in this era and the people who lived

FIGURE 0.3  Miracle at Mont St. Michel: pilgrims in motion (Luttrell Psalter, England, 1325– 40), fol. 104v. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer. aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_f104v.

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with disabilities during this time were merely markers of sin. Close attention to religious, literary, artistic, and medical evidence helps to create a nuanced and thick cultural history of disability and showcases the agency of—and varied lives led by—people who we might now consider disabled. Religious beliefs and spiritual practices were plastic and attitudes toward disability were often shaped by varied cultural scripts as well as local social circumstances; individuals also had inventive strategies for determining their own responses to disability in the world around them. A careful examination of visual and artistic works demonstrates how readily medieval understandings of disability veer from social scripts of sin or cure. In the widely influential secular romance Roman de la Rose (composed in French verse by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the thirteenth century), the allegorical figure Vieillesse (Old Age) is grammatically feminine and also personified as a woman. Amans (the Lover) has a dream in which he encounters personifications exploring facets of fin’amor or courtly love. Marking a divergence from the idealized youth and beauty of maidens in aristocratic culture, Vieillesse is excluded from the Garden of Love and is depicted in the visual tradition accompanying the text as if a statue ensconced inside a niche on the stone wall that surrounds the garden (Figure 0.4). Vieillesse has wrinkles on her face, and her clothing suggests a middling social status (she wears a humble headdress and a simple blue dress covered by an apron); moreover, she uses crutches under each arm, an apparent functional adaptation to aid her mobility in later life. Such imagery casts old age (and its associated physical changes and impairments) as undesirable and the basis for exclusion from courtly society, yet this seemingly “static” personification of Vieillesse is nonetheless portrayed as if the figure is in motion and has her own agency independent from her apparently fixed meaning as an allegorical figure. Even if the work’s visual program and textual rhetoric seek to disqualify Vieillesse from full participation in social life, reading the visual imagery “literally” in this instance (as it were, as an accidental representation of an old, impaired, non-elite woman within a courtly genre) opens up a potential space for attending to strategies of adaptation and thriving under adverse circumstances. Vieillesse is of course a personification allegory and not a “real” medieval woman, so reading too much into the markers of disability in the Roman de la Rose and its illustrative tradition can only go so far. One vivid account of a historical woman’s lived experience of disability is recorded in a fourteenth-century illustrated manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5716), an anthology of miracle stories known as Vie et Miracles de Saint Louis (Life and Miracles of Saint Louis) by a Dominican friar Guillaume de Saint-Pathus (Figure 0.5). In addition to narrating the life of King Louis IX of France (also known as Saint Louis), this work recounts miracles that took place at Louis’ tomb, confirming his sanctity. Miracle 49 relates the story of Agnès de Pontoise, a household servant for a local bourgeois household, who becomes blind at the age of thirty due to a tumor; after a miraculous cure upon her devout prayer at Louis’ tomb, she takes up wool spinning until at least age forty-five. As Hannah Skoda has observed, “physical proximity with the suffering was, for Louis, a way of both identifying with the penitential implications of their pain and of revealing his Christian charity” (Skoda 2010: 59). Such a collection of stories serves primarily to demonstrate the sanctity of Louis more than it intends to relate the experiences of those who seek healing at his tomb, but this work nonetheless suggests multifaceted modes of relating to disability beyond cultural scripts of sin or cure.

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FIGURE 0.4  Vieillesse or Old Age (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, Lyon, France, c. 1487), fol. 10v. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/ manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_4425_f010v.

In the text and illustrations of Vie et Miracles de Saint Louis, Agnès does not navigate the world with the aid of a walking stick, nor a dog (as blind men are often portrayed; note images above), since these two modes of navigation were acknowledged as unreliable and only used as a “last resort” if a blind person did not have access to alternative options (Metzler 2013b: 178). Agnès draws upon her existing social support network of family members and professional communities of women to move through the world. On the left in the image, Agnès is examined by doctors; in the middle, her older sister touches her shoulder while Agnès grasps her robe. The text states that Agnès moves about just as

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FIGURE 0.5  Agnès de Pontoise, a blind spinner, led by her sister to the shrine of Louis IX. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5716, fol. 633v. Public domain; Gallica Online. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8447303m/f640.item.

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the blind do (“aloit ausi comme les avugles vont”), touching her hand to the shoulder of whoever leads her or holding onto the guide by the robe (“tentant sa main sus l’espaule de celui qui la menoit, ou le tenoit par sa robe”) (Fay 1932: 180). On the right, she miraculously is cured while visiting the saint’s tomb. This narrative is sensitively attuned to the lived experience of its characters and provides subtle stories of adapting to and accommodating disability, incorporating blind ways of orientation and mobility as well as flexible structures of support. The text offers access to everyday realities of Agnès’ lived experience, and the narrative adapts to blind modes of perception. When Agnès loses her sight (“perdi du tout la veue”), she cannot see sun, candlelight, nor fire: “ele ne veoit rien du monde, neis la clarté du soleil ou la lumiere de la chandele ou du feu” (Fay 1932: 180). In relating things unseen, the text brings forward phenomena that can be vividly felt and (in case of fire) heard. As much as Vie et Miracles de Saint Louis might be motivated by narratives of cure, the storytelling (in both modalities of text and image) nonetheless dwells with blindness and finds ways to approximate alien life experiences otherwise inaccessible to sighted people. This work situates a disabled person not as an isolated individual, but rather as a subject integrated into a social network and community, and the work attentively reveals disabled forms of agency and knowledge-making. Dominant cultural scripts can present disability as pitiable, undesirable, or requiring cure, but mindful readings of medieval texts and art reveal a remarkable openness to disability as a locus for creative adaptation, basis for knowledge-making, and impetus for reconfigured social structures. Several chapters in this volume demonstrate just how pervasively disability reshapes medieval notions of sin, spirituality, and community. Edward Wheatley’s chapter, for example, outlines how blindness in the Latin West accrued ambiguous meanings, coming to be linked with sin through its use as punishment (both political and divine), while also generating new possibilities for communal care through the establishment of institutions for the blind throughout Europe. Julie Singer’s examination of deafness similarly illustrates the multifaceted ways people adapted to the social disadvantages associated with embodied difference; although deafness was often linked to spiritual or intellectual obstinacy, the physical condition in itself did not hinder people from economically participating in their communities. Kisha G. Tracy traces how speechlessness, a condition often associated with deafness, facilitated forms of community as alternatives to a mainstream culture. While literary and legal instances of the removal of the tongue as punishment for a sin of speech result in an association of lack of speech with sin, voluntary speechlessness—such as that of monks—could mark a commitment to a spiritual life grounded in silence as a virtue. Moreover, Eliza Buhrer explains that medieval literature can position sin as a barrier to reason, but nonetheless theologians and philosophers present complex understandings of intellectual impairment that recognize its biological, congenital, and humoral dimensions. Detailed discussions of medical, hagiographical, legal, religious, and literary representations of disability suggest a dynamic symbiosis of disability and sin that has the potential to perpetually transform social realities and perceptions. By suggesting the many possible dimensions of disability that could be made available through scenes of cure (miraculous or medical), we seek to elucidate manifold forms and meanings of disability beyond seemingly “obvious” external markers. The academic field of medieval disability studies has expanded in a relatively short amount of time and has broadly shifted from an initial medical approach (examining phenomena such as deafness, blindness, or lameness as conditions requiring treatment or cure) to situating

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understandings of disability within a cultural environment and exploring how forms and meanings of disability are shaped by society. In this book’s cover image, the body of the actual physician–surgeon is “off stage,” with just the tip of his black shoe visible on the bottom left; this luxuriously clothed shoe marks a distinct contrast to the bare feet of the humble and rustic people in motion seeking treatment. By placing the figure of medical authority “off stage,” this book’s cropped cover image appropriately centers the disabled subjects themselves, while also setting disability in motion. How might we (modern readers and scholars) understand medieval disability from the vantage point of disabled people themselves? How was medieval disability understood, perceived, felt, and experienced? This volume offers disability not as an explanatory mechanism or stable “object” of analysis in history, but rather as a capacious entry point into more questions. This book invites readers to interrogate cultural assumptions about the meaning, matter, and manifestations of disability—in the Middle Ages as well as today.

0.2. ORIENTING DISABILITY: LANGUAGES AND LOCATIONS In our opening discussion of visual and textual representations of disability, we follow the lead of disability historian Kristina L. Richardson, whose scholarship on medieval Islamic social contexts calls for a move away from positioning disabled people as mere “objects” of study to situating disabled people as “subjects” of their own stories, both in the past as well as in the present (Richardson 2012a). In line with our efforts to shift scholarly attention away from medical approaches to disability, we urge a social constructivist mode; that is, we approach disability not as an inherent quality of “marked” or problematic individuals, but focus on disability’s construction by a surrounding society and culture. As Richardson remarks: “If one can view gender and the body as constructed by culture and social conventions, as modern theorists of gender claim, then one should be comfortably able to regard disability and ability as constructed categories” (Richardson 2012a: 128). An attentive reading of a medieval medical manual that would appear to visually stereotype bodies that we might now consider disabled can nonetheless open up flexible modes of expanding the social contours of disability and attending to lived experience in the historical past. The historical contexts addressed in this volume fall within “the Middle Ages,” a time frame encompassing the years 800–1450 CE according to timelines established by Western Europe. As medieval historian of medicine Monica H. Green observes, “the Middle Ages” is a term that aligns itself with “western European history,” implying the notion of a “middle period” situated “between the supposed cultural peaks of antiquity and the Renaissance,” and “the Middle Ages” have become “part of the narrative that Christian culture has told itself” (Green 2010c: 2). This volume acknowledges its own bias toward Western Europe, but even so, the broader history of this book’s cover image offers a useful reminder of the ubiquitous forms of cross-cultural interconnectedness characterizing the medieval world. The text from which the cover illustration derives—a manual produced in Europe and written out in Latin—is ultimately a translation of a twelfth-century Arabic treatise attributed to Albucasis (Abu al-Qasim, or Al-Zahrawi), a renowned healer from the multiethnic and multi-faith milieu of Islamic Spain (Glick et al. 2006: 526–8). Green’s scholarship on Latin translations of Albucasis demonstrates the multidirectional flows of medieval medical knowledge: ancient Greek traditions were refined, augmented, and recontextualized throughout a networked Islamic world and in

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turn transformed by local practices of translation and illustration upon divergent points of entry into Europe (Green 2011), and this book’s cover image aptly depicts bodies in motion moving toward their own goals and desires. Across the medieval world—centuries prior to the invention of the term “disability” itself—the range of vocabularies and cultural frameworks that might approximate disability are diverse and invite modern-day scholars to consider flexible features of human variety far beyond seemingly self-evident categories such as blindness, deafness, or lameness. In Islamic medieval contexts (including those from which Albucasis’ original text arises), conceptions of human disability were expressed by the classical Arabic term ‘aha (“blight” or “damage”), a word “not intrinsically linked to the human body”—as it could be extended to crops as well as nonhuman animals—and the term did not so much track physical disability as designate “a mark that spoils the presumed wholeness, integrity, or aesthetics of something” (Richardson 2012a: 125). In Jewish rabbinic texts, the closest term might be mum (“blemish”), encompassing physical and sensory impairments but not always deafness (Watts Belser and Lemhaus 2016: 345). Byzantine texts might refer to “ever-suffering (or troubled) people” and as such “the Byzantine vocabulary of disability was rich but ‘flexible’” at least within hagiographical texts (Efthymiadis 2016: 391; Samama 2016). In the medieval Latin West, the closest one might come to an umbrella category for “disability” is infirmus (“infirm,” “weak,” or “sick”—whether the condition is temporary or permanent) or its cognates in vernacular languages (Metzler 2006: 5; Scarborough 2018: 16). Such a range of understandings attentive to human vulnerability and variation thwart any modern Western sense of “disability” defined by limitations (individual or social) associated with what any given body can be and do. Historicizing medieval forms of somatic variation marked as deviant, unusual, or extraordinary can yield cultural frameworks that surprise us today: left-handedness or blue eyes could be conceived as “blights” in Islamicate contexts (Richardson 2012b); lycanthropy, or becoming-werewolf, was a locus of social anxiety and a challenge to social categories in the Latin West (Bynum 2005; Pearman 2010: 73–112; Cohen 2012); and leprosy had a range of complex meanings, representations, and social consequences throughout all of medieval Afro-Eurasia (Green 2014; 2017). Chapters in this volume by Aleksandra Pfau and Eliza Buhrer, which address “mental health issues” and “learning difficulties,” respectively, affirm that modern understanding and vocabulary do not always transfer neatly onto medieval conceptions of disability, and medieval frameworks thwart modern attempts to disassociate mind, body, and spirit. Pfau demonstrates that no single discourse—religious, medical, legal, nor literary—exerts complete dominance over how mental illness is identified, interpreted, and treated by a community. Buhrer likewise illustrates that approaches to “learning difficulties” of the past cannot simply impose modern medical concepts onto the medieval past, as medical, theological, and religious influences all affected not only the discursive frameworks, but also social responses to—and treatments of—people whose minds and learning modalities diverged from mainstream social expectations. As with all of the disabilities discussed on this volume, the medieval conceptions of mental and cognitive ability are complex; people with mental cognitive impairments could be viewed as dangerous or sinful and thus ostracized by their communities, or they could be cared for and integrated into their communities. This collection seeks neither to replicate stereotypical notions of the medieval past as a barbaric time when all disabled people were marginalized, abjected, or shunned, nor to romanticize the Middle Ages as some utopian time before the stigmatization of disability. A rosy view of disability in the medieval past takes its clearest form in the historian

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Henri-Jacques Stiker’s claim that “the disabled, the impaired, [and] the chronically ill were spontaneously part of the world and of a society that was accepted as being multifaceted, diversified, disparate” (Stiker 1999: 65). Social historian Irina Metzler instead characterizes disabled people as “liminal,” neither full participants in mainstream medieval society nor entirely excluded from it (Metzler 2013b: 7). A nuanced approach along the lines of Metzler is useful as a reminder of the unavoidable fact of human variation that inevitably puts every body (i.e., each individual person) in a liminal position vis-àvis disability itself. Bodies have always (and will always) change over time. Each person moves in and out of conditions of health and/or impairment, along with transformations that occur with age and shifts in sociocultural environment.

0.3. MODELING DISABILITY: IN MEDIAS RES It is working within a social constructivist mode—and the radical decentering of an autonomous and independent subject—that is the most generative aspect of “starting in the middle” in writing cultural histories of disability. Medieval literary and cultural studies is a field that explores thick modes of reframing disability that place any human “in the middle of things”—that is, situating people within social environments that interact with the body’s own features and potential. Monica H. Green explores disability and the “diversity of humankind” as evidenced through the circulation of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian medical knowledge throughout the medieval Mediterranean (Green 2010c); within the Latin West, people whose bodies were “marked” or viewed as inferior or socially disadvantaged (enslaved, women, Jews, Muslims, and “even the leprous and impaired”) could resist and navigate how they were categorized and how their bodies were perceived to signify (Green 2010a: 171). Medieval literary and cultural studies has long attended disability-related issues, even before an established scholarly discourse had emerged around “disability” per se. Cultural theorist Jeffrey J. Cohen’s formative work on monstrosity attended to hybrid bodies as disruptive and generative forms of category confusion (Cohen 1996), and Cohen’s critical insights have since informed recent assessments of the dynamic interplay of monstrosity and disability in medieval culture (Godden and Mittman 2019). Christopher Baswell’s initial framing of “eccentric” bodies in medieval practices of care and community has shifted to an emphasis on “disability networks” beyond any autonomous individual (Baswell 2003; 2017), and Richard Newhauser’s discussion of a multisensory Middle Ages might not “name” disability as such, but nonetheless attends carefully to medieval embodiment and lived experience via “sensory communities” (Newhauser 2014). Edward Wheatley’s “religious model” of disability (specifically situated within the frameworks of the Latin West) has most helpfully situated medieval people as psychosomatic wholes, recognizing how spirituality shapes understandings of the body (Wheatley 2010, and also in this volume). More recently, Richard H. Godden and Jessica Chase have turned their critical attention to the material and cultural dimensions of prosthetics to trace how human bodies act in codependency with nonhuman objects and agents in dynamic ecologies of interaction (Godden 2016, and also in this volume; Chase 2017), and Jonathan Hsy suggests how theorizing prosthetics (in the case of medieval miracle stories in which the transplanting of a leg from a dead “Ethiopian” or “Moor” reanimates a living European’s immobile leg) opens up as of yet unexplored possibilities for analyzing medieval constructions of race (Hsy 2018, and also discussed further below).

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Medieval disability studies has experienced rapid expansion over the past ten years. The focus on bodily ability and the notions of deviance that it creates emerged somewhat organically from the general centering of the body found in earlier medieval scholarship that began to consider issues of gender, sexuality, and identity formation in its use of feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer theories. Like many fields in their beginning stages, early medieval disability scholarship concentrated on establishing historically situated terms, definitions, and models that could facilitate a more multivalent understanding of disability in the Middle Ages than previously discussed in longue durée surveys of disability, while also establishing a “disability canon” of texts written by writers with disabilities or particularly suited for analysis through the lens of disability. Because medieval notions of the self and body were so often mediated through a matrix of spiritual, material, and cultural factors, medieval disability scholars readily rejected a medical model of disability that offered a static portrayal of the disabled body as a problem in need of treatment or cure. Metzler’s social model differentiated between impairment, or the physical reality of a condition of the body, and disability, or the social interpretation of that physical reality, with the caveat that an explicit awareness of disability (in the social sense) had not yet come to exist in the Middle Ages (Metzler 2006: 5). This emphasis on social interaction produced generative readings of medieval texts and bodies, but its reliance on a stark differentiation between impairment and disability hindered investigations of medieval examples in which disabling did occur. Metzler’s later focus on the liminality of medieval disability highlights its in-between nature, as opposed to insisting on the rigid distinction that the social model demands (Metzler 2013b). Building upon and adapting a social model, subsequent medieval disability scholars have added further nuance to understandings of disability in the Middle Ages. Wheatley’s religious model illuminated the spiritual dimensions of medieval disability, noting the discursive power of Western Christianity to shape interpretations and responses to disability in Latin-speaking Europe. Wheatley’s work demonstrates that there are biblical, religious, and literary discourses that associated inward sinfulness with outward physical difference (Wheatley 2010). We see this play out in literature that depicts some disabilities or disabling illnesses—such as Cresseid’s leprosy in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid or Gwennore’s blindness in Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal—as punishment for some kind of moral error. However, as noted above, this sort of response was not universally applied or accepted, and scholars like Joshua R. Eyler have advocated a cultural approach that examines disability in relation to its environment, keeping both physical dimensions and social interactions in mind (Eyler 2010: 6). Julie Singer has gone so far as to propose removing distinctions from disability and impairment altogether to focus on “the transformative effects that ‘disabled’ bodies might operate on other categories of social identity” (Singer 2012: 137). In order to facilitate such a process, Singer suggests a “transhuman” approach that moves beyond binaries to present an “elastic” conception of disability (Singer 2010b: 175). A more “elastic” conception of disability perhaps more accurately captures the multivalence of disability both in general and in the Middle Ages more specifically. Interpretations of and responses to disability are in constant flux, subject to their cultural, historical, and social locations. Notions of disability are also unique to specific conditions; as readers will note when reading the contributions to this volume alongside one another, responses to physical disabilities such as blindness may share some features with mental illnesses, but they will also disconnect from one another in distinct and even contradictory ways that reveal much about a society’s anxiety about or acceptance of bodily and mental

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difference (e.g., see Wheatley and Pfau in this volume). Both John P. Sexton’s and Richard H. Godden’s chapters highlight the uniquely medieval social horizons that influenced notions of normality in the Middle Ages. Sexton’s study of the “atypical” presents a diverse collection of literary perspectives that represent assorted bodily differences, including ulcers, beardlessness, queer gender expression, injury, congenital differences, and miraculous cure. Through his analysis of the varied and various representations of and responses to such bodies, Sexton shows that the medieval notion of the “atypical” is, much like that of today, a product of socially constructed norms. Godden’s examination of “mobility impairment” similarly focuses on physical difference in the context of social attitudes and cultural expectations. Texts and visual art reveal that mobility aids such as crutches, hand-trestles, walking sticks, wooden limbs, or wheelbarrows served practical purposes, but such prosthetic devices could convey deep symbolic meanings as well. Insofar as physical mobility is concerned, disabled people in the medieval past shared with their modern counterparts a need to access support and care and to navigate varied forms of social stigma and environmental barriers associated with embodied difference. The perceived identifiability of disability also affects its resonance within a community. In her study of disability, disease, and illness, Susan Wendell has asserted the importance of considering both readily and non-readily categorizable physical and mental conditions in explorations of disability and acknowledging that people with disabilities can be both healthy and unhealthy and that those with illnesses might and might not experience disabling symptoms (Wendell 2001). Scholars of medieval disability have begun to expand the reach of their investigations, bringing illnesses such as leprosy, inevitable conditions such as old age, and socially disabling identity categories such as femaleness, femininity, and race into the theoretical matrix of disability. Alicia Spencer-Hall’s chapter in this volume further illustrates the complex and sometimes conflicting ways in which the contours of disability blur, particularly when placed in conversation with chronic pain and illness. In her examination of the chronic pains and illnesses of a pilgrim healed by the Franciscan beguine Douceline, Spencer-Hall demonstrates the ways in which cure cannot completely instate able-bodiedness. By emphasizing an experience of disability that is oft-neglected, Spencer-Hall uncovers the spectral nature of “cured” disability, a facet that could be easily missed in a reading concentrated on visible and/or easily identified disabilities. Another critical strategy that medieval disability scholars are using that illustrates and exploits the “elasticity” of medieval disability is (re)turning to the field of monster studies to enrich analyses of embodied difference. Monster studies has long provided a framework through which to think critically about medieval bodies that exceed the limits of the norm. As “difference made flesh,” monsters, like people with disabilities, compel questions of normality and deviance, sameness and difference, and the self and the Other (Cohen 1996: 7). Medieval depictions of murderous giants, monstrous births, and the “deformed” or even animal-like features of non-Western or non-Christian peoples communicate social anxieties about cultural fictions rooted in the body, including hypermasculinity, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Bringing the disability perspective into considerations of the monstrous (and vice versa) has the potential to enhance each perspective by illuminating the ways in which the language of each frames and informs the other and demonstrating that, although disabled and monstrous bodies are not one and the same, they are discursively produced as (un)intelligible in similar ways. The forthcoming collection on monstrosity, disability, and the posthuman by Asa Mittman and Richard H. Godden promises to provide a model by which future explorations of disability and monstrosity might offer greater insight into the ways in which embodied

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otherness not only reveals uncertainty about the (un)known, but also provides the potential to resist normalizing narratives by compelling intersectional critiques of both monstrosity and disability (Godden and Mittman 2019).

0.4. INTERSECTIONS: DISABILITY, GENDER, RACE, AND MANY HORIZONS Intersectionality—a concept originally addressing the structural marginalization of black women by acknowledging the interplay of race and gender as concurrent domains of social difference (Crenshaw 1991)—has become vital to contemporary modes of cultural analysis. Intersectional approaches addressing concurrent phenomena of gender, race, sexuality, and class have come to inform “intersections” among disciplines with medieval studies (Metzler 2011) and modes of disability-centered cultural analysis today (James and Wu 2006; Kafer and Kim 2018). Tory V. Pearman has explored how queer and feminist paradigms contextualize medieval representations of leprosy, masculinity, and womanhood in late medieval England (Pearman 2010; 2015; 2019). Roland Betancourt charts new frontiers in the field of Byzantine sensory studies and intersectionality (Betancourt 2018; forthcoming). Geraldine Heng’s paradigm-shifting book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, posits medieval race as a social system of managing human difference and distributing power: “race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences” (Heng 2018: 19). Although Heng does not name disability as such, this structural approach to social analysis resonates with interpretive paradigms in both contemporary and medieval disability studies. Influential disability theorist Lennard Davis approaches disability not as a static category but as a set of relations between the body and the world (Davis 2002), and Irina Metzler makes a parallel move in casting disability along the lines of gender or race as an “analytical tool” for cultural history (Metzler 2011). A proliferation of new paradigms for disability continues to shape contemporary contexts from “extraordinary” bodies to the reframing of analytical methods beyond binaries of the disabled body versus the “able-bodied” or “abled” or “nondisabled” or “normate” body (Garland-Thomson 1997) to capacious and variable notions of “debility” and “capacity” (Puar 2017), and the “inbetweenity” of social belongings (Brueggemann 2009) is increasingly informing medieval disability studies as well. Julie Orlemanski notes a strategic anachronism in the term “medieval disability” itself that makes it operate as a “historical prosthesis” (Orlemanski 2016); such a framework allows an entry point into the historical past, as well as a careful interrogation of terms embedded in any particular cultural moment. Disability is always at the intersection of social phenomena such as gender and sexuality, as Garland-Thomson remarked in her early calls to integrate feminism and disability theory (Garland-Thomson 2002), and as Pearman illustrates in her study of gender, sexuality, and disability in medieval literature (Pearman 2010). Medieval disability studies adapts its available frameworks while generating new ones, including a “chronicity” of lived experience (Alicia Spencer-Hall, in this volume), “dismodern” subjectivities (Godden 2016), forthcoming work at the medieval intersections of racial difference, queer desire, and trans* and nonbinary gender embodiments (Bychowski 2018; 2019; Kim and Bychowski 2019; Kao forthcoming), and multifaceted articulations of gender, race, and sensory modes of knowing and somatic experience (Betancourt 2018; 2020). The chapters in this volume showcase the medieval past as heterogeneous in embodiments, languages, cultures, religions, and geographies, and this volume contributes to a broader

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understanding of the plurality of the Middle Ages. It is an era (if it is indeed “one” era) that demonstrates a dynamic interplay among languages (including Latin and vernaculars) and cultural perspectives. This heterogeneity of orientations toward disability in and beyond the Latin West departs from a general tendency in earlier medieval scholarship to narrate the study of disability through a sequence of discrete “models” (Eyler 2010; Godden and Hsy 2013), and it is the hope of this volume’s editors that future approaches to disability in the historical past and present will continue to attend to disability’s complex and generative intersections with gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, language, and social class. In order to help the reader access the heterogeneity of the medieval past, this volume’s chapters use discrete “channels” of disability as their entry points. These chapters span from readily identifiable disabilities, such as mobility impairments, blindness, and deafness, to other less easily discernible disabilities, such as chronic pain and mental illness. In the past as well as the present, any one person can have multiple disabilities, and disability itself as a cultural phenomenon always intersects with multiple domains of difference. Some of the disabilities addressed in this volume are temporary, others permanent; some are physical, others mental or cognitive; and some share features with illness or other diseases or impairments, while others are more clearly classifiable. The “channels” represented here thus are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and some chapters will intersect with, depart from, or even contradict others. Indeed, these “channels” are meant to be in flux—to communicate with, inform, refine, and challenge one another. This “movement” between, around, and through the chapters presented here closely simulates the bodies in motion that this collection seeks to analyze and reflects the motion of the category disability itself. The chapters that follow do not intend to present a unified, all-encompassing, or static understanding of disability in the Middle Ages. Instead, they provide varied pathways—or “channels”—into, around, and through the disabled bodies at their center. As a result, this collection demonstrates that disability is perpetually reinventing itself and reconfiguring social relations and cultural scripts. In the distant past as well as the present, disability moves in relation to cultural, social, and historical forces.

0.5. RECONFIGURED FLESH: DISABILITY, RACE, AND GENDER The concluding “case study” in our introduction demonstrates the vitality of intersectional approaches to medieval disability. We examine a much-retold story appearing in vernacular languages throughout the Latin West ultimately derived from the thirteenthcentury Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) of Jacobus de Voragine with a robust tradition in visual art: the miracle of a leg transplant attributed to the physician–martyrs Saints Cosmas and Damian (Figure 0.6). This miracle is most commonly associated with two physicians originally identified as Arabs from what is now Syria, and the “multiple lives” of the story in texts and in visual art suggests a cultural symbiosis between religious and medical paradigms for disability and healing. Varied iterations of this story across time and space reveal how concurrent modes of embodied difference (including race and disability) interact in local medieval contexts. In the Latin tradition and its subsequent vernacular iterations across Europe, a man in Rome who has a cancerous leg makes devout prayers to the martyred saints, and while he is asleep the saintly pair appear with the necessary materials (ointments and iron razors: unguenta [et] ferramenta) to remove the man’s rotten flesh and replace the gap with new flesh:

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FIGURE 0.6  Saints Cosmas and Damian perform a miraculous transplantation of a leg. Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, Spain, c. 1495. Public domain; Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:A_verger%27s_dream-_Saints_Cosmas_and_Damian_performing_a_miraculous_ cure_by_transplantation_of_a_leg._Oil_painting_attributed_to_the_Master_of_Los_Balbases,_ ca._1495._WDL3251.png.

“From where shall we take flesh in order that, having cut away the rotten flesh, we may fill up the empty place?” Then the other said: In the cemetery of St. Peter ad Vincula an Ethiopian today was recently buried: from him therefore bring [flesh] that we may

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supply this [man]. And, behold, he hurried to that cemetery and brought the leg of the Moor and, cutting off the leg of the sick man, inserted in its place the leg of the Moor. (Walter 2016: 1350) [ubi carnes accipiemus, ut, abscisa carne putrida locum vacuum repleamus? Tunc ait alter: in cimiterio sancti Petri ad vincula hodie Aethiops recens sepultus est, de illo ergo autem affer, ut huic suppleamus. Et ecce ad illud cimiterium properavit et coxam Mauri attulit, praecidentesque coxam infirmi loco ejus coxam Mauri inseruerunt.] (Graesse 1850: 639) The ensuing miracle relates how the Moor’s leg successfully replaces the Roman’s removed leg, and the Roman’s diseased flesh is discarded in the Moor’s tomb with the rest of the dead body. In her reading of this miracle tradition, Katie L. Walter notes that “the prosthetic capacity of flesh is made to extend between bodies in order to substitute for an absent part: the living flesh of a dead man is exchanged for the dead flesh of a living man” (Walter 2016: 1351). The entire miracle “raises similar questions to those that modern implants and prostheses are understood to also raise,” troubling the perceived “boundaries of the human and of the individual,” as well as the “relationship between the animate and the inanimate,” and “resist[ing] binary invocations of natural/artificial, living/dead, human/ non-human, inside/outside” (Walter 2016: 1351). Whether or not medieval Europeans actually believed such leg transplants were medically feasible, this extraordinary miracle story illustrates the dynamic flexibility of medieval conceptions of race and disability and how such categories of difference depend upon one another. The Latin text initially identifies the dead body specifically as “Ethiopian” (Aethiops) before substituting the broader and more racially and geographically capacious term “Moor” (Maurus), and the category confusion posed by the flesh of the Ethiopian/ Moor once it is transplanted into the gap in the Roman’s body reverberates throughout the rest of the story. The saintly pair of Cosmas and Damian trouble any easy distinction between “self” and “other” in the text (one holy physician is speaking to the other, yet the text does not specify who is addressing whom), and the fact that these martyred surgeons are performing the miracle posthumously further emphasizes the incarnational miracle’s dislodging of fixed categories of living and dead. Moreover, the story demonstrates how the disappearance of a marked disability (through surgical replacement) coincides with an apparent emergence of a marked racial difference (through the leg of an Ethiopian/Moor) and jostles existing modes of knowing and perception: The man [i.e., the Roman] woke up, felt no pain, put his hand to his leg, and detected no lesion. He held a candle to the leg and could see nothing wrong with it, and began to wonder whether he was himself or somebody else. Then he came to his senses, bounded joyfully from his bed, and told everyone about what he had seen in his dreams and how he had been healed. (Ryan 1995: 197) [Evigilans autem cum se sine dolore sensisset, manum ad coxam apposuit et nil laesionis invenit, apponensque candelam cum crure nil mali videret, cogitabat, an non ipse, qui erat, sed alius alter esset. Rediens autem ad se prae gaudio de lectulo prosiliit et quid in somnis viderat et qualiter sanatus fuerat, omnibus enarravit.] (Graesse 1850: 639) The disorienting effects of this narrative confound stable understandings of race or disability. The man awakes and “began to wonder whether he was himself or somebody

INTRODUCTION

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else,” and he tests the new reality of his bodily integrity first through sensation (“felt no pain”), then touch (“put his hand to his leg, and detected no legion”), then through sight (he could “see nothing wrong”) aided by a candle, and then finally by motion (he jumps and “bounded joyfully from his bed”). The story moves the reader through states of chronic pain, amputation, limb replacement, and regained mobility, with sensory modalities of touch and sight testing ever-shifting social realities. All the while, the Latin text withholds from the reader any overt indication of how racial difference is discerned (e.g., the text does not explicitly announce any perceived physical distinction between the body of the Roman and the inserted flesh of the Ethiopian/Moor). The text’s movements across languages and artistic media beyond the Legenda Aurea demonstrate how the story’s provisional alignments of disability and race are locally adapted and reconceived. The fifteenth-century Alphabet of Tales composed in Middle English identifies the posthumous leg donor as a man “of Ynde” (i.e., “India” or somewhere unspecified in the Middle East), yet the text soon drops any markers of geographical origin, referring only to a “whik” (quick; i.e., living) leg and a “dede” (dead) leg instead (Banks 1904–5: 153–4). In late fifteenth-century Iberian visual art, it became the predominating convention to depict the leg of the donor (be it Ethiopian or Moor) as dark, thereby creating a clear visible contrast between the transplanted flesh and that of the European man’s living body. As Carmen Fracchia observes: “it was especially after the reconquest of Andalusia from the Moors in 1248 that churches dedicated to these holy doctors [Saints Cosmas and Damian] in urban centres such as Burgos, Leon, Oviedo, and Valencia spread throughout Spain” (Fracchia 2013: 79), and in images produced in Burgos, such as the representation of the scene by the Master of Los Balbases around 1495, the Moor’s leg had come to be understood as dark-skinned. Although the European’s removed (white) leg now lies on the floor, the (dark) body of the dead Moor is absent from view. In a local Iberian context, the absence of the Moor’s body suggests the recent expulsion of the Moors from the realms of Castile and León (Fracchia 2013: 80), and a convenient artistic device for distinguishing between the flesh of the donor and of the recipient (the use of differential skin color) has deep sociopolitical implications: the white Christian body has become whole through Moorish absence, yet a trace of Moorish presence persists nonetheless. An intersectional approach to the many afterlives of the miracle of Saints Cosmas and Damian showcases the potency of prosthesis as a key concept underpinning both medieval disability and medieval race. To adapt the influential theory of “narrative prosthesis” as formulated by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, disability (in this case, the cancerous leg and its inevitable replacement) is an “opportunistic metaphoric device” upon which the miracle story depends (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 47). In a material and literal sense, prosthesis (i.e., the surgical insertion of a substitute limb) creates bodily wholeness while still rendering disjunctures openly visible. The deployment of a dark, non-European leg in the visual tradition furthermore enacts a process of medieval Western “race-making” under local “conditions of possibility” (Heng 2018: 4). In a medieval European context, skin color is only one possible mode of marking racial distinctions (in other contexts, clothing or other physical features are the more salient factors), and the representational strategy of depicting the “donor” leg as dark in this particular artwork makes perceptible the whiteness of the otherwise “unmarked” European (male) body. Moreover, the artist’s disinterest in rendering the full body of the non-European “donor” leaves unresolved the theologically and politically unsettling question of whether a dark non-European is afforded the full humanity that the European claims.

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In the early modern period, the visual tradition of the leg transplant miracle in Spain evidenced congealing associations between blackness and slavery, increasingly aligning the darkness of the Moor or Ethiopian with signifiers of subservience or inferior social position (Fracchia 2013: 81), and divergent transmigrations of such iconographical traditions carry over in later periods into New World colonial contexts (Duffin 2013). In medieval Spain (e.g., in Burgos around 1495), the meanings of embodied difference erratically “marked” through skin color or through what we might now call disability were still in flux, and the close attention to the local and period-specific contexts of cultural artifacts in this analysis offers one brief example of how future intersectional approaches to disability might proceed. Texts and artifacts from the distant past offer generative opportunities for thickly reassessing dynamic interactions of race, religion, class, and gender. Performing intersectional analysis in disability studies—in medieval Europe and beyond—not only requires a deep awareness of local environments and contexts, but also entails movement across academic disciplines, languages, and source materials. Literature, medicine, material artifacts, and cultural theory all play a role in transforming our understanding of a more capacious Middle Ages and in rejuvenating continued reassessments of social structures past and present.

CHAPTER ONE

Atypical Bodies Seeking after Meaning in Physical Difference JOHN P. SEXTON

Medieval bodies, like their modern equivalents, exist in a dynamic environment that is largely adapted to the needs and abilities of the majority. The means and definition of work; the expectations of productiveness and speed; the accommodation of bodies at play or rest; the easy availability of bodily attire and accoutrement; the shape and scale of constructed things; access to sites of worship and labor—all of these are informed by the measure of the imagined, composite human body.1 The resulting environment, or context, is then experienced subjectively, reflecting back on the discrete body of each member of the community in a constant negotiation between the perceived normal or typical body and the actual fact of an individual physical self. Each body, then, is typical to the extent that it works within and adapts to the environment supposedly created for its use, and atypical in the ways in which and to the degree that the self diverges from expected generic form, function, and needs. Some deviations are trivial for social purposes, while others carry persistent consequences or insurmountable obstacles in their difference from the normate body.2 The resulting dissociation of the atypical body from the idea—or ideal—of the normal body is a matter of degree rather than inclusion or exclusion. The vast majority of bodies deviate from the consensus normate. The resulting social consequences of specific physical differences, however, may in many cases exaggerate the degree of exclusionary distance. The experience of exclusionary distance is closed off by the individual body only considered as a present knowledge, since bodily experience is not constant for any individual. Injury, illness, age, and circumstance all affect the relationship of the individual self to the normate standard. As a result, each person is likely to have developed a subjective and evolving etiology of what constituted disability.3 Any attempt to survey the medieval period broadly or intersectionally will necessarily privilege certain discourses (particularly those accessing writing or artistic expression), certain demographics, and certain cultures. This chapter, for example, makes no claim to universality, offering instead a few cases (drawn primarily from western medieval Europe and disproportionately from my chosen field of northern European literature) and a few preliminary attempts at the broader implications for the study of medieval experience of the marked or atypical body. The common link among the cases discussed below is an appreciable and conscious alienation of the subject body from its contextually normate coeval.

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1.1. CAN AN INDIVIDUAL BE ATYPICAL? In the final section of his eponymous saga, the warrior and poet Egil Skallagrimsson suffers progressively greater impairments of his body due to the combined effects of age, illness, and a lifelong struggle with physical deformity.4 Once famous for his strength and wit, Egil endures the diminution of his body and senses. He grows stifflegged, bent, frail, incontinent, hard of hearing, and, eventually, blind. Egil endures, as well, the contempt of those around him as his venerable, vulnerable body becomes an inconvenience to them. He is abused by his daughter’s servants, who begrudge him a place by the fire when it interferes with their work. As ever, he catalogs his experience in verse: My head bobs like a bridled horse it plunges baldly into woe; my middle leg both droops and drips while both my ears are dry … Blind I wandered to sit by the fire, asked the flame-maiden for peace; such affliction I bear on the border where my eyebrows cross. (Egil’s Saga ch.85)5 Egil’s physical condition is, in part, the consequence of old age, but is possibly exacerbated by the late-stage symptoms of a bone disease.6 It is, through a new manifestation of physical difference, only the last form of a body marked by difference throughout its story. Throughout his life, Egil experiences the alienation of his self through his identification as physically, even biologically, atypical. Egil is the abnormally large son and grandson of shape-shifters, the great-grandson of a berserk, and the twicegreat nephew of a man called Hallbjorn the Half-Troll—but also the prosaically different. Egil is described as a “very ugly” boy who grows into a bald man “with a wide forehead, bushy brows, and a nose that was not long but extremely broad … his chin and jaw were exceptionally broad” (Egil’s Saga ch.31, 55). His forehead slopes over his eyes so far that on one memorable occasion, he squints so that his eyebrow rests down on his cheek. Long after his death (again according to his saga), Egil’s bones were moved to a new grave in a churchyard at Mosfell. The evidence given for this is the discovery, during a later renovation, of bones “much larger than normal human bones” and a skull “astonishingly large and even more incredible for its weight [which] was all ridged on the outside, like a scallop shell” (Egil’s Saga ch.86). Monstrosity is most usefully thought of in modern disability studies as teratological rather than fantastical difference. It is complicated within a medieval context, however, by the fluidity with which source materials move between—and occasionally collapse— these nodes. The monstrous human, a problematic term in modern thought, is a feature of medieval conceptions of the atypical body. The nature and range of human bodies, in medieval thought, accommodates monstrosity without necessarily positing a concomitant loss of humanity. Egil, descended from trolls, lycanthropes, berserks, and the merely unbeautiful, is both monstrous and eminently human.7 The act of interpretation by others, including those who attribute the misshapen bones to Egil, must be understood as operating within a more generous—if sometimes, to our sensibilities, cruel or dehumanizing—definition of human bodies.

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It is, of course, significant that the saga identifies the bones as Egil’s on the basis of their monstrosity, rather than demonstrating Egil’s atypical bones from a burial known to be his (Bragg 2004: 191).8 The text argues that the legendarily misshapen warrior–poet’s body is attested by the later discovery of bones that draw the same fascinated horror that Egil encountered in life—a life, of course, attested by the text in which the find is reported.9 Egil shapes, and is shaped by, his identity as an atypical body. Egil’s self-descriptions, and his treatment in Egil’s Saga, provide an important corrective to the urge toward defining disability through a binary relation with the elusive unmarked body. The medieval conception of the atypical was as widely constructed as the range of variety in the human body. The very notion of the “atypical body”—in a medieval or a modern context—is thus inherently problematic insofar as it suggests a minority status for those identified as marked by difference. Simply put, the likelihood of any one person possessing the normate body in all its requisite definitions is quite small. Only when the definition of “atypical” is artificially reduced to a single asymmetrical binary does the normate body retain a claim to median experience. The elided or invisible acts of negotiation involved in identifying the normate body are created by and create expectations for the atypical. The binary thus created is contingent, predicated on each single impairment or injury being treated in isolation. The collected experiences of the “atypical” as disenfranchised or othered individuals estranged from a collective collapses once the privileged position of those unmarked by a particular difference is discounted. The conceptual liminality of difference, with its implied and inferred distance from a larger body of “normal” selves, ignores the number of potential fracture points along which the individual may be classed as differing from the (often undefined) normal. The stability of the normate body as a social and experienced reality becomes increasingly suspect when subjected to the same analytical models as disability. While any one binary might produce a working definition of normal and abnormal bodies, the compilation of many binaries into a matrix of meaning renders the idea of the normate body progressively less likely to be the experience of any one individual. Egil Skallagrimsson is non-normate physically, though for various and changing reasons over the course of his life. He is also normate, or non-normate, in countless other ways—a brutal warrior whose body signaled difference and possible disease or genetic monstrosity, but also a poet, a careful (though occasionally ostentatious) dresser, a physically gifted and imposing figure, a dexterous and shrewd rune-carver, a deliberately offensive figure willing to use his atypical appearance as part of strategies to upend social expectations, and so on. Late in his narrative, Egil’s increasingly non-normate appearance, impairments of sight and hearing, and eventual decrepitude and senescence highlight the necessarily shifting asymmetric relations that define disability through binary comparisons. His relation to unremarkable, “normal” median cultural identifiers shifts according to the various metrics deployed against him throughout—and after—his life. The study of age-as-disability, injury-as-disability, mental disability, and so on (to say nothing of the increasingly elastic theoretical matrix of disability studies) is best served by a conscious decentering of the idea of “normal.”10 In its place, we might consider the many possibilities of experience available to the individual within a social and physical environment arranged for the convenience of the privileged and the majority of any given binary—normalcy by convention, convenience, or committee rather than by a default state. Ultimately, an individual cannot be inherently “atypical.” The term is comparative, not descriptive.

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This is not to suggest that the normate body (or mind, or sex, or identity) was not as real and pervasive a part of the medieval conception of selfhood as it is of the modern. Various institutions and groups benefit, in both contexts, from the notion of a whole, healthy, vigorous, male, heterosexual, Christian (and so on) body as the default or “typical” incarnation of the human. The “docile, compliant body,” posited by Davis and others as the goal of modernity, is also implicit in discourse of the normate medieval body (Davis 2013: 5). The medieval body, to rethink these terms, operates from a socioreligious assertion of docility and compliance as signs of spiritual—and perhaps physiological—completeness. In many texts and contexts, a change to the atypical body that moves it toward its normate form is seen as a redemption of that body. This rhetorical stratagem recurs regularly, with religious texts furnishing a variety of examples. A typical text is the sixth-century Miracles of St. Hilary. Several detailed descriptions of those bearing malformations of the body are scattered among the miracle stories attributed to Hilary: one girl comes to the shrine of the saint because her “right hand had become useless during her lifetime … Although natural causes had been influential, the contraction of her tendons had twisted her disabled hand into the appearance of a ball of string”; two lepers arrive “disfigured with sores” (Van Dam 1993: 157–8). These petitioners are healed of their conditions, and are followed by an even more striking and extreme example. Fortunatus describes a paralyzed girl [who] trembled within the carnage of her dead body; in her entire corpse only her eyes functioned, as if her eyes were keeping watch and guarding over her dead limbs. Her tongue was stiff … and although her voice came from the depths of her heart, it could not arrange itself in connected words. Her hands were weak and uncontrollable … her feet were unstable … the lump of her entire body was constructed badly and rigidly. During the festival she was brought into [Hilary’s] church and propped up with all the other people who were awaiting his immense goodwill. (Van Dam 1993: 159) The paralytic’s body, like the bodies of all the pilgrims described in the Miracles, is healed by the saint. Such is the expectation of the hagiographic tradition. The moment before the healing occurs, however, provides an image that requires a moment’s pause: the semiresponsive body of the paralytic girl is part of a gathering of afflicted persons, each of them atypical in some way, each of them seeking access to miraculous transformation. In submission to the care of the saint’s presence and intercessory power, the disabled figures gain in spiritual and physical completion. The study of medieval disability must begin with the mind-set of those for whom this gathering was a plausible occurrence. How did people of the medieval period think about disability in their world? Consider Hilary’s reported healing of malformations of the body alongside other specifically medieval efforts at achieving transformation: the refinement of proper confession and penance over the course of the medieval period and the alchemical quest to transmute substances (including the famous lead-into-gold example). All three ideas, woven as they are into the tapestry of medieval thought, spring from the same urge—to seek miraculous or incremental change in the world not for change’s sake, but as an undoing of a perceived corruption that manifested some aspect of the postlapsarian vale of tears. Corruption of the body, of the soul, and of the natural world shared at least some motive force in a medieval context. On the other hand, medieval experience of the body also encompassed the power of dismembered saintly relics to multiply the presence and power of a saintly intercessor; the culturally specific meaning of a severed ear or a

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brand as a marker of past violations of the law; the use of a king’s mund—his hand—as a synecdoche for the king’s power; or the authority granted to those possessed of spiritually significant bodily suffering. This is a mental landscape of the self and of the so-called “normal” in some ways a long way removed from the modern. In practice, the stability of ultimate (i.e., divine) meaning meant that some medieval writers confronted physical or mental difference with an equanimity that modern writers have often lacked. As others have observed, medieval objects and literature attest to the ubiquity of markers of difference in the medieval world. The limitations of medicine, the dangers of daily life, and the far less medicalized interpretation of mental difference all inform medieval responses to—and definitions of—disability. Whether present in the distressed, distrained, corrupted, altered, senescent, or injured body or mind, or simply omnipresent in the destabilized and fallen mortal coil, impairment was never far from the medieval experience.11 The instability of the merely physical was mere truth in a fallen world. This is only one way to approach a coherent construction of the medieval ideas about the meaning of disability. There are equally complex conversations to be had in related areas, some of them already underway. The question of the social dimensions of disability, recently taken up by Sally Crawford and Christina Lee, proposes a culturally specific matrix of thought for accessing medieval health, disease, and disability. As Crawford argues, these categories “are not static and unchanging,” but are “subject to cultural construction, manipulation, and definition. Medieval ideas of healthy and unhealthy … were not necessarily, or even usually, comparable to modern approaches” (Crawford and Lee 2014: 5).

1.2. THE UNREMARKABLE BODY Medieval disability studies grapples with the matrices of acculturated meaning that marks all identity-formation theory, but it must do so within the limitations of historicist inquiry. Any articulation of the atypical or “othered” body or mind as a medieval subject must necessarily be informed by contemporary constructions of otherness and, for that matter, constructions of the able or the unremarkable. In the absence of the modern medicalized base model for discourse and interpretation of disability (itself a problematic position; see Singer 2012: 135–41; Davis 2013: 82–94), how was “able” to be defined? And who, in the act of scholarship, are what Crawford and Lee call “the arbiters of normal” (Crawford and Lee 2014: 5)? A further difficulty, insurmountable in the course of a single chapter or volume, is the variety of experiences of disability across a millennium and several continents. Even within a single cultural and chronological context, we cannot speak of the experience of “able” or “disabled,” “typical” or “atypical.” Nor can we, with any confidence, speak of the medieval response to the atypical body. The idea of a single medieval approach to disability, or even a universal understanding of what constituted an atypical body, is beyond reductive. In nearly all cultures, the meaning of an impaired or atypical body was contingent. Missing teeth in one person indicate a sufferer of scurvy; another, a disease of the gums or teeth; another, a survivor of violence or an accidental fall.12 Similarly, a missing leg may indicate a congenital condition, a disease, an accident, or violence—and a full communal response to the absent limb still may hinge on agreed-upon interpretations of the absence.

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A woman’s experience of bodily typicality differed from a man’s; a child’s experience was likewise different from an elderly person’s, as was a poor widow’s experience in comparison to her wealthy coeval. Further, these should be understood as continua rather than binaries, with the richness of experience necessarily and rightly frustrating theoretical models. Better that we should deploy and redeploy our language and categories than that we should inadvertently create terminology so broad as to be meaningless or so monolithic as to impair our investigative understanding. Disability studies undermines its own goals to the degree that its critical materials become universalized. Difference, if it is to yield insight into any mind-set but our own, must be examined as a function and outcome of context. Bodies marked by difference are inextricably linked by conscious or unconscious relation to the unmarked body. Any articulation of the different or “othered” body or mind as a medieval subject must therefore be informed by contemporary constructions of otherness and, equally significantly, constructions of the able, the ideal, or the unremarkable.13 Such constructions are informed by a complex cultural matrix from which they cannot be disentangled without a catastrophic loss of context and meaning. Understanding, for example, the ways in which the centering of the normative, idealized, or unremarkable body crowds out the far greater number of othered, vilified, or remarkable bodies in the margins of medieval cultural expression requires knowing the cultural matrix that determines membership in those forms, decides on the lines that demarcate and divide them, and articulates the overlapping worldviews that contribute to the medieval idea of ability, disability, and alterity. Some fracture points in the competing constructions of “disability” and “othered” are obvious. The unremarkable body, a physical catalog of explicitly unexceptional qualities, is rarely defined outside of a binary with either the superior or the disabled body. Implicitly, it is assumed to exist everywhere at all times, thus forming an invisible and problematic “stable” basis for analysis of the atypical body. This inferred body existed for the creators of space, art, and writing, just as it does for those who now study their creations. It is the presumptive body, the “image of Man,” from which all bodies derived their claim to normalcy from the degree of conceptual distance that separated the fact of bodily specificity from the hypothetical. When it is defined, the unremarkable body is more often limned by absence than by presence. It is usually an “expected” body, constructed by the lack of a defining binary exclusion from a normate body and reinforced by its conformity to the unexamined body at the center of body discourse. Bernard of Clairvaux’s description of a terminally ill man, on the other hand, offers a rare glimpse of the unexpected able body: [Malachy] came all the way down from the upper story on his own feet and climbed back up the same way, and yet he said that death was at the gate. Who could believe this man was dying? Only himself and God could know it. His face seemed no paler, no thinner. His brow was unlined, his eyes were not sunken, his nostrils not pinched, his lips not contracted, his teeth not discolored, his neck was not wasted or gaunt, his shoulders were not bowed, nor had he lost flesh on the rest of his body.14 As Malachy nears death, Bernard searches in vain for some sign on the flesh of his debility. In a circumstance where the atypical body is expected, we find the unmarked body decentered from its usual meaning. The frustrated search for signs of infirmity necessitates an examination of the unexamined—the “normal” body.

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1.3. SEX, GENDER, AND THE ATYPICAL BODY A seemingly unimpeded figure, Chaucer’s Cook, nevertheless carries “on his shyne a mormal”—an ulcerated wound that marks him, to the reader as to his fellow pilgrims, as a suffering body.15 He is only one of the figures marked by difference in The Canterbury Tales, appearing alongside the “somdeel deef” (I.388) Wife of Bath and the skin-blemished and swollen-faced Summoner. There is also the lank-haired Pardoner, whose body, voice, and beardless face famously leads the Chaucer-pilgrim to identify him as “a geldyng or a mare” (I.693) and has enticed scholars to craft a series of bodies and sexual identities in response.16 An intersex (or seemingly intersex) body presents somewhat differently in the modern context, which emphasizes medical and surgical intervention alongside cultural pressure to identify intersex persons as either male or female. Medieval writers generally emphasize association of the intersex figure with one sex or the other “according to the predominance of the sexual organs” (Richardson and Sayles 1955: 15).17 This is not to say that medical intervention was unthinkable, though the degree to which surgical intervention was merely theoretical is difficult to discern (Metzler 2010: 35–6; generally DeVun 2015). Some Western Christian writers placed hermaphroditic bodies in the same categories as other disabled figures, speculating that a resurrected body would be assigned male or female sex characteristics (DeVun 2018: 138–40). Others, particularly early writers such as Gregory of Nyssa and John Scotus Eriugena, argued the opposite—that all bodies, resurrected into their prelapsarian perfection, would be angelically androgynous (DeVun 2018: 136–7). The intersex body was clearly a site of fascination, disabled (in the modern sense) but potentially a refutation of—even a correction to—the binary sex characteristics of “typical” postlapsarian bodies. The literary discourse generally privileges identity and performance rather than medical intervention. The aforementioned “diagnosis” of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s “pseudohermaphroditism” on the other hand assumes a recursive problem of identity— the Pardoner’s male-performing body is identified as potentially intersex, with both male and female sex characteristics, but registers (and, in some scholarship, is received) as an unsuccessful assertion of a normate masculine body rather than a successful intersex figure. The gendering of bodies as normatively male or female, of course, obscures a range of bodily experiences.18 But a more complex problem is the degree to which the normate body is not merely coded as male, but actually warps the meaning of both intersex and female bodies as a default other. The resulting intersection between gender and disability is more than a mere rhetorical flourish of modern scholarship. To be “typical” is so often coterminal with the male body (or at least male identity) that the female body is subject to an asymmetrical binary potentially as disabling as other “atypical” bodies. This alienation extends as well to the reader or audience, implicitly invited to recoil from the “dangerous and unsavory” female body possessed of “orifices, exudations, and emanations” that can corrupt and contaminate the male body. The frightening, damaging, and implicitly abnormal female form is atypical, and antithetical to the male form in its pristine but vulnerable normalcy (Miller 2010: 137). Gendered, unexpected, or atypical bodies, in their distance from the expected norm, are required to undergo a process of analysis, explanation, and classification. This process is proportionate to the perceived distance of the subject body from its unexamined normate control. Crucial for any understanding of disability in the medieval period, however, is the understanding that an atypical body in one place, time, or class takes

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on different meaning in another. Njal Thorgeirsson’s inability to grow a beard forms the basis for a crisis of interpretation in Njal’s Saga. Repeated attempts to assert correct and false readings of Njal’s sex, his family’s legitimacy, and his community standing form the catalyst for a central feud within the saga. Njal’s enemies seek to identify his beardlessness as a mark of either androgyny or non-normate sexuality. Their tactic is to defame Njal with the nickname “Old Beardless,” an erasure of his masculine vitality on the dual grounds of androgyny and senescence. This is no small matter in a culture in which mature masculine heteronormativity, and therefore full participation in the public and legal cultures of Iceland, is signaled in part by hairiness. Njal’s friends and family respond with violence, but also with prima facie assertions of his normate masculinity. A typical exchange in the saga centers on Njal’s decision to add a gift of a brightly colored garment to a financial settlement given to Flosi Thordarson, an antagonist of Njal’s family. Flosi claims that the gift is an insult to his own masculinity, and adds: “To tell my guess, it’s your father’s doing, Old Beardless—for there are many who, looking at him, can’t tell whether he’s a man or a woman.” Njal’s eldest son Skarpheðin replies, in part, “That’s an evil speech … anyone can tell he’s a man because he’s had sons with his wife” (Njal’s Saga ch.123).19 Though Njal’s enemies never fully succeed in connecting the fact of his face to the disabling implications of a lowered (non-normate) status, his family is forced to fight a number of battles on his behalf, and eventually his family is consumed by the violence required to protect Njal from his atypical body (Sexton 2010: 156–63).

1.4. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ATYPICAL BODY It hardly need be said that not every atypical body was pathologized in the same way in medieval thought. Congenital difference, injuries to the body, and physical infirmity each carried meaning, but that meaning was not consistent from one difference or individual to the next. The Christian medieval world acknowledged the presence of corruption in the fallen state of human bodies. This was not, however, a simple conflation of sin with disability. Rather, the contaminating nature of sin meant that all bodies were imperfect; seeking incremental change toward purifying the body was the duty of every Christian (Eyler 2010: 3–4; Newman 2013: 40–1). Though all bodies were, to the degree of their corruption, “disabled” from their purpose as a vessel for a spirit in communion with God, the universality of sin precluded the experience of the postlapsarian body as “disability” in the modern socio-medical sense of the term.20 A further important distinction is the absence of a general medicalization of the atypical body. While medieval medicine did recognize some bodies as dysfunctional or suffering—humoral medicine provides one example of this mechanism—the external recourse of persons marked by difference who wished to understand their bodies was in social and comparative relation to their communities. People whose marked bodies drew attention, or who experienced and navigated their world differently from others due to bodily difference, would have recognized in those relations the parameters of typical and atypical, but may not have identified their conditions as primarily medical in nature. It is, rather, through this social context and interpretation that an atypical body would find its definition. The modern distinction of impaired and disabled is therefore of limited use in understanding the medieval body. We should look, instead, to some of the many contexts that supplied a contemporary meaning to the idea of disability.

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1.5. CONGENITAL DIFFERENCE Bodily difference could and did challenge cultural models of the “normal” body, and also challenged institutional definitions of the worth of a person. Spiritual worth was one measure, labor value another, legal status another. The worth of an atypical infant, on the other hand, tells us a great deal about the cultural assessment of difference alongside or beyond these institutions. Literary, documentary, and material evidence all refute the common misconception of widespread disregard or disposal of congenitally atypical infants. Bodies buried in various locations show that children born with congenital markers of difference were frequently cared for as well as contemporary medicine and cultural expectation allowed. Indications of congenital difference among royal or privileged families offers a different but equally compelling sort of evidence, and may demonstrate an expectation that the advantages of economic privilege would have been afforded to atypical offspring.21 Even those without substantial resources seem, by and large, to have made what efforts were possible to ensure the survival of living children. Evidence from graves around England, for example, demonstrates the survival into late childhood or adulthood of individuals with congenitally absent limbs, chronic illness, failure to thrive, or diseases such as tuberculosis and poliomyelitis. While a lack of medical understanding undoubtedly reduced the survivability of congenital deformations, care appears to have been taken when and as possible to ensure the survival of the atypical (Crawford 1999: 96). The overall evidence suggests that at every stage of life, the atypical bodies of congenital difference were visible parts of medieval communities. Their presence would have been expected, acknowledged, and integrated into conceptions of the range of possible human bodies and experiences. To be sure, pregnant women—then as now—had to navigate any amount of superstitious or wrongheaded advice about avoiding congenital deformations. The social, extramedical classification of a congenitally atypical body as different from one resulting from injury or illness may well have been informed by the search for meaning. The experience and frame of reference of the individual is different, of course, but in a medieval context, the meaning of difference was partly shaped by this distinction. An injured body could have many causes, but in the vast majority of cases the cause was a known quantity. Congenital difference offered fewer clues as to correct interpretation. In the absence of clear causation, the atypical infant body provided a tabula rasa for cultural inference, with medical and gestational causes competing with the possibilities of parental sin (or carelessness), inferiority (or punishment) of the family, malnutrition of the mother, infidelity, and so on. In addition, atypical births presented a practical set of challenges for a parent. The congenital malformation of the cleft palate, for example, made the infant suckling phase difficult and potentially life-threatening. The term “harelip” is most likely post-medieval, but the leporine association of the condition has a long history. The Anglo-Saxon term for a cleft palate was hærsceard (“hare-notch”), while superstitions associating a pregnant woman startled by a hare with a cleft palate still informed medical opinion into the nineteenth century (Bhattacharya et al. 2009: S4–S8).22 The literary record shows the survivability of cleft lip conditions through the use of associated names. The Icelandic record includes the agnomina skólm (meaning, among other things, “gap” or “open-mouth”), holmúðr (“hollow-mouth”), holgómr (“hollowgums”), and skarð (which, though often translated into English as “harelip,” identifies a cleft lip simply as a “notch” or “breach”).23 The archaeological and historical record

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likewise shows that the presence of a cleft palate could be overcome with great care and attention to the infant. The survivability of a cleft palate is therefore likely to have partly hinged on the economic privilege of an infant’s family (Skinner 2017: 6). In some cases, surgery may have been attempted, but was generally cosmetic in nature. One remarkable early medieval effort is provided in the Anglo-Saxon Leechbook: [To make a salve,] pound mastic quite small; add egg white and mingle … Cut away the edges of the cleft lip with a knife. Sew [the edges] together with silk, then anoint both inside and out with the salve before the silk rots. (Cockayne 1864–6: I.59)24 Assuming that this passage refers not to theory but to an actual medical practice does not mean that the treatment was likely to have been widely practiced. The difficulty and danger of surgery for an infant meant that other solutions were also sought. Evidence of the use of a mammiform pot to aid in feeding a child has been found, including one well-preserved example in an infant burial in Castledyke.25 Survivals of children and adults with cleft lips or palates are known from other burial sites, indicating that care for children with difficult congenital conditions was, at least to a degree and in certain circumstances, both understood and expected (Crawford 1999: 94). The social place of children and adults marked with a visible facial difference would have been culturally specific and affected by many of the same factors true of modern cleft lip survivors— access to education and guidance for parents and access to medical intervention for infants, for example, but also factors such as expectations for unfettered speech capability or the ability to grow facial hair. The evidence suggests that survival into adulthood, with or without surgical intervention, was more common than might be expected, both before and during the medieval period.26 The legal responsibility of parents for a child deemed atypical seems largely to have been assumed or asserted fact. The anecdotal and literary evidence of parents and siblings caring for the needful in hagiographic or homiletic texts supports a robust tradition in the law codes identifying parental responsibility for children’s needs and, in the case of the sickly or atypical child, for their misdeeds as well. These laws often hinge on the question of a child’s ability to take responsibility rather than on physical form, and so generally fall outside the scope of this study. But along with the codes’ assignment of parental responsibility for a deaf, blind, or mentally atypical child, the presence of physical difference would likewise trigger institutional reinforcement of family duty toward a child with unusual physical needs.

1.6. THE INJURED BODY The body’s vulnerability to disfigurement, injury, or incapacity is cause for insecurity in both an absolute and comparative sense. Universally, we face the inevitability of changes in one’s capabilities over time, as well as the uncertainty over the possibility of traumatic injury.27 The experience of the body’s baseline level of form and ability—necessarily subjective and informed by the number of asymmetrical binaries that define a person as atypical—is inevitably informed by the possibility of diminution or alteration. Any individual’s sense of vulnerability may rise in proportion to awareness of the precariousness of one’s identity as a normate figure in one’s culture. Contrary to arguments treating disability as a single, absolute other from which all identities are removed, medieval texts demonstrate considerable nuance when responding to changes in an individual’s capacity, form, and function.28

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Fear of injury is particularly difficult to quantify. Whether due to misadventure, punishment (divine or human), occupational hazard, warfare, or other cause, injury threatens an instant change to an individual’s relationship to the normate standard and to the subjective status quo ante. The visibility of injury does not require but invites a social response. Writers and chroniclers routinely deployed injury or disfigurement as tangible evidence of consequence for action or sin, as in the example of Bisclavret’s noseless Lady giving birth to noseless daughters. But injury might also serve as a sign of honorable acts, suffering, or heroism, as in the examples of Onund trefótr or the Genoese archers whose mutilation, and subsequent pensions, are described in the Annales of Bartholomew the Scribe (Skinner 2017: 120).29 The reality of injury, from accidental disfigurements to the practice of mutilating one’s enemies—whether in fact or as a hyperbolic feature of disapprobatory chronicles—similarly offers traumatic lessons, though the nature and purpose of those lessons, beyond the combined horror of and fascination with the mutilation itself, resists generalization.30 Medical attention to the injured body proceeded mainly from the desire to avoid further harm. Attention to the effects of medical intervention can be found in leechbooks from the earliest period: If the red or flushed symptoms on the skin come from wounds or from cuts or from blows, you should quickly tend those matters with scarification and poultices of barley and you will heal it. If the darkened flesh is to the degree deadened that feeling has been lost, then you must quickly cut away all the deadened and numbed flesh, all the way to the living, until there is no more dead flesh remaining. Following that, you may heal the wounds. If you wish to carve away or cut off a limb from a body, you should first examine what sort of place [on the body] is affected and the strength of the place, since some places more easily rot if tended carelessly. [If you must amputate] cut not at the limit of the healthy flesh, but much more must be cut on the whole and living flesh; by this technique you will better and more quickly cure the wound. While unsuccessful surgery or subsequent infection would have meant that many interventions were ultimately fatal, a significant number of people survived these procedures and went on to be visible in their communities. These figures are, however, often invisible in the literature unless their atypical appearance was the reason for their inclusion or otherwise caused comment. An exception to this is in the use of nicknames as identifiers. With rising reliance on bureaucratic paperwork across most of medieval Europe, the gradual and uneven adoption of transferable surnames meant that identifiers were necessary. They differentiated one woman from another, told of a man’s family or his line of work, and served as a record of salient features that might enter into public record or local legend. They might be synecdochial personal descriptors (as in the Anglo-Scandinavian gaytbayn, blaiklok, massingberd); they might indicate an injury or disfigurement (the Icelandic einhenda, skarði, bægifotr); and they might function as clear signals of communal disapproval (the English unrede, brendcheke, liggebiþefyre).31 Their purpose was manifold—the need, bureaucratically and socially, to isolate Thorkel streak from Thorkel skin-swathed from Thorkel scratcher was indiscrete from the need to assign social judgments to the correct man or woman in a third-party situation. Medieval nicknames were often curiously immune to personal preference—Iceland, for example, acknowledged a man’s right to

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kill over slanderous poetry, but expected that a name like Eyjolf Saur (Eyjolf the Foul/ Beshitten), Thorgrima Witch-Face, or Skalla- (Skull) Grim would be tolerated (Peterson 2015: 4). But beyond this, the cultural expectation was that nicknames were the product of communal judgment. Nicknames were, in short, a negotiation between one’s reputation and one’s neighbors. Nicknames referencing visible injuries were of particular importance for registering correct understanding of a body. While the name itself might tell little apart from the fact of a missing or damaged limb, the context of the name and its use provides more information. In most of the Icelandic sagas, we find one or more people who suffer permanent bodily injury. In Grettir’s Saga, for example, we find the father-and-son pair of Ofeig burlufótr (Club-Foot) and Onund trefótr (Tree-Leg). In Eyrbyggja Saga, we find Thorir trefótr and Thorolf bægifótr (Twist-Leg). All four denote men with atypical bodies, but register differently as judgments of those bodies. Thorir trefótr loses his leg in a fight against the peace-loving Thorarin the Black. His wound is not particularly worthy or shameful—it is simply a fact, and his nickname merely recognizes the trauma of the injury. Ofeig, mentioned only in passing, appears to have a congenital malformation of the foot or leg. His son Onund, however, loses his leg in the celebrated Battle of Hafrsfjord while assaulting the ship of King Harald Fair-Hair. Onund’s missing leg, due partly to the rhetorical work of his friend Thrand, becomes a potent but problematic symbol of the heroism of his fight against Harald.32 Onund himself is deeply affected by the loss of his limb, and struggles to come to terms with his loss: Men thought me worthy, once, of Hrotti’s sword-storm when the spear-clash sounded harshly—Sugandi and I. Now I step onto a ship with one leg to visit Iceland. The poet’s waning in this world. (Grettis Saga ch.8)33 Onund neither fully controls nor is controlled by his loss. The author deliberately offers multiple perspectives toward a right understanding of the meaning of Onund’s amputation, but avoids resolving those perspectives. In the end, Onund is a one-legged man celebrated for his skill and capacity, but always and solely as Onund Tree-Leg. Even in the presentation of Onund’s eventual death and burial, the author offers only ambiguity about the consequence to Onund’s life of being identified by his sacrifice. Eulogized as “the bravest and nimblest one-legged man ever to live in Iceland” (Grettis Saga ch.11), Onund is buried in “Tree-Leg’s Mound,” a final reassertion that Onund’s injured body requires a redefinition of his self. In Eyrbyggja Saga, by contrast, Thorolf Bjornsson is introduced with his arrival in Iceland as a great Viking. He emigrated some years after his mother and was with her during his first winter in Iceland. Thorolf decided that his mother’s farmland was insufficient, and so he challenged Ulfar the Champion for his land, calling him to a duel since Ulfar was aged and childless. Ulfar chose to die rather than be cowed by Thorolf. They fought their duel at Alftafjord and Ulfar was killed, but Thorolf suffered a leg-wound

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and always walked limping after that. Because of that, he was called “Twist-Leg.” (Eyrbyggja Saga ch.9)34 The story of Thorolf Twist-Leg, which includes his troublesome life and his terrifying afterlife as a draugr, or revenant, includes a series of changes wrought upon Thorolf’s body. He begins as a large and unmarked man, a “great Viking” and man of accomplishment. He is then maimed in the commission of a shameful act of bullying, triggering a change to his name. After he dies, his body continues to transform—immediately postmortem, his body is stiff, hard, and unnaturally heavy, all signs of a restless corpse. His corrupting (though initially uncorrupted) body drives animals mad and terrorizes the neighborhood. His body later becomes more hideous, frightening, and mobile, to the point that he begins to kill animals and men. Later, even the total destruction of the body by fire will prove insufficient, and Thorolf’s spirit will continue to bring evil to the region. Not all injured bodies in the sagas receive a nickname relating to their injury. In the same sagas, we find Aud of Mavahlid, who loses a hand while working to stop a fight in Eyrbyggja Saga, and Thorbjorn Öngul (Fishhook), the nemesis of Grettir Ásmundarson, whose nickname is unrelated to the fact that his eye was gouged out—not with a hook, but with a hnefatafl game piece while arguing with his stepmother. Naming responded to but was not coterminal with difference. Rather, a name might come about because of a felt need to acknowledge certain kinds of difference. It is the result of a specific literary and historical context, and responded not only to the fact of physical difference, but also to social judgment about such differences’ meaning. Thorolf Twist-Leg, whose bullyragging of an elderly man is implicitly contemptible, is “twisted” by his reputation as much as by his limp. His afterlife echoes his actions in life, as his animated corpse terrorizes the neighbors and drives them off their land. His twisted body is neither symptom nor evidence of a twisted man; it is a convenient metaphor, a visual metonym for his socially unacceptable and non-normate personality. In the later medieval West, visible injury also took form and gained significance from the spiritual habit of imitatio Christi. Harm to the flesh, whether divinely or self-inflicted, might signify great spiritual achievement on the part of the sufferer. The physical injury to the body, however, could admit of both spiritual and pragmatic causes and meanings. The stigmatic body, for example, came to be freighted with miraculous meaning, particularly in the wake of Francis of Assisi’s manifestation of the phenomenon in 1224.35 While Francis and others bore the stigmatic marks as suffering earned through devotion, others made the choice to inflict on themselves wounds in homage to Christ’s. In his Life of Marie d’Oignies, Jacques de Vitry recounts how Marie, after a period of contemplation over her past delight at the eating of flesh, “needlessly cut out a large piece of her flesh with a knife,” an act that de Vitry characterizes explicitly as a wound “of charity and invigorated by the wounds of Christ.” The injury is reinforced by a postmortem anecdote: the women who wash Marie’s corpse are “amazed” when they find “the places of the wounds, but those who had known of this event through confession understood what the scars were” (de Vitry, The Life of Marie d’Oignies 54; Klaniczay 2015: 133). de Vitry distinguishes among the injury’s signifiers as self-harm, as miraculous manifestation, and as extremity of religious devotion, distinctions he expects his reader to find accessible. The physical reality of stigmata marked a body as different from and—if accepted as legitimate—spiritually superior to the unmarked body. It also overlapped with a matrix of socioreligious marks upon the body that included abnegations of human appetites, the deliberate discomfiting or injuring of the flesh, the display of diseased or traumatized

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bodies, the disincorporated bodies of saints, and so on. In some cases, these marked bodies coincided with other markings, such as those connected to punitive mutilations of the body or to ordeals undertaken in law. The marked medieval body carried a performative quality that marked out traumatic, or at least apparent, injury as requiring a complex interpretive structure.

1.7. MIRACULOUS HEALING AND THE ATYPICAL BODY Disability and sin were discrete categories in medieval thought, but they overlapped significantly, especially in the rhetorical spaces of religious writing. Within these discourses, disability was particularly accessible as a persistent metaphor in addressing the fundamentally flawed and corrupted bodies of postlapsarian humanity. The challenge of the atypical body to the complacency of its supposed opposite seemingly creates, among its effects, evidence of miraculous power through the reasserting of the normal body. Modern analysis has tended to read in healing miracle stories a reinforcement of the typical disability binary, with the normate, unafflicted body superior to the afflicted. The disabled may be sanctified through suffering, cursed by deformity, chastised through illness, or damned by torments—but the miracle of healing brings a re-centering of the unexceptional body. Stories of curative miracles thus reinforce the basic alterity of the disabled figure. The atypical figure is “never fully human,” by this logic, only attaining or recovering that status through miraculous removal of affliction or difference.36 This is a highly problematic position for a number of reasons, not least of which is the general medieval recognition of sinfulness, like sickness, as a human constant. The ill, injured, or otherwise impaired body was readily available as a metaphor for salvation as healing, and arguably provides the largest number of descriptions of non-normative bodies in the medieval world. The vitae of saints, particularly those of martyrs, offered high-profile tales of the sundering of blessed bodies that emphasized the vulnerable nature of all physical selves. Whether the vitae served as psychodrama for the sublimated desire of the audience to experience dismemberment is debatable.37 The texts certainly linked intercessory power with the saintly ability to overcome disintegration and injury. This was manifested directly in the ability of saints’ bodies to recompose a dismembered body even postmortem, but also indirectly through assertions of the undiminished power of the divided relics of a saintly corpse. Implicitly, such claims create an oscillation of stability and instability in a single body. Those elements that are spiritually significant triumph over the vulnerable, afflicted, or sundered bodily selves of the saints and their faithful. Fundamentally, however, these healing stories are parables. Their allegorical aims posit spiritual, not medical, wholeness as the reward for contrition and devotion. The saints’ position as healers of the afflicted offered powerful evidence of the presence of Godly mercy in the world. The sixth-century bishop Nicetius of Trier sounded an already familiar note when he claimed that the Lombard king Clovis would convert if he came to Tours and witnessed the miracles at St. Martin’s shrine, “where we see in the present the blind receive their sight, the deaf their hearing, and the mute their health” (Episotolæ Austrasicæ VIII; Van Dam 1993: 84). But the assertion that afflicted bodies were mutable—unstable, that is, even in their atypical state—carried two apparently opposing implications for those possessed of bodily difference. The act of healing was a manifest power that argued for the possibility of change, healing, or reconciliation. It also created the injured or infirm body as a lapsarian embodiment, with the attendant

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possibility of social judgment against the infirm. The markers of difference inscribed upon the injured or infirm function as markers of suffering—the imagined suffering of the marked in the gaze of the able-bodied, to be sure, but also the visible markers of humanity’s postlapsarian existence. The moment of healing is perhaps less directly relevant than the transformation it suggests is possible—the redemption of a fallen body through the saints’ intervention and God’s grace. Problematic as this equation may be in modern terms, it introduces a wealth of possibility for thinking about medieval selfperception and one kind of perception of disability. Hagiographic literature is at once a treasure trove for those seeking literary representations of physical difference and a frustrating subject for anyone seeking insight into medieval thinking about disability. To examine a single hagiographic tradition is potentially to gain a far greater appreciation for the presence and meaning of disability and difference in the vitae. Ælfric’s Life of St. Swithun, to consider one well-known example, reveals a virtual army of difference-marked individuals. Swithun is revealed as a saint by appearing in the dream of a man suffering from a severe hunchback and convincing him to make his way to the saint’s grave; nine other men, all of them ill or suffering impairments, are healed even before Swithun is credited with the healing and translated into the old minster at Winchester. Once he is placed in his new shrine, Swithun sets to work, healing so many pilgrims that “the graveyard lay full of disabled folk, so that others could hardly seek entrance to the minster” (Ælfric, Lives XXI 151–2). In all, nearly 80 percent of the narrative reads as a piling on of healing miracles, one disabled body after another seeking Swithun’s shrine and going away “whole”; so many people leave the props of their former existences behind that, we are told, the monks of Winchester become weary of singing the obligatory praises to Swithun, while “the old church was hung all round with crutches, and with the shamble-stools of cripples” (Ælfric, Lives XXI 431–2). Even leaving aside the obviously pertinent issue of the opposition created between the disabled or afflicted body and the healed, “whole” body, several questions come immediately to mind when reading Ælfric’s text. What did it mean that Swithun’s shrine was envisioned as the object of a mass pilgrimage of the sick and the disabled? How did the shrine’s appearance, surrounded by the discarded paraphernalia of disability, influence visitors’ experience of Swithun and his church? How did a member of Swithun’s cult respond to impaired persons in the streets of Winchester, and how did those persons react to the hagiography that told them they could be transformed by sufficient faith? Why does Ælfric, known as an unusually skeptical hagiographer when recording miracles, offer these repetitive iterations of the healing of the blind, the lame, the deaf, and the bedridden? What, exactly, did adherents to saints’ cults think cures were effecting upon the disfigured or afflicted body? In other words, what is achieved in the creation or restoration of an unremarkable or able body, and how stable is the image of that “normal” self? How should we understand Ælfric’s assertion that, as a former member of the community at Winchester, he himself had “very often seen” the miracles attested in this life? What, specifically, did the terms Ælfric uses (unhæl, creopera, adliga, untrum, paralisyn, blind, or dumba) signify to an Anglo-Saxon audience?38 And, perhaps most crucially, what does physical difference mean in a text like this? The evidence of hagiography is useful so long as it is examined in awareness of the essentially rhetorical nature of hagiographic texts. The miraculous healing made possible by saintly intercession required a veritable parade of atypical bodies. If the essentially formal nature of saints’ miracle stories was not sufficient to undermine their use as

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records of the experience of difference, the sheer volume and redundancy of miraculous cures would suggest their hyperbolic nature. The allegorical meaning of such bodies, not their material and historical existence, justifies their centrality to hagiography. The afflicted body—fallible, vulnerable, and permeable—has pride of place as a metaphor for the frailty of the spiritual self. But the implications of bodies in search of healing go beyond the simple allegory of redemption to point to the relation between atypical and unremarkable bodies. The allegorical potential of an atypical body as a sign of man’s susceptibility to error, irresistible as it may have been to producers of hagiography, is a premise that is only fulfilled by the continued vulnerability of its cured or healed counterpart. The “healed” or transformed body, clean of present suffering, remains corporeal and, inherently, prey to future calamity or eventual diminution. Bodily health and spiritual virtue are, alike, vulnerable and temporary conditions.

1.8. THE BODY AND THE SELF Obviously, the examples set forth here are no more than a toe in the water. I have hoped, in this brief survey, to convey a number of points, but chief among them is that the atypical body is definable as such primarily as a by-product of the construction of normalcy. Criteria that privilege the unexamined normate body aside, the experience of any body is to be typical, or atypical, as time, circumstance, and fortune allow. The articulation of bodies as typical, normal, unremarkable, or ideal is partly a matter of expectation, partly a semiotic discourse of physiology, and partly a matter of social consensus. To the degree that the body is contiguous with the idea of the self, each body is inevitably object and subject simultaneously. A body, in short, is available for comparison, vulnerable to interpretation, and permeable to change even as it asserts the significance of its present and its presence. Allowing for the distinct markers of time and place, the medieval world operated with much the same combination of awareness and unexamined assumption about normate and non-normate selves as does the modern. Atypical bodies, then, are neither as atypical nor as distant as the unexamined center seems to suggest—a quality that they perhaps share with the ahistorical imagining of the medieval past.

CHAPTER TWO

Mobility Impairment The Social Horizons of Disability in the Middle Ages RICHARD H. GODDEN

The study of mobility impairment in the Middle Ages faces significant challenges. While there are numerous representations of individuals with mobility impairments throughout medieval literature and culture, they are often brief and fleeting. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, most of these representations of mobility impairment treat their subjects as objects of pity or scorn, and in many cases, the impairments themselves disappear as the disabled individual becomes cured, as often happens in genres ranging from hagiographic literature to medieval romance. For these reasons, it can be difficult to reconstruct anything resembling a lived experience for the physically impaired. Even more importantly, these representations are often written by the nondisabled, and so may contain more projection and anxiety than firsthand accounts might.1 However, the World Health Organization estimates that approximately 15 percent of the global population has some form of disability, and although we cannot estimate the number of disabled people in the Middle Ages with any real accuracy, it does seem safe to assume that some writers would have had some form of impairment, at least from aging if not illness or disability. And yet, there is an absence of self-identified writers with a mobility impairment compared to writers who wrote about their own blindness or deafness (see Chapters 4 and 5 in this volume). The potential lack of identification leads to the next challenge. It is a critical commonplace that there was no term in the Middle Ages that relates directly to the modern disability (Metzler 2006: 5). In place of one single term, Irina Metzler (2006: 5) identifies several terms in Latin that could roughly correspond to disability: “[b]esides infirmus there are any number of other vague references to disability as a concept … for example, deformans, malformans, decrepitus, imbelicilis, impotens, debilitans, defectus.”2 All of these terms have negative connotations according to modern standards—deformed, malformed, decrepit, imbecile, impotent, debility, defective. Middle English terms with a similar negative connotation would be “lame” or “crepel” (cripple). These terms can cause a visceral reaction in the modern student of disability, but each of them needs to be contextualized in their medieval setting. This problem of terminology, where the medieval terms may be offensive and modern terms may be anachronistic, captures the fundamental problem when approaching medieval disability: Were the experiences of the physically impaired in the Middle Ages comparable to those

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in the modern era? Was it significantly worse to be disabled during the medieval period than it would be today? The answer to both questions is a qualified yes. In studying mobility impairment in the Middle Ages, it becomes clear that the medieval disabled faced many similar issues to their modern counterparts—they faced stigma and inaccessible physical and social environments, and the acceptability or legitimacy of their impairments was determined by others. And yet, it would be foolish to overlook the great differences between medieval and modern medicine. Disabled people in the Middle Ages frequently faced poverty, pain, and alienation, but they were also integrated into their communities, and the developing technologies of care, both on an individual and a social level, were often direct predecessors to modern ones. This chapter will describe medieval disability in its own context, but in doing so, it aims to bring into focus the many areas of continuity between the experiences of disabled people in both eras. Generally, disability can be divided into three groups: sensory; cognitive or intellectual; and physical or orthopedic. This chapter focuses on the latter group, specifically impairments that affect mobility. Whereas sensory impairments may fall into reasonably defined categories, such as blindness or being Deaf, mobility impairment encompasses a wide array of conditions and situations, often blurring with or being in addition to sensory and cognitive conditions. If the social model of disability is applied to the Middle Ages, then one would distinguish “impairment” (i.e., the biological circumstances) from “disability” (i.e., the hindrance or hardship experienced because of some inaccessibility in the built or social environment).3 The social model was a response to what is termed the medical model, in which the understanding of disability is limited by the need to pathologize and cure impairments. Although this chapter often uses the terms impairment and disability without the exact precision called for by the social model,4 the distinction is a useful one, as it describes a tension between the individual experience of impairment and disability as “a set of social relations” (Davis 1995: 28). To understand physical impairment in the Middle Ages (and today) is to discern the social attitudes toward physical difference, the institutions (social, legal, religious) that separate the disabled from the nondisabled, and the web of social relationships in which disabled people find themselves. Before turning to the various social registers in which disability can be seen, however, this chapter will first survey some of the origins and causes of mobility impairments in the Middle Ages, and it will also detail the various sorts of mobility aids disabled people were able to avail themselves of.

2.1. ORIGINS AND CAUSES One way to classify mobility impairment would be according to medieval models of illhealth. Originating with Galenic medical theory, and developed further by Avicenna, one might identify three modes of ill-health: (i) mala compositio, or congenital impairments; (ii) mala complexio, or humoral imbalance; and (iii) solutio continuitatis, or a disruption of the body’s “continuity”—in other words, an injury, trauma, or wound.5 For the purposes of this chapter, mala compositio and solutio continuitatis are the most important in terms of understanding the social and cultural dimensions of mobility impairment. Congenital impairments could include a host of conditions, but were generally considered incurable. Paralysis, for instance, would not be curable by medieval medicine. On the other hand, a disruption of the body’s “continuity,” such as an injured limb requiring amputation or bones needing to be set, might be attended to by surgeons and barbers. From a medical standpoint, congenital and sudden impairments

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might be classified differently, but from the point of view of impairment, they are largely overlapping categories in terms of lived experience. This section will first survey some views on congenital impairment and then examine some of the common ways for a healthy body to become impaired in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the most insistent question concerning the causes of disability in the Middle Ages is whether or not there was a necessary link between impairment and sin. Canon 22 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, for example, stipulates that “bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin,” and therefore physicians for the soul should be called before physicians for the body.6 An impaired individual might suffer their debilities as a result of either their own sinfulness or that of their parents. Although it would be incorrect to describe the presence of impairment as necessarily being a function of sin, some medieval writers did profess this idea, especially when it suited their argument. For instance, Gerald of Wales, in his History and Topography of Ireland, laments the widespread phenomenon of impairment among the Irish: Moreover, I have never seen in any other nation so many individuals who were born blind, so many lame, maimed, or having some natural defect. The persons of those who are well-formed are indeed remarkably fine, nowhere better; but as those who are favoured with the gifts of nature grow up exceedingly handsome, those from whom she withholds them are frightfully ugly. No wonder if among an adulterous and incestuous people, in which both births and marriages are illegitimate, a nation out of the pale of the laws, nature herself should be foully corrupted by perverse habits. It should seem that by the just judgments of God, nature sometimes produces such objects, contrary to her own laws, in order that those who will not regard Him duly by the light of their own consciences, should often have to lament their privations of the exterior and bodily gift of sight. (2006: 118) Here, Gerald expresses the notion of impairment, particularly congenital impairment, as punishment for unnatural sexual activity, or for not showing the proper faith in God and His law. However, in this case, Gerald’s despair over the propensity for the Irish to be born lame or with natural defects is related to his racial animus against the Irish. As Derek Newman-Stille (2010: 257) argues, Gerald’s text demonstrates how “one form of alterity is written as another.” Racial or religious otherness slides, therefore, into physical difference. Yet, while the view of impairment as divine punishment was present in the Middle Ages, it certainly was not the only, or even the prevalent view of disability. Metzler (2006: 187) describes the “strong ambiguity” between physical impairment and spiritual sin. As Metzler notes, the biblical tradition and the shift from the Old to the New Testament reorient the emphasis from punishment to the occasion for miraculous healing. Though the relationship between sin and impairment may be an ambivalent one, Richard Cross offers a different perspective in his reading of Aquinas’ analysis of the relationship between sin and impairment. Cross (2017: 324) argues that, in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, the idea of “original justice” speaks to the physical and spiritual integrity that prelapsarian Adam possessed, and therefore lost, after the Fall. Aquinas describes the consequence of this loss as follows: when original justice is removed, the nature of the human body is left to itself, so that according to diverse natural temperaments, some men’s bodies are subject to more defects, some to fewer, although original sin is equal in all.7

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Aquinas’ view of the human body is fundamentally Aristotelian, one that perceives a teleology for the human embryo where the proper end is what was considered the standard human body, with physical difference representing a failure to achieve that form.8 Aquinas would state that, while everyone shares equally in original sin, bodily defects were distributed more unequally, contributing to the diversity of human bodily form. As a result, physical differences could be said to arise because of original sin, but the link is not a necessary one in terms of causation. As Cross observes, “Aquinas has, in effect, normalized impairment,” which he “does not put … into some radically different category from other defects: all humans, after the Fall, are defective in various ways; disability is just one of those defects” (2017: 330, 329). Thus, disabled and nondisabled alike have original sin in equal measures. Although there are contradictory explanations for the presence of congenital physical impairments, those acquired later in life can be attributed to familiar categories: war, illness, old age, and the hazards of work. While there are no precise data for the number of physically impaired individuals in the Middle Ages, there is substantial evidence from various sources to suggest that disability, then as now, was not a rare occurrence. Carole Rawcliffe (1997: 3), in her Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England, describes how there were myriad factors for poor health in the Middle Ages that could lead to physical impairment. Widespread health problems such as insufficient diet or epidemics could lead to weakened and impaired bodies. Leprosy, for example, could lead to nerve damage, loss of feeling in the extremities, paralysis, and swelling of joints and limbs, not to mention increasing the risk of infection—these symptoms could either cause mobility impairment or heighten the possibility of accident and injury that would lead to the same result (Judd and Roberts 1998: 53–4). Further, illustrations and fictional representations of lepers in the Middle Ages often depict them using some sort of mobility aid such as crutches, demonstrating the high probability of mobility impairment in those with leprosy. Rawcliffe also notes the high likelihood of becoming injured in war. For instance, in 1374, around a quarter of the Provençal army came home with scars to the hand or face; in fact, many English soldiers left for the Hundred Years War relatively whole and healthy, only to come home wounded, injured, and sometimes even missing a limb (Rawcliffe 1997: 3–4). Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries (2015), in their study of battlefield trauma, survey archaeological evidence that suggests the almost surprisingly high survival rate of soldiers in battle. They attribute this to two factors: “the effectiveness of military surgeons and armor” (Woosnam-Savage and DeVries 2015: 47–8). Most soldiers did not suffer limb loss, for example, during battle, but rather due to amputation being used as a way to prevent further trauma, such as the spread of gangrene (Woosnam-Savage and DeVries 2015: 43).9 Aside from limb loss, soldiers faced multiple challenges and traumas that could place them firmly in the category of the disabled. Illness and warfare, however, were not the only causes of disabling trauma in the Middle Ages. In addition to the unpredictable nature of accident, some medieval occupations carried a high risk of injury (Judd and Roberts 1999),10 and there was also the practice of mutilation as corporal punishment, which could leave a person potentially more economically productive than if they were imprisoned (Hopkins 2013).11 Ferragud’s (2015: 236) observation that “for a whole range of reasons, a large number of people survived in medieval society missing part of their body” could be extended to injury and illness overall. For a whole range of reasons, many people in the Middle Ages survived and lived their lives with some form of physical impairment that affected their mobility, and therefore likely also affected their ability to work and support themselves.

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2.2. MOBILITY AIDS Marit Van Cant observes that “[i]llustrated sources show that impaired persons in the Middle Ages were able to adapt to their physical needs through the use of crutches or hand blocks” (2018: 205). Most sources, textual or illustrated, represent the physically impaired using some sort of aid to help them navigate their environment, and such objects are arguably the chief visual signifier of disability in the Middle Ages. The drawing “Beggars and Cripples” by Hieronymus Bosch (1500), for example, includes thirty-one distinct individuals, most with some form of physical impairment or illness, and at least twenty-eight of them are using some sort of stick, crutch, or block to aid their movement (Figure 2.1).12 By far the most common assistive device would be the crutch, and it could be said that the crutch might represent medieval disability in the way that the symbol of the wheelchair does for the modern period. Usually, the crutch is a single stick with an axillary part—that is, a horizontal handle meant to go under the armpit, or axilla (Hernigou 2014a: 1332). The modern form of the crutch, on the other hand, contains a handle between two pieces of wood or plastic with an axillary top, and it is a relatively recent invention, dating to the beginning of the twentieth century (Hernigou 2014a: 1332). Most depictions of the use of crutches are generally limited to mention of their existence, but the case of a man named Arnolf may shed some additional light on their use. In the miracle depositions from the First Papal Commission of Elizabeth of Hungary, Arnolf is described as crippled in one leg so that he was not even able to sit in an upright manner. He supported himself with specially fashioned crutches, without which he was unable to get around except by crawling, which is what he did in his own house. He remained this way for about a year. On the last Feast of St. Michael, he made his way to the tomb of the lady landgravine and, after invoking the grace of God and Elizabeth’s assistance, he was restored to health and returned home without crutches. (Wolf 2011: 139) First, it deserves mention that these crutches were “specially fashioned” for Arnolf, suggesting the possibility of mobility aids being adapted to the needs of their users. It is also notable that he uses his crutches predominantly outside of the home, whereas he seems to prefer to crawl when in his own house. In discussing this particular case, Metzler (2015: 109) considers a few possibilities raised by Arnolf’s choice: “This may have been because it was a form of mobility he could achieve independently of help from other people. However, it is possible that such severely-impaired people experienced the pressure of a cultural imperative to be a biped in public as a defining mark of what makes a person human.” Although there is insufficient evidence to determine whether or not Arnolf makes this choice out of the desire for independence or out of the pressures of cultural normativity, the inclusion of this detail in the brief description of his life prior to miraculous healing is nevertheless intriguing. Jenni Kuuliala (2016a: 286), in her Childhood Disability and Social Integration in the Middle Ages, might provide a more practical explanation when she describes how some physically impaired individuals, such as a boy named Cünradus, did not need a walking stick when on the ground, but did need one for sloping surfaces.13 Yet other examples suggest that the physically impaired used a stick or crutches more for long distances as opposed to getting around their house. In the case of severe impairment or when disabled people needed to travel longer distances, however, mobility was often aided through the help of others. As Metzler (2015: 95) observes, the impaired demonstrate a surprising amount of mobility, especially as they

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FIGURE 2.1  “Beggars and Cripples,” drawing by Hieronymus Bosch. Courtesy of Albertina Vienna, 2019. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Beggars_and_Cripples.jpg.

often undertook journeys of pilgrimage. In such cases, disabled people might be placed upon a horse, drawn in a litter, or placed in a basket. After the crutch or walking stick, one of the most common mobility aids would be hand-trestles, or hand blocks, used for crawling upon the ground. An example of these

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objects can be found illustrated in The History and Topography of Ireland by Gerald of Wales. In British Library Royal 13 B VIII, fol. 30v, there is a drawing of a cripple, a visual reference to Gerald’s lament over the number of deformities in the Irish (Figure 2.2). This figure is on his knees, sitting upright, using hand blocks to support himself. His right leg is clearly twisted so that his foot faces the wrong direction. Hand blocks would be preferable in cases where an impaired individual could not place weight on either of their feet, thereby making a crutch useless. Another illustration of a man using hand blocks occupies the margins of the Romans Arthurien, found in Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 95. f. 297r (Figure 2.3). In this case, the man crawling upon the ground has bandages around both of his amputated stumps.14 While there is significant evidence for amputations in the Middle Ages, there is little evidence to suggest that prosthetic limbs were available or in use until the innovations of Ambroise Paré.15 Amputees typically used either hand blocks, a peg leg, or a bent-knee peg, all of which are depicted in Bosch’s “Beggars and Cripples.” The peg leg was “basically a modified crutch with a wooden or leather cup” for the stump to fit into (Thurston 2007: 1114). A recent archaeological discovery of a sixth-century man in Hemmaberg, Austria, demonstrates the design flexibility of the peg leg. Next to the skeleton of this man, who is missing a foot, was found an iron ring and some wooden debris, which suggests the iron ring may have been used similarly to a leather cup, with a stick attached to it so that the man could walk (Binder et al. 2016). The bent-knee peg, on the other hand, was most used for either nonfunctional limbs or below-the-knee amputations. These came in a few forms, including a wooden pole with a leather strap attached to support a limb or stump or a modified crutch leg with a longer horizontal platform for the leg or stump to rest on, fastened with

FIGURE 2.2  A crippled man in the margins of The History and Topography of Ireland by Gerald of Wales, c. 1250, London, British Library, Royal 13 B VIII, fol. 30v. © The British Library Board, reproduced under Creative Commons.

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FIGURE 2.3  A double-amputee in the margins of the Romans Arthurien, 1250–70, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 95, fol. 297r. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2019.

straps (Hernigou 2014b: 1535–6). Assuredly, some of the differences in the material or the complexity of construction are related to issues having to do with class and other material circumstances. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that some of the more opulent prosthetics in the Middle Ages were entirely imaginary, and more functional. The story of Saint Melor, for instance, tells of a young boy outfitted with lifelike prosthetics. When his father, the Duke of Cornwall, died, the boy Melor’s uncle, Riuoldus, desired to have him slain so as to take the duchy; however, an assembled council of bishops prayed that he would not be killed, and so instead, his right hand and left foot were cut off so that he would not be an appropriate heir. Later, a silver hand and bronze foot were fashioned for Melor, and because of his piousness, a miracle occurred, rendering the metal limbs just as functional as natural ones (Doble 1964: 21). Melor is mutilated because of his social position, but that position also enables him to be the recipient of lavish metal prosthetics, unlike the peg leg that might have been procured for someone of a lower class. Aside from its qualities of bronze and silver, these limbs also supersede what can be accomplished by men. The prosthetic limb as we think of it may not yet have been a reality, but it was certainly dreamed of.16 Mobility aids of all sorts help the physically impaired achieve some measure of independence. Whether they are prosthetics that replace missing limbs or assistive devices that supplement typical locomotion, these objects are all material recognitions of some deficiency or absence in the body.17 It seems appropriate, then, that crutches were sometimes referred to as a potente in Middle English, or a potence in Old French (Metzler 2013b: 195).18 Likely, these terms derived from the Latin potens, meaning power. The

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Middle English Dictionary offers the first sense of potente as a “crutch; a staff, support.”19 Further, this word could also describe a crosier, or T-cross, used by a Bishop. As Metzler notes, there is surely a link between potente as a word for crutch and impotens as a word for the physically impaired. As Section 2.3 will discuss, a defining feature of disabled people in the Middle Ages is often their inability to work, lacking the power, quite literally, to participate in productive economic activity. The crutch—and I would extend this to other mobility aids—would seem to restore some of the power that the physically impaired may lack in their own bodies.

2.3. SOCIAL ATTITUDES Disgust, pity, fear, love, charity, sympathy, suspicion—the encounter with disabled people in the Middle Ages provoked a range of emotional and social responses both from the nondisabled and from institutions that were sometimes tasked with distinguishing one group from the others. Charting and describing some of these responses can illuminate the often ambivalent and ambiguous space that the physically impaired occupied in medieval society. One of the most visceral and immediate responses to physical impairment can be fear or disgust. An exemplary instance of this is the meeting between King Edward and the cripple Ghillie Michael, as described in Mathew Paris’s History of Saint Edward the King. On his way to the Chapel of St. Peter, the King is halted in his procession by the figure of Ghillie Michael, a beggar with numerous physical impairments, who asks to be carried the rest of the way to the chapel. He is described as follows: His face was wrinkled and dark, and everyone took pity on his lament. His feet were twisted, his muscles were numb, and his legs were thin and nearly without flesh. From the knees down his legs turned unnaturally toward his back, and his withered feet, which also turned backwards, stuck to his buttocks. The poor wretch pulled himself along the muddy road with the help of ingeniously made hand trestles that he held against his chest. (Paris 2008: 78)20 The description of his twisted and withered limbs matches similar descriptions of supplicants who go to the shrine of a saint to be healed. In this particular episode, several coexisting, and at times contradictory, social attitudes can be discerned. He is first described as a figure of pity, but it should also be noted that he is alone, a beggar, and he is discovered on the side of a road, in a liminal space. Moved by pity, the King decides to carry Ghillie Michael upon his own back. At the sight of such an august personage coming into contact with someone so deformed, a different emotion is elicited among those present: He sent for the poor man and bundled him onto his back, making him his load, and thus he carried the weary invalid. Those who did not know why he was doing this taunted him, saying: Stop that: Why are you carrying that stinking wretch? The pus from his wounds is running down your clothing and soiling you and your robe, wetting you to your garters! But Edward would not put the man down. And at that the man’s dead flesh began to stretch and his joints relaxed, correcting his deformities. The sinews that had been turned front to back were restored to their proper position. (Paris 2008: 78–9)

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The disgust that the assembled people feel is palpable. Although this negative emotion is quickly transmuted into charity, not to mention the wonder that must have followed the miraculous healing of Ghillie Michael, the reaction to the King’s embrace of the cripple speaks to the feelings of revulsion and a desire for distance that arise from the encounter with disability. For the healthy and prosperous, the figure of a disabled beggar like Ghillie Michael, with his sores and his twisted feet, would incite feelings of fear and uncertainty. Sharon Farmer (2002: 157), in her Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris, describes the case of Amelot of Chambly who was so afflicted, her appearance so deformed, that children fled from the sight of her; even more, in Nuremberg in 1478, beggars were required to cover up their wounds and deformities lest their horrid appearance cause adverse effects to pregnant women (Metzler 2013b: 192). Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999: 67ff) describes the fear of such liminal, deformed bodies, especially lepers, in the later Middle Ages, and notes the tendency to sequester lepers in their own hospitals and communities. Even aside from more extreme forms of fear, such as blaming lepers for the spread of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, Stiker (1999: 69–70) notes the fundamental anxiety that the sight of disabled bodies might provoke in the nondisabled—that prosperity and health might turn into poverty and illness. The perceived sickness and deficiency of disabled bodies—their sores and their missing or crooked limbs—bring into focus the ultimate instability of health, not only in the face of unpredictable illness and accident, but simply in the fact of aging and its inevitable effects on the body. While it would not be accurate to say that disabled people always experienced poverty in the Middle Ages, there is certainly a strong overlap between these two groups. In the Book of Sainte Foy, for example, an episode of miraculous healing is narrated, describing the supplicant as follows: While the boisterous group of young people from Brioude were passing by the village of Massiac, they came on an old man who was very decrepit and extremely aged. From his youth he had been unable to use his arms and legs. In addition he suffered from a condition that had developed at the same time, namely that his limbs were stiff and unbending; he could neither move them to walk nor sit with any comfort. Since he suffered from such a physical impairment and had to struggle with it every day, he lacked any means of support and patiently joined the ranks of poor beggars. (Sheingorn 1995: 248) The old man’s inability to provide support for himself necessitated his entry into “the ranks of poor beggars.” Thus, disability shows up quite often in historical scholarship on poverty.21 Like the disabled, the poor often provoke contradictory emotions—of pity and distaste, of a desire to help and a desire to sequester. Not only this, but disability as a social and legal construct becomes a criterion for distinguishing between the deserving poor and the undeserving. The legitimately poor in medieval society were able to receive alms, charitable donations from the community. Unsurprisingly, much effort was directed at distinguishing who, exactly, could receive alms and other forms of charity. As Metzler (2013b: 156–7) traces in her A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, different ecclesiastical and communal definitions generally agreed which subgroups formed the “needy.” Typically, the truly destitute, orphans, widows, the sick, and the physically impaired constituted the authentic poor. However, having a physical impairment itself was not quite enough, in many cases, to mark someone as needy. For instance, Farmer (2002: 88) notes how some Parisian hospitals would not give beds to the sick or impaired

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if they could move around on their own. This selectivity of some hospitals indicates the trajectory of the concept of the hospital in the Middle Ages. In its most widespread form, hospitals were a “place, an area, designated for the overnight care of the needy” (Horden 2012: 719), yet they developed from religious houses that distributed alms to the needy to more specialized institutions that focused on the sick and disabled, including leprosaria, to ultimately secular organizations that provided care for the infirm (Rawcliffe 2013: 318ff). Through rule, custom, or legislation, it can be seen how physical impairment becomes disability—impairment alone is insufficient, and it is only when an individual cannot perform some perceived social function that they become disabled. In the Parisian hospitals mentioned above, the ability to move around on one’s own speaks to a certain amount of self-sufficiency, which not only became a factor in being admitted to medieval hospitals, but also determined one’s legal status with regard to labor and begging. The capacity to work became a particularly pressing social and legal concern in the wake of the Black Death, when a significant number of the labor force died as a result of the epidemic. The disabled poor, because of their inability to work or care for themselves, were able to receive alms, and those with severe enough physical impairments that impeded their ability to productively work could also receive legal sanction to beg. In 1388, the English Statute of Vagrancy, which also reaffirms measures in the 1349 Ordinance of Labors, stipulates that, with certain exceptions, those who can work, must work. The Statute includes a clause stating that “‘every man who goes begging and is able to serve or labor,’ excepting ‘people of religion and hermits approved,’ is liable to forced labor under the first provision” (Middleton 1997: 217). Someone would be unable to “serve or labor” because of a physical impairment, and therefore would be excepted from work requirements. Late medieval English law was particularly discriminating when it came to issues of labor, and its safeguards against those who can work but choose not to speaks to widespread suspicion concerning disabled beggars. Although medieval citizens whose physical impairments precluded them from productive labor were often given special status under the law, a widespread suspicion surrounded disabled beggars, expressing an anxiety that the able-bodied might feign impairment in order not to work. A vivid example of this concern occurs in the fourteenthcentury dream vision Piers Plowman by William Langland. In this particular scene, Piers is helping to organize a group of pilgrims to plow a half-acre patch of ground before setting out on pilgrimage. However, not everyone was quite so eager to work: At this, the scrimshankers [someone who shirks their duties] took fright, and they began to pretend their site was defective, or they twisted their legs to look as if they were maimed—layabouts of this ilk know all the little tricks!—and started moaning to Piers and begging him to let them off. “Oh, bless you, sir,” they whined, “our poor arms and legs aren’t fit for working; but we’ll gladly pray for you, and for your plough as well! We’ll ask the good Lord to give you an abundant harvest and reward you for all this enormous kindness you’re showing to us here. You see, we’re in such terrible shape, we simply can’t risk pushing ourselves too hard with any really happy physical work.” (Langland 2009: 67–8)22 The narrator describes some of the pilgrims as “scrimshankers,” or “faitours” in Middle English, which means “deceiver” or “imposter.” These imposters perform various impairments, such as feigning blindness and laying their legs in such a way as to look twisted and injured. One can imagine that their physical deception caused them to

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resemble someone like Ghillie Michael. The “faitours” claim that they are “in such terrible shape” and therefore need Piers and others to provide for them.23 In response, Piers immediately expresses suspicion: “If what you say is true,” replied Piers, “I’ll find out soon enough. But I’ve a shrewd suspicion you’re a bunch of idle parasites! Truth, though, knows exactly what’s what with each of you. I’m an old hand of his, and I’m under orders to tell him the names of anyone who injures any of his honest workman. You people simply consume what others earn by the sweat of their brow. But Truth is going to teach you to drive his team—and if you don’t learn, you’ll have to be content with barley-bread and water from the stream. On the other hand, those who really are blind, or crippled, or chained up in prison, will eat loaves of wheat and drink the same drink as I do, till God in his good time send them relief from their afflictions.” (Langland 2009: 68)24 If their claims are true, he will quickly find out. He goes on to label them “parasites,” in comparison to someone who is economically productive. To beg without true need, therefore, is to be a waster, a negative contribution to social and communal efforts. If it turns out that they are lying, as he suspects them to be, they will “have to be content with barley-bread and water from the stream”—that is, eat inferior bread and only drink water from a nearby brook. But, were they to be telling the truth, they would have better bread and they would drink with Piers himself. Similar invectives could be found among sermons and other ecclesiastical literature.25 But, it is notable that this representation occurs in a literary text, suggesting that it has permeated, to a certain degree, the social consciousness beyond ecclesiastical circles. The problem of labor in the Middle Ages neatly demonstrates how disability becomes socially determined and conferred, overlapping with but perhaps separable from physical impairment. The suspicion toward the physically impaired went deep, however, beyond legal determinations of who could work or not, and beyond the concern that some would fake disability. Farmer (2002: 60–1) notes that thirteenth-century writings had a preoccupation with the moral turpitude of the poor: “[w]ithout labor, they [the disabled poor] had no protection against the dangers of idleness … [and became] despicable in their wretchedness.” In their wretchedness, their physical condition was thought to be a punishment for sin, and they were also thought to be overindulgent, drunks, lustful, and possessing a host of other sins because of idleness. A story that recurs throughout the twelfth to fifteenth centuries captures this theme of the dangers of idleness. As one example, Jacob of Voraigne’s Golden Legend tells the story of two lame beggars who face the prospect of being cured by St. Martin, and one beggar says to the other: “Behold, brother we live a life of soft leisure … and it is this infirmity by which we are cast down that lays claim to all of this for us. But if—God forbid!—we were to be cured, manual labor, to which we are unaccustomed, would inevitably weigh us down.”26 Unlike Langland’s false beggars, these two express doubt about receiving a miraculous cure because, as we are meant to believe, they are so addicted to idleness and leisure that the idea of manual labor becomes unthinkable. This fear that disabled people did not, in fact, want to be cured suggests some skepticism over the deserving nature of the physically impaired. So far, I have charted mostly negative emotional and social responses to the physically disabled in the Middle Ages. In these cases, those with physical impairments are often found isolated, or are separated from others through legal status. However, that is certainly not the entire story. While there are several literary representations of disability throughout the Middle Ages, by far the predominant source for the study of physical

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impairment would be hagiographic literature, including saints’ lives and canonization records for sainthood. Their ability to effect miraculous healing during their lives signals the sanctity of a future saint, and the proven record of posthumous healing provides the necessary miracles required for canonization. The sheer number of physically impaired individuals that populate hagiographic literature provides many insights into the social attitudes toward—and the relationships with—disabled people in the Middle Ages. Before further examining the webs of social relationships that disability illuminates, it must first be acknowledged that the primary function of the physically impaired in hagiographic literature is to be cured. In this way, the lists of miracles attributed to medieval saints (or would-be saints) adhere to what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “narrative prosthesis.” In their book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 53) argue that “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess.” Narrative prosthesis works as follows: some form of bodily difference is brought to a reader’s attention, and then “the remainder of the story rehabilitates or fixes the deviance in some manner.” Where modern literature and film may emphasize rehabilitation or some sort of “overcoming disability” narrative, medieval literature often emphasizes a miraculous or fantastical healing. In the third book of Thomas of Monmouth’s work on William of Norwich, for example, a woman named Claricia is described. She had long suffered from pain in her kidneys and knees, and could no longer move about unaided: And so, coming to that venerable tomb in the arms of those who led her there, but even more led by faith, she stood for a while praying, and then, with her knees bent as far as possible, she pressed them bare onto the bare stone. At that touch, the aforementioned pain in her limbs began to recede, so that she could already feel a long-lost health pouring into each of them. And so it happened that she who had come so weak, carried in the arms of others, by the work of divine medicine returned healthy and strong, needing support from no one. (Thomas of Monmouth 2015: 86) Most episodes in these lists of miracles follow the same template: a disabled person is introduced, their impairments described, an offering to a saintly figure is made or there is some contact with sacred matter, and finally the impairment disappears. This tendency for the physically impaired to be cured is a pervasive feature of medieval literature, spanning across genres. The Quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian literature, for instance, intertwines the search for the holy object with the impaired Fisher King who is healed at the end.27 And yet, closer analysis would suggest that disabled people are not merely props in the lives of others, nor are they figures simply in need of healing; rather, they provide the opportunity for the miraculous to occur. It should also be noted that the sheer number of the lame and crippled coming to be healed is significant. The lists of miracles for William of Norwich or Elizabeth of Hungary, for instance, seem never-ending. As soon as one is healed, another body presents itself. Despite the miraculous healing that anchors each episode, restoring a body to health as narrative prosthesis, the figure of the disabled returns repeatedly, insistently. Further, despite their emphasis on the miraculous, hagiographic texts provide a wealth of incidental and mundane detail about the lived experience of the physically impaired. For example, the account of Arnolf makes note that “[h]e supported himself with specially fashioned crutches, without which he was unable to get around except by crawling, which is what he did in his own house. He remained this way for about a year.” While at first it may not seem remarkable, it is notable that Arnolf lives in his own house.

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Fortunately, most houses in the Middle Ages would be a single story, making accessibility issues less problematic (Hanawalt 1986: 32–3). Because he is described as having been in this state for a year, it is reasonable to assume that either he was temporarily disabled or had experienced a worsening of his condition. His living in the community is a salient contrast to images of disabled people being in hospitals or being vagrants and beggars. Certainly, though, whether or not the physically impaired live in their communities would often have been a question of class, demonstrating the intersection of bodily difference and economic access. Kuuliala (2016a: 286), for example, explores how the impaired interacted with their communities, and notes that in wealthier families disabled children would, unsurprisingly, have more resources and be better able to participate in communal life. For the most part, the lived experience of the physically impaired in the Middle Ages is difficult to reconstruct because of a lack of sources. As Rawcliffe (2013: 314) notes in Urban Bodies, “informal and generally elusive networks based on kinship, gender, neighbourhood and parish helped the sick and disabled with ad hoc support, which, by its very nature, remains unquantifiable.” Yet while these informal networks of family and community cannot easily be quantified, they can be observed. For instance, the woman Claricia, discussed above, approached the tomb of William of Norwich “in the arms of those who led her there.” Similarly, Ghillie Michael and the old man from the Book of Sainte Foy received assistance from strangers. Further miracles in the Book of Sainte Foy (Sheingorn 1995: 173, 201) include a man named Humbert who is brought to the shrine by his parents, and also “a peasant who had a daughter then about seven years old, paralyzed from her waist to her feet. Encouraged by the great abundance of miracles that had been worked through Sainte Foy, the peasant confidently carried his daughter on a horse-drawn pallet to the holy virgin’s shrine.” Numerous episodes of miraculous healing mention the physically impaired being assisted, carried, or drawn in a litter or wheelbarrow, and sometimes those providing assistance were either strangers or family members.28 These details are often seemingly insignificant compared to the accounts of miraculous recovery, but they do paint a picture of disabled people existing in social and familial relationships. Ghillie Michael might have been encountered alone, in a state of wretchedness, but he achieves health through the help of others. The recurring presence of others in these episodes stresses the webs of social relationships in which disabled people might find themselves. While the exact nature and depth of these relationships cannot always be adequately ascertained, it does become clear that the mobility of the physically impaired is owed, directly or indirectly, to the help of others. The primary means for the physically impaired to navigate their environment, however, would be some sort of walking stick, crutch, or hand-trestle. As discussed above, there were numerous mobility aids available to disabled people. It is worth recalling the “ingeniously made hand-trestles” that Ghillie Michael used to get around. Though seemingly in a wretched state, he has possession of these objects that someone presumably made for those with mobility impairments. The case of Arnolf proves even more instructive, for he has crutches that were “specially fashioned.” It is interesting to note that, in these two disparate examples, the mobility aids are specifically identified as being specially made. On the one hand, there is nothing very distinctive or particular about this. Obviously, someone had to have made these objects, but one is described as “ingeniously made” and the other is “specially fashioned.” This small mention brings the mundane objects into focus, out of the background, and further suggests the larger network of social relationships in which the impaired exist. In the case of Arnolf, one

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might have the sense that someone made the crutch specifically for him. In the case of Ghillie Michael, it may be better understood that the writer is observing the general ingeniousness of these objects, and that they were made with care. The observations about ingenuity or craft concerning these objects is also remarkable because their role in these narratives is to be left behind. Even when abandoned, though, crutches and other assistive devices have a role to play. As Wolf (2011: 40) observes in his essay, “The Afterlife of St. Elizabeth,” it was common for shrines to be adorned with the abandoned crutches and walking sticks that the cured no longer needed. In the terms of narrative prosthesis, the miraculous healing functions as a prosthetic that replaces the actual prosthetic that the disabled individual had relied on. However, being left at the shrines, these objects shift from being practical items to symbols—that is, to advertisements. For example, in one episode in the miracles attributed to William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth (2015: 105) writes, “More and more came [to the tomb to be healed], and as some left others came after them, because the frequent successes of the earlier ones spurred those who followed to good hope.” These devices are more than just props waiting to be discarded. Aside from their prosthetic function, they illuminate webs of social relationships, and they also come to represent, curiously enough, health. Their presence validates the curing potential of the shrine. The potency of the saints and their shrines becomes dependent upon the material testimony of these objects and upon the physically impaired bodies in need of healing. Narrative prosthesis provides a useful way to consider episodes of miraculous healing, yet it only tells one part of the story. In the way that crutches and other objects become advertisements for the healing efficacy of a shrine, they signal the interdependent relationship between disabled people and their communities. As Metzler (2013b: 7) observes, the impaired in the Middle Ages are often represented as liminal, in the margins. At the same time, however, one can see how disabled people existed in social networks, and how they were integral, even necessary, aspects of various communities.

2.4. CONCLUSIONS The study of mobility impairment in the Middle Ages reveals a set of social, legal, and individual circumstances that, at times surprisingly and vividly, mirror their modern counterparts. The medieval disabled struggled to obtain some form of health care, faced stigma, received charity and communal support, and navigated inaccessible environments with care, and ultimately decisions about their livelihood were often in the hands of others. They were born with physical impairments because of reasons entirely outside of their control or they acquired an impairment through remarkably familiar ways, such as war, illness, and workplace injury. In some ways, this presents a bleak picture, both of living with a disability in the Middle Ages and also of the sense that not much has particularly changed in the modern era. And yet, it also becomes clear that mobility impairment in the Middle Ages cannot be understood except through an examination of social relations and institutional forms. Disability is fundamentally a social phenomenon, not only in its construction, but also in how it brings into focus social and familial bonds.

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CHAPTER THREE

Chronic Pain and Illness Reinstating Chronic-Crip Histories to Forge Affirmative Disability Futures ALICIA SPENCER-HALL

3.1. THE SEMIOSOMATICS OF MEDIEVAL CHRONIC PAIN AND ILLNESS Why do we hurt? What is the sick and pained body trying to articulate? What meaning are we—the afflicted, and those bearing witness to our pain—supposed to derive from the body’s “semiosomatic” (Larocco 2016) gestures? History, culture, politics, even the intimate minutiae of personal experience all orient our understanding of illness, of what even can be labeled as an illness. Nevertheless, the material fact of illness and pain endures as a central organizing node, viscerally connecting the ailing human bodies from which we try, then and now, to make meaning. We may not know firsthand how people in the Middle Ages felt pain and conceptualized illness, but we know that they too felt pain and fell ill. Whatever else it might mean, pain signifies “embodiment with a vengeance” (Larocco 2016: 347). This is the foundational characteristic of pain, its stable cross-cultural and trans-chronological felt reality. Taken over the long durée of human history, then, illness (and pain) as an experience category is an iteration of chronic embodiment. This chapter is not a neat survey of the lived experience of all chronic pain and illness in the medieval era. Given the compressed space at hand, that would be impossible. More than that, though, chronic illness challenges coherency, stability, linearity. Imposition of unflinching rigidity—a harmonious or teleological “story”—on this messiness would entail a suppression of the orienting characteristics of the conditions under discussion. Furthermore, there simply was no singular nor fixed conception of pain or illness in the Middle Ages (Cohen 1995; Metzler 2006: 47–8). Physical dysfunction could be spiritually useful, a gift from God. It could be a marker of moral degradation, a corporeal figuration of an individual’s sins. More explicitly, it could be a punishment direct from God. Such classifications were not held in strict opposition, but instead were correlative. Saints, for example, could be “blessed” with horrific illnesses, and also miraculously cure sick devotees, whether their sickness explicitly originated in sin or not.1 What is more, pain and illness were not just or only the preserve of religion. Extant medical texts, hagiographies, consilia, and even fictional narratives demonstrate the acceptance of medical treatment as a means of treating illness. “Medical treatment” is a somewhat

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anachronistic phrase here, for it suggests that, as in the modern era, there was an explicit split between “rational” scientific medicine and religious belief. In actuality, medicine and religion were inseparably conjoined. Against this kaleidoscopic backdrop, one thing above all comes into focus. Pain and chronic illness in the medieval era were understood—and lived—as integrally productive states, governed by an explicit epistemological compulsion. Esther Cohen (1995: 52–3) remarks: In the widest sense of the term, it might be said that pain was seen as an avenue to knowledge. Knowledge of the body, of the soul, of truth, of reality, and of God. Whether self-inflicted or caused by others, physical pain was a way of affirming the boundaries of identity. That pain is communicative, that it means something, was taken for granted in the Middle Ages. In this context, Steve Larocco’s (2016) theorization of the “semiosomatics” of pain, which stresses above all that pain is “informational” and “imperative,” seems downright medieval (351–2). This chapter centers the “semiosomatics” of medieval chronic pain and illness even as the lived materiality of chronic illness in the Middle Ages is, ultimately, impossible for us to ever recover. Nevertheless, we can discern—if only we look hard enough, feel with enough sensitivity—the ways in which the “semiosomatics” of chronic illness penetrated the sociocultural fabric of the Middle Ages, how they disturbed the status quo. We can examine the ways in which meaning was assigned to these seemingly inarticulate infiltrations, for the “semiotics of pain,” as Larocco (2016) argues, is one that “intends (non-subjectively) to trouble the interpersonal realm, to move and change the tenor of the social reality in which it arises and is situated” (355; emphasis in original). Moreover, the “semiosomatic” chiefly exerts itself “to generate change, adaptation, or transformation. Its function is to move, not tell, to incite, not re-presence. … The purpose of such signs is not to represent injury, but to alter the social sphere itself, by making pain, in some fashion, forcibly present, to push it into the social realm” (349). While pain always communicates something “about absolute vulnerability” through its “semiosomatic” performance, precise meanings by which such non-discursive practices are interpreted are contingent on the sociocultural and subjective context(s) of the bodyin-pain (351). Larocco (2016) refers to the Middle Ages to drive home the importance of sociocultural context in making meaning out of pain’s “semiosomatics.” “For a medieval flagellant,” he notes, “chronic pain might have a meaning that would make it bearable and perhaps even rewarding, even if such pain might entertain or disgust onlookers, while similar pain incurred in torture might be subject destroying, except for the torturer” (351). This helpfully sketches the key thrusts of medievalist pain scholarship to date. The macro-discipline of pain studies—an interdisciplinary field drawing from literature, anthropology, psychology, and more—was put on the map more generally by Elaine Scarry’s 1985 monograph, The Body in Pain. Many scholars continue to use Scarry’s framework, though some of her fundamental arguments have been productively critiqued, nuanced, or outright rejected. Undergirding Larocco’s (2016) theory of “semiosomatics,” for example, is an explicit rejection of Scarry’s contention that pain is fundamentally inexpressible, destructive to language, and a vector of total subjective isolation (passim; see in particular 344–7, 350, 353–6).2 Medievalist pain studies were catalyzed, if not outright launched, by Esther Cohen’s 1995 essay, “Towards a History of European Physical Sensibility: Pain in the Later Middle Age.” In this essay, Cohen articulates her theory of “philopassianism,” the

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medieval conceptualization of pain as a useful experience, not necessarily to be avoided. Pain could be viewed as a positive, even welcome, experience in the Middle Ages, most spectacularly in the rigorous ascetic practices of saints (e.g., see Cohen 1995; 2000; 2010; Easton 2002; Mills 2005; Mowbray 2009). Yet, pain also loomed large in medieval punishments, entertainingly grisly events that nevertheless concretized mechanisms of social control (e.g., see Merback 1999; Cohen 2006). What is more, medieval comic literature frequently depicts violence, with pain as par for the humorous course (e.g., see Tracy 2012: 191–242). Medievalist scholarship brings to the fore the polyvalency of pain and the absolute dependency of any meaning with which it may be assigned on specific context(s). In almost all such scholarship, however, chronic pain as a specific category of experience has been entirely overlooked. At best, the particularities of the chronic pain experience have been subsumed into generalized discussions of “pain,” deployed in practice as a synonym for “acute pain.” With its informational compulsion, pain enacts “transindividual feeling” (Larocco 2016: 344). It is unpleasant not only to be in pain oneself, but to witness the pain of others—pain that so easily could be our own too, it seems, if our bodies decide to revolt. As a result, pain is routinely “overlooked, slighted, discounted, or denied” (358). Until recently, this rhetoric of avoidance has characterized the disability history of chronic pain and illness, not just in medieval scholarship, but also in the entire field of disability studies. This avoidance is most often rooted in laudable aims, including challenging damaging ideologies of disability as sickness, disease, abnormality. Nevertheless, the clamoring of myriad “semiosomatic” impulses have been ignored, suppressed from contemporary discourse and the historical record. The communications of countless bodies-in-pain, their “semiosomatics” speaking across time and cutting through historical periodization, have been silenced. This inattention contributes to a sense, for many, that pain is irrefutably “inexpressible” and “unshareable.” This fundamentally dislocates an individual with chronic pain not just from the rest of their contemporary community, but from history itself (Patsavas 2014: 214). Paying attention to the traces of pain experiences conserved in historical sources, then, becomes a political act, reaffirming the value of chronic lives and underscoring the “survive-ability” of chronic pain itself. This process entails an appreciation for the “cripistemology of pain,” defined by Alyson Patsavas (2014: 205) as “a process of knowledge production that situates pain within discursive systems of power and privilege.”3 Situating pain in terms of cripistemology demands its recognition as “an experience that exceeds the boundaries of individual bodies” (Patsavas 2014: 213). Pain is “fluid, relational,” a “leaky experience that flows through, across, and between always-already connected bodies.” This leakiness extends not just between geographically dislocated, but also temporally asynchronous bodies. Attention to the medieval appreciation for pain’s fundamental, and always polyvalent, epistemologic value allows us to excavate possible “cripistemologies of pain” in our present moment, joining together in a chronic community out of time. I begin this work by establishing the lexical grounds of engagement, the ambiguous terminology at our disposal from medieval and modern discourses. Next, I discuss the ways in which chronic pain and illness have mostly been neglected by medievalist studies and disability studies. I pinpoint one area of particular friction: the problem of “cure.” The medieval conception of pain and illness is ineluctably impacted upon by the possibility of mystico-medical healing. This is emphatically the case in miracle stories, in which chronic pain and illness are evoked solely as conditions to be alleviated. Superficially, at least, in these tales disabled

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bodies exist only to be annihilated, “fixed” into normative able-bodiedness. How do we deal with medieval sources that seemingly perpetuate the discriminatory medical model of disability? I propose one approach, offering a case study of the thirteenth-century Occitan hagiography of Franciscan beguine Douceline of Digne (c. 1215–74). Leveraging Alison Kafer’s (2013) “political/relational” model of disability, I (re)situate this text, and the sketches of non-normative bodies it contains, in terms of a truly inclusive disability community. This community allows the incorporation of the desire for, and existence of, curative intervention into categories of disability, medieval and otherwise.

3.2. TERMINOLOGY: AMBIGUITY AND PLURALITY “Chronic illness” is diffuse modern terminology. There is no singular definition for the term, and professionals and those living with chronic illness alike deploy the phrase with variant granular inflections (Walker 2001; Bernell and Howard 2016). Nevertheless, broadly speaking, a “chronic illness” is persistent and incurable, but not terminal. There may be no known effective treatment protocol, though ongoing medical interventions are usually needed, including medication, surgery, and monitoring. The “chronicity” of a given illness is not fixed. Developments in medical science can transform a previously acute illness into a chronic condition, as survival rates for previously terminal diseases increase. Chronic illnesses are often, but not always, episodic and variable in nature. “Good days” of relatively improved health, or functioning more in line with normative standards of pace and productivity, are contrasted with “bad days” (or “flares”), periods in which symptoms are more intense and debilitating.4 “Chronic disease” and “chronic illness” are often used synonymously today, even in medical literature (Martin 2007: 2086; for an example, see Walker 2001). Strictly speaking, however, the “disease” refers to biomedical fact (e.g., cerebral lesions caused by demyelination in cases of multiple sclerosis), while “illness” relates to the lived experience of that disease state (e.g., the experience of a person living with multiple sclerosis, including psychosocial factors) (Charmaz [2000] 2007: 277; Wendell 2001: 32 n.1; Martin 2007: 2086; Falvo 2009: 10). Chronic illnesses, however, can blur the lines between the two, particularly in cases of chronic pain syndromes. Many such conditions lack identifiable, or unique, disease biomarkers. In other words, they do not show up definitively in biomedical testing and must be diagnosed differentially (e.g., see Reilly 1999). The lack of scientific “proofs” of disease underpins the significant discrimination faced by those living with such “disease-less diseases,” who must often battle for their “illness” (subjective lived experience) to be understood as a product of genuine events (objectively and meaningfully real physical dysfunction; i.e., linked to a biomedically invisible disease). Pain is a routine component of many chronic illnesses, either as a persistent presence or as an episodic visitor, often appearing during flares. As such, instances of seemingly “acute” pain during flares (i.e., pain that will, in the relatively near future, abate) are integrally chronic if examined with a wider temporal focus, due to the fact that the pain repeatedly and insistently returns, with the point being: you might not be in pain today, but you will certainly be in pain again. This recurrent pain often feels “familiar,” located in the same bodily area or making itself known using the same agonies as previously. Alongside persistent pain that accompanies an identifiable disease, the experience of chronic pain can be a chronic illness in its own right. Persistent severe pain, for example, is the primary symptom that determines diagnoses of complex regional pain syndrome (International Association for the Study of Pain [1994] 2002: xii, 40–3).

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Chronic pain and illness cannot easily, if ever, be defined according to the monolithic logic of cause and effect, a logic in which a given sensory output invariably follows a given sensory input. Instead, such conditions challenge singular categorizations and cause myriad bodily and psychosocial effects. The inherent plurality of “sickness” is underscored by the anonymous author of the thirteenth-century manual for anchoresses, the Ancrene Wisse: Sickness that God sends … does these six things: (i) washes away the sins that have been committed before; (ii) guards against those that were on the way; (iii) proves patience; (iv) keeps one in humility; (v) increases the reward; (vi) makes the patient equal to a martyr. (1993: 4.88; 2000: 4.55–8)5 These six positive effects, however, do not occur for illnesses “that someone gets through their own stupidity.” While the text expounds with verve the spiritually affirmative value of sickness, these other, less desirable afflictions are evoked momentarily, and then immediately passed over. The comfort offered by the taxonomy—a classification system to allow anchoresses to (re)contextualize their bodily pains positively—is thus undercut. Illness is presented here as a therapeutic and prophylactic intervention by God: it is “the soul’s healing, medicine for its wounds, a shield to prevent from getting others” (4.88). However, the text later pivots to present “medicine” as metaphorized temptation, prescribed by the Devil himself: He has so many boxes full of his medicines, the evil doctor of hell, that to one who refuses, he offers another straight away—and a third and a fourth and so on all the time until he comes across one that is in the end accepted, and he then pours that one out for him frequently. (1993: 4.107) Medicine is no longer salutary, but instead diabolical. The devout must then rely on God’s grace as a source of comfort against the Devil’s poisoned “phials,” ingesting His “remedies” to counteract the tainted medicine and thereby guard the soul. This does not mean, however, that earthly physicians are to be avoided in favor of total reliance on divine healing. Anchoresses must “ask for a doctor and medicine” (4.92) when wounded by fleshly temptations, including keenly felt sickness. In these instances, pain is useful as a warning sign to seek help. By contrast, “spiritual hurts” do not necessarily “seem painful,” and thus may not be treated in time with confession and penitence. In the Ancrene Wisse, as in medieval culture more generally, religion and medicine are mutually permeable registers used to make sense of bodily disorder, to give discursive shape to ragged corporeal sensation. Neither discourse alone suffices to do this work. The same is evident in our contemporary context, with “religion” displaced by more diffuse “sociocultural” and often “patient-centered” frameworks. The medicalized language of “disease” is not enough to capture lived realities, nor the totality of the disease experience itself. Outside the hospital or treatment clinic, “disease” morphs into “illness” and “disability,” and “pain” floats between domains. It is for this reason that I refer to “illness” and “pain” as states that flow into one another, at times felt—and lived—simultaneously, and at other times bracketed off as discrete entities. This is also the case for “chronic pain” and “chronic illness.” “Chronic lives” are lives in which the physical exigencies and sociocultural signification of chronic illness and/or chronic pain are radically present. “Sickness” is used throughout as a synonym for “illness.” The ambiguity of terminology also reflects the ambiguity of medieval vocabulary in this area. Irina Metzler (2006) summarizes the murky linguistic terrain:

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“Disease” (disese) was a general term in Middle English usage for trouble, misfortune or misery, encompassing both a notion of bodily discomfort, suffering or pain, as well as a notion of corporal infirmity or impairment. “Sickness” (siknes[se]) was also a blanket term for an abnormal or special state of health, and could sometimes signify a specific mental or physical disorder. In medieval Latin … infirmi, aegro and egroti were often used as interchangeable terms for “diseased”, “sick” and “impaired.” Infirmi appears to be another umbrella term, referring to a wide range of afflictions. (4–5) In the twelfth century, Metzler notes, hospitals were typically described as housing infirmi, which conveys the implicit meaning of “chronically ill,” though the term is often translated only as “sick” by modern editions (5).6 By contrast, M. K. K. Yearl (2007) asserts that, in medieval monastic regulations, the term infirmi refers to “transient infirmity,” and the “chronically ill” “did not receive much attention in customaries or in any other monastic documents dealing with daily life” (175). At other times, the chronicity of a condition may be explicitly evoked. William Maclehose’s (2017) study of twelfth-century English miracle collections, for example, shows that the most common temporal modifier for pain is the Latin “diuturnus” (“for a long time”).7 This is deployed either to convey vague duration or in conjunction with more specificity, stipulating years of suffering. Frequently, the significant duration of pain is contrasted by the swiftness of the reported miraculous healing, which takes place with “extraordinary velocity” (“mira velocitas”).

3.3. GAPS IN THE RECORD: THE PROBLEM OF CURE Miracle collections function as a showcase of a saint’s miraculous healing powers. As such, they do not typically record ineffective or partial cures, which would signify the persistence of chronic conditions. If a condition is incurable, it is essentially unmentionable. A similar rhetoric governs medical texts, which often skip over chronic illnesses, evoking them only to move quickly onwards to more “engaging” topics. Medical author Ricardus Anglicus (fl. late twelfth or early thirteenth century), for example, remarks in his treatment of disease, the Micrologus: I do not deal with certain afflictions, such as epilepsy, chronic toothache, paralysis, apoplexy, etc. because I think they are incurable and I could find nothing certain or the fruit of experience in the authors I have read though there are some quacks who vainly try to cure them. (Cited in Metzler 2006: 69; emphasis added) Ricardus’ statements are indicative of the general attitude toward chronic illness espoused by twelfth-century medical texts from Salerno, site of the first medical school and epicenter of medieval medical research (O’Boyle 1998: 108). For at least some medieval physicians, then, a lack of (existing) cure means a condition is not worthy of further discussion, even in terms of detailing symptomatic treatments that may increase a patient’s quality of life. Chronic lives are thus effaced from this medico-historical record, sublimated into a diagnosis that itself is evoked only to be skipped over as quickly as possible. Curability is the determining factor for Ricardus et al. to pay attention to (chronic) conditions, textually or otherwise. So too does the issue of cure loom large in contemporary debates as to the inclusion of chronic pain and illness under the banner of disability. If not precisely “unmentionable,” the chronically ill have nevertheless been viewed as “undesirable,” as the “unhealthy disabled” (Wendell 2001), in disability studies until very

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recently. Much necessary work has been done in disability activism to resist and move beyond the medical model of disability. This pathologizing model categorizes disability as individualized sickness, the “factually corporeal” expression of deviance. The disabled body is de facto diseased and must be cured at all costs to return to “normality.” The social model of disability affirms the dignity of the non-normative body, a body marked by impairments but disabled only by society. Chronic illnesses offer a fundamental challenge to this paradigm: the non-normative body itself is the principle site of aversive and disabling experience(s). In addition, bracketing off disability from illness effectively erases from view the plentiful correspondences between lives lived with “traditional” disability and with chronic illness. This includes marginalization and stigmatization, systemic artefacts of ableist society that can only be challenged and overthrown by collective action and crucial activism in which people living with chronic illness are often at the vanguard (Wendell 2001: 19, 23–6; Bernell and Howard 2016: 3). As Wendell (2001: 18; emphasis in original) points out, “some people with disabilities are sick, diseased, and ill” (see also Linker 2013: 501–2). What is more, not every person living with a chronic illness seeks a cure or perceives their illness in exclusively negative terms (Frank 1991: 115–22; Charmaz 2008: 14–15; Wendell 2001: 30–3; Patsavas 2014: 208–11). Thus, the rejection of chronic illness as disability reveals inherently ableist assumptions as to the primacy of health and the value of a life lived in perpetual sickness. It re-inscribes a hierarchy of embodiment: first, the able-bodied, then the healthy disabled, and finally the unhealthy disabled, followed only perhaps by the dead (Linker 2013: 526). Gaps in disability history on the subject of chronic illness as a category ultimately represent “fear of perpetuating the medical model” of disability (Linker 2013: 519). This is an understandable, even sympathetic, rationale. Similarly, the reticence of medievalists to tackle chronic illness as disability can perhaps be explained, at least in part, by the worthy desire to avoid the creation of a “factual” pre-history to the ever-present, deeply destructive, ideology of illness (and by extension disability) as corporealized immorality (Eyler 2010: 2–3). Irina Metzler (2006: 13; emphasis in original) adroitly describes the prevailing attitude in scholarship: “This belief of modern authors that ancient or medieval societies invariably saw a link between sin and illness appears to be the dominant historiographical notion on the subject of disability.” Since its earliest inception, the field of medieval disability studies has vigorously demonstrated that this “belief” is just that: an assumption not substantiated by evidence from actual medieval sources. Disability in the Middle Ages may have been understood in terms of sin, but this was certainly not the only interpretation of non-normative bodies. And yet, chronic illness remains a topic seemingly avoided by medievalists. This is, perhaps, due to the kinds of narratives in which we most often gain glimpses of illness: the miracle tale.8

3.4. INCORPORATING THE POSSIBILITIES OF CURE Miracle tales were commonplace in medieval texts. They are embedded in a variety of hagiographic works, mobilized in exempla collections, and contained in stand-alone miracle collections as catalogs of the therapeutic holiness of a particular saint or location. In a typical tale, the non-normative body literally exists (i.e., is written about) solely as an object for divine cure, echoing all too closely the medical model of disability. As such, miracle tales that throw cure into uncomfortably stark relief represent apposite source material for productively advancing disability scholarship. This entails mobilizing our twenty-first-century discomfort at such descriptions, digging deeper into the sources to

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tease out a plurality of meanings. Of primary importance is decentering our implicit biases, especially the notion that “cure” is “the future no self-respecting disability activist or scholar wants” (Kafer 2013: 7). Accepting the presence of and desire for cure in medieval sources permits us to envision not just the future, but also different modes of the present, in which the chronically ill— and the often difficult lived realities of disability—can be fully present in disability studies. Such acceptance must, if it is to be productive and affirmative, operate according to the blueprint of Alison Kafer’s (2013) “political/relational” model of disability: The political/relational model neither opposes nor valorizes medical intervention; rather than simply take such intervention for granted, it recognizes instead that medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance. In so doing, it recognizes the possibility of simultaneously desiring to be cured of chronic pain and to be identified and allied with disabled people. (6) Kafer underscores that disability is “experienced in and through relationships; it does not occur in isolation” (8). These relationships include the networks of support and care that so many people living with disability depend on, social interactions centering on the non-normative body. In addition, the non-normative body reaches out in some sense, radiating disability to all those organized around it. In this way, for instance, nondisabled family members and friends may also be affected by the ableist attitudes and structures around them. Finally, held in total isolation, a non-normative body is stripped of its classification—it is now no more or less than body, full stop. Relationality thus structures the experience of disability: “disabled and abled form a constitutive binary.” This is crucial to the dynamic of the medieval miracle tale, which is founded upon a transformative transaction between healer and healed. The healer, whether literally ablebodied or spiritually “able-bodied,” requires the non-normative bodies of those seeking healing, those living with disability in all forms, to establish their saintly bona fides. An encounter with the saint gives form to the individual in search of healing: they derive their (textual) existence solely from the “fact” of their non-normative body, served up as an object for miraculous healing by the saint. This transaction is social and communal. The healing itself is performative, generative of the saint’s elevated status in their community. The miracle must be witnessed in some form to be effective in this maneuver. Moreover, the act of being healed radically changes the now-cured subject’s social role, a tectonic shift that affects all those around them—if only the reader is ever permitted to glimpse their life “post-cure.” Take, for example, this representative vignette from the Life of Douceline of Digne (c. 1215–74), a beguine and holy woman in thirteenth-century Provence (France): In the convent at Marseilles, a young beguine from Roubaud was seriously ill. Her feet, legs, and abdomen were so swollen that it seemed as if her skin would split. She could scarcely get out of bed, and could not walk around. In that convent at Marseilles, the sisters performed the ceremony of the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday. The blessed mother [Douceline] was there with them and in her compassion she wanted to wash the feet of this one who was sick. And when she had washed them and kissed them reverently and affectionately, the young sister was cured of her illness and restored to health, although the doctors had given up and considered her to be dying and beyond being saved.9 (Phillipine of Porcellet 2001: 12.8.83; 1879: 12.8.83)

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The text does not name the woman because her subjectivity is not that important. Her body, though, is of prime interest, in the grips of a vividly grisly—gross and thus engaging—illness. But the specific kind of illness with which she suffers is not particularly important, and the author does not even attempt to identify it. What is important is that it is severe, and seemingly incurable. Douceline, then, is gifted with particularly impressive healing talents: she cures the incurable. In this she is a proxy for Christ, a fact underscored by the similarities established in the episode between Douceline and the Son of God: the highly connotative washing of feet as a sign of humility (John 13). Douceline is not identified by name in the scene, but instead is figured as the “blessed mother” of the sick beguine and all her sisters. This brings to the fore the holy woman’s role as head of the convent in Marseilles. In fact, Douceline founded the convent, and indeed founded her first beguine institution near the Roubaud River at the edge of the town of Hyères, later replaced by a second community in the town (Garay and Jeay 2001a: 7). It is for this reason that location is so emphasized, with the two references to the Marseillaise convent placed prominently at the beginnings of sentences and the beguine’s hometown of Roubaud flagged. Douceline is Christ-like, and thus her devotees—the women who join her institutions—take on the role of the apostles. This functions as vivid promotional material to highlight Douceline’s institutions as centers of spiritual excellence. This meshes with the overarching aims of the biography’s author, Philippine of Porcellet, a contemporary follower of Douceline and member of her Marseillaise institution, to bolster the community’s reputation and sense of identity (Garay and Jeay 2001a: 14–22; 2001b: 155–9). Douceline’s inner life is evoked concisely in this episode. Descriptors highlight her humility and spiritually elevated care for others: she wishes to wash the beguine’s feet “out of compassion”; she does so with reverence and devotion. By contrast, the young beguine is presented reductively as the “one who was sick” (“la malauta”). Sickness is her whole identity. Once healed—her sickness taken away—she ceases to exist. This provides an indicative example of the value accorded to bodily difference in miracle tales generally. These texts are archetypically governed by a logic of “narrative prosthesis” as theorized by David Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (2000): “Disability inaugurates narrative, but narrative inevitably punishes its own prurient interests by overseeing the extermination of the object of its fascination” (56–7). Faced with this “extermination,” what, if anything, can we learn of the anonymous beguine’s lived experience of illness here? What can stories of illness so dependent on cure speak to about the experience of medieval disability, and indeed contemporary experiences of disability? At first glance, not necessarily very much. And yet, silences are central to the experience of chronic illness (Charmaz 2002). Constructing personal narratives of illness functions as a means of making meaning of the difficult to parse semiosomatics of chronic life. Yet these narratives’ “presences” are constituted, at least in part, by corresponding refusals of expression, the stuff that individuals choose not to disclose or may be unable to articulate. These narrative lacunae must be attended to, according to Charmaz: Silences have meaning too. Silence signifies an absence-of words and/or perceivable emotions. However, absent sounds may, at times, reflect active signals—of meanings, boundaries, and rules. (303) Let us return to that anonymous beguine from Douceline of Digne’s biography, then. She still has more to disclose, if only in the very fact of her silence.

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The anonymous beguine is conjured to reveal the potency of Douceline’s mystical therapeutic capacity. However, the text does not stipulate that the illness Douceline cures is caused by the young woman’s sin. Indeed, the convent evidently seeks out non-mystical medical treatment for her, showing that illness—even in a monastic community—could be seen as requiring earthly medicine. The lack of attention to the cause of the illness here reflects a general tendency in miracle tales. Metzler’s (2006: 151) detailed study of miracle tales demonstrates, for example, that the “vast majority” describe conditions for which cure is sought “without attribution of either punishment or chance/accident” as a cause of impairment. This finding is upheld by similar studies of miracle collections (e.g., Finucane [1977] 1995: 72). The beguine is neither saint nor sinner; her illness is caused neither by holiness nor by her sin. Her illness does not materialize an externality—a stroke of chance, the chaotic machinations of the universe. Instead, the beguine’s illness is an artefact of her integral materiality, an expression of her very humanity. None of this negates the fact that her condition is unpleasant, difficult to bear herself and to have to witness. Alleviating her suffering is a narrative priority. In the episode’s closing sentence, the beguine is syntactically enclosed between Douceline’s mystically curative touch and the ineffective interventions of unspecified physicians: And when she had washed them and kissed them reverently and affectionately, the young sister was cured of her illness and restored to health, although the doctors had given up and considered her to be dying and beyond being saved. (Phillipine of Porcellet 2001: 12.8.83; emphasis added) She is trapped, powerless, in between these two iterations of cure, the religious and the medical. In the very moment of her textual erasure, then, the beguine reveals the fate of the non-normative body who is forced to embrace cure as a “solution” to her disability. While this is productive for the text’s readers, it nevertheless suppresses the particularities of the beguine’s life, eliding even her own reaction to being miraculously cured. Elsewhere in Douceline’s biography, however, the text provides a more expansive portrayal of the curative experience, offering glimpses of a chronic life pre-cure, during cure, and—crucially—“post-cure” in the tale of a young boy from Marseille, Pellegrin. As we shall see, life “post-cure” does not mean existence without disability.

3.5. LIFE “POST-CURE”: THE INCOMPLETE HEALING OF BROTHER PELLEGRIN The anonymous beguine’s entire textual existence is contained in a single paragraph. Pellegrin’s tale, by contrast, unspools over a total of eighteen paragraphs (thirteen paragraphs up to and including his cure, with a further five post-cure) (Philippine of Porcellet 2001: 12.10–22.84–7; 15.35–39.109–10). The sequence opens by underscoring the unnamed three-year-old boy’s disabilities. He was “born deaf and mute,” “so deformed that he had never been able to walk and people would stare at him because of his deformity. He had a hump on his chest and his shoulders, and was all curled up” (12.10.84). The boy is also afflicted with putrefying cranial wounds: His head was eaten with fistulas, and he had such terrible lesions from them that the dressing they put in them penetrated to a depth of three fingers. It had reached the point that the sores were eating into his skull, and one of his ears was so eaten away with the disease that it was barely attached and hung down on

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his check; they expected it to fall off at any time. His whole cheek was affected, and even his neck. And the smell that came from it was unbearable. (12.10–11.84; 1879: 12.10–11.170–2) The repulsive realities of tending to ever-spreading systemic disease are emphasized: fingers penetrating flesh to tend stinking wounds, the anticipation of increasing bodily fragmentation. As with the healed anonymous beguine, sickness is not an indicator of sin here, and description of the effects of unspecified disease is prioritized over attempts at diagnoses. The relative precision of the term “fistulas” (“festola”) gives way to repeated references to generalized illness (“aquella malautia” twice, “malautia” once), and the vague “nafras,” translated here as “lesions” but more properly represented by “wounds” or “injuries.” The boy, or rather his body, is an object of communal care, signified by the unspecified “they” that anticipate his ear’s functional demise. Chief among these caretakers is his mother, named in the episode’s opening sentence as Mathiève, a widow at the end of her tether. The smell of her son’s wounds is “unbearable,” but so too is the situation she finds herself in. The next sentence testifies: “The child’s father had died and his mother was extremely distressed. She prayed constantly to Our Lord to take him, because he was in such pain and source of more and more tears” (12.11.84). The boy’s pain is invoked in order to be passed over, or at the very least presented as equivalent to his mother’s now chronic emotional pain. Instead of fulfilling Mathiève’s wish to “mercifully” kill her son, God instructs her to take the boy to Roubaud and be touched by Douceline of Digne. The holy woman is, predictably enough, moved by the boy’s physical condition. What is striking here is the initial focus of attention: the boy’s cephalic disease with no mention of his other disabilities. Douceline touches his lesions, and they immediately begin to heal. In order to ensure that Douceline continues to heal her child, however, Mathiève feigns ignorance that the cure is taking place (12.14.84). She continues to show the holy woman each of the boy’s debilities, ensuring that Douceline touches the child “in all the places where he was disabled or deformed” (12.16.85). Why would Douceline stop after only healing the boy’s cranial wounds? Perhaps she, without any experience of living and caring for the boy, does not recognize his physical disabilities as actually being in need of a cure. Or has the boy received his “allotted” amount of spiritual healing, carefully parceled out in increments by the holy woman so she can treat as many people as possible? Whatever the case, these details accentuate the fact that the curative encounter is performative, dependent on the invocation of specific gestures and the submission of all present to an implicit orienting script. This is further emphasized later in the tale, as the sisters of Roubaud warn Mathiève to avoid letting on that she attributes the healing of her child to Douceline (12.21.86). Such recognition would upset the holy woman. Instead, the mother must present her “completely well” child as the object of more diffuse divine healing, a product of “God’s great goodness and mercy.” After Douceline’s intervention, the boy is cured, his limbs now miraculously unclenched, his hearing and speech returned. This, however, is not the end of the story, for Mathiève does not know what to do with her cured child, barely even recognizing him now as her own kin (12.17.174–6). Returning home with him, she puts the child “where she usually kept him, tied and wrapped up,” alluding to her routine treatment of the boy, both loving and cruel. When he starts walking toward her, calling out “Mother,” she reacts not with joy but confusion and fear. This could not possibly be her child, for he has the power of speech. Fortunately, a visiting woman has the wherewithal to ask the boy whether he

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was, truly, Pellegrin. He confirms his identity. The connotative weight of the boy’s name resonates here: “Pellegrin” literally means “pilgrim” in Occitan. This evokes the alterity of foreign lands, alongside the tribulations of pilgrimage itself, a quest to pay tribute to God and thus remake oneself anew in His eyes. After his “pilgrimage” to Douceline, Pellegrin’s subjectivity is (re)articulated. He is now accorded a name and the vocal ability to vouch for his own identity. And yet, his mother must be further convinced. She runs her fingers over his miraculously cured head and finds, finally, proof of his identity. His ear had been hanging off his head, but now it is securely attached, held in place by a series of neat “reddish” stitches that remain perpetually fresh (12.18.86). This offers verifiable trace of Pellegrin’s previous physical dysfunction. Though the boy now superficially possesses a “normative” body, he is forever marked by his disability. This disability is central to his identity and the role he plays in his family. Nevertheless, Pellegrin’s sensory disabilities—his deafness and muteness—have been transferred to Mathiève. Speech has become unintelligible to her, no longer an epistemological vector. Instead, she depends on the epistemology of touch to make sense of her reality. It is not just Mathiève’s aural and oral faculties that are affected. She can no longer believe her eyes and is thus metaphorically blinded. Faced with the full weight of the miracle, Mathiève takes her son’s place as the disabled node connecting the family, if only momentarily: she runs to her father’s house “shouting like a madwoman” (12.19.86). Douceline touched Pellegrin to heal him; Mathiève touches Pellegrin to see him, to believe in him, and thus herself be healed of suffering, eventually. Douceline’s healing touch radiates through Pellegrin’s body. But his body also operates as a conduit for disability, flowing from him out into those around him. Disability can never be annihilated; instead, it is forever reconstituted along relational pathways. In due course, the family appreciates—with glorying wonder— Pellegrin’s healing and give thanks to God. The grandfather urges Mathiève to have the child (re)blessed by Douceline, who proclaims that the boy must be dedicated to the religious life in imitation of St. Francis (i.e., become a Friar Minor) as a way to thank the Lord. The tale ends with a flash-forward to the fate of the healed boy, who dutifully followed Douceline’s order and became a Franciscan cleric (12.22.87). Nevertheless, this only represents a pause in Pellegrin’s story, rather than a definitive happy ending. Pellegrin’s story picks up once more three chapters later (15.35.109). His presence is markedly different from the earlier sketch. Though his former paralysis is noted, no mention is made of the cure of his wounds, which were previously so prominent. The rationale becomes clear, as the text reports Pellegrin’s episodic bouts of illness, seeds of his former condition(s) reactivated by acts of disobedience. Though Pellegrin plans to become a friar, his brother wants him to be a monk. Terrified of his sibling, Pellegrin accedes to the plan and approaches the monastery of St. Victor. Pellegrin’s body rebels against him: Suddenly he felt a terrible pain in one of his ears that had earlier been cured through the Saint’s virtue. The further he went and the closer he came to the monastery, the worse the pain became. When he was inside the church and they were about to put the robes on him, his ear, neck and throat became so swollen that he could barely speak, and he had to return home. (15.37.109) Back at home, Pellegrin rededicates himself to following Douceline’s ordinance, if only she cures him (again) (15.38.220). Pellegrin’s visceral, almost anaphylactic reaction to the monastery happens twice before he gets the message (15.39.110). This brings the total of his “cures,” counted as discrete episodes, to three. Cures, even miraculous ones, may

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only be partial, or conditional. Although visible signs of disability and chronic disease may disappear, that does not mean that the “cured” body is unmarked by bodily and subjective difference. In his adult life, Pellegrin’s chronic condition is ambiguously framed. On the one hand, it signifies the inescapable bodily link he has with his healer and his responsibility to God. It thus operates as a mechanism to exert control over his life and his destiny. His disability remains “dormant” in his body—but could in theory come back with full force were he to exhibit “bad” behavior. However, his episodes of pain and illness are also affirmative. Even in this final vignette, they are not described as originating in sin of any kind. When Pellegrin cannot speak his mind openly to resist his brother’s plans, the semiosomatics of his pain expresses his desires. His illness offers vivid testimony as to the righteousness of his entrance into the Order of St. Francis, for despite what Douceline had said on the matter, the local Franciscan friars were disinclined to accept Pellegrin into their community. Faced with his repeated reactions to the Victorine monastery, they allow him entry, albeit grudgingly. Pellegrin’s entire monastic identity, then, is founded upon his enduring bodily difference. Life “post-cure” does not equate to a return to ablebodied normativity. The non-normative body—and its attendant subject position(s)—can be suppressed, but never fully erased.

3.6. CONCLUSION: CLAIMING CRIP Was Pellegrin ever disabled, in our contemporary understanding of the term? Can Pellegrin’s “post-cure” life and body be claimed as disabled? Do such categorizations really matter for those of us in the contemporary disability community? To answer the latter question: yes and no. Historical representation matters, but rules-lawyering about classifications of disability is not particularly helpful. What matters is the moment of recognition when we read Pellegrin’s story: the moment in which we feel linked to his lived experience of disability, in which we see our own lives and bodies reflected, somehow, in his biography. In that moment, we find ourselves as part of a trans-historical chronic-crip community. And that community is constructed by the conscious, politicized decision to let that moment of recognition unfold, by allowing ourselves to “claim” Pellegrin as “crip” (Kafer 2013: 13–14). Kafer formulates the basic logic of “claiming crip” as follows: the conscious inclusion of the nondisabled in the crip community, coupled with the refusal of “simplistic binaries like disabled/nondisabled and sick/healthy” (13).10 The work of “claiming crip” is “to recognize the ethical, epistemic, and political responsibilities behind such claims,” to force the seal on the hermetic enclosure of normative able-bodiedness. The process of “claiming crip” brings to the fore a particularly ambiguous area of disability identity politics: what to do about people who may be classified as disabled by others, but who do not identify as such themselves. It “doesn’t matter,” Kafer maintains, whether such people “claim crip [themselves] or not”: “rethinking our cultural assumptions about disability, imagining our disability futures differently, will benefit all of us, regardless of our identities.” I concur, adjusting Kafer’s proposition only to add that these alternative imagined futures are painted in ever more detail by imagining our disability histories differently. We must challenge assumptions as to disability identities and claim medieval subjects as crips wherever we find them in our sources, whenever it is clear that we, as modern scholars, recognize the disability experience in the traces of their (and our) lives. The point is not to force monolithic fixity: “disability, same now as it ever medievally was.”

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Instead, “claiming crip” on behalf of medieval subjects acknowledges that we cannot ever know firsthand the lived experience of medieval folks with non-normative bodies, nor do modern categories of disability identity seamlessly fit the shapes of their sociopolitical contexts. It is an acknowledgment of the limitations inherent to our task of the historical recovery of disability. But it is also a way to form trans-historical crip communities, diverse collectives that show the constructed-ness of the normate in every moment. It telegraphs our indebtedness to our contemporary subject positions as twenty-first-century disability scholars, while also destabilizing the very biases that we bring to our work, compelling us to ask more and different questions about bodily difference. “Claiming crip” is a means to enact communion, (re)uniting non-normative bodies throughout time and space into a “collective affinity” (Kafer 2013: 10–12) of corporeal difference. The Ancrene Wisse presents pain as a visceral experience of communion: God shed his blood for all, but it only has value for those who flee the flesh’s pleasure and torment themselves. And is that any wonder? Is not God our head and we all his members? But is not each member in pain with the suffering of the head? He is then not his member who does not have an ache beneath a head so painfully aching. (1993: 6.166) Christ’s lived experience of pain during the Passion is excruciating and lengthy. It is the archetype of acute pain, a “useful” and “productive” pain that will, eventually, end. But the fundamental productivity of Christ’s pain is in its chronicity, in the ways in which the body of the Church and the bodies of the church bring Christ’s pain into their present moment(s), live it themselves, and share a portion of Christ’s suffering. This is revealed in gory visions of a still-bleeding Christ, a mainstay of medieval devotional literature bolstering doctrines of transubstantiation and real Eucharistic presence. Douceline of Digne’s cures take place in this context, exemplified by her vision of Christ in a tabernacle “completely overcome, bleeding from all parts of his body, and gravely wounded. There was still fresh blood flowing from his wounds as if he had just been taken down from the cross” (Philippine of Porcellet 2001: 10.15.71). The present-ness of Christ’s Passion is perhaps most startlingly illustrated in a fifteenth-century woodcut (Figure 3.1), found in a manuscript of devotional texts produced by Carthusian monks in England.11 The tableau is drenched in blood: blood flowing from Christ’s wounds, coursing down his body as he carries the cross; blood spattering across all earthly things in the visual frame, including the monk kneeling at Christ’s feet. Christ’s blood is not contained by the woodcut’s frame. It seeps ever outwards, or so it seems, drenching the vellum support on which the image is pasted. This is the effect created by the decoration on this folio, and several other pages in the codex, “hundreds of tiny crimson wounds superimposed on red vellum backdrops” (Thebaut 2009: 175). Figure 3.1, then, allows for a Eucharistic experience for its reader/viewer: Christ’s blood flows ever outward of the originary scene of his Passion, authentically present in the reader/viewer’s own moment. Reading becomes sacramental, and contact with Christ’s blood, somehow freshly spilled once yet authentically eternal, affords union with the divine (Thebaut 2009: 178). Christ’s wounds make sense as redemptive only if they are chronic: episodic, never fully healed, dependably recurrent. What happens if we “claim crip” on behalf of Christ, or his body, or just his pain? What futures—and pasts—become imaginable if we examine the Christological logic of chronic pain?12 “Claiming crip” in the manner I am suggesting is a methodological intervention that exerts the disruptive, disorienting, disjunctive logic of crip time. This temporal mode

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FIGURE 3.1  Colored print with Christ as Man of Sorrows adored by a Carthusian. London, British Library, Egerton MS 1821, fol. 9v. Public domain; British Library Online. https://www. bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMINBig.ASP?size=big&IllID=1073.

resists linearity and teleology; it contains not one but many potential timelines. It draws attention to the way that, in its lived experience, time dilates, extends, shrinks. Crip time is, as Richard Godden and Jonathan Hsy (2013) attest, “significantly dependent upon the pressures that embodied difference would generate for a person with a disability” (330).13 It is an integral part of the lived experience of disability, insidiously and often

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implicitly so. We need more time or less time, different kinds of time. Such temporal disorientation is keenly embodied in chronic lives. The very definition of chronic illness rests upon the inhabitation of an unexpected—“difficult”—temporal mode. Chronicity dissolves the expected teleology of illness. Those of us with chronic lives exist in the duration, never to reach the end point of health. Waiting for diagnosis, often we feel as if we are “suspended in time” (Charmaz [2000] 2007: 282). Hopes of cure entail deferral, anticipating a future while we pause living in the present. Managing chronic illness means grappling with time, living in episodic fits and starts: the joyous fluency of the “good days” when you get things done, the “bad days” of living in slow motion. Frequently, we obey not the “clock time” of neoliberal employment, but instead “meds time,” the schedule upon which our medications must be taken. Pain thickens time: “the pain experience dominates the life situation of the patient,” leading to “a feeling of being ‘entrapped’ in the present” (Hellström and Carlsson 1997: 138).14 Locked in the painful present, the past and future fade away, becoming harder to remember, even to imagine. “Claiming crip” on behalf of medieval subjects simultaneously reimagines the past and the future for bodies-in-pain. This marks the start of a “cross-temporal conversation,” a “provisional zone of contact” that allows for “an intersubjective encounter” (Godden and Hsy 2013: 334). In such encounters, medieval and modern chronic bodies flow into one another, meeting and coalescing in episodic bursts of pain and illness, after which they disentangle and return to their respective historical periods.

CHAPTER FOUR

Blindness Evolving Religious and Secular Constructions and Responses EDWARD WHEATLEY

Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote his widely popular work On the Properties of Things in Latin around 1240; by 1400, it had been translated into French and English, and by 1500, the latter translation had been printed by Wynkyn de Worde in London. The ongoing popularity of the work, which is a forerunner of the encyclopedia, makes Bartholomaeus’ description of blindness a useful starting point for this chapter. He draws on stereotypes of blind people that were current when he was writing, but as we will see, those stereotypes remained operative in medieval Europe through the Middle Ages and beyond. Bartholomaeus writes: among all the sufferings and evils of the senses and of feeling blindness is most wretched … For without any bond blindness is a prison to the blind, for blindness beguiles the imaginative virtue of knowing, for in judging white the blind person thinks it is black, and vice versa. It prevents the virtue of consideration in judging, for he judges and considers and plans to go eastward and is beguiled in his judgment and goes westward. And blindness overturns the virtue of affection and desire, for if men proffer the blind person a silver penny and a copper one in order to choose the better one, he wants to choose the silver penny but chooses the copper. The blind man’s wretchedness is so great that it makes him subject not only to a child or a servant for conducting and leading him, but also to a dog. And the blind person is often brought to such great need that in order to pass and escape the peril of a bridge or a ford, he is compelled to believe a hound better than himself. Also in perils that all men doubt and fear, because the blind man sees no peril, he is certain, and on the contrary, often when there is no peril the blind man fears most. He often trips on a flat path and stumbles. Often where he should raise his foot he bends it downward and vice versa, where he should set his foot on the ground he raises it upward. He puts forth his hand all around groping and grasping; he seeks all around his route with his hand and with his staff. Seldom does he do anything with certainty; nearly always he doubts and fears. Also when the blind man lies naked he believes that he is clothed and covered. Also often when all men see him he thinks he is hidden. Also the blind person sometimes raises his eyes toward heaven and to the sun, but the brightness of heaven does not comfort his eyes. The sun beam is present to the blind person’s eye, but he does not know the virtue and the effect of the sun … Also

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sometimes the blind person beats and smites and aggrieves the child who leads him, and shall soon pay for the beating by the doing of the child, for the child has the beating in mind and forsakes him and leaves him alone in the middle of a bridge or in some other peril, and doesn’t teach him the way to avoid the peril. Therefore the blind person is wretched, for in the house he dares do nothing trustfully, and in the street he is afraid lest his fellow forsake him. (Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1975: 364–5; my translation) The passage attempts to be charitable to a certain extent, but is largely paternalistic and condescending, particularly in its assertion that a blind person’s position forces him to trust a dog more than himself; there is no suggestion of compensatory use of other senses. The blind person’s use of violence against his guide characterizes him and his kind as ill-tempered and also raises the possibility of the perhaps justified revenge of the guide upon the blind person through further violence, revenge that is represented in later works of popular literature. In short, blindness for Bartholomaeus is objectified as a monolithic misery that cannot be handled in any productive way. This bleak representation of the blind man confronting the physical world is unusual among Bartholomaeus’ descriptions in that it considers the impairment in almost total isolation, as if Bartholomaeus were observing a person with a carefully controlled, nearly scientific objectivity. Under such circumstances, the impairment solely belongs to the blind man, and its difficulties are limited to the way he makes his way through the world. But aspects of disability are socially determined, so in order to understand blindness as it was constructed in the Middle Ages, we must examine evidence of the responses to it and the meanings it was given in broader social and historical contexts. Indeed, Bartholomaeus takes a small step toward contextualizing blindness in relation to religion by telling his sighted readers that they would be better off blind than misusing their sight in worldly, sinful pursuits that would ultimately damn them to hell (Bartholomaeus 1975: 365–6); however, this warning tells us more about the sighted than the blind. But the connection of religion and disability is more the norm than the exception in medieval discourse, and when blindness is considered in relation to medieval Christianity, it becomes the subject of a number of religious constructions, some of which are as problematic as the purely personal ones described by Bartholomaeus. The medieval European construction of disability through the culturally dominant Western Christian church is an example of the religious model, a useful definition of which appears in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies: The moral or religious model is perhaps the most pertinent within studies of biblical or other ancient literatures. Through this lens disability or other physical differences are read as divine punishment or reward, curse or blessing, connected to the demonic or the divine, caused by sin and/or remedied by divine intervention. Physical or mental impairments are aligned with moral value and thus may lead to disablement. This critical lens highlights how disability is rarely, if ever, perceived and engaged as a neutral category or in an impartial manner. (2014: 102) The church’s control of the discourse relating to illness and disability was based largely on miraculous cures in the New Testament, in which Jesus plays the related roles of miraculous healer and spiritual “physician.” His cure of a blind person is described in John 9:

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1. And Jesus passing by, saw a man, who was blind from his birth: 2. And his disciples asked him: Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind. 3. Jesus answered: Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (Holy Bible 1899)1 Jesus then cures the man. Here, the disciples assume that blindness must be punishment for sin, an association that certainly remained alive in the Middle Ages, but Jesus refutes that assumption, stating that the impairment is merely an absence or a void within which divine power can be exercised and “made manifest” to both the witnesses of the miracle and the blind man himself. This view of impairment must be considered alongside another miraculous cure from John that makes the connection between disability and sin more explicit. Jesus’ disciplinary declaration to a man who had been “infirm” for thirty-eight years was incorporated into a canon from the highly influential Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that sought to regularize the practice of confession of sins. The canon reads as follows: Since bodily infirmity is sometimes caused by sin, the Lord saying to the sick man whom he had healed: “Go and sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee” (John 5:14), we declare in the present decree and strictly command that when physicians of the body are called to the bedside of the sick, before all else they admonish them to call for the physician of souls, so that after spiritual health has been restored to them, the application of bodily medicine may be of greater benefit, for the cause being removed, the effect will pass away. (Qtd. in Amundsen 1986: 88–9) Here, the “physicians of the soul” (i.e., priests) must ensure a person’s spiritual health before medical doctors are allowed to act. The church was clearly attempting to control the practice of medicine, allowing it a limited role alongside religion. This canon came out of the same council that required Christians to confess their sins at least once a year, which is a type of restoration of spiritual health that the canon requires. Repeatedly in medieval literature, art, and religious teaching, representations of disability in general and blindness in particular were strongly influenced by the ways they were represented in Jesus’ miracles. As in John 9, the disability became the locus at which a saint or holy figure proved his or her holiness, particularly if the person with the disability claimed to have faith in the curer. Representations of miraculous cures appear frequently in medieval visual art of all genres, and they were also enacted in religious drama. Beyond the Bible, thaumaturgic (i.e., curative) miracles filled what has been called “the only book more widely read than the Bible” in the late Middle Ages: Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea or Golden Legend, a lengthy compilation of saints’ lives and other religious texts, written in about 1260.2 Their presence there is no doubt due to the fact that the canonization process required proof that a Christian under consideration for sainthood had performed miracles while alive, and the miracles that were most Christlike, such as curing disabilities, were particularly privileged. It might appear that Christianity’s emphasis on the possibility of miraculous cure for the most faithful would create a concomitant belief that disability was the result of or punishment for sin, but such was not always the case. Irina Metzler has argued persuasively that modern historiography rather than medieval attitudes is responsible for the perception that in medieval Europe impairment was inevitably associated with sin (Metzler 2006: 11–13).3 Although the association of disability with sinfulness was

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certainly available as part of the religious model, that association was not inevitable. And, of course, there were other models of disability in Europe as well in which sin was not an issue, not least the medical model, which became more accepted in relation to certain kinds of impairments in the later Middle Ages. However, medicine had relatively little to offer people with visual impairments (although eyeglasses were invented in Italy for nearsightedness in the 1280s and for farsightedness in the 1450s; Wheatley 2010: 8), so the religious model remained dominant. The church was involved not only spiritually but also economically with people with disabilities because of two important forms of charity: alms-giving to individuals and management of institutions for groups (Stiker 1999: 73–4). Generous gifts and bequests were made to religious institutions that cared for people with disabilities, particularly monasteries and convents. Religious orders usually controlled hospitals, regardless of who founded them, and some of those orders were founded specifically to care for the infirm (Amundsen 1986: 86). But the role of Christian charity in the lives of medieval people with disabilities can be overemphasized, a tendency that deprives those people of agency. While some people with disabilities would have required alms or care from institutions, many others would have lived and worked with their families and communities, receiving any necessary aid, whether monetary or otherwise, from them; charity would have been unnecessary or perhaps even unavailable to them. But the religious model remained significant for both those in institutions and those in conventional social and familial settings because they all needed to internalize the discipline of the doctrines of the church, including penance, if they had any hope of miraculous cure. Therefore, the aspects of the religious model described above take precedence over acts of charity: people with disabilities had to make themselves worthy of receiving the benevolence of the church, whether economic or spiritual. With this basic outline of the religious model in place, we can now begin to differentiate between blind people and people with other disabilities, for the blind and visually impaired were disadvantaged in particular ways by the medieval church. To use a term coined by David Bolt, medieval Christianity was profoundly “ocularnormative” (i.e., it privileged visual perception over perception through the other senses; Bolt 2014: 14). This assertion may seem counterintuitive inasmuch as medieval Christians were meant to cultivate an inner vision that should transcend worldly concerns and should not be based in the physical senses (as suggested in Bartholomaeus’ warning to the sighted above). However, Western Christianity’s pervasive iconophilia during the Middle Ages and beyond made sight central to many religious observances. Thomas Lentes effectively describes this type of religious gaze: Image devotion and prayer were directed, above all, toward the creation of interior spaces of vision as well as the change from one world to the next. The outer gaze at a material picture was often only an occasion for creating inner images. Images of the Passion, for example, visualized whatever aspects of the contemplation of the Passion were to be created by the inner eye: the memory of Christ’s suffering and death. External and internal gazes were complementary. The inner person was perceived as a place into which images that penetrated the external eye could be projected. Through the worship of images, the internal space for vision was intended to be filled with images of salvation and of the saints. (Lentes 2006: 366) While the goal of gazing on sacred objects or images is to create proper inner vision, the use of physical sight seems almost a necessary precondition to the creation of that

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special interiority. So what could visually impaired people do in order to create the same spiritual state? If any medieval writers addressed this question, their work remains little known. And only with the rise of iconoclasm, first among some medieval heretics such as the Lollards and then during the Reformation, was sight less privileged: a notable voice among sixteenth-century iconoclasts was Huldreich Zwingli, who stated that images had no effect on him because of his nearsightedness, thus constructing his visual impairment as, if not desirable, at least acceptable (Lentes 2006: 363). According to Lentes, medieval Christians “tried to secure their salvation through eye contact with whatever objects of salvation might be available—for instance, the host being elevated, the relics in the ostentatio, or icons” (Lentes 2006: 361). The number and variety of holy objects created and enforced ocularnormativism in Christian Europe. But paramount among the holy objects to be gazed upon was the Eucharistic Host. From the twelfth century through the remainder of the Middle Ages, the laity generally partook of the Eucharist through only their sense of sight (except at Easter, when usually the Eucharist was actually ingested). The “elevatio” required the priest to consecrate the Eucharistic bread and then raise it above his head so that it could be seen by the congregants. The synodal statutes of Paris of 1205–8 required the bread to be consecrated before the “elevatio” so that the viewers would see the actual body of Christ instead of mere bread, and priests were instructed to raise the Host high enough to be visible to all. Eamon Duffy asserts that the “elevatio” became “the high point of the lay experience of the Mass” (Duffy 1992: 96), and there is ample evidence of this in both written texts and the visual arts, in which representations of the Host generally show it at the moment when the priest is holding it above his head. After the Synod of Paris mentioned above, the ritual of the “elevatio” spread across Europe within a mere fifteen years (Snoek 1995: 56), and during the later Middle Ages it “almost completely replac[ed] sacramental communion” (Snoek 1995: 59). The “elevatio” became so central to Christian practices that people sometimes went from one church to another to see the Host repeatedly. Because Christians under interdict for sinfulness were forbidden from entering churches, they sometimes drilled holes in their doors in order to catch a glimpse of the “elevatio” (Snoek 1995: 60). In some church naves where wooden rood screens blocked the view of the host, holes called “elevation squints” were bored through the wood at the eye level of the kneeling congregants (Duffy 1992: 97).4 The intensity of people’s desire to see the Host was among the reasons for the creation in 1264 of Corpus Christi Day, a feast meant specifically to celebrate the body of Christ, a celebration that often involved taking the Host out of the church and displaying it in some type of public procession (Snoek 1995: 59–61). Beliefs that came to be associated with the “elevatio” disadvantaged the blind and visually impaired even further. Ingesting the host had to be preceded by confession of one’s sins, but those who only saw the host derived spiritual benefits from it without having to confess. As G. J. C. Snoek says, “‘communion with the eyes’ implied no confession and no danger of receiving communion unworthily” (Snoek 1995: 293). For the visually impaired, then, the spiritual renewal of this common form of quasi-communion was unavailable, and medieval sources make no mention of alternative practices available to them. Texts from both sides of the channel attest to the significance of the “elevatio” and connect visual impairment to it. According to an anonymous Middle English chronicle written by a London author in the late 1460s, a locksmith helped a heretical Lollard steal the Eucharist, but then went to mass to pray for forgiveness, where he was unable to see the Host any of the times that it should have been visible: “when the priest held

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up that holy sacrament at the time of elevation he might see nothing of that blessed body of Christ at any time during the Mass, not even during the Agnus Dei” (Gray 1985: 11; my translation). Questioning his own sanity, the man drank a great deal of ale and attended three more masses, but experienced the same strange inability. Then he and his accomplices were arrested, thrown in prison, and sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, the locksmith confessed his sins and again went to mass, where now he could see the sacrament clearly. The chronicler closes the story by saying that he believes that their souls were saved. The text thus equates sinfulness with the inability to see the Elevation of the Host and spiritual rectitude with restored vision. The locksmith’s relief at his reentry into the Christian fold hours before his death bears similarities to the relief of fourteenth-century French poet Gilles le Muisit, the abbot of Tournai, who reentered the community of the sighted after having his cataracts removed. In a poem thanking the Virgin Mary for the miracle of his restored vision, he mentions specifically his joy in being able to see the Savior at the altar: “I truly see my savior at the altar” (Le Muisit 1882: vol. 2, 234; my translation). Seeing the Savior specifically at the altar when most churches have multiple images of him is almost certainly a reference to the “elevatio.” Partaking of the Eucharist through the sense of sight alone moves beyond the general ocularnormativism of the medieval church into the realm of “ocularcentrism”; another term coined by David Bolt, it is defined as “a perspective—and, by extension, a subject position—that is dominated by vision” (Bolt 2014: 17). The elevation relies exclusively on vision for the taking of communion. The ocularcentrism of Christian practices such as the elevation has been described as “the idealized formalization or even ritualization of viewing, that is, a ritual enactment of the very act of seeing the sacred and its impact on the viewer in sacralizing his vision” (Jørgensen 2004: 173–4). Vision is ocularcentrically both the medium and the object of ritual observation. A final aspect of the religious construction of blindness should be mentioned here. In Christian discourse, as elsewhere, terms for disabilities have a strong metaphorical dimension, and blindness is frequently used metaphorically to represent apostasy or heresy—the refusal to “see” Jesus’ divinity. Simi Linton has correctly asserted that metaphors of disability are “powerful tools of persuasion,” and metaphor and reality structure each other synergistically (Linton 1998: 125). The metaphor of blindness in Christian discourse was used with great frequency as an epithet to apply to Jews, and this figurative association of blind people with Jews resulted in similar types of stereotyping, marginalization, and even punishment for both groups. The trope appeared in numerous medieval genres, with some, such as sermons, more predictable than others, such as drama, particularly the fifteenth-century English Croxton Play of the Sacrament (Wheatley 2002: 351–82). It is impossible to separate the religious model of disability from a more social model in medieval Christian communities because, in most instances, the religious community was partly if not entirely the same as the social one. Even so, social and legal practices also helped to construct perceptions of blindness in ways that differ from religious constructions. Sociologist Ervin Goffman’s theory of “stigmatization” is useful in considering how blindness may have been viewed socially. The implication that “uncured” disabilities somehow represented shameful incompleteness is discussed in his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Goffman historicizes the term “stigma” by connecting it to the branding or scarring that identified Greek slaves, though in the Christian era it referred more generally to “bodily signs of physical

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disorder.” He continues, “Today, the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kind of disgrace that arouse concern” (Goffman 1963: 1–2). Although Goffman wrote decades before the constructionist model of disability was delineated, his ideas anticipate it: the “disgrace” that attaches itself to a stigma is more powerful than the bodily evidence that gives rise to the stigma. In other words, the disgrace constructs the disability, regardless of the impairment, and the perception of what constitutes the disgrace caused by particular “bodily evidence” differs according to time and place, as do the constructions of disabilities based on certain impairments. When considered in relation to the Christian Middle Ages, Goffman’s ideas help us understand how the church’s creation of a complex set of attitudes toward blind people could have resulted in stigmatization. However, the stigma associated with the “incompleteness” or sinfulness of blind people was not limited to religious discourse, because in medieval Europe disability could be read as a sign of sin in the sociopolitical rather than religious sphere. Physical mutilation as punishment for crimes, particularly among the Normans and the French, made the social meaning of several disabilities difficult to interpret in given situations. At times and places where mutilation was used as punishment, people must have been at best uncertain about and perhaps actively suspicious of the type of stigma that certain disabilities represented. A man without a hand could have been born that way, could have lost it in an accident, or could have had it cut off as punishment for theft. Blindness could also be read as accidental or due to divine or judicial punishment. The use of blinding as punishment would have kept such suspicions alive until well into the Renaissance, particularly on the continent. Mutilation as punishment situates the social meaning of blindness in the Middle Ages ambiguously between the bodily marks of shame suffered by Greek slaves and Goffman’s modern concept of stigma, due to the possibility that disability could have been a marked sign of a literal judgment of criminal activity rather than an unmarked impairment. The English and the French had very different histories of the use of mutilation as punishment in the Middle Ages. Blinding as punishment was used much more frequently by the French and the Normans than by the English, and when blinding was done in England, Norman colonizers often did it to their colonial subjects. Only once does AngloSaxon law mention blinding as appropriate for serial criminals, and only then after they had been mutilated in other ways. It is surely significant that this law came about not under an English king but a Danish one, Cnut, in 1035, but I have seen no evidence that it was ever enforced.5 After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, William the Conqueror used punitive blinding frequently, and extant evidence of blinding by Norman colonizers would not include undocumented examples of the enforcement of William’s infamous poaching laws, whereby poachers of deer could be blinded as soon as they were apprehended (Douglas and Greenaway 1953: 164). The practice of blinding even spread to the Norman clergy. In the year of William’s death, Archbishop Lanfranc ordered the blinding of citizens of Canterbury who protested the installation of a Norman abbot at St. Augustine’s Abbey (Earle and Plumner 1892: vol. 1, 287–92). The latest example of punitive blinding that I have found in England was performed in 1223,6 though the practice is mentioned as a possible punishment in the borough customs (i.e., local laws) of Portsmouth in 1272 (Bateson 1904: vol. 1, 77). In the thirteenth century, the forest laws associated with the Magna Carta forbade the blinding of poachers, and in 1285, the Second Statues of

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Westminster ruled that rape was to be punished by the execution of the rapist, whereas earlier, blinding and castration were evidently permissible (though unrecorded) in some boroughs.7 So blinding was done to the English largely by the colonial powers, which, in the two centuries immediately following the Norman Conquest, could have allowed the English public to interpret being judicially blinded as evidence of potentially admirable political resistance rather than criminal activity. The situation was very different in France, where the Norman practices were adopted by the French even before Normandy came under full French rule. The bloodiest episode was perpetrated in 1210 by Simon de Montfort during the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in the settlement of Bram, between Carcassonne and Castelnaudary. The events there were in response to an enemy earlier blinding some of Simon’s soldiers. The following description of the carnage is by Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, a supporter of de Montfort. They put out the eyes of the defenders [of Bram], over a hundred in number, and cut off their noses. One man was spared one eye so that, as a demonstration of our contempt for our enemies, he could lead the others to Cabaret. The Count [de Montfort] had this punishment carried out not because the mutilation gave him any pleasure but because his opponents had been the first to indulge in atrocities and, cruel executioners that they were, were given to butchering any of our men they might capture by dismembering them … The Count never took delight in cruelty or in the torture of his enemies. (Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay 1998: 79) Peter seems almost unaware of damning de Montfort’s character with faint praise, thus reinforcing the veracity of his account of this horrifying event. Blinding as punishment was practiced concurrently for centuries in several European countries. In Germany, the practice appeared in the thirteenth century, where it was used on criminals as old as eighty (Metzler 2013b: 13), and it also appears in at least one work of German literature (Metzler 2013b: 28–9). In France, it continued through the fourteenth century and into the last quarter of the fifteenth century (Gonthier 1998: 145–6). It may have even affected the French language: in other romance languages, words for blindness and blind people are etymologically related to the Latin word caecus, but French has a unique term, “aveugle,” from the Latin “ab oculis,” meaning “without eyes.” This term entered the language in the twelfth century, when punitive blinding was widespread (Wheatley 2010: 29). In France, the association of blindness and criminality apparently gave rise to a set of stereotypes of the blind as, at best, agents of misrule, or worse, criminals. These stereotypes are available relatively early in such literature as the thirteenth-century farce Le Garçon et l’Aveugle (The Boy and the Blind Man), in which a blind beggar, who has been described as “a drunkard and a glutton, coarse, cynical, and debauched” (Weygand 2009: 14), has become rich from his begging. A boy introduces himself to the audience with asides disclosing that he intends to trick and humiliate the blind man, which he will do while serving as the man’s guide. The boy physically abuses the man and ultimately steals his money and clothes, leaving him stripped and silent before the audience. During the course of the play, this character becomes Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ helpless blind man writ large: he is subject to a child who forsakes him, leaving him alone. The farce survives in only one manuscript, but it contains additions and emendations that indicate its use as a performance text for two

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centuries (Symes 2004: 105–45). Similar plots involving the humiliation of blind characters not only appear in other comic drama such as La Farce du Goguelu (1949: 357–67), but also provide comic interludes in lengthy plays based on stories from the Bible. One such example is Le Mystère de la Résurrection ([1456] 1993) from Angers, which was performed over three days, each of which features an appearance by a blind man, Galleboys, and his tricky guide Saudret, who both steals from and beats Galleboys. The Liber Vagatorum (Book of Vagabonds and Beggars), written in 1509, also relies on medieval stereotypes of dishonest blind people. The writer describes two types of blind beggar. One goes to pilgrimage sites, hides his own hat, and tells the locals that it has been stolen; he then collects “ten or twenty” hats and sells them while claiming falsely to have been on pilgrimage to Rome and St. James of Compostella. The other type ties bloodied cotton to his eyes and claims to have been blinded in the forest by criminals, a ruse to move potential alms-givers to pity him and give more. The writer, who concludes each description of a type of beggar with advice on how to deal with them, finishes the section on the blind as follows: “Know them well before thou givest to them; my advice is only give to those thou knowest” (Liber 1932: 101–3). Another medieval perception of blind people who begged for a living was that they actively rejected the possibility of a thaumaturgic miracle in order not to have to work. This stereotype would have again reflected negatively on blind people, who would be perceived as eschewing the divine grace that was available to them. Such a blind man appears in an episode of the chapter devoted to St. Martin in the aforementioned Golden Legend. A blind man and a lame man hear about the saint’s recent death and the power of his body to cure disabilities. They state that they have no desire to be cured, because they would then have to labor. They decide to run away, with the lame man carried by and directing the blind man, but they cannot escape quickly enough to avoid being cured—and thus their cure is in effect a miracle of chastisement for their sinful laziness (Jacobus de Voragine 1993: vol. 2, 300). This episode was dramatized more than once, with the added physical “comedy” of having the lame man ride on the blind man’s shoulders; in one version, an episode in the longer play Le mystère de la vie et hystoire de monseigneur sainct Martin, the blind man justifies remaining impaired by telling his friend how much more difficult life would be if they were cured: “Alas, we would be apprentices, but now we are masters. There isn’t a burger or a priest who doesn’t give to us now. We earn a great deal more money without trouble and without labor. Then we wouldn’t have a penny if it weren’t by laboring” (qtd. in Le garçon 1989: 55–6; my translation). Interestingly, this character’s attitude toward work and his impairment was anticipated in the Carolingian period by an old man in Aix-en-Provence who refused to pray for the restoration of his own sight. He defended himself thus: Why do I need the vision that I lost so long ago? It is worth more to me to be deprived of it than to have it. Blind, I can beg and none will repulse me. Rather, they hasten to attend to my needs. But if I got my sight back, it would seem wrong for me to beg alms even though I am old and weak and cannot work. (Qtd. in Metzler 2013b: 95) Perhaps the man’s age served as a partial excuse for his attitude, but nevertheless, refusing to pray and actively rejecting what God might grant cannot have been well received.

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The distrust and suspicion of blind people inherent in such texts are closely related to the medieval figure of the beggar who feigns disability (and in the drama described above that includes blind characters, actors would have shown audiences just how effectively blindness could be feigned). This figure loomed so large in the medieval imagination that it affected the treatment of the genuinely visually impaired. Politically, it resulted in a number of laws limiting the movements of beggars to specified areas; such measures kept them in a community that knew whether they were actually disabled. The effect of anxiety about feigned beggars also resulted in the marking of people who were really visually impaired; some wore badges that identified them as residents of particular institutions, and others wore emblems that served as recognizable licenses to beg. A variety of textual evidence about feigned disabilities among beggars appears in medieval European literature. For example, in one version of the play of the blind man and the lame man, after their cure, the newly sighted man praises God for the miracle, while the formerly lame man curses his luck and says he will rub potions and lard on his legs in order to appear lame and continue begging (Jacob 1882: 229). In the fabliau Les Trois Aveugles de Compiègne (The Three Blind Men of Compiègne), the plot is set in motion by a clerk who wants to test whether three men making their way along a road are pretending to be blind (Cortebarbe 1979: 109). In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the allegorical figure of Hunger “cures” beggars feigning disability by making them so hungry that they can no longer avoid working to earn their daily bread (Langland 1988: vol. VI, 191–2). Another socioliterary construct that took a dim view of the blind was courtly love. We need not concern ourselves here with the degree to which the code of conduct outlined in Andreas Capellanus’ twelfth-century Art of Courtly Love was actually followed by historical medieval lovers, a subject that continues to be debated. What is more significant for our purposes is that Andreas’ emphasis on visual aspects of the act of falling in love makes courtly love deeply ocularcentric: for him, “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and the excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex” (Capellanus 1941: 28). Because of this emphasis on the visual, Andreas goes on to write: Blindness is a bar to love, because a blind man cannot see anything upon which his mind can reflect immoderately, and so love cannot arise in him … But I admit that this is true only of the acquiring of love, for I do not deny that a love which a man acquires before his blindness may last after he becomes blind. (Capellanus 1941: 33) Even though a blind man’s inability to be immoderate is supposedly admirable, such a condescending and exclusionary attitude, which could certainly have been refuted in the medieval world, suggests that courtly love was more of a literary construction than a conduct manual. Elaborating upon Andreas’ second assertion here, Julie Singer has argued that French and Italian love poetry of the Middle Ages actually provided forms of rhetorical therapy for blindness and visual impairment, providing a different kind of sight of the beloved (2011). During the centuries when these negative perceptions and stereotypes were current, there were also positive developments for blind people in France: the foundation of hospices for the blind. And perhaps not coincidentally, some of them were founded by William the Conqueror, who himself used blinding punitively. According to a medieval verse chronicle, William founded hospices either entirely or partially reserved for blind inhabitants in Cherbourg, Rouen, Bayeux, and Caen (Gauthier 1984: 99–100). It is

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unclear whether these were founded before or after the Norman Conquest, but it is tempting to assert that William was trying to atone at home for the sins he had committed abroad. A pivotal event in the social history of blindness took place in Paris around 1258, when Louis IX, later St. Louis, founded the Hospice de Quinze-Vingts (“Hospital of the Fifteen-Twenties,” for three-hundred residents). This institution, which still exists as the National Center for Ophthalmology, was the first of its kind not to be under church control, and the hospice’s richly documented medieval history is full of conflicts with the bishops and clergy of Paris. In contrast to the way we might think of institutions due to our knowledge of the cruelties and strictures of many of them in later centuries, the Quinze-Vingts actually allowed families of blind people to live with them there, and residents had a voice in governance through certain administrators whom they elected. The residents were not cloistered, but were encouraged to go out into the streets of Paris wearing special fleur de lys badges that identified their affiliation, and they could beg or hold other jobs to earn money. They were also licensed to beg at church doors anywhere in France, competitively close to the alms boxes that served the local poor, which further increased the tensions with the church (Guillaumat and Baillart 1998: 39–40). Other “aveugleries” modeled on the same principles were founded elsewhere in France: l’Hospice des Six-Vingts in Chartres in 1291, and other such institutions in Tournai (now Belgium) in 1351, Meaux in the same year, Caen by 1364, Rouen in 1478, and Orléans by the end of the century (Guillaumat and Baillart 1998: 115–17). Louis’ hospice and later ones modeled on it effected a significant rupture in the social construction of blindness: the royal protection of blind people must have improved their lives in certain ways, but it also created a greater public profile for them, evidently leading to envy, contempt, and what might now be called a backlash. In a poem by Rutebeuf, the residents of the Quinze-Vingts became the objects of scorn within a few years of the institution’s foundation, well before Louis’ death: The king has assembled in a residence (although I don’t know what for) three hundred blind people, troop after troop. Across Paris they go three by three; all day long they do not stop braying, “Give to the three hundred who don’t see anything.” One pulls, another pushes, they often give each other jolts because there is no one to guide them. If the fire took it, there is no doubt that the house of their order would be entirely burnt down, and the king will again have more to do.8 Two centuries later, the poet François Villon reinforced this satirical view of the institution in his Testament (Will) by bequeathing his spectacles to the residents there (Villon 1974: 132, lines 1728–35). Some countries in Europe followed the French example of institutions particularly for the blind, but others did not. Flanders saw the creation of two such institutions in the fourteenth century. One was evidently founded at Bruges in 1305 by Robert de Béthune to show his gratitude for the city’s inhabitants who had fended off an invasion by Philip the Fair five years earlier, and in about 1370 Peter Van der Leyen founded another in Ghent (Stadelman 1909). England apparently had no institutions founded solely for blind people. It has been suggested that St. Mary within Cripplegate, also called Elsingspital in honor of its founder William Elsing, was a hospital for the blind (Orme and Webster 1995: 121), but Elsing’s charter of 1331 stipulated that the institution give preference to blind or paralyzed priests; any remaining space in the hospital could be given to blind beggars (Victoria History 1909: 535). So although Elsing had an interest in the blind, his generosity was first and foremost directed toward disabled priests who

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could no longer perform the mass. The hospital of the Papey has also been labeled an institution specifically for the blind, but in fact it, too, was meant for infirm members of the clergy (Orme and Webster 1995: 121), and thus it resembled Elsingspital in its primary clientele. These hospitals strongly reinforce the religious model not only because they were under church control, but also because they were actually ministering primarily to priests, who were likely to believe in some form of the religious model of disability. Around 1340, the goldsmiths of London asked for royal financial assistance for “the many men of that mistery [trade] blinded by the fire and smoke of quicksilver, and some worn out by manual work and oppressed and debilitated with various infirmities,” and they were given a “messuage with appurtenances” worth twenty pounds a year by Edward I, beginning in 1341 (Jefferson 2002: 67, 7). But while the documentation shows that the king was made aware of the occupational hazards of goldsmithing (and would have wanted to support its practitioners since their work was obviously important for the public display of royal wealth and status), there is no indication that this gift became an institution, as no institutional records survive. Elsewhere in Europe, especially in Spain, guild-like organizations for the blind were apparently favored over institutions. Blind people in medieval Spain organized themselves for reasons of both self-protection and religious piety, thereby distinguishing themselves from other beggars (and presumably allaying the suspicions that they might be feigning, as described above) and identifying themselves as professionals. These “brotherhoods of the blind” sometimes gained their members enough power to control some of the traditional jobs associated with the visually impaired, particularly singing and reciting prayers (Sutherland-Meier 2015). Perhaps the first of the Spanish cofradías (confraternities) for the blind was established in Toledo by blind veterans after the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. In Valencia in 1329, the first set of bylaws for a local brotherhood was enacted after receiving the approval of Alphonse IV of Aragon. They delineated duties that ranged from such religious and charitable acts as giving food to a poor person on the Tuesday after St. Martin’s Day to helping other members who were ill or needed a share of sharing alms. The bylaws set the annual dues for membership at twelve dineros. The group clearly gained power over the next 170 years, during which they took control of the singing and reciting of prayers in the city and, by 1502, any blind or disabled person who made a living through these activities was required to join the cofradía and pay dues (Sutherland-Meier 2015). In other words, the group became a guild-like closed shop. Indeed, a document from 1495 suggests a kind of apprentice system: in Triana, one Leonor Rodríguez consigned the care of her twelve-year-old son Lope to Juan de Villalobos for four years in order for the boy to learn to accompany the older blind man to recite prayers properly (Sutherland-Meier 2015). Brotherhoods of the blind spread across Europe through the remainder of the Middle Ages. For example, in France, royal privileges were granted in April 1418 to the fraternité des aveugles of Saint-Gratien of Bayeux (Jeanne 2012: n. 34). In Italy, Genoa had a Consorzia di Ciechi or Congregatio Orborum from the thirteenth century, and in the late Middle Ages, the confraternity ran a hospice with a blind man as its director (Pullan 1994: vol. VI, 9). Venice followed in 1315, Florence in 1324, Padua in 1358, and Milan in 1471. In accord with the religious model of disability, these organizations “assured [their members] an eternal life thanks to prayers and other religious functions performed by fellow members. Christian behaviour and an honorable life were essential requisites

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to membership” (Carnelos 2016: 2). In Germany, brotherhoods were apparently not concerned with limiting their membership exclusively to the blind. Although Strasbourg’s brotherhood was founded in 1411 by twenty-five blind people, in 1433, its official name became the Fraternity of Poor Beggars of Strasbourg, suggesting that people with other disabilities and perhaps even nondisabled people had been allowed to join. By 1454, Zülpich was home to a brotherhood of blind, crippled, and other poor people who lived on alms and contributed to a fund for the relief of sick members. By 1480, Frankfurt had a brotherhood for the blind and the lame (Lindberg 1993: 44). These organizations have been identified as important examples in disability history of self-advocacy undertaken by their members: “men and women with disabilities who participated in these organizations were self-advocates of their time” (Colon et al. 2005: 45). Beyond loss of sight due to natural causes or as punishment, both accidental and purposeful blinding in combat or other fights were addressed in laws and some recorded incidents that also state the amount of monetary compensation (Old English wergild) that the victim received for the loss of sight. Seventh-century Kentish laws demand payment of fifty shillings in wergild for the loss of one eye, twice as much as the twenty-five shillings for the loss of hearing in an ear. Laws later implemented by King Alfred made compensation for loss of an eye equal to that for loss of a foot (Metzler 2013a: 33). Two such records come from Ghent in the 1370s: in 1374, after Annin Arents shot Annin Masins in the eye with an arrow, presumably blinding that eye, the victim was paid seventy-two Parisian pounds. Three years later, Colard Van den Gardine’s son accidentally blinded a boy in one eye by poking him with an unnamed object, and the compensation was 150 Parisian pounds. In recounting these examples, Irina Metzler asserts that fines for impairment of a child were higher than those for adults, presumably because the person had to live with the condition for a longer period of time (Metzler 2013a: 33). As for the day-to-day lived experience of blind people, it is difficult to extrapolate from limited documentation all of the types of work that they might have done, but evidence survives that they held a variety of jobs, with minstrel and basket-weaver as perhaps the most stereotypical (Metzler 2013b: 84). But one blind Italian, Francesco Landini (1327–97), rose far above the level of minstrelsy in his musicianship to become well known in his country as an organist and composer of madrigals and other music (Singer 2010a: 39–52; Straus 2011: 18–21). Among other jobs, in Frankfurt, lame and blind men served as watchmen, guards, and church bell-ringers (Metzler 2013b: 77). Blind women could work as spinners (Metzler 2013b: 188). In his book De Re Aedificatoria (1452), Leon Battista Alberti indicates another job that may have been stereotypically associated with blind men when he writes, “Even the blind can make themselves useful working in a ropemaker’s shop” (Henderson 1994: 357). Ropemaking may have been a larger scale, masculine analogue to women’s spinning, in which the tactile nature of the task could compensate for visual impairment. It was not until the sixteenth century that a census from Norwich (1570) shows the jobs that blind people were doing, but we can assume that they did similar jobs in the Middle Ages; the census mentions a blind baker and a blind octogenarian who supported herself by knitting (Metzler 2013b: 76). In preindustrial society generally, the variety of jobs that needed to be done would have allowed blind and visually impaired people to find work that did not require sight. In her social history, Metzler also describes well-off families supporting elderly servants who had gone blind late in life (Metzler 2013b: 128–35). Associated with minstrels were blind poets at work in Europe. The fifteenth-century poet John Audelay refers to himself as

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blind in several of his poems, though he does not explore his disability thematically in his work (Wheatley 2010: 212–19). This is not true of Chaucer’s contemporary John Gower, whose poetry about his blindness has been read by Jonathan Hsy as “highly innovative formal and rhetorical strategies for representing visual impairment” that suggests an activist-oriented mode of advocacy (Hsy 2013: n.p.). In Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Tory Pearman reads the representations of blindness in the tales of Medusa and Constance as thematically central. She argues that in the work as a whole, blindness is linked to sin and cure is contingent on confession (Pearman 2013). However, regardless of these instances of improved treatment of and better attitudes toward the blind, they also continued to undergo humiliation and degradation. A particularly shocking example of such treatment on the European continent was a cruel “game” played in public in which a pig was tied to a stake and a group of blind men were given clubs in order to try to beat the pig to death, with the promise that they could have the meat afterward. For the sighted audience, the supposedly entertaining spectacle was in seeing the blind men beating each other as they tried to kill the pig. Such a scene, along with the four blind men being led to the event by a sighted boy, is represented in a bas de page illumination is Bodleian Library MS 264, a copy of The Romance of Alexander (Figure 4.1) (Wheatley 2005). Recorded evidence shows that this “game” was staged twelve times in different cities across the Low Countries, France, and Germany between 1386 and 1498 (Richard 2015: 525–56).9 However, records show that the program of illuminations in Bodleian MS 264 was completed by Flemish artist Jehan de Grise by 1344 (Wheatley 2005: 213), more than forty years before the earliest written record of the “game,” so obviously it predates the oldest extant description of it, and this unfortunate fact necessarily raises the question of the number of times it was staged without being recorded in writing. It is difficult to draw conclusions about blindness in the European Middle Ages because of both the length of time that the period encompasses and the broad geographical area covered in this chapter. What can be said is that the attitudes toward and treatment of blind people varied enormously during this period. Negative attitudes toward the blind are widely represented not only in literary and other texts, but also in ritualized humiliation such as the “game” of killing the pig, both of which had a long and widespread history. And ocularcentric practices such as the Elevation of the Host both called attention to the difference of blindness and disadvantaged blind people. On the other hand, positive developments occurred, such as the foundation of institutions and confraternities to support blind people, though these developments did not take effect consistently across Europe, nor were they all successful in the long term. What did begin to emerge in the Middle Ages was an understanding of blindness as an impairment that could be differentiated from other impairments—differentiation that encouraged society to focus on the special nature of blindness and the unique abilities of blind people. Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ bleak portrait of a solitary blind person struggling against the world that opened this chapter was effectively challenged and in some cases undermined by social developments in the Middle Ages.

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FIGURE 4.1  Four blind men being led by a sighted boy in a copy of The Romance of Alexander. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 264, fol. 74v. Image available online: http://image. ox.ac.uk/show?collection=bodleian&manuscript=msbodl264.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Deafness Reading Invisible Signs JULIE SINGER

I have such a heavy head, Such a deaf and numb ear, If anyone plays a joke on me or makes a disparaging remark I don’t hear a bit of it. … I say that my outward life Is more cursed, powerless, The most wretched, the most painful That there is, I believe.1 In the Middle Ages, deaf people were isolated, powerless, mocked and excluded—or so the above-cited lament of a deaf character in a late medieval farce, and the conventional wisdom derived from such cultural artefacts, would have us believe. The reality is, of course, far more complicated.2 Medieval European understandings and representations of deafness draw heavily on biblical imagery and Galenic medicine, and therefore display a great deal of continuity with ancient traditions. But medieval writers also use deafness to think through a number of larger cultural debates particular to their period: theological discussions of knowledge, sin, and salvation; philosophical questions about the authenticity and legibility of signs; the iconographic problem of the representation of the invisible. Before the invention of any complete, grammatical sign language, and before any evidence of the emergence of identifiable deaf communities,3 few deaf people had the opportunity to write about their lives, and most hearing people seem to have had little understanding of the experiences of the deaf—and yet, medieval writers show great interest in deafness as a powerfully allusive image, a lived experience, and an alternative way of knowing the world.

5.1. THE VOCABULARY OF DEAFNESS Medieval European terms for deafness remain largely unchanged in modern European languages. These words can be heavily charged with meaning, especially given the prominent role of etymology in the medieval linguistic imagination. The language of deafness is also attested, metaphorically, in medical and mathematical discourses and in common turns of phrase.

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Isidore of Seville’s highly influential seventh-century Etymologiae (Etymologies), known for its fanciful word histories, derives the Latin surdus as follows: “Deaf (surdus), from the filth (sordes) formed out of the humor in one’s ear, and although deafness occurs on account of a number of reasons it still keeps the name of the foresaid defect” (Isidore 2006: 229). The etymology alludes to the widespread belief that deafness was caused by obstructions to the ear; the connotation of filthiness, extended to all cases of deafness regardless of their cause, casts the condition in a pejorative light. This association persists in the medieval Romance languages, whose vocabulary of deafness derives, unsurprisingly, from the Latin (French sourd, Italian sordo, Portuguese surdo, Spanish sordo). In Germanic languages, too, terms like the Middle English deef, Middle High German toup, Middle Dutch doof, and Old Norse daufr all evoke (etymologically speaking) notions of dullness and obtuseness: these terms all derive from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *daubaz (“stunned” or “deaf”), which is ultimately thought to derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root as the English “dumb” and its other Germanic equivalents. This connection is sometimes stated outright, as in the fifteenth-century English-to-Latin dictionary Promptorium parvulorum, which equates “Defte, or dul” to “Obtusus, agrestis” (1908: col. 123). In his English translation of the thirteenth-century encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, executed near the turn of the fifteenth century, John Trevisa also uses the term “heringeles” (hearingless; Trevisa 1975: 114), a word that, like the German gehörlos, defines deafness as a fundamental lack. The terminology used to evoke hardness of hearing is less precise: for example, Jenni Kuuliala (2016a: 39) notes the use of surditas in miracle narratives to refer to both partial and complete deafness, alongside the term quasi surdus. Trevisa renders the Latin “grauitas auditus” (hardness of hearing; Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1979: 46) as “heaviness” (1975: 114) or “thickness” (1975: 366) of hearing; Jean Corbechon, c. 1370, renders the same phrase as “oït dure” (hears with difficulty, or literally, hears hard; BnF MS fr. 16993, fol. 25r and 96v). That the French writer renders the nominal phrase “hardness of hearing” with a verb phrase, “hears hard,” underscores a fundamental difference between conceptions of the deaf (who can be designated by a simple noun, sourd, which uses their impairment to define them) and of people who “hear with difficulty.” The latter are identified with a verbal structure somewhat similar to contemporary peoplefirst language: that is, with a syntax that emphasizes the person and then describes his or her actions, rather than assigning him or her a label that suggests that a disability is a defining characteristic of that person’s identity. In other ways, too, medieval writers typically treat partial hearing loss and other auditory impairments like chronic ringing of the ears as distinct from deafness. These impairments are discussed in separate chapters from deafness and attributed to distinct sets of causes sensible to different treatments. These discussions are typically adjacent because they both pertain to the ear and must thus appear near one another within the head-to-toe organizational principle of medieval medical and surgical treatises; but the difference between deafness and other auditory impairments is a matter of kind and not just of degree. The language of deafness also has deep metaphorical resonances in many medieval languages. In medical texts, the adjective “deaf” is used to describe bodily structures from which there is no outflow: thus, Martin de Saint-Gille, in his French translation and commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates (1362–5), uses the adjective sourd to refer both to bodies that have stopped excreting bile (1954: 74) and to nonbleeding hemorrhoids (1954: 162–3); the same type of hemorrhoid is called “surda” in Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia magna IV.2.7 (1997: 241) and “deef” in the Middle English

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translation of John Arderne’s Practica de Fistula in Ano.4 Guy de Chauliac also calls blunt surgical instruments surdis (“defe” in the Middle English translation). In mathematics, the expression “deaf number” (numerus surdus), denoting what we would today call an “irrational number,” begins appearing in Latin translations of Arabic mathematical treatises in the twelfth century (Van Wymeersch 2008). In less specialized discourses, “deafness” typically conveys worthlessness or uselessness. Thus, in Middle English, a “deaf nut” is one without a kernel. Equivalents of the modern expression “to turn a deaf ear” are current in both Middle English and Middle French: they appear in the Ayenbite of Inwyt, the sermons of Jean Gerson, George Chastelain’s L’outré d’amour, and the anonymous Vie du saint hermite Regnart. In literary texts, the word “deaf” appears frequently as a descriptor for pagan idols, which, axiomatically, can neither hear nor answer prayers (Berruyer-Pichon 1992: 335). A murder victim is described as “mute and deaf” in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Notre Dame (1951: 50), for corpses can no longer speak nor hear. The French cliché “sourd comme un pot” (deaf as a vessel) similarly evokes inanimacy. Such figurative language, using deafness as shorthand for non-responsiveness or non-aliveness, is quite literally dehumanizing.

5.2. DEAFNESS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE In the medieval West, deafness is not highly theorized (Bondio 2010: 334). A look at the way deafness is characterized and categorized in encyclopedias can shed light on the lack of conceptual clarity surrounding the condition. In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, for example, the very brief entry on deafness appears in Book X—a book devoted to vocabulary—and not in the book on medicine and diseases. While Isidore’s cursory treatment of deafness is lexical rather than medical in its focus, the most widely read European encyclopedia of the later Middle Ages, Bartholomew the Englishman’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things, c. 1260), accords deafness a larger yet more diffuse treatment. Bartholomew engages in three discrete discussions of deafness. In Book III (on the soul and reason), deafness is broached at the end of the entry on the sense of hearing, a structure that explicitly constructs deafness as a lack; in Book V (on the parts of the body), deafness is integrated into an explanation of the structure of the ear and is presented as a deficiency that can be inborn or caused by certain actions; and in Book VII (on diseases), deafness is pathologized, with an explanation and a set of proposed remedies that are informed by humoral theory.5 These iterations, often repetitive in their content yet distinct in their framing, hint at multiple interpretive possibilities that deafness presents: Is it a disease with its own etiology and remedy, or is it a lack? Is it a sign of malady or simply of alterity? Deafness is treated fairly systematically in the writings of the physicians Avicenna and Bernard of Gordon and the surgeons Lanfranco of Milan and Guy de Chauliac, but as Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio points out, it is only in the fifteenth century that medical writers engage in fuller reflection on the condition’s etiology or its psychosocial impact (2010: 334). Congenital deafness is sometimes attributed to conception during maternal menstruation or other forbidden times in texts such as the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Metzler 2006: 87–8)—but notably, such explanations do not figure prominently in medical discourses. Throughout the high and late Middle Ages, when presenting deafness within the coherent medical model of humoral theory, both popular and specialized medical texts typically construe the condition (especially when it is not congenital) as resulting from non-natural influences: foreign objects, excessive cold, or the immoderate consumption

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of alcohol. Thus, the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Regimen sanitatis salernitanum admonishes, “after eating do not sleep or move too much: that typically damages the hearing, and so does drunkenness” (Cummins 1976: 124). In the commentary on those verses erroneously attributed to the celebrated physician Arnald of Villanova (c. 1240– 1311), it is explained that these actions damage the hearing by engendering excess vapors that rise to the head; citing Avicenna, the commentator adds that sun exposure, hot baths, vomiting, overeating, and loud noises can also cause hearing loss (Cummins 1976: 124–5). These ideas clearly gained currency beyond the medical sphere: in the morality play Excellence, Science, Paris et Peuple, possibly written by a Parisian clerk c. 1465, the character Science uses similar language in an attempt to diagnose Paris with deafness: “When a brain is chilled/The humors suddenly descend from it/Such that they deafen the hearing” (Aubailly and Roy 1990: 44). Relatively few medical and technological interventions were available to the deaf in medieval Europe. Most types of deafness were considered untreatable: as the Montpellier physician Bernard of Gordon puts it in his Lilium medicinae (Lily of medicine, 1312), “Congenital deafness cannot be cured. Long-standing deafness is hopeless” (Bernard of Gordon 1480: III.8, n.p.).6 Medieval readers are recorded as having arrived at similar conclusions: Kuuliala reports that “in the first diocesan process of Raymond of Peñafort from 1279 there is an interesting case recording that a youth who was almost completely deaf carefully studied medical books in order to find a treatment, but found nothing of use” (2016a: 219). Despite many physicians’ skepticism, therapies were attempted. Surgical manuals and regimens frequently include recipes for fumigations or ear drops, which are typically recommended for those deafened by humoral imbalances or, especially, by vermin or foreign objects. Similar recipes can be found in widely diffused texts such as the pseudoOvidian De medicamine aurium (Fischer 2008) and Peter of Spain’s mid-thirteenthcentury Thesaurus pauperum. Bernard of Gordon sets out a number of commonsense rules for the use of such medicaments: substances should be administered one at a time, the ear should be cleaned thoroughly before a new drop is attempted, and narcotics should only be used if the hearing impairment is accompanied by intense pain. However, some of the treatments proffered in medical texts are completely fanciful, such as Hildegard of Bingen’s recommendation that a patient place a lion’s right ear over the affected ear (Metzler 2009: 90). As for the hard of hearing, medical illustrations sometimes depict people cupping their hand to their ear, but there are few indications that any other hearing devices were available. Commercially produced ear trumpets are attested only from the seventeenth century onward. Aside from a few isolated references, such as an allusion to “a horn in the ear” of the deaf boy Loÿs in Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’ Miracles de saint Louis (Fay 1932: 50, in a passage to be discussed in greater depth below), earlier evidence for the use of animal horns as hearing devices remains largely conjectural.7 One of the most noteworthy characteristics of deafness as it is theorized by medieval writers is the frequency with which it is associated with other infirmities. Such connections stem both from medical explanations of deafness and from the condition’s symbolic resonance as a signifier of human fragility; they also render deafness more “visible” by pairing it with other conditions. Thomas of Cantimpré, in his Liber de natura rerum (On the Nature of Things, 1237–44), seems to gesture toward a notion of heritability that differentiates deafness from other infirmities: “From the mute and the deaf, mute and deaf children are begotten, and from lepers, leprous children are often born; and yet the

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blind are not born of the blind, nor the mutilated from the mutilated, nor the one-eyed from the one-eyed” (1933: 58). An Old French moralization of this passage, however, describes a country in which Some are deaf, dumb and mute, Others blind and leprous. The deaf engender a leper, And the blind a mute; … So it happens that a mute engenders A deaf person, and a leper comes To engender a blind person. (1933: 58) Gone is Thomas’ distinction between seemingly heritable and non-heritable conditions; instead, deafness, muteness, blindness, and leprosy are all flattened into interchangeable signifiers of the precarious fragility of the state of sin. Thomas of Cantimpré’s discussion of deafness in conjunction with leprosy is unusual; in medieval Europe, deafness is more often associated with old age and with muteness. Deafness—or, more often, hardness of hearing—is frequently cited as a natural part of the aging process. In addition to encyclopedic and medical texts such as those of Bartholomew the Englishman and Martin de Saint-Gille, literary texts often exploit the trope of the deaf, aged character (usually an old man). In the Old Norse Egil’s Saga, written c. 1230 (possibly by Snorri Sturluson), the eponymous hero becomes “dull both of hearing and sight” (1968: 219).8 Egil describes his own infirmities as ofdaufligt, which Eddison translates as “over-deaflike” (1968: 220) and Sigurðsson as “dismal” (2008: 234n31). In the late fourteenth-century English allegory of Piers Plowman, Age “hit [the narrator] under the ear, and left him nearly deaf” just after inflicting male-pattern baldness and just before causing tooth loss, gout, and impotence (Langland 1992: 248). But the hearing loss that comes with age typically does not preclude communication: not in the above-cited works, nor in the Middle High German maere “The Old Mother and Emperor Friedrich” (“Die alte Mutter und Kaiser Friedrich,” discussed in Metzler 2013b: 116)—one of the rarer works imagining a deaf older woman, along with the far better known Canterbury Tales, which will be discussed below—nor in the mid-fifteenthcentury rondeaux of Charles of Orléans, nor in Gabriele Zerbi’s 1489 Gerontocomia, one of the first guides devoted entirely to the care of the aged. The association of deafness with muteness is even more pervasive, and in this instance, deafness nearly always is an insuperable obstacle to communication. Following Aristotle, who writes in Politics 1253a that mute people are usually also deaf, medieval authors typically state that people who are born deaf are also necessarily mute (de Saint-Loup 1994; Metzler 2009: 80). Moreover, the two conditions are so commonly associated with one another that, in literary texts, other characters frequently presume that a mute character must also be deaf. The best-known example is Boccaccio’s tale of Masetto da Lamporecchio (Decameron III.1), wherein Masetto feigns muteness in order to infiltrate a convent; the targets of his deception communicate with him exclusively in signs and speak indiscreetly in his presence, presuming that he is also deaf. In this case, of course, Masetto is able to turn presumptions about his auditory ability, intellect, sexuality, and social class to his own advantage.9 His supposed deafness has rendered an otherwise offlimits world accessible.

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Deafness, particularly when accompanied by muteness, is frequently characterized as an impediment to learning and intellectual development. Bernard of Gordon writes that “those born deaf are mute, for speech is acquired and not innate, and for this reason it is said that hearing is the gateway to understanding”; he goes on to cite an unidentified “versificator” according to whom all human learning, the legacy of Greece, would have disappeared if all men were deaf (Bernard of Gordon 1480: III.9, n.p.). Generally speaking, it is a medieval truism that deaf and mute people, especially those who are deaf and mute since birth, are unteachable. The belief that the deaf are incapable of intellectual achievement is widespread, but not universal. Patrick K. Ford cites an Irish counterexample, Feis Tight Chónain, wherein “Finn tells of a deaf man among the Fianna, ‘and there never was a lay or poem composed on Fenian subjects which he has not stored up in his memory’” (1990: 37); and the fifteenth-century Dutch humanist Agricola details how he taught a deaf child to write in De inventione dialectica libri tres. Still, hearing is typically held out as a superior means of learning (as compared to the inferior mode of silent reading), and in many parts of medieval Europe, deafness and muteness are often interpreted as indicators of a lack of sense or reason.

5.3. SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND INTEGRATION There is much evidence to suggest that, relative to other disabilities, deafness presents less of an impediment to social integration in many parts of the medieval West. In the most thorough study to date on deafness in medieval France, Aude de Saint-Loup makes precisely this argument, observing that medieval documents cataloging other infirmities often exclude the deaf (1994: 213). The sermons cited by Geneviève Berruyer-Pichon (1992: 132–5, 162–3), including those of St. Bernard and St. Bonaventure, likewise mention the deaf far less often than they do the blind and the mute.10 In Old Norse sagas, deafness, like other impairments, is treated with “relative unconcern”: Lois Bragg cites a stanza from the Eddic poem Hávamál, which declares that “the deaf may be dauntless in battle” (Bragg 1997a: 173). Sharon Farmer, however, opines that “deafness, before the invention of modern sign language, placed the individual on the margins of human communication and hence of human dignity” (2002: 77–8). And the epithet deaf could indeed be an insult, as can be seen in a fifteenth-century dispute between the Tailors’ Guild and the Corporation of Exeter: “Yf any Brother dysspysse anoder, callenge hym knaffe or horson or deffe or any yoder mysname, he schall pay” (If any member of the guild disparages another, calling him “knave” or “whoreson” or “deaf” or any other insulting name, he shall pay).11 The degree to which deafness impeded social integration varied according to both geography and social class. According to Bragg, “premodern societies seem generally to have ignored deaf members and left them to get along in their families and isolated rural communities as best they could” (1997b: 4). If participation in the workforce is one measure of social integration, we can surmise that the deaf were most integrated in the class of manual laborers. The surgeon Henri de Mondeville remarks that the deaf are able to learn manual trades (Metzler 2009: 91), and Farmer finds evidence of this in French historical records (2002: 75), including the aforementioned story of the deaf– mute youth Loÿs, who amasses a long work history even before his miraculous healing. As for the bourgeoisie, mutual-assistance fraternities founded in cities across northwest Europe in the later Middle Ages, such as those in Kingston-upon-Hull (1357) and Trier (1437), offered pensions to infirm members, including the deaf.12 But the deaf were often

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precluded from inheriting (e.g., in the twelfth-century Lombard Consuetudines feudorum and the thirteenth-century customal Der Sachsenspiegel)—a form of exclusion that would have been felt most keenly among elites. Some legal commentaries, like the English Fleta (c. 1290), do explicitly distinguish between the deaf and the hard of hearing (Turner 2013: 52); restrictions of legal personhood apply to the profoundly and congenitally deaf. Wendy Turner notes that “those born deaf or dumb were more likely than the mentally incapacitated to be skipped in the line of inheritance and certainly could not acquire property since they could not consent in the required oral fashion” (2013: 51– 2). The deaf could not make a promise by stipulation according to the “Corpus iuris civilis, Gratian’s Decretals, and many local law collections following the Roman law” (Kuuliala 2016a: 119). The deaf could not make valid contracts according to Philippe de Beaumanoir’s late thirteenth-century Coutumes de Beauvaisis (Pfau 2008: 119); their limited legal agency provided them protection from lawsuits (Pfau 2010: 97). Following the Institutes of Justinian, Florentine statutes from the 1320s onward required that the deaf be assigned guardians (Mellyn 2014: 28). While the guardianship of the deaf is widespread in later medieval Europe, it is certainly not the only available model. Metzler points out that “the Talmud expressly forbids placing the deafmutes with idiots and those unable to conduct their own affairs, since there is the possibility of educating deafmutes and enabling them to reason” (Metzler 2009: 92). In sum, though, the law codes suggest that deaf people in the upper classes were regarded as “inutilis” (helpless), as Matthew Paris describes Katherine, the deaf daughter of England’s King Henry III, who died in 1257 (1872–83: V.632). Though deaf people were limited in their participation in legal matters, and their integration into the workforce depended on their gender, class, and trade, there is evidence that at least from the thirteenth century deaf people could participate quite fully in religious life. Deaf people, like all orthodox Christians, were required following the Fourth Lateran Council to confess annually; Thomas Aquinas (in De poenitentia Suppl. Qu. 9, art. 3, 2) and Raymond of Peñafort (in Summa de poenitentia, III, 34, 50) suggest that the deaf may confess with signs (Schmitt 1990: 254). Although deaf women appear to have been considered poor prospects for marriage, especially in the upper classes (Kuuliala 2016b: 73), deaf–mutes could legally marry in the church (Metzler 2009: 93); some local law codes such as the thirteenth-century Livre de jostice from the Orléanais specify that they may marry if they can consent in signs (Pfau 2008: 118). Deaf men were even permitted to participate in Crusades after 1213 (Metzler 2013b: 41–2). We can gain some further insight into the worship activities of deaf people by reading miracle narratives, especially those recorded in canonization trials.13 Once again, the Miracles de saint Louis’s story of the deaf–mute youth Loÿs, cured after he imitated the gestures of those praying before the body of the soon-to-be saint Louis, offers a remarkable example: it is specified that Loÿs “knelt and joined his hands without knowing what he was doing” (Farmer 2009: 204). This is yet another way in which the story of Loÿs is an outlier, for most miracle narratives remain silent about the precise ways in which the deaf have prayed for the restoration of their hearing. Loÿs’ story also highlights why, in addition to being deemed untreatable by the medical community, congenital deafness would have been less likely to receive “miracle cures,” too. The ears are considered the best pathway to understanding, including understanding of religious doctrine; gestures and signs, though capable of conveying meaning, are not adequate to even rudimentary religious training. Thus, people born deaf are unlikely to have understood the word of God. This must account, in part, for the relatively minor representation of deafness in

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the corpus of miracle narratives as a whole. In his study of eleventh- and twelfth-century healing miracles, Pierre-André Sigal (1985) finds that together, deafness, muteness, and other afflictions of the ear are cured in 11 percent of the texts in his corpus, and deafness (unlike other conditions such as mobility impairments) is rarely described in any detail. Metzler finds a similar pattern in her study of a broader chronological and geographical range of miracle accounts (2006: 132). Unsurprisingly, Sigal reports that there are many more children and youth among the mutes and deaf–mutes seeking miracle cures than there are among those who are only deaf. And yet, in her study of 231 miraculous cures of a physical impairment acquired in childhood, as described in the canonization processes of twenty-one saints in Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, England, and Sweden, Kuuliala finds that fewer than 10 percent of the cases involved deafness or other afflictions of the ear (2016a: 11–18). In this textual genre, deafness’s incurability equates to invisibility.

5.4. VIEWING, TESTING, AND COMMUNICATING WITH THE DEAF In medieval Europe, more than in the present-day West, deafness is treated as an invisible disability—and not just through its disproportionately low representation in healing miracles. The difficulties inherent in the identification and portrayal of deaf people are especially apparent in the iconography of deafness, or the lack thereof (de Saint-Loup 1994: 212–13). Depictions of Christ healing a deaf–mute, as described in Mark 7:31– 7, are the most frequently occurring type of visual representation of the deaf. In such images, the figure’s deafness is not indicated through any of his physical characteristics, but by the actions or reactions of other figures. Many images, including illuminations in a fourteenth-century French Bible historiale (BnF fr. 152, fol. 403v14), a fifteenthcentury Czech Historia Novi Testamenti (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 485, 28r15), and a fifteenth-century German Expositiones evangeliorum (Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Claustroneoburgensis 4, 114v16), represent the healing by showing Christ sticking his finger in the deaf man’s ear (Figure 5.1). Other illustrations, however, offer no visible sign of deafness. One particularly compelling example is to be found in a fifteenth-century manuscript containing Jean Corbechon’s French translation of De proprietatibus rerum (BnF MS fr. 22532, fol. 102v).17 A marginal note instructs the artist to illustrate the chapter on deafness in Book VII with a picture of “a man who, as he is deaf, brings his ear close to a friend in order to listen to what he says”—but the image, which shows the men at some distance from one another and suggests their mutual incomprehension only through conventional gestures, does not reflect the instructions (Figure 5.2). Even with such explicit guidelines, medieval artists appear to have difficulty conceiving visual markers of deafness, and the condition is therefore nearly unrepresentable. The limited iconographic possibilities for the representation of deafness reflect the difficulty of diagnosing conditions that, while physiologically explained by humoral theory, betray no visible, external signs. As in the literary texts that render deafness more visible by pairing it with other conditions, some works represent deafness through visual analogy with other, more easily represented impairments—though these strategies can also highlight deafness’s interpretive ambiguity. In the Bodmer manuscript of René d’Anjou’s Mortifiement de vaine plaisance, for example, an allegory of a cart drawn by

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FIGURE 5.1  Fifteenth-century German Expositiones evangeliorum representing Christ healing a deaf man and sticking his finger in the man’s ear. Klosterneuburg, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Claustroneoburgensis 4, fol. 114v. By permission of the Augustinian Canonry Klosterneuburg, Library. http://cdm.csbsju.edu/digital/collection/HMMLClrMicr/id/16400/rec/1

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FIGURE 5.2  An unheeded marginal instruction to the illustrator in a copy of Jean Corbechon’s French translation of De proprietatibus rerum. Paris, BnF MS fr. 22532, fol. 102v. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

blind and deaf horses is illustrated with an image of two horses, one blindfolded and the other with a band tied around its head and covering the ears (René d’Anjou 2009: 33v): the blindfold’s use as a conventional visual shorthand for blindness is what allows the reader to interpret the other band as a signifier of deafness. A similar representative

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strategy is employed in the roughly contemporaneous morality play Excellence, Science, Paris et Peuple, whose dialogue makes it clear that the actor playing Paris must have been accoutred with a similar signal of deafness—though this one proves more ambiguous. Science initially presumes that Paris is deaf because he has a kerchief tied around his head; Excellence, observing the same fact, presumes that Paris must have a toothache. Through this ludic dispute, we see both the inherently ambiguous visual representation of deafness and the social dimension of its diagnosis. Deafness offers no telltale visual markers; it can only be diagnosed, tested, or confirmed through failed attempts at dialogue or provocation. As Edna Edith Sayers has noted, “deafness in any narrative presents the author or storyteller with a most difficult challenge” (2010: 87). Medieval literary texts often display considerable anxiety about not only the difficulty of representing deafness, but also the impossibility of a visual diagnosis of auditory impairment, and the ease with which deafness can be feigned. In addition to Boccaccio’s tale of Masetto da Lamporecchio, whose plot centers on a simulated disability, episodes of feigned deafness also occur in sources as varied as the thirteenth-century Icelanders’ saga Laxdoela saga, in which the Irish princess Melkorka feigns deafness and muteness and is sold as a slave (Bragg 1997a: 173); the early thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal (Daniel of the Flowering Valley) by the Middle High German poet Der Stricker, in which the hero feigns deafness in order to defeat an adversary18; and George Chastellain’s Burgundian Chronicle, which devotes a chapter to a fraudulent seer posing as a deaf–mute in Ghent in the 1450s, while also alluding to a similar case in Portugal (1863–66: 3.298–300). These characters carry out their deceit by suppressing their reactions to auditory stimuli: Chastellain explicitly describes the “application” with which his fraud works to avoid reacting to sounds (298, 300). More than any positive visible sign, the failure to react is for many medieval writers the hallmark of deafness. In literary representations, therefore, deafness often reveals itself only when dialogue is attempted. As Jonathan Hsy (2016) puts it, “deafness is not an ill in itself. It is only a problem when a deaf person comes into contact with non-adaptive people who hear and speak.” This is notably the case in theatrical texts, wherein “dialogues de sourds”19 offer on-stage confirmation of a character’s deafness: notable examples in the French tradition include the Mystère de sainte Barbe en cinq journées and its farce (Longtin 2005), and the slightly later farce Mimin le goutteux et les deux sourds (Gordon 2007). Against the backdrop of this theatrical convention, the humor of the scene in Excellence, Science, Paris et Peuple in which Science persists in believing Paris to be deaf despite Paris’s ability to carry on a conversation emerges in sharp relief. In other genres, too, hearing characters use notions of deafness to interpret the non-responsiveness of others with whom they unsuccessfully attempt to interact. In the romance Mélusine by Jean d’Arras (1392–3), the titular fairy asks her future husband Raymondin if he is a deaf–mute when he fails to greet her as he passes by. And hearing people go to great lengths to confirm another person’s deafness in one of the medieval period’s most remarkable accounts of interactions between a deaf subject and the hearing community in which he lives: the story of the miraculous healing of the deaf–mute boy Loÿs in Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’ Miracles de saint Louis (1282–3). Before his healing, “it could never be perceived by anyone, in any way or by any sign, that he could neither hear voices nor sounds nor could he speak” (Fay 1932: 51). People including the children of Gauchier, the smith for whom he worked for twelve years, repeatedly test him.

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People blasted a horn in his ear and cried to him through a horn that had been placed in his ear, but he perceived nothing and didn’t hear. And at the same time they hit him and slapped him hard to prove whether or not he could speak. Nevertheless, he did not say a word, only making the signs of a mute man. And the children of Gauchier threw burning coals on Louis’s bare stomach to prove whether or not he could speak and if he was truly mute, and again he did nothing except make the signs of a mute and cast the coals away. And for these reasons he was commonly held to be deaf and mute. (Farmer 2009: 203) By the same token, Gauchier’s household recognizes that Loÿs has regained his hearing when “they called him and he turned toward them” (Fay 1932: 54)—illustrating that tests to establish hearing are far less violent than those employed to establish deafness or muteness. Eventually the youth, now named Loÿs in honor of the saint who healed him—he was apparently nameless before—learns to speak, taught via the same methods by which “very young children are taught, or even as people teach birds” (Farmer 2009: 205). In her reading of the story of Loÿs, Irina Metzler offers the important caveat that this narrative is “transmitted through the lens of hagiographical and legalistic conventions” and should not be read as a transparently “genuine” account (2013b: 3). It does, however, distill many of the most common tropes in medieval cultural representations of the deaf: the association of deafness and muteness, the necessity of testing the authenticity of an auditory impairment, the inability of the congenitally deaf to understand religious doctrine, and the various means by which the deaf can communicate with the hearing and with each other. Medieval philosophers “did not clearly distinguish between language, a mental faculty, and speech, one of its possible manifestations, and it was speech, not language, that was held to be the mark of man, that which distinguished humans from the beasts” (Plann 1993: 6)—and they held that those born deaf are never able to learn to speak. The deaf and mute evidently could communicate, however. Although lipreading is rarely mentioned (Metzler 2009: 87), many deaf characters, including Loÿs, are described as communicating with signs. These signs are sometimes presented as a coherent system capable of communicating relatively abstract ideas, such as the signs by which a deaf– mute princess communicates with her ladies in the thirteenth-century romance Robert le Diable (2006: 284–6), and perhaps some signs alluded to in the canonization process of St. Bernardino of Siena (Kuuliala 2016a: 276). Other signs appear as rudimentary communicative devices used to convey practical workplace instructions (as in the stories of Loÿs and Masetto), still others merely as comical gestures (as in Mimin le goutteux et les deux sourds). According to Lois Bragg’s authoritative study of the subject, there were “no genuine sign languages … or deaf communities (groups consisting of at least several households and persisting over generations)” in medieval Europe (1997b: 2).20 There were, however, signal systems used in monastic communities. These were “speech surrogates” rather than true languages (Sebeok and Sebeok 1987: vii), and as Bragg points out, these constitute “a system whose raison d’être is to limit, not enhance, communication” (1997b: 12). Though it is tempting to regard monastic signs as an “ancestor” of modern sign languages, they are better understood as gestures participating in a broader medieval culture of silence (Schmitt 1990; Bruce 2007). While medieval and early modern discourses exalting silence are commonplace, these rarely mention deafness or muteness (Bondio 2010: 332). Deafness is sometimes praised for the same reason that silence is exalted: as

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a safeguard against temptation. Yet silence can also be seen to have “aphrodisiac effects” in Boccaccio’s tale of Masetto (Marcus 1979: 2), in a subversive anticlerical joke that also reinforces the disruptiveness of deafness’s feignability.

5.5. WILLFUL RESISTANCE, PROTECTIVE DISENGAGEMENT Deafness, like other disabilities, is highly available for moralization in the Middle Ages— not just in Susan Sontag’s (1989) sense of that term, but more generally, as part of an allegorical habit of mind. With deafness, the contradiction between positive and negative associations is especially stark. On the one hand, deafness can figure an obstinate resistance to faith, and on the other, a stoic imperviousness to temptation. Images of deafness as an emblem of obstinate refusal are impregnated with attitudes that we might today label as “audism.” Deaf people—that is, deaf people in the abstract or the aggregate, not individual people who were deaf—were typically represented as being less intelligent, not only relative to able-bodied people, but also as compared to people with other conditions such as blindness (an idea derived from Aristotle’s De sensu 437a). Before the invention of sign languages, people born deaf were considered to be largely unteachable. By extension, the language of deafness is also applied to those who choose to be “unteachable” or unreachable. Adam, who did not heed the word of God, is described in devotional texts as deaf (Berruyer-Pichon 1992: 132). Such imagery is fully developed in Jean Gerson’s Pentecost sermon Mansionem apud eum faciemus, which is constructed around the central conceit that when the Holy Spirit comes knocking, the faithful should allow it in. The sermon’s guiding image depends on hearing the knock, the voice, the call of religion. Gerson exploits the familiar trope that true knowledge can only come through hearing (1968: 680) and preaches that Obedience ought to open the door to the Holy Spirit, but too often she fails: “She turns a deaf ear to the voice of the Holy Spirit, or she is so asleep that she hears nothing, or she keeps her doors shut with the locks and bolts of various sins, or shamefully she sends it away” (Gerson 1968: 682). When the Holy Spirit comes knocking, “Too deaf is the soul that does not awaken to such thunder … Break, my Lord, says Saint Augustine, this deafness. Surely whoever does not obey this sound will hear the terrible thunder of the most dolorous sentence” (Gerson 1968: 684). Gerson frames hearing as an essential contributor to salvation—and underscores that selective metaphorical deafness is a matter of choice. However, deafness can also serve to protect innocence, when hearing is construed as a pathway to temptation and sin. Paradoxically, then, “he who hears the best [physically] is the most deaf [spiritually].”21 In an early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman collection of exempla for sermons, Nicole Bozon’s Contes moralisés (Moralized Tales), it is suggested that just as an elephant uses its ears to swat away flies, “the temperate man should let flying words pass him by and should appear to hear nothing” (Nicole 1889: 20). These widespread ideas find notable expression in René d’Anjou’s Mortifiement de vaine plaisance (1455), according to which “sight and hearing are naturally, of the five senses, those that most move man’s will, either to good or to evil”; therefore, “everyone who truly and wholly desires to direct all of his love toward love of his creator must blind and deafen his eyes and ears” (René d’Anjou 2009: 34r, 35v–36r). The prolific late fourteenth-century poet Eustache Deschamps toys with such commonplaces in his Ballade MLXIX, bearing the refrain “Our Lord has shown you such grace” (Deschamps 1887: 364–5). In response to an appeal to “give to the deaf man who hears nothing,/Who can do nothing but beg”

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(vv. 3–4)—an appeal that belies the conventional wisdom according to which deafness largely did not impede integration into the medieval workforce—a hearing person (v. 7) tells the beggar that his deafness is a divine gift, for “through hearing man can be troubled” (v. 18). Though it must be of little comfort to the beggar who struggles to support himself, this rhetoric taps into well-established stoic portrayals of blindness. Petrarch, for example, writes in his De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul) that a deaf person is safe from fraud, flattery, and the sounds of annoying laughter; that he can still communicate by reading and writing; and that he can still appreciate music by understanding the mathematical principles that underlie it (1991: 3.239–42). Such celebrations of deafness are often undermined, however, through ironic or intertextual play. Petrarch’s supposed reclamation of deafness includes a characterization of that condition as “ludicrous” (1991: 240) and a reaffirmation of the necessity of hearing to the acquisition of faith (“It is well that this did not happen to you before you received the faith, which primarily comes by hearing and which you now have”; 242). And Eustache Deschamps curiously switches from the third person in the stanzas of his ballade to the first person in the envoi: that is, the beggar whose request is recorded in the stanzas is revealed to be Eustache Deschamps himself, a hearing poet. Collectively, such gestures underscore that it is metaphorical deafness that is desirable, not the real thing.

5.6. DEAFNESS, GENDER, AND SELF-REPRESENTATION Deschamps’ personalized pushback against stoic use of the imagery of deafness, while voiced by a non-deaf person, is also indicative of a broader tendency in late medieval letters: a greater interest in the subjectivity and self-representation of the deaf. Curiously, and in contrast to the other literary representations already examined, the first-person deafness narratives that are the best known today tend to be those recounted in a female voice. In this last section, we will consider two celebrated literary examples, one fictional (the Wife of Bath) and the other autobiographical (Teresa de Cartagena), along with a brief consideration of a third case, that of Rixenda, a recipient of a miraculous cure who described her own experience during a canonization trial of St. Louis of Toulouse. In the two literary examples, a notion of “deaf gain”22 intersects with gender and other social categories to construct deafness as an authorizing or empowering condition—and while deafness is construed more negatively in the canonization trial testimony, its authorizing effect is somewhat similar. The Wife of Bath undertakes a pilgrimage, Teresa de Cartagena writes a consolatory text, and Rixenda gives testimony—that is, all three women gain an enduring voice—because of their deafness. The best-known hearing-impaired character in medieval literature is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who is “somdeel deef” (somewhat deaf) as a result of an assault by her much-younger fifth husband. Her deafness is the first of her characteristics described in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and is thus an essential part of her verbal portrait. In the prologue to her tale, the Wife explains at length the circumstances of the fight from which her condition resulted: frustrated by her husband’s lengthy readings from a misogynistic screed, the Wife tears three leaves from the book and knocks down her husband with a hard blow to the cheek; he responds in kind, leaving her temporarily dazed, partially deaf, and permanently in charge of the household and of her husband. The Wife’s deafness has long been read as a signifier of her intellectual or spiritual state (Robertson 1962; Storm 1981), and it is only the last decade that has seen any sustained discussion of this text from a disability studies perspective.23 Both Tory Vandeventer Pearman and Jonathan Hsy, in

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their respective readings, have called attention to the General Prologue’s judgment of the Wife’s condition as “scathe” (damage, injury, pity), a qualifier that, according to Pearman, “labels her deafness as both a pity … and a punishment” (2010: 65). Hsy points out that the word scathe “both invites and resists diagnostic approaches. Is it a pity that she cannot fully participate in the oral/aural storytelling contest? Or is it shameful that her deafness (as she reveals later in her prologue) is a result of domestic violence?” (2016: n.p.). Of course, she does participate in the tale-telling (volubly so), and arguably, her deafness has augmented her ability to make herself heard.24 She may have lost the physical battle with her husband, but she has won the war of words, burning the offending book and supplanting it with her own tale. The notion of an enabling deafness that authorizes a subject’s self-expression emerges even more clearly from the mid-fifteenth-century writings of Teresa de Cartagena. A nun from a prominent converso family of Burgos (i.e., a Jewish family that converted to Christianity), she lost her hearing as an adult and authored the Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm) sometime after 1450. In this text of Boethian inspiration, Teresa adopts familiar stoic tropes of deafness and integrates them into an authoritative firstperson perspective. She expresses gratitude for the “solitude that removes [her] from things harmful and dangerous to both [her] body and soul,” just as Petrarch’s Reason encourages the deaf complainant to do, but at the same time Teresa does not downplay her physical and emotional pain: “When I look at my suffering in temporal terms, it seems very painful and anguished” (1998: 26). She brings her personal experience to bear on common tropes, explaining, for example, that people with disabilities are protected from sinful thought precisely because physical suffering leaves one with little mental energy (1998: 65). As a person whose deafness was acquired later in life, she does know how to speak, but she chooses no longer to do so, and is annoyed when others ask her to talk, for “speech is pointless without hearing, like faith without works” (1998: 27). She chooses to communicate instead through the written word, a mode of communication that her deafness both enables and authorizes (Deyermond 1976: 28; Juárez 2002: 133; Brueggemann 2005: 580). James Hussar has pointed out that “sick” and “deaf” were also common anti-converso epithets (2006: 161); in using this vocabulary to reclaim her voice, Teresa at once vindicates her body and her heritage, constructing a broader “community of sufferers” (Juárez 2002: 133) that is not limited to people who share her physical disability. Writing her personal consolation is a transformative act: “What I used to call my crucifixion, I now call my resurrection” (Teresa 1998: 29). Salvation and reclamation take on different meaning in the narrative of Rixenda de Fayensa, a girl deaf since early childhood who was purportedly healed through the intervention of St. Louis of Toulouse at the turn of the fourteenth century. In an extremely rare, direct account of hearing loss, Rixenda reports that “as her age increased, the deafness grew in her, and it disturbed her hearing on both the left and the right side, so that it seemed to her as if there was a swarm of bees and a constant buzzing resounding in her ears” (Kuuliala 2016a: 253).25 Rixenda herself does not express any sentiments of “deaf gain,” only relief that, against all odds, her condition has been cured. And yet, like Teresa de Cartagena, her words have been recorded for posterity only because her “ears closed their doors to human voices” (Teresa de Cartagena 1998: 74). It is her hearing loss that has allowed us to hear her voice. In summary, medieval European texts portray deafness as a largely unknowable and untreatable condition: one that does not necessarily exclude a non-hearing person from his or her community of origin, and is not constitutive of a Deaf community or

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culture. Deafness is difficult to see but easy to feign, posing an interpretive puzzle both for visual artists and for hearing people who seek to interact with those whom they believe to be deaf. From everyday idioms to elevated theological discourses, medieval European languages construct deafness as a signifier of helplessness, inactivity, or a lack of receptivity to the divine word. However, deafness and other forms of bodily alterity are exalted in some literary traditions, such as Norse sagas, and a select few personages— especially women, who already face other barriers to public self-expression—are able to exploit their deafness as an authorizing force. So while some deaf people in the Middle Ages might (like the character cited in this chapter’s epigraph) have described their existence as cursed, powerless, wretched, and painful, the lived experiences and cultural representations of deaf people in medieval Europe were far richer and more varied than such stereotypes suggest.

CHAPTER SIX

Speech Medieval Representations of Speech Impairments KISHA G. TRACY

The Lord said to him: Who made man’s mouth? or who made the dumb and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? did not I? (Exodus 4:11)1 In Exodus, Moses, although selected by God to convey his message to the people, expresses his concern that he does not have the ability to speak eloquently. In the verse above, God replies that the instrument of speech, the mouth, as well as those who are speech-impaired, are divinely created. He then commands Moses to deliver the message to the people, stating, “I will be in thy mouth” (4:12). In these verses, we find a succinct outline of one medieval approach to speech disabilities. They were apparent in everyday life. Any individual could experience them, and, by themselves, they did not indicate cause for condemnation, as God created the “speechless” just as he created the mouth. Despite this description, however, the representation of and social attitudes toward speech disabilities in the Middle Ages are far more complex than one biblical verse can convey. First of all, there is the distinction between being unable to speak at all and exhibiting atypical speech patterns, such as stammering. Second, the manifestations of these disabilities can vary from the physical, such as missing or removed tongues or as a side effect of deafness, to circumstantial, such as being “rendered speechless” by awe or fear. Other manifestations, also contained within the medieval terminology, include choosing not to speak, such as in certain monastic orders, or excessive speech. Further, the medieval understanding of speech impediments incorporates nonverbal or manual methods of communication, such as sign language systems, which accommodate for speech impairments. Benson Bobrick in Knotted Tongues: Stuttering in History and the Quest for a Cure weaves his own experiences as a stutterer into a history of the disability. He remarks: In its severest form, [stuttering] can be a crippling disability; and of all disabilities, it is perhaps the least understood. The dignity of the person, his distinctive humanity, and even his soul, as made manifest in rational discourse, was (and is) by tradition associated with speech. Together with the capacity for thought that it expresses through language, speech defines us as human more adequately than any other faculty we have. Its deprivation—in stuttering, its audible and visible disintegration—cannot but be felt as a catastrophe. (1995: 23)

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Bobrick’s reference to speech as the manifestation of discourse—and, thus, humanity— situates speech disorders as a social construction. Speech is “by tradition,” or what we could call “by expectation,” a primary method of human communication, and, without the ability to communicate or limited abilities to do so, the established human activity of verbal interaction is fractured. Bobrick focuses on stuttering as an “audible and visible disintegration” that reminds others, perhaps uncomfortably, of the existence of such disabilities. Medieval constructions of speech impediments acknowledge these complexities in their definitions and representations.

6.1. DEFINITIONS The commonly used medieval term mute, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the Latin mūtus,2 both an adjective and a noun meaning “dumb, inarticulate, silent, speechless” and “a person who is unable to speak.” The definition of the adjectival form breaks down into several categories. Referring to humans, it is “lacking the power of speech; unable to speak owing to a congenital or pathological condition; dumb,” but it is also “intentionally making no articulate sound; refraining from speech, silent,” as well as “temporarily deprived of the power of speech, through shock, emotion, etc.” An additional definition focuses on animals as “naturally lacking the power of speech.” Lewis and Short define the term similarly as “dumb, mute,” “that does not speak, silent.” The vernacular languages have similar words derived from the Latin. The Anglo-Norman Dictionary defines mut/mute/meut as “mute, lacking the ability to speak,” “(of animals) dumb,” “dumbstruck, speechless,” and “silent, still.” The Middle English Dictionary defines mūet/mewet/miwet/mut(e) as “of a person: afflicted with dumbness, mute, dumb” and “silent, speechless (with awe, contempt, grief, deference, etc.); also, discreetly silent.” In these definitions, there are references to the physical state of being speechless, the sense of temporary speechlessness caused by awe or some other catalyst, and also the concept of voluntarily refraining from speech. These are all gathered under the umbrella heading of mute. Spēcheles is an additional adjective in the Middle English, but it appears to be used more often in terms of temporary speechlessness than for permanent conditions. The word dumb that repeats here deserves focus. The modern derogatory use of this word as “foolish, stupid, ignorant” is a much later construction, seemingly developing around the eighteenth century. Prior to that, dumb, derived from a Germanic adjective, is, with some exceptions, mostly used as a reference to the state of being “destitute of the faculty of speech,” whether for physical reasons, mental shock, or choice. There is also that same reference to animals as in mute. The Bosworth–Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary defines dumb/se dumba/dumbe as “speechless, mute.” In the Middle English Dictionary, the definition of dǒmb/dǒumb/dumb in addition to similar phrasing includes an entry for inanimate objects, particularly idols, that are “mute, dead, impotent.” The Anglo-Norman Dictionary references dom as Middle English and defines it as “dumb, lacking the ability to speak.”3 The modern derogatory usage is missing as the word is used as a synonym for being speechless, rather than an implication of cognitive ability or social stigma. Other relevant words include stammer and babble. Stammer has a Germanic etymology and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “to falter or stumble in one’s speech; esp. to make one or more involuntary repetitions of a consonant or vowel before being able to pass from it to the following sound,” with a note that it might be “the result of indecision, or of sudden emotion (as fear, anger, delight, or grief), or may proceed from

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pathological conditions of the organs of speech or of the nervous system.” In Middle English, stameren/stamere is “of a person, the tongue, etc.: to stammer, stutter” and “afflicted with a speech impediment, stammering.” A similar Middle English word is wlafferinge, “stammering, stuttering.” The word babble has a complex etymology. There are parallel formations to the English word in several European languages, both Germanic and Romantic, all of which have a similar meaning of “foolish, incoherent, or excited talk; gabble; prattle,” as well as “mumble, mutter.” The Middle English word blaberen is defined as “to speak indistinctly or incoherently; read or repeat unintelligibly or without regard to its meaning; babble, mumble.” The Anglo-Norman word baubeer/baubeier/ babeier is “to stammer, speak indistinctly.” The terms “stammering” and “babbling” both focus on impediments to communication rather than speechlessness.

6.2. MEDICAL THEORIES The medieval medical theories of speech issues center mostly on the tongue. The tongue is understood as controlling the ability to speak, and many speech disorders are attributed in some way to the inhibition of the tongue. Denyse Rockey and Penelope Johnstone have found that this focus originated with Aristotle: One of the first lines of inquiry centered on the tongue’s shape and mobility. Since antiquity, it has been realized that this organ served both taste and articulation, and Aristotle was able to elaborate its latter role through his new science of comparative anatomy. The human tongue, he believed, was best adapted to speech because its breadth and softness conferred great malleability … If lingual flexibility was fundamental to speech, it was logical to explain pathology in terms of some restriction of movement. (1979: 233) This restriction of movement could take many forms. According to Irina Metzler, there are descriptions in the medical manuals of enlarged as well as paralyzed tongues: Speech disorders (“default” of speech), according to a Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac (c. 1298–1368), were caused by palsy (paralysis) or cramp of the tongue, by ulcers and through humoral imbalances, that is by too much moisture in the nerves; especially in the case of stammering (wlaffynge) they could be accompanied by “flux of spittle without will,” and these disorders present in children sometimes cured themselves fully by adolescence. Similarly, a fifteenth-century Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac (who was originally writing around 1240) stated that speech disorders were caused by corrupt humours which blocked the nerves and made the tongue lax, and caused it to become paralysed. (2006: 76) And, further, it is of course impossible to move the tongue if it has been removed completely. The concept of humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—that Metzler discusses above as affecting the tongue and thus the ability to speak continued through the Middle Ages. Humoral imbalance could “be revealed through [the tongue’s] taste, color, temperature and size” (Rockey and Johnstone 1979: 235). Rockey and Johnstone identify different writers, Western and Arabic, who discuss how humoral imbalance could manifest in the tongue: excessive phlegm, dryness, tremors, constriction, etc. (234–6).4 Specific manifestations of humoral disorder could result in certain speech tendencies: “Aristotle had found stuttering (ischnophonia) more prevalent amongst melancholics because their imagination outstripped their physical capabilities” (234).

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While speech issues might manifest in the tongue, their causes could be quite varied. One of the major causes identified was deafness. Metzler highlights that congenital deafness often is accompanied by functional speechlessness in that “to learn to speak one must first be able to hear spoken language” (Metzler 2014: 59). This connection, however, is focused on the physical ability to produce sound, rather than communication, which can be accomplished through other manual forms such as sign language. The phrase “deaf–mute” or “deaf and dumb” is familiar in modern terminology, although the usage of the latter is unacceptable given the stigma that has developed around the word “dumb.” In the Bible, these disabilities are often linked, such as in Mark 7:32—“they bring to him one deaf and dumb”—and in Mark 9:25—“deaf and dumb spirit.” In medical tracts, connections are made between deafness and muteness. For instance, Paulus of Aegina links a certain type of swelling of the tongue with deaf boys. Jahiz makes note of deafness leading to an inability to speak as a result of the inability to hear sound (Rockey and Johnstone 1979: 235–6). Jean de Jandun posits that someone raised away from other humans would be unable to produce language because he had not heard it, just as someone born deaf (Metzler 2014: 60). Ancient and medieval medical practitioners understood further causes of speech disorders. Among these are what in modern terms we call aphasia and strokes. Aphasia is a loss of speech or the loss of the ability to understand language. Juergen Tesak and Chris Code have traced the understanding of this disorder through the concept of memory: Ventricle or cell theory emerged in the Middle Ages and established a connection between brain structure (the ventricles) and cognitive function (e.g., memory). Since language performance was understood as memory performance, aphasic impairments were attributed to a disorder of memory, i.e., damage to the ventricle that contains memories—often a ventricle located in the posterior part of the brain. Aphasia at the end of the Middle Ages was thus seen as a disorder of memory. (2008: 15) The disorder of the memory, or forgetfulness, was perceived as a particularly difficult one, as it had implications for complete confessions and the ability to participate in certain occupations. For instance, Mary Carruthers in The Craft of Thought explores the connection between monasticism and memory, particularly through rhetoric. Further, in her Medieval Craft of Memory, Carruthers emphasizes that memory was an “inventive function” intended “to make new things,” particularly with respect to communication that included an oral or speech component (ex. prayers, sermons, hymns, stories, etc.) (Carruthers 2002: 3). In this construction, an impediment to speech that is tied to memory then limits the ability to create orally. In terms of strokes, Axel Karenberg and Irmgard Hort, in studying their medieval history, acknowledge the loss of speech that can accompany one: In accordance with Galen, apoplexia magna was described as a complete loss of motion and sensation accompanied by impairment of consciousness and respiratory damage. Furthermore, apoplexia minor could be … a “hard” one (“dura”), which affected the voluntary motion of one side of the body, as well as the ability to speak and which was caused by a repletion of one side of the head with sticky humors. (1998: 181–2) In this case, loss of speech is one of the side effects rather than the focus of the illness, similar to congenital deafness. These, of course, are not the only conditions with relations to speech. One circumstance that appears frequently in medieval literature and history is the removal of the tongue. Victoria Blud, in The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature, 1000– 1400, notes the reasons for this frequency:

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[A]s the locus and instrument of speech, the tongue of a medieval subject whose speech proved corrupt was also liable to be punished or removed. Law codes and penitentials advocated speech be conditioned or curtailed; unruly speech—a sin of the tongue— was tameable but in some cases the only guarantor of governance is removal of the tongue, cutting off speech permanently. (2017: 143) The reasons for getting a tongue cut out varied. Blasphemy was certainly one of the more prominent, particularly during the Inquisition. In the Anglo-Saxon Laws of King Alfred as well as the Theodosian Code, the offense of “folk-leasing” or slander is punishable with the removal of the tongue.5 This punishment matches the passage from Matthew 5:29–30 that calls for the removal of any body part that causes sin: And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. The same command is echoed in Mark 9:43–7. In this chapter, however, there is a further comment that it is better to enter heaven “maimed” (debilem), “lame” (claudum), or “one eyed” (luscum) than to keep the body part and be cast into hell. In other words, it is better to be impaired than to sin. In the case of punishment by removal of the tongue, a sin of speech is met with the removal, albeit forcibly rather than voluntarily, of that part.

6.3. REPRESENTATIONS While the medical theories of speech impediments provide insight into the construction of the physical relationship of body and speech, literary or metaphorical representations help to reconstruct social perceptions. There is, for example, a remarkable amount of hagiography in which the antagonists attempt to silence saints by removing their tongues or, as Blud characterizes, “the standard attempt made on the part of the pagan tyrant to shut up his Christian victim” (2017: 146). The cutting out of the tongue is usually followed, in these stories, by the saints continuing miraculously to communicate. In William Paris’ Middle English Life of Christina, the saint does more than simply overcome the mutilation after Julian, her tormenter, orders her tongue cut out: “Kytte oute hir tonge! It dos me woo.” And whan hir tonge lay at hir too, She spake als wele, that maydyn brighte, As never it had be kytt hir froo. Thei herd and seye, all men, with sight. She toke hir tonge upe, where it lay, And even sche caste it at Julian eye, That aftir nevermore alway On that syde myght he noght see. (ll. 460–8) In addition to continuing to speak as if nothing had happened, Christina picks up her tongue and throws it at Julian. It hits him in the eye, blinding him on that side. Julian attempts to disable Christina by removing her tongue, fails, and is himself physically

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disabled with partial physical blindness for his previous metaphoric blindness. He acknowledges, after calling her a witch (l. 472), that Christina’s “stroke greves” (blow grieves) (l. 477) him more than her words, indicating that the loss of speech is not in any way a loss of identity or agency. The story of Philomela is one of the most poignant of the secular medieval stories that tell of the amputation of tongues. Originally a Greek myth, the tale was told later by Ovid, and then found its way in the fourteenth century to Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, among others.6 The story begins with married couple Procne and Tereus. When the wife expresses the desire to see her sister, her husband promises to bring her back on his next trip to visit her father. Philomela is allowed to travel with Tereus, who, overcome with lust, rapes her. When Philomela threatens to tell what he has done, he cuts out her tongue and abandons her. In Chaucer’s version in The Legend of Good Women, the removal of Philomela’s tongue takes place in one line with little discussion: For fere lest she sholde his shame crye, And doon him openly a vilanye, And with his swerd her tong of kerveth he, And in a castel made her for to be Ful privily in prison evermore, And kepte her to his usage and his store, So that she mighte him nevermore asterte. O sely Philomene! (ll. 2332–9) All that we really get from this is that Tereus carves the girl’s tongue out with a sword. In Gower’s version in Book 5 of Confessio Amantis, there is far more description: And he thanne as a lyon wod With hise unhappi handes stronge Hire cauhte be the tresses longe, With whiche he bond ther bothe hire armes— That was a fieble dede of armes— And to the grounde anon hire caste, And out he clippeth also faste Hire tunge with a peire scheres. So what with blod and what with teres Out of hire yhe and of hir mouth, He made hire faire face uncouth. Sche lay swounende unto the deth, Ther was unethes eny breth. Bot yit whan he hire tunge refte, A litel part therof belefte, Bot sche with al no word mai soune, Bot chitre and as a brid jargoune. And natheles that wode hound Hir bodi hent up fro the ground, And sente hir there as be his wille Sche scholde abyde in prison stille Foreveremo. (ll. 4684–5705)

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Here, Tereus cuts out Philomela’s tongue with shears, a common tool for legal punishment. Gower focuses on the gore of the act, mentioning the blood and tears. Philomela is almost dead, her breathing nearly stopped. Then follows the description of the “litel part” of her tongue that was left, not enough to allow her to speak, but enough that she can make the sounds of a bird. This detail is significant, given that she is later turned into one. While Chaucer’s version does not give many details of the actual act, it does give other relevant information. When Philomela decides to embroider a tapestry telling the story of her rape to send to her sister, Chaucer reveals that she “coude eek rede, and wel y-nogh endyte,/But with a penne coude she nat wryte;/But lettres can she weven to and fro” (ll. 2356–8). The question in this passage is the difference between “endyte” (to write or compose), which perhaps in this case indicates in her imagination, and “wryte.” She does not seem to be allowed to write anything such as a letter or at least anything that is more than fleeting. Instead, her form of communication is sewing, which we find in Gower as well, who merely says that she wove “lettres and ymagerie” (l. 5771) without any discussion of her limitations in communication. Later, in Chaucer’s version, when Philomela enlists a messenger to take the embroidery to Procne, she clearly communicates “by signes” (l. 1367) what she wants and promises him “by signes” (l. 2369) many oaths. When Procne travels to find Philomela, Chaucer reminds us twice that she looked upon her “dombe suster” (ll. 2377, 2380). Gower refers to Philomela as “specheles” (l. 5811) and as relying on Procne to make supplication to the gods because she herself “lacke speche” (l. 5862). The Legend of Good Women ends with the reunion of the sisters, perhaps to prevent any doubt of their status as “good women,” while Confessio Amantis continues the story with Procne killing and feeding their son to Tereus. This continuation allows the retelling of how they all are transformed into birds by the gods. As a nightingale, Philomela regains speech and is able to sing her story and woe. Ironically, it is as an animal, one of the “dumb beasts,” that she is able to speak. Both at this point and through her sewing and sign language, she is able to communicate; indeed, she not only communicates, but is able to name her attacker, which leads to his punishment. One further detail to note in both Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions is that Philomela is by far more ashamed of the loss of her virginity than she is by the loss of vocal speech, indicating that the stigma of the rape supersedes her mutilation and, given her continued ability to communicate, perhaps disables her far more than the loss of her tongue.7 The story of Philomela emphasizes the sin of her attacker rather than her own; the cutting out of her tongue is an unprovoked attack, not a punishment. The Bible, however, does contain examples of the loss of speech as divine punishment. For instance, in Psalms 30:19 (31:19), it calls for “deceitful lips” to be “made dumb.” The most explicit example appears in Luke 1:20–2 when John the Baptist’s father, Zachary, is told by an angel that he will have a child. Given his and his wife’s advanced age, he is skeptical, and the angel replies: And behold, thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be able to speak until the day wherein these things shall come to pass, because thou hast not believed my words, which shall be fulfilled in their time. And the people were waiting for Zachary; and they wondered that he tarried so long in the temple. And when he came out, he could not speak to them: and they understood that he had seen a vision in the temple. And he made signs to them, and remained dumb. In the biblical version of this story, it is clear that Zachary’s speech loss is a punishment for disbelieving God’s messenger. It is unclear when he emerges from the temple what

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he communicates to the people, but he does manage to make signs to them. In the ninthcentury Old Saxon Heliand, this scene is more explicit: The angel gave him as punishment that he would not be able to say a single word, not even move his mouth, “until a son is born to you, until your old woman bears you an earl, a newborn baby of good family, and he comes shining into this world. At that moment you will speak, you will regain the power of speech, and you will not be dumb any longer.” It happened then and there. What the angel of the All-Ruler said in the shrine came true: the old man lost his speech—though he kept a clear mind in his head … Then the good man came out of the sanctuary. The earls crowded in closer, they were extremely curious to hear what he would say to them and what truth he would let them know. He was not able to say a single spoken word to the warrior-companions of his retinue, he was only able to let the people know with his right hand that they should follow the teaching of our Ruler. The people understood that he had seen something directly from God, but that he could not say anything nor let them know about it. (Song 3, 10) In this version, the punishment is more extreme in that Zachary is unable to “even move his mouth” in addition to being unable to speak. When he does lose his speech, the text is careful to state that he “kept a clear mind in his head,” indicating that the loss of speech does not affect his cognitive abilities. When he emerges and returns to his companions, there is the strong statement that they are awaiting to hear him as they press in closer. In this case, the text tells us that he signed to them with his right hand that they should “follow the teaching of our Ruler,” supplying what is missing from the biblical version. While the earlier version indicates that the people “understand he had a vision,” in the Heliand it is clear that they understand, both in terms of comprehension and acceptance, that Zachary could not let them verbally know what he had seen. The concept of speech disorders as punishment for sin finds its way beyond biblical texts and into other genres, such as the romances. Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal is the story of the Arthurian knight Perceval, who transforms from a boy ignorant of all chivalry to a guest in the Fisher King’s castle to a maturing warrior. The text concerns disability in multiple ways, given that it includes the injured Fisher King himself.8 In terms of the inability to speak, however, it is Perceval himself who struggles with this condition. After Perceval leaves the Fisher King, he happens upon a lady who ends up being revealed as his cousin. She questions him about his behavior in the castle and the mystical procession involving a bleeding lance (which becomes part of the Grail story in other texts) he witnessed, castigating him for his lack of speech: “And did you ask why it bled?” “I didn’t say a word, so help me God.” “I tell you, that was a grave mistake …” “Did you ask where they were going?” “Not a word crossed my lips.” “God help me, so much the worse … Oh, hapless Perceval! What a disaster that you failed to ask all this! You would have healed the good crippled king—he would have regained the use of his limbs and the rule of his land—and you would have profited greatly! But now, I tell you, many ills will beset both you and others. And know this, too: this misfortune has befallen you because of the wrong you did your mother—she has died of grief on your account.” (31–2)

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Much later in the text, Perceval meets a hermit, who also turns out to be a relative, his uncle, and who echoes the lady’s assessment: Brother, a sin of which you’re unaware has done you great harm: it’s the grief you caused your mother when you left her. She collapsed in a faint at the foot of the bridge outside the gate, and of that grief she died. It’s because of the sin you committed there that you came to ask nothing about the lance and the grail, and many misfortunes have befallen you in consequence … It was sin that cut off your tongue and stopped you asking the reason when you saw the lance-head with its endless flow of blood; and folly seized you when you failed to learn who was served from the grail. (55–6) Here, the hermit is clear that it is sin, causing his mother’s death when he left their home to become a knight, that “cuts off his tongue” and stops Perceval from speaking in the castle. In Perceval’s story, while certainly the text attributes his lack of speech to a sin, there is a connection between the knight’s inability to speak with how he was raised. In the theory posited by Jean de Jandun mentioned earlier, language is a result of social contact. Perceval grows up isolated from the chivalric world, and the fact he was never taught to speak courteously is approached in the text as if it were a speech impediment. When Perceval’s father dies after being wounded in battle, his mother wants nothing more than to protect her son from such a fate. She succeeds until Perceval accidentally meets with a group of knights. At that point, he exhibits his inability to speak and dialogue in the proper manner of a romance character. He angers the knights when he does not answer their questions, being in awe of their clothing and equipment. He does not engage in courteous speech, nor does he know how to do so. Perceval proves over and over again that he is unable to speak properly, either speaking the wrong words or, as in the case of the Fisher King, not speaking at all. For instance, not long after his encounter with his cousin, Perceval sees a falcon attack a goose. Three blood drops fall to the snow, and the knight is transfixed at the sight, comparing it to the colors of his beloved’s face. So mesmerized, he does not answer two of Arthur’s knights who try to learn his name and take him back to camp: “The knight didn’t move; he seemed not to have heard. He addressed him again but he made no reply” (38). Instead of speaking with them, Perceval silently defeats them with his lance. He only speaks again when Gawain courteously invites his conversation, indicating that Perceval is beginning to respond to the language of this other society he has joined. There is simultaneously a discussion between Gawain and Kay, one of the knights defeated and wounded by Perceval, in which Kay mocks Gawain for using words and speech instead of his sword and lance, to which Gawain admonishes, “There’s no need to speak so harshly” (39). Given Gawain’s later success in speaking with Perceval, the text prizes both speaking and speaking well above other skills, and Perceval’s inability to do so for much of the text is an impediment to his development as a knight. There are several Biblical passages that echo this desire for good speech, including: Open thy mouth for the dumb, and for the causes of all the children that pass. Open thy mouth, decree that which is just, and do justice to the needy and poor. (Proverbs 31:8–9) For wisdom opened the mouth of the dumb, and made the tongues of infants eloquent. (Wisdom of Solomon 10:21)

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The presence of these passages does indicate that, if an individual is able to verbalize sound, they should choose to do so carefully and eloquently. Equally, there are warnings that certain types of speech are either evil or ill-advised, and thus there are moments when speechlessness is preferable to speaking: My lips shall not speak iniquity, neither shall my tongue contrive lying. (Job 27:4) Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. (Psalms 33:14; 34:14) As a city that lieth open and is not compassed with walls, so is a man that cannot refrain his own spirit in speaking. (Proverbs 25:28) And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard. (Matthew 6:7) Perhaps the most eloquent testament to desired speechlessness in the Bible is in Isiah 53, which is a highly debated chapter in Judeo-Christian tradition. The figure that the chapter describes is one who sacrifices himself for the sins of humankind, which is often read as prefiguring Christ. While doing so, he is depicted as voluntarily withholding speech: He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth. (Isaiah 53:7) The figure chooses not to speak, instead allowing himself to be sacrificed without any verbal protest. He is likened to a “dumb beast,” in this case a lamb. His lack of speech is both presented as a submission to God’s will and an emphasis of the sacrifice necessary to relieve the sins of humankind. This idea is akin to the “eye for an eye” philosophy in that it is better to be speechless than either commit sins of the tongue or speak when silence can be more productive. The idea of voluntary and productive speechlessness, supported by the biblical passages above as well as others, became a primary tenet of monastic rule. Both Benedictines and Cistercians promoted the value of contemplation and meditation. The Benedictine Rule clearly sets out the value of silence in chapter 6, “On the Spirit of Silence”: Let us do what the Prophet says: “I said, ‘I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I have set a guard to my mouth.’ I was mute and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things.” Here the Prophet shows that if the spirit of silence ought to lead us at times to refrain even from good speech, so much the more ought the punishment for sin make us avoid evil words. Therefore, since the spirit of silence is so important, permission to speak should rarely be granted even to perfect disciples, even though it be for good, holy, edifying conversation; for it is written, “In much speaking you will not escape sin,” and in another place, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” For speaking and teaching belong to the master; the disciple’s part is to be silent and to listen. And for that reason if anything has to be asked of the Superior, it should be asked with all the humility and submission inspired by reverence. But as for coarse jests and idle words or words that move to laughter, these we condemn everywhere with a perpetual ban, and for such conversation we do not permit a disciple to open his mouth. The Rule recognizes that there are types of good speech as well as evil speech, contrasting “good, holy, edifying conversation” with “coarse jests and idle words or words that move to laughter.” To avoid sins of the tongue, the Rule advocates voluntary muteness, refraining “even from good speech.”

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The issue of speaking well and the impediments to doing so continue in several texts. A famous example is in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the section about Caedmon of Whitby. Initially a secular brother, Caedmon is ashamed of his inability to speak in verse: He had lived in the secular life until he was well advanced in years, and had never learned any verses; therefore sometimes at feasts, when it was agreed for the sake of entertainment that all present should take a turn singing, when he saw the harp coming towards him, he would rise up from the table in the middle of the feast, go out, and return home. (2011: 49) One night, when he returns to the stable, he is visited in a dream by a supernatural being that tells him to sing. Caedmon is suddenly able not only to speak and write in verse, but to do so better than all those around him. His experience has been categorized as a type of xenoglossia or “the sudden, miraculous ability to speak, to understand, to read, or to write a foreign language” (Cooper-Rompato 2010: 1). While certainly Caedmon is not given the ability to speak a foreign language, in many ways, his sudden ability to speak in verse is similar. It is a language that he was unable to speak previously, and he is described as “receiv[ing] the gift of song freely by divine grace” (2011: 49). Later, as Caedmon is dying, it is significant that Bede carefully tells us that he was able to speak the entire time, indeed “talking pleasantly” with everyone in the sick house to which he had asked to be taken. One of the last lines about his story is that “his tongue, which had composed so many holy words in praise of the Creator, uttered its last words while he was in the act of signing himself with the cross, and commending his spirit into God’s hands” (2011: 50). While he may have lived the majority of his life with limited speech, Caedmon dies with the full use of the faculty.9 Stammering is one of the primary speech disabilities described in various texts. St. Notker the Stammerer, or Balbulus (c. 840–912), was a monk of St. Gall in what is now Switzerland. He is informally known as the patron saint of stammerers, particularly children. Of himself, Notker says, in his biography of Charlemagne written c. 883–4, that he is “a toothless man with stammering speech” (164). Ekkehard of St. Gall (c. 980–1056) wrote of Notker: Notker was frail in body, though not in mind, a stammerer in voice but not in spirit; lofty in divine thoughts, patient in adversity, gentle in everything, strict in enforcing the discipline of our convent, yet somewhat timid in sudden and unexpected alarms, except in the assaults of demons, whom he always withstood manfully. He was most assiduous in illuminating, reading, and composing; and (that I may embrace all his gifts of holiness within a brief compass) he was a vessel of the Holy Ghost, as full as any other of his own time. Notker presents himself in terms of his speech disability, focusing on the frustrations of a “stammering speech.” Ekkehard acknowledges that indeed the saint was a stammerer, but that this speech impediment was in no way an indication of Notker’s abilities. There is the assertion that he was “timid in sudden and unexpected alarms,” but this is balanced against or compensated for by his strength in the extraordinary ability to fight demons. Despite Notker’s issues in verbalizing, he was a prolific writer and composer. This fact bears out what David Compton asserts: “Stammerers are able to talk, and to read aloud, perfectly well. There’s nothing wrong with the physical mechanisms of their speech: the basic difficulty isn’t to do with muscles, phonation, respiration, articulation, it’s to do with confidence, control, and identity” (1993: 34). Ekkehard states definitively that the

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saint was a vessel of the Holy Ghost, “as full as any other.” He deliberately removes any doubt of Notker’s worthiness due to his stammering, eliminating any connection between a speech impediment and the ability to be a saint. It is a significant statement against constructing disability as a punishment or as a limiting factor. On the opposite end of the spectrum from both Caedmon and Notker, exemplars of restricted speech are those who exhibit excessive speech or “babbling.” Metzler notes this characteristic in a certain character type: “The stutter of fools was believed to be a characteristic of their lack of linguistic abilities. Imitation of the stammering language, or of the childish speech, of the natural fool can be found in a literary character feigning madness and acting the fool” (2016: 205). Just such a character is Tristan in the AngloNorman “The Madness of Tristan” (“La Folie de Tristan de Berne”). Tristan assumes the appearance and character of a “fool” in order to visit the court of King Mark and see his beloved Yseut. The term fol/fool/foole in the Anglo-Norman is a reference to being “mad,” perhaps “foolish,” “misguided,” or “reckless.” As with the term dumb, it should be used carefully given its derogatory overtones. In the text, Tristan illustrates the speech of an individual such as the type is mimicking: “Fool, what is your name?” “My name is Picous.” “Who was your father?” “A walrus.” “By whom did he have you?” “A whale. I have a sister I will bring to you. The girl is called Bruneheut: you shall have her and I will have Yseut.” “If we exchange, what will you do?” “Listen to this!” said Tristan. Between the clouds and the sky, where there is no frost, I shall build a house of flowers and roses and there she and I will enjoy ourselves. I have not yet finished the story I am telling these Welshmen—may God shame them! … I have leaped and thrown reeds and balanced sharpened twigs. I have lived on roots in a wood and I have held a queen in my arms. I shall say more if I have a mind to. “Rest yourself now, Picolet. I am sorry you have done so many things. Leave your jesting for today.” “What does it matter to me if you are sorry? I do not care a scrap!” Then all the knights said: “No one heeds a fool or argues with him.” (154–5)10 In the alternative version of the text, La Folie Tristan d’Oxford, the knights and king say instead, “Here is a good fool at no loss for words.”11 The Oxford version indicates that, indeed, to be a “fool” is defined as someone with an excessive amount of speech, such as the rambling stories that Tristan tells while in his guise. On the other hand, the indication in the Berne is that “no one heeds” such an individual. While certainly this phrasing could suggest that they were ignored, it is tied to the speech patterns that they exhibit, the rush of incoherent thoughts or excessive language that eventually becomes at odds with the attention spans of their audience. This says more about the listeners than the babblers. The miscommunication is more on the part of the listeners who stop listening or only listen inattentively, thereby interrupting the process of dialogue. Rather than continuing to find meaning in the words, the listeners choose to label the speaker as disabled. Tristan is able to get away with his ruse because he manages so well to replicate this style of speaking and manipulate his audience.

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6.4. METHODS OF COMMUNICATION AND CURES In the previous discussion of representations, three methods of communication and thus access to social interaction emerge for those with speech issues: sign language, writing, and art. In the cases of Zachary and Philomela, they convey speech through sign. In neither text do we get a sense of what those signs entail, and, indeed, neither would have been trained in a formal system as they are either spontaneously speechless, as with Zachary, or isolated, as with Philomela. The authors of these texts, however, clearly were aware of methods by which the speechless communicated to others. While these two characters were not trained, systems of formal sign language did exist in the Middle Ages, particularly among the monastic communities that required vows of silence. With such large groups of people living together, some form of communication was necessary simply for the day-today operation of the monasteries. There were several systems: Anglo-Saxon, Augustinian, Benedictine, and Cistercian, among them. Some of these are still in use today. Robert A. Barakat, whose study of monastic sign languages is invaluable, tells us: Just when a system of signs was first introduced into the monastic orders is vague and uncertain. Sign languages of many types were in use long before the birth of Christianity, in ancient Egypt, among the Greeks, and later among the Romans, who invented a system of finger counting and a language of pantomime. The Venerable Bede included in his work, De Temporum Ratione, a method of finger reckoning probably borrowed from secular sources … There is every indication that most of the early orders specified the use of signs when and where verbal communication was not desirable. (1987: 88) While sign was useful for these communities, it did raise some interesting problems, the foremost of which was the question as to whether sign language was, in its way, breaking the vow of silence. If silence was desired, then any form of communication could be problematic. As an extension, there were additional questions as to whether an individual could sin through this method of communication as with any other. Scott G. Bruce asserts that these “concerns shaped the linguistic character of the Cluniac sign system and influenced the mechanisms of observance and control that were intended to curb its misuse in the monastery” (2007: 4). In addition to sign language, writing was a common method of communication for overcoming speech impairments. St. Notker is a primary example. While his stammering sometimes prevented spoken words, he is known for his written works, including his musical compositions. Although certain scholars such as William C. Stokoe (1987: 326) place the acceptance of the deaf and speechless as beginning in the Early Modern period, Metzler has shown that many ancient and medieval thinkers found that the cognitive capabilities of those without speech were not necessarily impaired: Origen (c.185–c.254) stated that speech is independent of voice (Patr. Grec. 11,91), because while speech manifests the thoughts of the mind, voice just articulates them, plus in developmental terms voice is earlier (e.g. there is voice in children before they can speak). Nemesius of Emsa (in On the Nature of Man, around 400) said people who are mute from birth are rational, as are those who are mute from accident or injury. This is so because utterance is not a prerequisite for reasoning. And Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395), On the Making of Man, believed that the seat of reason is not in the brain, but all over the body; the soul is diffused throughout the body; a speech defect is therefore not a mental defect. (2016: 55)

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As such, individuals with speech issues are not precluded from expressing thought in writing. A question does arise about those who were unable to write. Philomela, for instance, is not allowed to do so, but there are also others who were uneducated. Given Philomela’s example, she turned to sign, but also to sewing and imagery in order to communicate. Instead of using written words, she conveyed her story through a form of art. There are many creative ways to speak without voice. These methods indicate how speechless or stammering individuals would participate in important activities, such as confession or legal testimony. In terms of curing speech disorders, as different theories indicate, many of the medical approaches focused on the tongue and the balancing of the humors and, thus, so did the attempts at cures. David Compton notes that the Greek physician Galen “recommended that the tongues of stammerers be soundly cauterized—thus establishing the theory of pain as the great redeemer that persisted for many centuries,” and that Guy de Chauliac recommended “application of embrocation, cauteries, blisters, and gargles for the tongue” (1993: 18). Benson Bobrick mentions bloodletting, cathartics, and searing of the lips as attempted cures, mainly in an effort to “dry out” the person in order to counter “excessive humidity”; to that end, they would rub the tongue with “salt, honey, and sage.” He also discusses the more extreme measures by other medieval physicians, including Lanfranc of Milan (thirteenth century), who treated stuttering by dividing “the frenum … [with] a redhot silver razor rather than a knife or thread,” which diverged from Avicenna (eleventh century), who preferred to avoid “unnecessary bleeding and [to] protect the sublingual veins” with “an alternative procedure for surgery on the tongue … [by perforating the membrane] towards the root with a needle, and tied.” Several medieval medical tracts, including those by de Chauliac and Bernard of Gordon (fourteenth century), mention that young people with speech issues will simply outgrow them, which is a belief held to modern day despite the development of the field of speech therapy. The American Speech–Language–Hearing Association mentions that parents concerned about their children’s speech development are likely to hear some form of “they will outgrow it” response from peers as well as general practitioners.12 One medieval literary method of curing was miracles. The Bible contains numerous examples of the curing of the mute. God is given this power in Isaiah 35:5–6: Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall be free: for waters are broken out in the desert, and streams in the wilderness. Christ later emulates this skill several times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke as the people repeatedly bring him the disabled to heal. Among these are frequently the “dumb.” During these scenes, it is important to point out that the etiology of the disabilities is rarely noted. Sometimes, as in Matthew 9:32–3, it will state that the individual was possessed by a devil, which Christ then casts out in order to heal the person. More often than not, however, the cause of the disability is never discussed. The point of the scenes is to highlight Christ’s ability to heal rather than the causes of speechlessness. The same is true in hagiography, which is intended to mirror the stories of Christ. There is, in this model, a privileging of cures over the individual, on “fixing a problem” rather than interacting with the human being, an attitude perhaps even more prevalent currently given the consistent modern “need” for medical cures. In the biblical representation of divine healing, the almost complete lack of specificity about the individuals being cured indicates nothing about their humanity.

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6.5. CONCLUSIONS Individuals with speech impairments—either speechlessness or other forms—were familiar figures in the Middle Ages. They were common in the Bible, in diverse genres of literature, and, of course, in everyday life. The causes of these conditions varied from congenital to corporal or divine punishment to torture to temporary catalysts. As with the historical study of any disability, it is essential to remember that the social understanding and reactions to those with any impairment were dependent upon the circumstances surrounding those individuals. The same is true for the speech-impaired. If a person was speechless because they committed a crime that was punished by law, then the impairment could be viewed negatively. If, however, a person became speechless through accident or unprovoked violence against them—or through voluntary choice—then there might not be any social stigma whatsoever. Of course, on the other hand, if members of society were impatient or judgmental, then stigma was indeed still possible despite the circumstances. While certainly the function of speech was highly prized in the Middle Ages, the speechimpaired could participate fully in society, and alternative ways to communicate were available to them.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Learning Difficulties Ideas about Intellectual Diversity in Medieval Thought and Culture ELIZA BUHRER

One of the challenges of writing about learning difficulties in the Middle Ages is defining what exactly we are investigating when we look for evidence of a modern concept in the distant past.1 Today, we recognize a broad range of conditions that can impede people from acquiring knowledge and skills. These include genetic disorders like Down’s syndrome, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, traumatic brain injuries, neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and learning difficulties, which are conditions like dyslexia, dyscalculia (difficulty with mathematical reasoning), and dysgraphia (difficulty writing coherently), which may make it challenging for individuals to learn in a typical manner but do not prevent them from learning in other ways, since they are not associated with intellectual impairment. The modern medical community understands all of these conditions as biological disorders because they correspond to measurable differences in the structure or biochemistry of the brain. This seems to suggest that they are biological realities rather than social constructs, and thus people with such minds have always existed. However, the difficulty of studying the history of any of these conditions arises from the fact that most did not exist as medical categories until very recently, and the way we understand learning difficulties would have been foreign to medieval thinkers. What, after all, would dyslexia have meant in a world where literacy was neither widespread nor expected? Nevertheless, one approach might be to search medieval texts for descriptions that seem to resemble modern learning difficulties. Such descriptions are not impossible to find, since medieval medical texts, administrative records, and theology provide ample evidence that medieval society recognized that some people are less able to learn and understand than others. For instance, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the courts of medieval England oversaw hundreds of inquisitions aimed at assessing the mental competency of so-called “idiots” (idiota) and “natural fools” (fatuus a nativitate).2 “Idiocy” was understood as a condition that rendered people unable to manage their own economic affairs, so the Crown appointed guardians to protect their interests and those of their heirs. Augustine of Hippo wrote of children “so slow and defective in memory that they cannot learn the letters of the alphabet,” and some medieval physicians recognized that brain injuries could impair individuals’ ability to learn (2007: 529). In a

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medical compendium written in the late fourteenth century, the English physician John Mirfeld described a monk who received treatment at his priory after he fell off his horse, hit his head, and lost sensation and movement in his body. While the monk ultimately recovered, Mirfeld noted that he was “never of such subtle cleverness (subtilis ingenii) or good memory (bone memorie) as before” (Moore 1908: 42–3).3 Yet, treating learning difficulties as trans-historical because they are rooted in biological difference would be misguided, as this relies on the same assumptions as the medical model of disability, which construes disabilities as medical problems in need of treatment. This model has been resoundingly rejected by scholars across the humanities over the past two decades in favor of an understanding of disability that emphasizes the role society plays in either accommodating or excluding, and accepting or pathologizing, human difference. It is not biological difference in itself that creates disability, but a combination of the facts of the body and social, cultural, and structural factors that shape how we define and respond to non-normative bodies and minds. To understand this point, consider the history of ADHD, which originated as a medical diagnosis in the USA during the late 1960s. Scientists throughout Europe and America agree that the symptoms associated with ADHD—impulsivity, difficulty maintaining attention, and restlessness—are caused by deficiencies of dopamine and norepinephrine neurotransmitters. Nevertheless, ADHD is understood and treated differently across cultures. It is viewed as a biological disorder that affects both children and adults in the USA, a biological disorder that generally improves with age in the UK, and a personality disorder in Italy. As a result, stimulant medication is used as a first-line treatment for ADHD in both the USA and the UK, but it is not licensed for adults in the UK (National Health Service n.d.). In contrast, ADHD is generally treated with psychotherapy rather than medication in Italy, where stimulant medication was legally restricted until 2007 (Franzzetto et al. 2007: 393). Accordingly, people with ADHD experience different levels of support country to country. ADHD might be a surmountable challenge in the USA, while it could be disabling in Italy. Meanwhile, in preindustrial societies, people with the same deficiencies of norepinephrine and dopamine associated with ADHD may have gone unnoticed, as the workings of their minds would not have been incompatible with the demands of daily life. Ultimately, to search for learning difficulties and other modern disorders in the distant past would require assuming that people with such minds have not only always existed, but have always been perceived as deviating from the norm, and this is obviously far from the case. The specific learning difficulties cataloged in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders only emerged as medical categories during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as traits that had previously been viewed as within the spectrum of normal human behavior began to significantly impede individuals’ ability to succeed in an increasingly industrialized and urban world. It is no coincidence, for instance, that descriptions of dyslexia were first published in medical journals in the 1880s and 1890s, just as public education was becoming free and compulsory in England and America.4 Accordingly, even when medieval texts seem to describe people with deficits that seem similar to modern learning difficulties, we should be cautious about assuming that those deficits held the same significance in medieval culture that they do today. For example, in the early fifteenth century, a mariner named Michael of Rhodes created a portolan to help sailors navigate between the major ports of Europe that contained so many technical

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errors that one might wonder if Michael struggled with dyscalculia (Falchetta 2009: 193–210). Yet, the rest of Michael’s work conveys a deep fascination with numbers. Michael’s portolan was part of a 440-folio codex containing work on mathematics, calendars, astrology, and shipbuilding, as well as Michael’s accounts of his voyages (Long 2009: 1–35). Much of the codex was compiled from other sources; however, Raffaella Franci has suggested that over one-hundred pages concerning commercial mathematics were Michael’s original work, since the solutions he provided for common mathematical problems were more complicated than those taught by abacus books (Franci 2009: 115– 46). With this in mind, Piero Falchetta has suggested that the portolan was not intended for practical navigation, but was instead a symbolic object written to impress Michael’s wealthy patrons, who recognized the authority of numbers, but lacked familiarity with them themselves. The portolan thus reflects a “transformation of the epistemological framework of knowledge related to navigation” and a cultural shift in which people began to trust numbers to communicate objective truth, even as most of Europe remained innumerate (Falchetta 2009: 210). Far from lacking capacity for math, Michael of Rhodes was among an early generation of Western merchants and mariners who pioneered the use of Hindu–Arabic numerals.5 Similarly, early medieval discourses on acedia, a vice that came to denote sloth by the tenth century, but originally referred to what might be described as spiritual ennui, contain accounts of monks unable to focus on their duties because of a particular combination of distractibility and mental sluggishness that resembles the symptoms of inattentive ADHD. John Cassian held that “from acedia [are born] idleness, somnolence, rudeness, restlessness, wandering about, instability of mind and body, chattering [and] inquisitiveness” (Wenzel 1967: 29). Alcuin of York described acedia as a condition in which “the leisurely mind runs back and forth through everything” (Williams 2012: 31). Meanwhile, Gregory the Great described the closely related concept of tristitia (which eventually replaced acedia among the deadly sins) as “slothfulness in fulfilling the mind’s commands, and a wandering of the mind on unlawful objects” (Lyman 1989: 6). Compare these to a clinical psychologist’s description of inattentive ADHD: There are some children … who chronically daydream. They are often very bright but they have trouble attending to any one topic for very long. They can be quite impulsive in saying or doing whatever comes to mind, and they find distractions impossible to resist. (Hallowell and Ratey 2011: ix) Divorced from context, medieval descriptions of acedia would undoubtedly resonate with anyone with ADHD who has struggled to focus on work amid an endless number of distractions. However, these discussions must be understood within the context of early monasticism. John Cassian modeled his understanding of acedia on that of Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century Byzantine monk who spent the latter half of his life living as a hermit in the Egyptian desert and developed the concept of acedia to describe the boredom and disenchantment that monks encountered living in solitude. Describing acedia as the “noonday devil,” Evagrius explained that he makes the sun appear sluggish and immobile as if the day had fifty hours. Then he causes the monk to continually look out windows and forces him to step out of his cell and gaze at the sun to see how far it still is from the ninth hour, and look around here, and there to see if any of his brethren is near. (Wenzel 1967: 12–13)

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The danger here is that monks’ minds will wander to the lives they abandoned, tempting them to leave the desert. The problems associated with acedia thus do not reflect those of people with atypical attention spans or non-normative minds. Rather, they are problems that would confront anyone who lived in isolation after trading the comforts of human society for the monotony of anchoritic life. Ultimately, modern learning difficulties would have had little significance in medieval culture because medieval ideas about intelligence, cognition, learning, and the knowledge and skills one needs to navigate day-to-day life do not map neatly onto modern categories. As a result, it does not make sense to try to reconstruct the history of learning difficulties by combing monastic chronicles for accounts of distracted novices, searching illuminated manuscripts for the work of dyslexic scribes, or attempting to unearth modern medical concepts in medieval texts. Instead, operating under the assumption that there have always been people who were regarded as more or less capable of acquiring knowledge, my goal is to explore how people in the Middle Ages understood intellectual variance and the impediments that limit people’s ability to learn. What did they believe was essential for one to know, and why did they believe some people were unable to acquire this knowledge? What terminology did they use to describe these problems, and how did they perceive people who experienced them? I will first explore these questions using theological and medical texts. Then, I will examine how the ideas of elites informed popular belief and culture.

7.1. INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT While medieval ideas about intelligence were quite different from our own, medieval thinkers understood that some people were less capable of learning than others. In late Antiquity, a small number of theologians contemplated why this was the case, due to the challenges congenital cognitive impairment posed to their theological anthropology. Augustine, for instance, raised the example of children unable to learn the letters of the alphabet when considering how it could be that God created a new soul for each body, since some people are “so imbecile they differ little from the beasts of the field,” and are born with an “absolute privation of reason” (Augustine of Hippo 1907: 529). Augustine discussed such individuals, whom he referred to as moriones, in enough places in his writings that it is clear he was interested in understanding why some people seem bereft of normative intelligence from birth, but he said little else about intellectual variance.6 For his purposes, it was sufficient to divide humanity into two groups: those born with the ability to exercise reason and those who seemed to lack this. By the twelfth century, however, the Aristotelian project of imposing order on creation through classification began to inform how philosophers and theologians thought about intellectual variance. As translations of Aristotle’s books of nature and Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine appeared in the West, medieval thinkers used natural philosophy to explain why some people seemed less intelligent than others. Exemplifying this, the French natural philosopher, William of Conches, claimed that when people seemed to lack reason, it was because the middle cells of their brains were “distemperate,” while “the less distemperate the brain, the more reason one has.” Moreover, “if the brain is extremely cold, one is stupid and without talent, and the colder one is, the slower one’s talent; the less cold one is, the sharper one’s mind” (Metzler 2016: 66). William’s contemporaries had similar ideas. Hildegard of Bingen, for instance, noted that “evil humors sometimes make smoke, which rises up in the brain and so infects it that people become stupid, forgetful, and insensate” (Wallis 2010: 358).7

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Two Galenic ideas about the mind and body—humoral theory and the theory of the inner senses, which held that the brain is divided into three ventricles or cells associated with different cognitive functions—informed William and Hildegard’s understanding of intelligence. These theories were becoming increasingly prominent at the time that William and Hildegard were writing due to the translation and transmission of Arabic– Islamic medical texts and were ubiquitous by the end of the thirteenth century.8 Humoral theory posited that the body contained a mixture of four humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Each humor corresponded to one of four qualities (black bile to dry cold, yellow bile to dry heat, blood to wet heat, and phlegm to wet cold), as well as elements, seasons, stages of life, organs, and temperaments. Medieval thinkers believed that each individual’s unique humoral balance determined their constitution and temperament, and humoral imbalances were responsible for poor health (Nutton 2006a: 23–5). In associating “stupidity” with coldness and mental acuity with heat, William and like-minded contemporaries presented intelligence as a spectrum, for since the balance of one’s humors varied from person to person, intelligence must as well. Moreover, changes in humoral balance caused by disease or injury could affect cognitive function. Equally influential was the theory of the inner senses, which William referred to when he claimed that people lacked reason when the “middle cell” of their brain was “distemperate.” Galen had posited that the brain was divided from front to back into three ventricles or cells, each of which housed the different cognitive functions described by Aristotle in De Anima. This understanding of cognition was transmitted to the West through Avicenna’s De Anima, which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century. The number of cognitive functions associated with each cell varied over the course of the Middle Ages; however, medieval thinkers generally believed that the first cell, which housed the imagination (imaginatio) and common sense (sensus communis), received information from the senses and transformed it into images, referred to as phantasms (phantasia). These images were then transmitted to the middle cell, which contained the faculties responsible for cogitation (imaginativa, or cogitativa) and judgment (estimativa). When the brain was working correctly, the cogitativa/imaginativa combined the images into new forms, in the way one might combine the idea of gold and the idea of a mountain to create a golden mountain. The estimativa then used these forms to deduce general principles about the world and make reasoned judgments. In other words, the middle cell turned information presented by the senses into knowledge and used that knowledge to make sense of the world and determine how to act. The last cell contained the memory (memorativa), which stored the ideas developed by the middle cell (Kemp and Fletcher 1993: 559–76). Injury or humoral imbalance in any of the three cells would cause cognitive deficits, but impairments impacting intelligence and reason were almost always attributed to the middle cell (Figure 7.1). This understanding of cognition was universally accepted through the sixteenth century. Medieval medical writers attributed different mental disorders to disturbances of different cells of the brain, and some even associated specific cognitive impairments with injuries to specific regions of the brain.9 For example, the fourth-century physician, Posidonius Byzantius, claimed that “when the anterior region of the brain is damaged, the faculty of imagination is disrupted; when the middle ventricle of the brain is damaged, the faculty of reasoning is impeded; and when the posterior (part) of the brain under the occipital bone is damaged the faculty of memory is destroyed” (Frampton 2008: 257). When combined with humoral theory, the theory of the inner senses could also be used to explain why people have different intellectual abilities.10 Sometimes this had unfortunate consequences. For instance, Albert Magnus argued that women were inherently less

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FIGURE 7.1  Drawing: head, showing cells of brain ventricles, c. 1347. Wellcome Collection, via Creative Commons. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/xmg3rejh

intelligent than men, as “the coldness of the complexion in women diminishes her perceptive abilities,” referring to the widely held belief that women’s natural humoral balance was cooler than that of men (Caciola 2003: 161). Twelfth-century natural philosophers did not explain why people with normative intelligence sometimes struggle to learn. However, in construing intelligence as fluid rather than fixed, and the difference between intelligence and “stupidity” as one of degree rather than kind, they were moving in this direction. In the thirteenth century, university-educated theologians built upon this foundation and began to distinguish between people who lacked the capacity for reason on account of congenital cognitive impairment, injury, or illness and people who possessed reason, but failed to exercise it.

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Discussions of intellectual diversity can be found even in the writing of twelfthcentury theologians. Hugh of St. Victor began the Didiscalion, a treatise on education, by describing the wide range of intellectual aptitudes people possess. There are many people, he claimed, “whose nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things,” while there are other people “whom nature has enriched with the full measure of ability and to whom she shows an easy way to come to truth” (1991: 43). These ideas were echoed in the writing of thirteenth-century scholastic philosophers. For instance, in a passage devoted to explaining why people cannot obtain perfect knowledge of God through natural reason alone, Thomas Aquinas offered an account of the degrees of human intelligence quite similar to Hugh’s: The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority; and is wanting in the minority. The good that exceeds the common state of nature is to be found in the minority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus it is clear that the majority of men have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are said to be half-witted or foolish (moriones vel stulti); but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. (Aquinas Summa Theologica, 1.23)11 Aquinas’ ideas here were informed by ideas developed during the twelfth century, particularly the theory of the inner senses. Like his predecessors, Aquinas believed that we begin to acquire knowledge when our mind derives universal concepts (referred to here as “knowledge of things intelligible”) from the information it receives from the senses. The degree to which we are able to succeed at this depends upon our ability to let go of sensory attachments. For if, as Aquinas asserts elsewhere in Summa Theologica, the “perfect intellectual operation in man consists in an abstraction from sensible phantasms,” then “the more a man’s intellect is freed from those phantasms, the more thoroughly will it be able to consider things intelligible, and to set in order all things sensible” (2.15.2). Aquinas did not discuss the physiognomy of the brain in Summa Theologica, but there is an affinity between his understanding of cognition and the notion that we acquire knowledge when the faculties of the brain responsible for judgment and reasoning work together to transform the phantasms presented by the imagination into general principles. Yet while Aquinas and his contemporaries’ views on intelligence drew upon twelfthcentury ideas, they went beyond just identifying different degrees of intelligence and impairment, and instead attempted to delineate the reasons people fail to acquire knowledge. This ultimately led them to distinguish between conditions that prevent people from learning through no fault of their own and conditions acquired through voluntary action. Aquinas in particular asserted that some people lack the ability to exercise reason because of innate biological difference or injury. Such people are distinct from the moriones and stulti mentioned in his discussion of intelligence in ST.1.23, for elsewhere he used the terms stulti and stultitia to refer to foolishness acquired when one turns from God and “plunges his senses into earthly things,” and contrasted this to the “natural indisposition” of “idiots” (ex indispositione naturali, sicut patet in amentibus) (2.2ae.46.2).12 Stulti and stultitia had similar meanings in the Vulgate Bible, where they were used to refer to people who doubted God’s greatness, disobeyed his commands, and committed a variety of less serious errors, such as speaking before thinking, laughing too loudly, showing excessive anger, and pursuing things that were hurtful to themselves.13 Ultimately, stulti were not people with permanent cognitive impairments, but people who failed to use the reason they possessed due to their own shortcomings (Figure 7.2).

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However, Aquinas also described people who “never had, and have not now the use of reason.” Referring to them as fatuis and amentes, he asserted that they lacked reason on account of “some impediment in a bodily organ” (impedimentum organi corporalis) and had far more severe deficits than stulti (3.68.12). For stultitia, he claimed, “is opposed to wisdom as its contrary, while fatuititas is opposed to it as its pure negation, since a fatuus man lacks the sense of judgement, while a stultus man has sense though dulled (hebetatum), whereas the wise man has the sense acute and penetrating” (2.2ae.45.1). Similar distinctions between profound intellectual disability and more mild conditions can also be found in the work of other thirteenth-century theologians. For instance, when addressing whether priests should assign penance to people unable to vocally confess their sins, such as the deaf, blind, morionem, and madmen (maniacum), Robert of Courcon

FIGURE 7.2  Detail of a miniature of the fool holding a stick and using a small animal to play as if it were bagpipes, and two men, one of whom is David, at the beginning of Psalm 52. From Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale, France, first quarter of the fifteenth century. London, British Library, Royal MS 15 D III, fol. 262. British Library Images Online. http://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=37773

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asserted that priests should invite most to perform penance, since even those who could not make a confession with their mouths could make a confession in their hearts.14 However, if someone was so insensate that they sat before the priest like the trunk of a tree, he should expect confession from them no more than he would from a tree; instead, all he could do was pray for them (Kennedy 1945: 300–1).15 Since medieval ideas about cognitive impairment do not map neatly onto the modern understandings of intellectual disability, we cannot know for sure that Aquinas used the terms fatuis and amentes to refer to congenital intellectual impairment, but there are good reasons to suspect this. For instance, Aquinas used the example of fatuis begetting fatuis to demonstrate that some “bodily defects are transmitted by way of origin from parent to child” (2.81.1). Likewise, in his Commentary on Aristotle’s On Sense and What Is Sensed, he attributed intellectual deficits to physiognomy, explaining that people with smaller heads were impetuous, “as if the heat from the heart were not being pushed back down enough by the brain.” Conversely, people with very big heads were “very slow and dull, as if the heat from the heart were being impeded by the size of the brain” (Aquinas 2005: 51). Further, in a discussion of whether amentes and furiosi (people afflicted by a frantic madness) should be baptized, he also implied that amentia could be a congenital condition (Aquinas 2008: 3.68.12). If Aquinas did use the terms amentes and fatuis to refer to something akin to the modern concept of intellectual disability, this may have reflected a broader shift in how medieval intellectuals conceptualized cognitive impairment. Over the past decade, a number of publications have suggested that society did not begin to recognize intellectual disability as a permanent, congenital, biological condition until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, citing the fact that few discussions of congenital intellectual disability can be found in medieval philosophy, theology, medicine, or popular literature.16 Nevertheless, around the time that Aquinas was writing, the royal courts of medieval England had just begun overseeing inquisitions involving people suspected of lacking the capacity to manage their own affairs. Jurists used a variety of terms to refer to those who lost this ability on account of injury, illness, or old age, including non-compos mentis, stultus, and furiosi, but they used the terms fatuus nativitate and idiota to refer to those who lacked this capacity from birth, lacked “lucid intervals,” and had no hope of recovering from their condition. Aquinas makes a similar distinction in Summa Theologia, noting that madmen (furiosos) “have fallen from a state of sanity into a state of insanity,” while amentes “are so from birth, and have no lucid intervals” (3.68.12).17 It is unlikely that Aquinas knew the fine details of the English common law, but these similarities can be explained by the fact that jurists’ conceptions of intellectual impairment were informed by canon law, particularly Gratian’s Decretum, with which Aquinas was more than familiar.18 In other words, they reflect a shared intellectual culture. In this same vein, late medieval medical writers also used the term amentia to refer to the most profound cognitive impairments. The physician Arnau of Villanova explained that stoliditas (stupidity) referred to the diminishment of reason, while amentia referred to its complete removal (Arnau de Villanova 1586: 156). Likewise, De Parte Operativa, a fragmentary work attributed to Arnau, explained that amentia and stoliditas were caused by coldness and humidity in the middle part of the brain, which impaired the estimative faculty (Salmón 2011: 380).19 While not every medieval medical text defined amentia this way, by the early modern period it was consistently identified with loss of cognitive ability and generally understood to be an incurable condition.20 Speaking to this, in the early fifteenth century, John Michale Savonarola cautioned physicians not to treat it:

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Amentia for ablatio, stoliditas for diminutio. Other names are fatuitas or infantilitas. The sick are like children who have no capacity for thinking, apart from what is present by nature, so that [symptoms are] closing of the eyes and touching of the eyeball, the stretching out of arms and hands, so as not to fall and seek support. Let others quarrel more over names. This is not suited to medici. (Metzler 2016: 69) Arnau of Villanova and John Michale Savonarola may not have used amentia to refer only to congenital cognitive impairment, since for amentia to remove reason implies that one must have once possessed it. Nevertheless, the fact that both believed that amentia entirely deprived people of reason suggests that their ideas were not too far from those of Aquinas. Regardless of whether medieval writers used amentia and fatuitas to refer to congenital intellectual disability or just cognitive impairment caused by “bodily impediment,” theologians believed that neither of these conditions prevented people from knowing God. Aquinas and contemporary theologians were interested in intellectual diversity for what it revealed about the relationship between natural reason and divine grace. Aquinas held that the existence of amentes and fatui demonstrated that humans required grace in order to know God and understand his commands, for while some things about God might be discovered through reason alone, the fact that very few people possess the capacity for this sort of intellectual activity demonstrates that most humans must rely on grace for such wisdom (accordingly, most of Aquinas’ discussions of amentes and fatui focus on whether they can receive the sacraments, particularly baptism). Once people received grace, Aquinas believed that they should be able to know God and direct their lives according to his will, since “if nature does not fail in necessaries, much less does grace fail” (2.2ae.45.5). In many ways, this understanding of cognitive impairment seems surprisingly modern. Contrary to what we might expect, theologians differentiated between severe and mild cognitive impairment, held that severe cognitive impairments were caused by biological difference rather than sin, and believed that even people with the most profound intellectual disabilities had rational souls by virtue of being human. Aquinas’ assertion that such people were capable of knowing God through grace also conveys a deep optimism about the relationship between God and man. Yet people do not always think clearly or act rationally. So, if everyone who has received grace possesses the wisdom necessary for understanding God and acting ethically, why do people so often fail to heed it? Medieval theologians discussed this question at length, and while nothing resembling the modern concept of learning difficulties existed during the Middle Ages, they acknowledged that a variety of circumstances could prevent people with normal intelligence from learning. Aquinas held that even very intelligent people fail to acquire knowledge of God, on account of “dullness of mind, or through having a number of occupations, and temporal needs, or even through laziness in learning,” and thinkers from John Cassian to John Gower offered similar explanations (2.2ae.2.5). In the Prologue to the Polycraticus (c. 1159), John of Salisbury wrote, “The shortness of life, dullness of the senses (sensus hebes), the laziness of negligence, permit us to know little” (Irvin 2014: 48). The English chronicler Ranulf Higden (1280–1364) echoed this, noting that “shortness of life, dullness of sense, torpor of soul, lapsing of memory, and unfruitfulness of labor impede us from much knowledge, but divine mercy has provided a remedy in writing” (Galloway 2004: 66). Likewise, John Gower wrote in the Prologue to Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) that “laziness, dullness of sense (ebes sensus), little schooling, and lack of labor, causes me, the least of all, to sing of lesser things” (Irvin 2014: 50). These similarities

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point to a common literary tradition, as well as the mimetic nature of medieval intellectual production. However, they also indicate that medieval thinkers had fairly consistent ideas about the reasons people are unable to learn. On the one hand, they acknowledged that most people cannot fully devote themselves to study because of external circumstances, such as lack of formal education, the need to work, “temporal obligations,” such as family, and the fact that life is simply too short. Generally, they held that people should not be faulted for failing to learn because of circumstances beyond their control, although also making an argument akin to the modern commonplace that people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Hugh of St. Victor asserted that while “lack of family wealth and a slender income decrease the opportunity for learning,” people should not be excused on account of this, as “we see so many laboring in hunger, thirst, and nakedness, to attain the fruit of knowledge” (1991: 44). Nevertheless, the fact that external factors often impede learning is one of the reasons that Aquinas and his successors believed that even people with abundant intellectual talents could not understand God without grace. However, medieval theologians also believed that some people fail to learn because of things within their control: laziness, negligence, and “dullness of sense.” The terms “dullness of sense” or “dullness of mind” are repeated throughout these discussions and have no modern equivalent. In Summa Theologica, Aquinas identified “dullness of sense in understanding” as a defect of the intellective part of the soul, which renders people unable to “arrive at knowing the truth about a thing, without many explanations” (2.2ae.15.2–3). While this seems to imply that “dullness of sense” was used to denote stupidity, theologians rather understood it as a voluntary condition acquired through sin, specifically the sins that arise from focusing excessively on sensory delights.21 From the fourth century, dullness of sense was associated with gluttony. This idea originated with John Cassian and was passed down through Isidore of Seville and Gregory the Great, who classified “dullness of sense in understanding” (hebetudo sensus circa intelligentiam) along with “foolish mirth, buffoonery, uncleanness and babbling,” as daughters of gluttony (Young 2014: 178). It is probably not without coincidence that these traits are also attributed to stultus and fatuus individuals in the Bible. Gregory’s characterization was accepted by theologians for centuries, and by the thirteenth century, the idea that gluttony impeded understanding was so ingrained that Aquinas used natural philosophy to explain why gluttony causes dullness of sense, attributing this to “fumes of food disturbing the brain” (2.2ae.148.6). Aquinas was not alone in believing that sin could alter the brain. It was commonly accepted in the later Middle Ages that excess food and drink causes smoke to rise through the brain, which, in the words of Hildegard of Bingen, makes people become “stupid, forgetful, and insensate” (Langum 2016: 166). Theologians similarly believed that lust caused an analogous impediment: “blindness of mind.” Albert Magnus even thought that lust could cause physical blindness, since, as Joy Hawkins explains, “the generation of too much heat during sexual intercourse, or from having too many libidinous thoughts, would cause the stomach to overheat and produce burnt humours, which, in turn, corrupted the entire venous system” (2015: 207). The eyes and brain were thought to be particularly vulnerable to such changes because they were phlegmatic by nature (Figure 7.3). There is little overlap between these explanations of why intelligent people fail to acquire knowledge and the modern concept of learning difficulties. Presumably, however, there have always been people who have struggled to learn in some way or another. One significant question this raises is whether medieval society would have attributed

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such people’s struggles to nature or sin. So far, I have suggested that while medieval thinkers recognized that cognitive impairment could be rooted in biological difference, they also believed that mental “dullness” resulted from one’s own moral failings. Yet, it is not clear how much these ideas informed common people’s assumptions about cognitive impairment and intellectual variance. Surprisingly, there is not much evidence that ordinary people embraced the idea that cognitive impairment could be a natural indisposition. However, the idea that sin impedes people from exercising reason was widespread in medieval culture.

FIGURE 7.3  Gluttony, from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, c. 1630–c. 1375, part 1. British Library, Royal MS 6 E VII, fol. 195. British Library Images Online. https://www.bl.uk/ catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=40344

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7.2. LEARNING DIFFICULTIES IN POPULAR LITERATURE AND CULTURE As previously noted, scholarship published in the last decade has suggested that nothing resembling the modern concept of intellectual disability existed in medieval culture. There is certainly evidence one could cite to the contrary, particularly the fact that the courts of medieval England distinguished between people with curable mental impairments and people described as idiota and fatuus nativitate, who supposedly lacked the capacity for selfgovernance from birth. However, for the most part, artifacts of medieval popular culture— including vernacular literature, hagiography, sermon handbooks, and art—contain very few references to congenital cognitive impairment. This is surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that medieval writers were familiar with the theory of the inner senses and associated specific cognitive deficits with afflictions of specific regions of the brain. As Simon Kemp and Garth J. O. Fletcher note, Chaucer identified mania as an affliction of the anterior cell of the brain caused by melancholy in the Knight’s tale (“but rather lyk manye/Engendred of humour malencolik/Biforen, in his celle fantastic”), and John Gower associated the goddess Minerva with wit and reason in the “celles of the brayn” (Chaucer 1987: 1374–76; Gower 2004: 1464). What this may suggest is that the notion that cognitive impairment could be inborn or caused by “bodily defect” may not have reflected ideas that were widespread in medieval popular culture, but instead those of an educated elite, whose thoughts were informed by Roman law and newly translated Greco-Roman medical and philosophical texts. However, there is some reason to believe that the concepts developed by medieval jurists informed how vernacular writers wrote about foolishness. While Chaucer never wrote about congenital cognitive impairment, he used the term “idiot” to describe folly twice in the corpus of his works. In the first book of Troilus, he refers to a “Seynt Idiot, lord of all these fools,” and in the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, Alisoun accuses her husband of wishing to “make an ydiot of our dame” by refusing to give her a key to the chest where they store their money (lines 308–12). This seems unremarkable, but outside the English royal courts, the term “idiot” was seldom associated with cognitive impairment before the early modern period. Instead, it was generally used to refer to people who lacked formal education, or holy fools. Exemplifying this, the cleric who recorded the Vision of Gottschalk, a peasant’s vision of hell dating from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, marveled that he learned of such mysteries from an “ydiote glebonis,” and the protagonist Gottschalk refers to himself as a simpleton and an idiot (“a me simplici et ydiota”). Gottschalk’s folly, however, was artificial rather than natural. The vision ends by proclaiming that no wise man would doubt Gottschalk’s story just because it was told by a simplici, pauper, and idiota (Gurevich and Shukman 1984: 51–66). Moreover, the reference to “Seynt Idiot” in Troilus has puzzled scholars because there is no obvious parallel in Chaucer’s sources. As Ben Parsons notes, continental literature contained a “pantheon of such holy men or saints facetieux,” including a Sainte Follie, Saint Sot, and Saint Grobian, and Chaucer may have been familiar with this tradition. Alternatively, Parsons suggests that Chaucer may have been alluding to a native tradition of “mock-saints” in England, which did not make its way into written culture until the sixteenth century (2011: 275–98). Regardless, Chaucer seems to have assumed that his audience would know to associate the term “idiot” with folly, so that he need not explain why “Seynt Idiot” would be “lord of thise fools.” There is no way to know whether this would have been a correct assumption, but if it was, then it would imply that legal ideas about cognitive impairment may have had a greater circulation within English culture than the dearth of references to “idiots” and “natural fools” in vernacular literature suggests.

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One other work from the early fifteenth century points to this. In The Tale of Beryn (c.  1410), a pseudo-Chaucerian work inserted as a single manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, a character feigns foolishness, asking his companions to shave his head to make him look the part. This causes another character to identify him as a natural fool: “Hanybald lokid on Geffrey, as he were a-masid, And be-held his contenaunce, & howe he was I-rasid; but evermore he thought, that he was a fole Naturell of kynde & had noon other tool, As semed by his wordis & his visage both” (Anonymous 1992: lines 2933–7).22 This is the only explicit reference to natural foolishness in literature from this period, and while the author’s identity is unknown, much of the poem concerns legal matters. This has led some to speculate that the author may have been a lawyer or law student and written the tale to comment on English legal practice, possibly for an audience of trained lawyers (Green 1989: 43–62).23 It is also possible that Chaucer may have associated the term “idiot” with foolishness because he was familiar with English law. Chaucer wrote at a time marked by an expansion of the common law, as the English royal courts oversaw cases that would have been tried in local courts a generation prior. As this occurred, people developed a deeper understanding of the law through their interactions with the courts. Chaucer would have been familiar with the law from his work as an administrator and bureaucrat, as well as his own experience with the courts. Over the course of his life, he appeared in court as a witness, defendant, plaintiff, and juror, and during the 1380s, he served as Justice of the Peace for Kent and as a Member of Parliament (Braswell 2001: 21–49). Thus, it seems plausible that he could have had a passing familiarity with the concept of legal “idiocy.” If this was the case, then it could also explain why he used the term “ydiot” in the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale. In this passage, Alisoun argues that her husband has no reason to keep their mutual property from her: But tel me this, why hydestow, with sorwe, The keyes of thy cheste awey fro me? It is my good as wel as thyn, pardee! What wenestow make and ydiot of oure dame? Now by that lord, that is called seint Iame, Thou shalt not bothe, thogh that thou were wood, Be maister of my body and of my good. (lines 310–14) When Alisoun claims that her husband is making an ydiot of her by withholding the keys to their chest, we might assume that she is simply using the term as a colloquialism for foolishness. However, why would this make her a fool, when the law granted control of communal property to husbands? If we assume that Chaucer’s understanding of the term ydiot was informed by his familiarity with the law, then this passage may have a double meaning, since there are affinities between how English law treated “idiots” and how Alisoun’s husband treated her. When the courts determined that someone was an idiota, the Crown appointed a guardian, who assumed responsibility for managing their property and providing for their care. The guardians of legal “idiots” thus became masters of both their bodies and their goods. Legal “idiots” also continued to have legal possession of their property so it could be passed down to their heirs, but they did not enjoy the use of it, just as Alisoun laments that while the goods in her husband’s chest belong to her as much as him, she has no control over them. With that said, even if this reading is plausible, the fact that Chaucer used a term that was rarely used outside of the courts does not demonstrate that he understood “idiocy” to refer to congenital

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cognitive impairment. It may, however, point to one of the ways in which the ideas of elites were introduced into popular culture. Regardless, most evidence suggests that there was little popular discourse about congenital cognitive impairment during the Middle Ages. There was, however, considerable recognition that sin could impede one’s ability to think and act rationally. Fools who possess reason but fail to heed it appear frequently as stock characters in the work of vernacular writers like Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Lydgate, the latter of whom authored a 176-line poem entitled The Order of Fools.24 Artificial foolishness became an even more common literary motif during the early modern period, as authors like Shakespeare used “wise fools” to speak truths, outwitting people of higher social status.25 Celebrations of folly, moreover, were part of medieval festival culture. For instance, in the “Feast of Fools,” a carnival of misrule celebrated in December in England and Germany, young men playing the role of “fools” assumed the duties of clergy (Stainton 2004: 227). Nevertheless, the fools of medieval literature and peasant culture were either holy fools like Gottschalk or people who had the capacity for reason but failed to exercise it because of sin. Starting from the premise that most

FIGURE 7.4  Detail of a historiated initial: a fool and a demon. Psalter and Hours, Use of Arras, France, c. 1300. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 15, fol. 96. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN. ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5804

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sin begins with folly, works in this tradition used fools to illustrate the myriad ways that otherwise rational people fall into error (Figure 7.4). Exemplifying this, Lydgate’s Order of Fools (1460) describes sixty-three fools, each of whom personify common, if serious, moral failings.26 Like the fools described in Psalms 13, 53, and 91, the first fool refuses to love or fear God or recognize the authority of the church (nouther loveth God nor dredith/Nor to his chirche hath noon advertence/Nor to his seyntys doth no reuerence) (MacCracken and Sherwood [1934] 1997: 449–55). Those immediately following him have disdain for their parents, the poor, their wives, and their fellow men. Later in the poem, we are introduced to fools who consider themselves wise in fields where they have no experience, fail to keep secrets, drink excessively, laugh too loudly, and boast too much. Lydgate’s fools are not cognitively disabled. Rather, their behavior seems to reference biblical depictions of foolishness, and many of their actions are those that medieval theologians associated with gluttony (Schieberle 2014: 212). Like that of all works in the “Mirror of Fools” or “Ship of Fools” traditions, Lydgate’s goal was didactic. By conjuring a parade of fools, Lydgate hoped that his readers would recognize their own follies and turn from sin. For the poem warns, “More than a fool, braynles, maad, and wood, Is he that neuer wyll forsake his synne” (Schieberle 2014: 214). In this sense, Lydgate’s understanding of the relationship between sin and folly was similar to Aquinas’; folly in the Order of Fools is a voluntary condition that could be remedied if people would only turn their minds to God. This message underlies most depictions of folly in medieval literature.27 Even Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494), which Foucault famously used to illustrate the liminality of the mentally ill in Madness and Civilization, mistaking a literary motif for historical practice, was not piloted by people with cognitive impairments, but people who committed mundane moral errors because sin had blotted out their innate capacity for reason. One fool is a bibliomaniac, collecting books but never reading them, another a spendthrift, and another overindulges his children. Brant begins his prologue by lamenting the sorry state of the world; despite the fact that the Bible and other instructional works provide people with the knowledge they need for salvation, folly and sin persist. Brant writes, All lands in Holy Writ abound And works to save the soul are found, The Bible, Holy Fathers’ lore And other such in goodly store, So many that I feel surprise To find men growing not more wise But holding writ and lore in spite. The whole world lives in darksome night, In blinding sinfulness persisting, While every street sees fools existing Who know but folly, to their shame, Yet will not own folly’s name. (Brant [1494] 2012: 57) In a world overrun by fools, the purpose of the book, which consists of a series of admonitory vignettes, is to act as a mirror through which the reader might recognize their own folly, and abandon sin (Figure 7.5).

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FIGURE 7.5  Illustration from a 1497 Latin translation of Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera Nauis (Ship of Fools), University of Edinburgh, Inc. 13, fol. 107r. University of Edinburgh, via Creative Commons. https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/UoEg al~2~2~42037~102996

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7.3. CONCLUSION Ultimately, people in medieval Europe had a variety of explanations for why some people seem more capable of learning than others. Medieval theologians and philosophers had surprisingly complex ideas about the relationship between the brain, mind, and intelligence. They thought that most profound cognitive impairments had physical causes and differentiated between greater and lesser degrees of impairment. Some of their ideas, such as Aquinas’ belief that amentes are born lacking the ability to exercise reason because of “bodily impediment,” do not seem too far from how we understand intellectual disability today. At the same time, people in medieval Europe also believed that one’s ability to learn could be impeded by sin, and this idea seems to have had a greater impact upon popular assumptions about how we acquire and fail to acquire knowledge than the notion someone could be born without enough intelligence to care for themselves through no fault of their own. Since we tend to imagine intellectual disability as a transhistorical concept, this is surprising and ultimately demonstrates the need to approach the past on its own terms when exploring the history of disability.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mental Health Issues Folly, Frenzy, and the Family ALEKSANDRA PFAU

In October of 1387, the French King’s Council granted pardon to a poor man named Robert Layné. According to the letter of supplication written on his behalf, several years earlier Robert Layné had been “out of all his good memory” so that he did not eat or drink for eight days and nights, “completely naked in the fields holding in his hands two stones with which he wanted to fight with everyone.” Eventually, the Seigneur and Dame of Campergny approached him and had him brought to their hostel, where he was tied up for a time until “by medicine or otherwise in the custody of God he came back to himself and had cognizance” and was able to return home. After a time, he went to SaintAcorée on a pilgrimage, but he never fully recovered. Instead, his neighbors negotiated his habit of “enter[ing] into a great frenzy every time one did harm or said bad things to him such that he seemed to be out of his sense” by avoiding angering him. However, one day, Robert Layné was carrying some money on behalf of one of his neighbors to the prévost of Montdidier, who recognized him and accused him of having “beaten and hit a man in the head with an axe.” Unsurprisingly, this accusation angered Robert Layné, even though he was not in fact guilty of the crime, and he said he would fight anyone who accused him of such a crime, even if the accuser was “the king himself.” This statement of lèse majesté caused the prévost to arrest him and put him in prison, from whence he sought his pardon (AN JJ 131 fo 103 no 166; Saunier 1993: 498). This narrative reveals several important aspects of the treatment of the mentally ill. First, Robert Layné’s mental illness manifested in destructive behavior, mostly against himself, but also with the threat of violence against others. Nevertheless, his community (and in this case, surprisingly, members of the nobility) reached out to try to help him. Though at first they restrained him to prevent him from doing harm, once he had “cognizance,” he was released and allowed to return home. As discussed below, in medieval French, mental disturbances were often described as a state “outside” sense, memory, or understanding. By returning to “cognizance,” then, Robery Layné moved from his original state “outside” his understanding to a state “inside” his mind. His recovery is attributed both to medicine (though the particular medical care is unspecified) and to God. Although the letter refers to God and notes that he chose to go on a pilgrimage, the language of the text never refers to the devil as a possible cause of his mental illness. After returning to health, Robert Layné was fully reintegrated into his society, to the extent that one of his neighbors trusted him to deliver money to the local governmental official in a nearby town. The only caveat to his reintegration the letter notes was that his community knew not to anger

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him in case they brought on his frenzy (Saunier 1993; Pfau 2008: 259–60). This letter suggests a complex relationship between the mentally ill and their communities: one that is not controlled by any specific domain of authority such as religion, medicine, or law.

8.1. TERMINOLOGY Because understandings of mental health and illness were not restricted to a single realm in the Middle Ages, medieval terminology for mental health issues varies greatly. For example, in the letter written on behalf of Robert Layné, the composers describe him as “out of all his good memory,” “frenzied,” and “out of his senses” (AN JJ 131 fo 103 no 166; Saunier 1993: 498). Medieval authors drew from a wide range of words in both Latin and the vernaculars to describe mental health conditions, ranging between religious language culled from particular biblical passages, medical language centered on the four humors and a tripartite model of the brain, and legal language focused on competency and intent. Jean-Marie Fritz, Wendy Turner, and Irina Metzler have all attempted a taxonomy of terms related to mental illness in the Middle Ages, creating categories that they map onto these terms. This work has been useful as a starting point for understanding many medieval theoretical texts about mental illness, but in practice, as the example of Robert Layné demonstrates, the use of these terms is often more fluid than these categorizations allow. Jean-Marie Fritz divides the “discourse” of madness into medical, legal, and theological languages, but acknowledges the ways that these discourses interconnect and influence each other. As he notes, madness was not the prerogative of a single approach in the Middle Ages, but rather “all the disciplines encountered the figure of the madman in the course of their discourses” (1992: 371). This also means that the modern terminology of mental illness may not always map neatly onto medieval concepts. In some cases, madness was understood as an illness, but legal and theological discourses did not always focus on that aspect. Legal terms such as furiosus, for example, or phrases such as sciens nec bonum nec malum (understanding neither good nor evil) focus on behavior and ability to discern truth rather than any root physiological cause. While in some cases terminology of madness in theological texts does include references to health, such as those that use the Latin term sanus as a root, terms such as daemoniacus refer to a spiritual rather than physiological source. The range of language and indeed linguistic frameworks used in the Middle Ages to describe these conditions makes any discussion of them fraught. This is compounded by linguistic problems in modern English that are equally difficult to parse. My preference is to use the term “madness” to describe most mental health issues in the Middle Ages, in part because that removes the concentration on health and illness included in many other modern terms, though throughout this chapter I will move back and forth between the two based on whether I am focusing on medical or social constructions of the condition (Pfau 2008: 6). In her thorough study of English legal records, Wendy Turner makes an effort to line up medical, ecclesiastical, and legal terms into a chart with a clear spectrum “from aggressive to passive” linked to “the front to back understanding of the brain among the medieval medical and church communities” (2013: 78). For her, the medical terms mania and lunatic are linked to the ecclesiastical term mania and to the legal terms furiosus, sciens nec bonum nec malum (understanding neither good nor evil), lunaticus, and freneticus, all of which she categorizes as aggressive and places within the front of the brain. The medical term demencia is then linked to the ecclesiastical term demencia,

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which is linked to the legal terms demencia and insanus. These terms are moving toward a less aggressive form of madness and are placed toward the middle of the brain. Finally, in the back of the brain, the medical terms melancholia, stupor, and lethargy are linked to the ecclesiastical term non sane memoria (without healthy memory), which is linked to the legal terms non sane memoria, ignorans, non compos mentis (without sound mind), fatuus, and idiota. These classifications are interesting for what they can tell us about some of the academic discourses about madness. It is worth pointing out, however, that in practice these terms could be used more interchangeably than this schema sets out. For example, in the case of Robert Layné, who was clearly seen as experiencing violent tendencies, he is described as “outside all his good memory” or non sane memoria, which this taxonomy would place in the less aggressive category. Similarly, melancholia could be used to describe a more violent madness in some legal texts (Pfau 2008: 191–206). While it is possible to argue that the use of a medical term in a legal text indicates a nonspecialist’s misinterpretation of the term, this would not be the case with the legal concept of being without sound memory. Irina Metzler’s work has focused on distinguishing between terms for intellectual disability and terms for mental illness. In addition to considering terminology from multiple languages current in medieval Europe, Metzler provides a case study of the term “idiot,” which changed meaning over the course of the Middle Ages, shifting from meaning the “common man” in late Antiquity to behavior associated with a lack of sense in the early Middle Ages, and finally, by the early thirteenth century, to meaning “intellectually less able” (2016: 44–7). For Metzler, terms like “idiot” or the French “fol” are used exclusively to refer to intellectual disability as distinct from mental illness. However, although she makes a convincing case that medieval intellectuals distinguished between conditions a person was born with and conditions acquired later, most of her sources discuss both in the same context. In theoretical texts, these distinctions seem to come to the fore, but in practice there is a great deal of overlap between the use of these terms, and sometimes categories become less clearly defined, as can be seen in a careful consideration of the overlapping use of terms in the Bible. The Bible includes both direct references to madness and individuals who were interpreted through medieval commentary as mad. Perhaps the most famous direct reference to madness in the Bible is the “fool” of Psalm 52, Dixit insipiens, which explains “the fool says in his heart there is no God” (Weber 1969; Challoner 1971). Here, the term insipiens is used as the inverse of sapiens or wisdom, but the term is used elsewhere to refer to insanity (i.e., the opposite of sanity).1 For example, the use of insipiens in Luke 6:11 is as follows: “And they were filled with madness; and they talked one with another, what they might do to Jesus.” Madness as perceived by the world was not always understood negatively in the Bible, however. Through inversion, the same terms used to describe the opposite of wise action could also be understood as the positive state of soothsayers and prophets,2 or the way Jesus was perceived by unbelievers.3 One pertinent example of this comes from the Fourth Book of Kings 9:11, when the prophet Eliseus anoints Jehu. The servants present ask, “why came this mad man to thee,” referencing Eliseus. In Latin, the term used here is insanus. In Christian understanding, then, these terms had multiple and varied significations. In interpreting these biblical cases and trying to understand their significance in more general terms, medieval theological texts treated madness as a loss of human reason, and Latin theological terms for madness taken from the Bible, such as insipiens, insania, and dementia, imply this lack (Fritz 1992: 7). The Latin biblical terminology for a more

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violent kind of madness uses the terms insania, furor, amentia, and dementia, as well as occasionally insipiens.4 In medieval French, some of the most common terms for madness were phrases that evoked a negation, much like the Latin terms insipiens, insania, and dementia. Jean-Marie Fritz, in an examination of the terminology for madness in medieval French romance, notes that the mad person is a being from outside, out of all civilized or socialized space, out of himself, out of his senses, and thus some of the expressions which habitually designate the frenetic in our romances are those such as hors du sen, hors de son mimoire, issir del sen, and not fol. (1992: 16) These expressions imagined madness as somehow outside of normal modes of comprehension and knowledge. The imagery placed the mad mentally outside the bounds of human thought processes, suggesting that their behavior would be equally outside expected social norms. Phrases and terms such as hors du sens, non sens, or insensible negated the positive valence of the term sens. In a phrase that makes the distinction between positive and negative meanings even clearer, some people were described as hors de bon sens.5 In using such phrases, authors were drawing on a long tradition of understanding sens as an essential component of comprehension, understanding, and knowledge, and the opposite of sens, or a lack of sens, as a negative condition that led to mental incoherence. Such usage was common in twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular literature, where the mentally unstable were described as “hors du sens” or as having their “sens dervé” (Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 9, 456–65; vol. 4, pt. 2, 1180). The verb derver or desver indicated a raving madness, often connected in romances to anger or to particularly grave wounds (Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 2, 1813–16). Like sens, entendement was used to indicate mental comprehension and cognition (Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 3, pt. 1, 570–1). Similarly, memoire often appeared in conjunction with sens to indicate a troubled mental state. For example, in Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Yvain, when Yvain was healed he returned to “son san et son memoire” (cited in Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 5, 1378). In Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, all three terms are used together, when an “ome desvé senz escïent, Qui rien ne set ne rien n’entent, Rameinent tot en son memoire” (“insane man without wisdom, Who knows nothing and understands nothing, Is quickly returned to his memory”) (cited in Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 5, 1382). The language of madness in medical terms focused on the perceived underlying physiological causes. According to humoral theory, madness, like any other disease, was caused by an imbalance of the humors, but particularly an extreme excess of any one of them. Thus, madness could result from an increasingly serious case of another disease. In this sense, the illness was understood to be physiological. Although madness was concentrated in the brain, where they believed the mind was located, physicians also saw it as a disease that affected the entire body of the individual. Medical texts divided madness into four distinct types: frenzy, mania, melancholy, and lethargy. Each category of madness corresponded to an excess in one of the humors. According to Hippocrates’ De Morbo Sacro, which Jean-Marie Fritz argues was influential for thinking about madness in the Middle Ages, frenzy and lethargy included fever, while mania and melancholia did not. This instability, according to Fritz, made mania and, especially, melancholia the focus of medical discourse in a way that frenzy and lethargy were not (1992: 133–8). However,

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more recently, Julie Laskaris has suggested that De Morbo Sacro was not in fact known in the Middle Ages, noting that “there is no evidence that On the Sacred Disease was translated into Latin, so its transmission into the medieval tradition is obviously in doubt. Its reception in the Renaissance and later seemed to center not on the rational premises it brought to medicine but, ironically, on the high degree of proper religious sentiment it proved that Hippocrates had expressed” (2002: 60). Frenesie appears in the earliest vernacular health treatise, the thirteenth-century Le Régime du Corps by Aldobrandino of Siena. He warns against sleeping on one’s back “because it makes many illnesses come, such as apoplexy, frenzy, phantasm” (cited in Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 3, pt. 2, 2236). The word appears in a number of non-medical texts as well. For example, in Gautier de Coincy’s Les Miracles de la sainte Vierge, he lists “li frenetiques, Li fors du sens, li enragiez” together, indicating that medical and literary vocabularies were not mutually exclusive in religious texts and suggesting a larger pattern of cross-pollination (Tobler and Lommatzsch 1925: vol. 3, pt. 2, 2236). Ultimately, the language of madness seems to become fully medicalized only in the early modern period. In a study of Italian legal sources between 1350 and 1670, Elizabeth Mellyn was able to trace a shift in the ways that Tuscans engaged with the legal system, from using legal terminology (“furiosi, mentecapti, fatui, and dementes in Latin and in Italian, pazzi, matti, and mentecatti”) to using medical terminology (“melancholic, manic, frenetic, and epileptic”). In her sources, this shift occurs in the sixteenth century (2014: 129ff). Thus, the terminology available to describe mental illness was varied and rich in the Middle Ages. While it is possible to categorize this language and see patterns between the multiple discourses that discussed the mentally ill, in practice the language used to describe individuals was often looser and vaguer than the language used in theoretical texts.

8.2. SOCIAL ATTITUDES The classic image of the medieval mad person as outcast from society was based mostly on literary evidence that will be discussed further below. Recent scholarship has focused on legal records to challenge that view and demonstrate the ways that the mad were integrated into their communities. Wendy Turner’s work on England, Elizabeth Mellyn’s work on Italy, and my own work on France in particular have each added important evidence for a more accommodating relationship with the mad. Wendy Turner has focused mostly on questions of custody for the “mentally incapacitated” in England, where from the mid-thirteenth century they became wards of the Crown. This created a need for a royal infrastructure that could establish mental incompetence, and evidence of these legal cases survive in the English court rolls. These rich resources provide fascinating evidence of the ways in which madness was defined and indeed what was considered necessary mental capacity for functioning in medieval society (2013). Turner also considers a number of legal cases involving crimes committed by people who were, in her terminology, “mentally incapacitated.” In many ways, she is following in the footsteps of David and Christine Roffe, who drew attention to the treatment of the mentally ill and incompetent in medieval England, arguing that, in the Middle Ages, “most madmen probably had more support in the community than do their modern counterparts” (1995: 1712). The example of Emma de Beston allows us to see the ways in which English law established a person’s mental capacity. On July 31, 1383, commissioners examined her to try to establish her state of mind. She owned property and had been given a guardian

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by the King a year earlier, but her relatives challenged the decision. The commissioners had to determine whether she was capable of caring for herself and her property. They did this by asking her a series of questions and recording her answers. The commissioners recorded, Being asked in what town she was, she said that she was at Ely. Being asked what day that Friday was, she said that she did not know. Being asked how many days there were in the week, she said seven, but could not name them. Being asked how many husbands she had had in her time, she said three, giving the name of one only and not knowing the names of the others. Being asked whether she had ever had issue by them, she said that she had had a husband with a son, but did not know his name. Being asked how many shillings there were in forty pence, she said she did not know. Being asked whether she would rather have twenty silver groats than forty pence, she said they were of the same value. (Cited in Roffe and Roffe 1995: 1708) As a result of these questions, the inquest determined that she was not of sound mind and left Emma de Beston in the care of her guardian unless she recovered. Several themes emerge in their questioning. The commissioners were trying to establish whether Emma de Beston was capable of functioning in her family and her community, and especially whether she could control and manage her property. The questions begin from a basic understanding of her current situation (where she is and what day it is), then focus on her family ties (whether she had been married and, if so, to whom, and whether she had any children). Finally, they move to consider her understanding of money. For the commissioners, it was clear from her responses that she had a limited ability to interact appropriately in the world, and especially to control her own finances. Elizabeth Mellyn has also been interested in exploring the ways in which kin and communities responded to madness. In her study of Florentine judicial records, she works to reveal “what families, communities, and civic authorities did to address the disorder or, in its worst manifestations, the chaos that [madness] visited on their households or unleashed in their streets” (2014: 1). As she demonstrates, the families in her sources worked to define madness in ways that allowed them to achieve practical ends. These families were variously seeking “reliable long-term care,” “curbing reckless spending,” or “excusing criminal or socially aberrant behavior” (2014: 192). In deploying the discourse of madness, families were engaging with a legal system that allowed them to act in particular ways. My work has also looked at the relationship between the community and the mad. In considering the evidence from French letters of remission, which were written to the King to request pardon for a criminal, I have argued that madness was simultaneously defined as a disruption of community and, through the requested pardon, could act as a mechanism for rebuilding that same community (Pfau 2008). This can be seen in the case of Robert Layné introduced at the beginning of this chapter. As we see in the narrative written on his behalf, his actions were a threat to his neighbors’ well-being as well as to his own. Nevertheless, rather than removing him from the community, his neighbors chose to negotiate his mental illness. Even when he had been arrested and was in danger of being convicted of a crime, his community chose to support him and to request that he be pardoned. Recent scholarship has chosen to focus on the ways in which medieval communities rallied around the mentally ill, rather than expelling them or confining them to hospitals. Indeed, the earliest hospitals for the mentally ill do not appear until the very end of the

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Middle Ages, and even then it is not clear that they were intended to be comprehensive. Instead, there was a clear expectation that the mentally ill would be cared for by their families (Pfau 2008; Turner 2013; Mellyn 2014; Ternon 2018).

8.3. THEORY Medicine and philosophy had multiple ways of understanding the functions of the mind, and indeed where the mind was located in the body. While physicians believed that the mind was located in the brain, philosophers believed it was in the heart. There were a number of divergent arguments about the treatment of the mentally ill because of these distinctions. As Ruth Harvey notes, because of the ambiguous nature of the bodily spirits, which both partook of the physical constitution of the body, and provided the link by which the mind communicated with the bodily organs, the doctors were led to the treatment of disordered reason almost as though it were a purely physical function; whereas the philosophers insisted that reason as such fell outside medical control. (1975: 8) Avicenna attempted to reconcile these two theories by positing that the bodily spirits had their ultimate source in the heart, but that their immediate source was in the brain. Thus, medical practitioners could continue to treat mental disturbance (Harvey 1975: 8). Indeed, as Eliza Buhrer argues, “medieval medical writers also inherited from these texts a surprisingly sophisticated framework for understanding mental disorder that … discussed mental disorder alongside other conditions affecting the brain, identifying phrenitis, mania, memory loss, melancholy, epilepsy, and senility as the primary disorders that could impede rational thought” (2014: 320). The Galenic explanation of cognitive processes within which Avicenna was working offered a tripartite model of the brain, where imagination was in the warm and dry front, reason in the warm and moist middle, and memory in the cold and dry back (Klibansky et al. 1964: 68–9; Harvey 1975: 35). Thus, the areas of the brain also correspond to three of the four humors (only phlegm is left out), with imagination associated with choler, reason associated with blood (a sanguine nature), and memory associated with melancholy. Isidore of Seville, in his sixth-century Etymologies, used the tripartite model of the brain to provide a model of mental illness under the heading of Chronic Diseases, dividing the general category of madness into three specific types: epilepsy, mania, and melancholy, which arise from imagination, reason, and memory, respectively (1911, IV.7; 2006: 111). This division based on models of the brain allowed for a more complicated reading of behavior in order to explain the disturbances believed to be caused by madness. Problems with the imagination generally produced visions, problems with the memory caused forgetfulness, and problems with reason caused people to do irrational things (Klibansky et al. 1964: 93; Park 1988: 466).

8.4. SANISM As noted above, recent scholarship has focused on the ways in which the mad were integrated into their communities, rather than being expelled. However, it is important to also note the ways in which medieval societies expressed concerns and in some cases fear about the potential actions of mad individuals. In some cases, these fears led to accommodations that could restrict the autonomy of the mad individuals. In labeling this

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section as “sanism,” I am engaging with discourse from modern disability activism that addresses the ways in which societies discriminate against and oppress individuals with a variety of mental illnesses or cognitive differences. Medievalists have often hesitated to fully embrace modern concepts in describing the past, and I am similarly using this construct to raise questions about the specific ways in which medieval societies chose to limit the actions of individuals labeled as mad or mentally ill, while acknowledging that the concept of sanism as discrimination or oppression would not have been recognized by the actors I am discussing (Pfau 2010: 96). As Wendy Turner has shown, mentally ill property owners in England were not allowed to take care of their own affairs, needing to have royally appointed guardians (2013: 141–209). The practice of guardianship was predicated on the assumption that mad people, who could not understand the world, would have no control over their belongings. In Roman law, this assumption led to an association of madness with prodigality. Justinian’s Institutes noted that both mad people and prodigals needed curators, even after they reached twenty-five, the age of majority under Roman law. Although the Laws of the Twelve Tables had recommended placing them in the care of close relatives, the Institutes noted that, generally, the guardian was chosen by an officer of the government (Behrends 1995: vol. 1, 36–7).6 Justinian’s Digest included a number of discussions of the practice of putting the mad into the care of a guardian, and it was here that the connection between prodigality and madness was most explicitly stated. The third-century jurist, Ulpian, noted that prodigals should be given guardians “on the analogy of a mad person” (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 2, 812–14),7 which created a correlation between the mad person’s inability to care for his or her property and the prodigal’s choice to squander his or her goods. Both were to be released from guardianship automatically, the mad person when “he regains his health of mind” and the prodigal when “he returns to his rational behavior” (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 2, 812–14).8 The connection between prodigality and madness is clearly stated, since mad people also needed to return to rational behavior (or come to their senses) in order to prove that they had returned to health. Ulpian’s statement suggests that the distinction between madness and prodigality was not in behavior but in cause: madness was viewed as a disease, whereas prodigality was a deliberate action. Jean-Marie Fritz also discusses the legal association between madness and prodigality, as well as tracing the same theme in literature (1992: 154–60, 276–7). The fear that the mentally ill might be incapable of entering into contracts was also used to disallow their witness testimony in court. In Roman law, Justinian’s Institutes listed mad people along with a number of others as incapable of witnessing wills: “neither a woman, nor youths below the age of puberty, nor a slave, nor a mute, nor a deaf person, nor a mad man, nor anyone forbidden from having property, nor one whom the laws declare worthless and incompetent to witness, can be witnesses” (Behrends 1995: vol. 1, 78–80). The list was included as one passage among many concerning the question of who could and who could not witness wills and how written or oral testaments must be made. Here, the Institutes defined how witnessing was intended to work by establishing who was excluded from providing it. There is no full discussion of the specific reasoning behind any of these particular restrictions, but it is clear that each type of person was considered to be incapable of witnessing wills for distinct reasons. Whereas women, youths, slaves, and those forbidden from holding property (note that it was not a blanket statement about all non-property owners, but rather those who were officially forbidden from holding property) were not considered appropriate witnesses

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because of their subordinate social position, deaf and mute people were not considered appropriate because they would be unable to fulfill the necessary functions of witnesses— hearing the will and later providing oral testimony as to its content. Mad people also would not be considered capable of fulfilling the functions of witnesses because they were believed to be incapable of comprehending the will or their role as witness. Madness, the inability to speak, deafness, blindness, gender, and social status were each perceived as limiting a person’s capacity to act in accordance with legal tradition in specific ways. Legal texts established varying limitations based on what was considered necessary to perform a particular legal action. Indeed, since these law codes were composed as part of a process aimed at establishing the outer limits of legal performance, they sometimes disagreed about what was required. The idea that mad people lacked the ability to comprehend the world was the underlying assumption behind all legal discussions of madness. According to Papinian’s discussion of bonorum possessio recorded in Justinian’s Digest, deaf, speechless, or blind people were able to make a claim on an inheritance if they understood the transaction. Inheritance claims only required comprehension, not the ability to hear, speak, or read. Since mad people were considered incapable of understanding, however, it was necessary to make arrangements whereby the time limitations were removed, so that if they recovered they would then be able to make a claim (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 3, 277–8).9 Unlike other perceived limitations on legal capabilities, which curtailed certain actions, mad people were viewed as unable to comprehend the law, and thus they could never act within it unless they recovered their sanity. However, unlike deafness, the inability to speak, or blindness, madness was not considered a permanent condition, and thus the mad person might later be capable of making a claim. Marriage in particular posed problems for legal theorists considering madness. Since Roman law required parental consent, it focused on the issue of mad parents. Could a child marry if the father (in this case, the parent is clearly gendered as male, since maternal consent was not necessary) was unable to consent due to his madness? Justinian’s Code resolved this by determining that, although the mad father could not consent to the marriage, neither could that lack of parental consent prevent either a son or a daughter from marrying (Behrends 1995: vol. 1, 14–15). In medieval law, the focus shifted to address the question of whether or not a mad person could enter into a marriage contract him or herself. This shift was a small part of a larger transformation of the Christian understanding of marriage toward a focus on the two individuals involved and their present-tense speech act as the central requirement for the marriage (Duby 1983). Canon law defined marriage as a contract requiring consent, and Gratian’s Decretals therefore determined that mad people could not be married. However, if they had already been married before becoming mad, then the marriage was still binding and could not be annulled on that basis. The issue raised was whether or not mad people could understand the world sufficiently to make important life decisions. If they were unable to comprehend the speech act required to contract a marriage, then they could not perform it, but becoming mad later in life was not grounds for annulling a marriage that had been contracted while the participant was capable of comprehending the act. It is worth noting here that, from the thirteenth century, marriage was not only a contract, but also a sacrament. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas determined that mad people could participate in baptism and the Eucharist, but not in marriage, ordination, or extreme unction (Aquinas 1964: vol. 57, 118–20). Indeed, James Brundage’s magisterial work on canon law demonstrates a

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shift in considerations of divorce and madness. Under Roman law, divorce was possible if one party to the marriage went mad, but under medieval canon law annulment was only an option if the person had been mad at the time of the marriage. The reform movements of the sixteenth century, particularly under Zwingli and Bucer, allowed divorce in cases of madness, even if it postdated the marriage (Brundage 1987: 39, 195, 201, 288, 559). The mentally ill were also feared as potentially violent. This fear in particular led to the expectation that the mad would be locked up or in some cases literally guarded to prevent them from harming themselves or others. In considering the problem of mad criminals and how they should be treated, legal theorists were concerned with protecting a person who lacked the capability to comprehend what, to his or her contemporaries, were basic truths about how one should live in the world. The texts reveal inconsistencies and uncertainties with regard to exactly why mad people should be treated with leniency and exactly how to define madness. The concept that mad people should not be punished for crime was already present in Roman law. Modestinus, recorded in Justinian’s Digest, indicated that “An infant or a madman who kills a man is not liable under the lex Cornelia, the one being protected by the innocence of his intent, the other excused by the misfortune of his condition” (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 4, 821). The issue came up again in the context of parricide, which was considered a particularly serious crime and therefore worthy of an especially terrible punishment. However, the punishment was not appropriate for the mad: “Truly, if anyone kills a parent in a fit of madness, he shall not be punished, as the deified brothers wrote in a rescript in the case of a man who had killed his mother in a fit of madness; for it was enough for him to be punished by the madness itself” (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 4, 822). This distinction in Roman law between the infant, who is innocent of intent, and the mad person, who is “punished by the madness itself,” is a significant one, and it is interpolated into medieval customals in interesting ways. Erik Midelfort observes that “the Digest held that [a mad person] was still punishable, although not by the state … One reason for this peculiarity is perhaps that the ancient Romans did not entirely believe that furor, or madness, was merely a state of mental infancy or a purely physical condition” (Midelfort 1999: 187). Indeed, these laws seem to reflect an ambiguity about how madness was defined legally. Legal theorists considered it necessary to take measures to prevent mad people from committing a crime or from committing further crimes after a first offense. They wrote this into their legal system by requiring the use of guards and restraints, which were sometimes presented as an alternative to capital punishment. The Roman jurist, Modestinus, argued that a mad person who had committed murder “must be guarded the more carefully, or even confined with chains” (Mommsen and Krueger 1985: vol. 4, 822). In Roman law, guard or confinement was not considered an aspect of punishment, but a preventive measure to protect others from the actions of the mad. Philippe de Beaumanoir also suggested imprisonment of the mad in order to prevent them from committing another crime. He insisted that if “they commit, because of their mad senses, a homicide or any other serious crime, they are not punished like others because they do not know what they are doing” (Philippe de Beaumanoir 1970–4: vol. 2, chapter 52, paragraph 1575). Instead of being punished “like others,” such as by being executed for committing a capital crime like homicide, Beauvaisis’ customary law called for the imprisonment of the mad person after a crime was committed, until he or she recovered from the madness, at which point the mad person could be released.

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Philippe de Beaumanoir even recommended that guardians take preventive action in the case of a person who “went mad,” rather than waiting until a crime had been committed. He explained: Those who are insane should be bound by those who must guard them and everyone must help do this to avoid the damages that might come from them, for they could quickly kill themselves and others … [T]he insane people must be placed in such a prison that they can never leave it, and be maintained from their own property as long as they are out of their senses. And if he returns to his senses, he should be released from prison, and his goods returned to him. (1970–4: vol. 2, chapter 52, paragraph 1575) The focus here is clearly on the need to protect both the mad person and the community at large. de Beaumanoir expressed a fear that mad people might commit suicide or murder, and so keeping such people bound or locked up would protect them and their community from their actions. In his view, all of those who were insane (forsenés) contained within them the potential for such disruptive action. Interestingly, although de Beaumanoir recommended that mad people be maintained from their own property, he also noted that “everyone” must help to guard them, suggesting the need for a communal effort. Norman custom also suggested that the community was responsible for the upkeep of a mad person, noting that “[i]f anyone is out of his senses, and he kills or injures a man by his madness (forsenerie), he should be put in prison, and be sustained by his [goods]; or it should be procured for him from the common alms, if he does not have anything with which he can be sustained” (de Gruchy 1881: 184). In Normandy, then, the community was expected to pay for the care of imprisoned mad criminals through their alms-giving, which suggests a very complicated attitude toward the mad. Here, they appear as objects of pity, appropriate receivers of alms alongside the poor and lepers, but without the type of reciprocal relationship that alms-giving usually implied, where the prayers of the receiver were exchanged for the temporal support of the giver (Mollat 1986; Rubin 1987). Not only would mad people be incapable of filling the role of grateful bedesmen and women, but also the legal text specifically indicates that this money was to be used for the care of a mad person who had been imprisoned because he or she had killed or injured another person. Thus, the uncomprehending criminal, who was incapable of prayer and whose inability to function normally in the world had injured or killed another person, somehow remained a reasonable recipient of community alms. The Norman customary law created a sense of communal responsibility through the figure of the mad criminal. Medieval legal discussions of madness reveal an uncertainty about the appropriate treatment of the mad. Although medieval law acknowledged a need to protect the mad, the question of what exactly madness was and how precisely to prevent catastrophe in the lives of the mad and their relatives remained unclear. The texts of customary laws offered several possible solutions to the problems that they believed madness posed, but they held competing and complex views of madness and how to treat the mad. While mad people were considered incapable of comprehending legal acts, and thus could not engage in them, the appointment of guardians prevented a mad person from losing all of his or her legal rights. In a similar vein, mad people were not held responsible for crimes. However, the law codes differed in discussions of the reasons behind this idea. Some determined that the mad were punished by their madness, suggesting that they were in fact guilty of the crime, whereas others argued that, just as they were not capable of comprehending legal acts, so they could not comprehend illegal ones. Regardless, the

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decision not to punish mad people for crimes opened up the fear of fraud. Just as modern legal systems struggle with the question of the insanity defense, authors of medieval law codes sought to prevent people from working the system by faking madness. Even in cases when the madness was substantiated by witnesses from the community, there was still the problematic question of how exactly to deal with a mad person who had committed a crime.

8.5. CULTURAL REPRESENTATION As a particularly influential text, the Bible’s treatment of madness is important for understanding medieval cultural concepts. Although the terminology used to describe King Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment does not draw from the terminology of madness used elsewhere in the Bible, it is clearly linked to madness from the description of what happens to him and from the way he himself reacts to his experiences. According to his story, King Nebuchadnezzar’s achievements in his realm and his construction of the Palace of Babylon led him to fall into the sin of pride. Nebuchadnezzar believed himself to be God’s equal, and God punished him accordingly. In fulfillment of his own prophetic dream, the King “was driven away from among men, and did eat grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven: till his hairs grew like the feathers of eagles, and his nails like birds’ claws’ (Challoner 1971). This description of madness as bestial behavior, and indeed as the antithesis of courtliness, often recurs in medieval romances, although it was not common to describe mad people as having their hearts changed into that of a beast. Interestingly, the association of this state with madness comes not in the description of his punishment, but in the words given to Nebuchadnezzar himself when his atonement is completed: Now at the end of the days, I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up my eyes to heaven, and my sense was restored to me: and I blessed the most High, and I praised and glorified him that liveth for ever … At the same time my sense returned to me, and I came to the honour and glory of my kingdom: and my shape returned to me: and my nobles, and my magistrates sought for me, and I was restored to my kingdom: and greater majesty was added to me. (Challoner 1971) By describing his release as the return of his senses, he categorizes his earlier behavior as an absence of sense, or madness. Medieval exegesis interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s madness as a punishment from God for his hubris, but he was given the opportunity to come back to himself, recognize his sins, and seek forgiveness (Doob 1974: 54–74). His return to his senses allowed for his reintegration into the community of the faithful, as well as the reinvestment of his royal powers. Given the number of medieval literary figures who follow in the footsteps of Nebuchadnezzar and exhibit symptoms of mental disturbance, it is unsurprising that many scholars have explored these texts. In fact, work in the 1970s by both Penelope Doob in Nebuchadnezzar’s Children and Judith Neaman in Suggestion of the Devil had a strong focus on medieval literature. As is clear from their titles, both books considered medieval religious ideas about madness to be particularly influential. Neaman argued that both “[l]epers and madmen, who fell into one social and moral group, were reflections of their diseases, which were either tests of martyrdom, purgations or punishments for sin” (1975: 112). The two authors cover medieval England, with some forays into French sources.

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It is certainly true that the descriptive languages of madness were similar in literary and other texts. However, Stephen Harper may be overstating the case with his contention that “[r]eal lunatics behaved like literary madmen” (2003: 62). Indeed, Muriel Laharie falls into this assumption as well. She sees the treatment of the mad as part of the growth in the persecution of marginal figures in the twelfth century, describing negative attitudes toward and violence perpetrated against mad people. However, the sources that she uses to demonstrate violent acts against the mad are exclusively literary texts from twelfth-century France (1991: 241–66). As Sylvia Huot argues, the audience is granted a double perspective on the insane hero in medieval romances: “When the madman has a character and a personal history, his treatment can be judged as just or unjust” (2003: 89). Thus, the mad figure in romance may be represented as debased and treated violently specifically because of the contrast with his previous exalted state. In exploring the use of the literary trope of madness, then, we need to be careful in the conclusions that we draw. The idealized chivalric knight in French literature is constantly engaged in a performance of his identity, according to Susan Crane (2002: 107–39). In madness, these performances of civilized identity are transformed into performances of bestial savagery. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances, such as Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, the anonymous Lancelot Cycle, and the Folie Tristan, the idealized knightly identity is challenged and subverted through madness. Yvain is driven mad by the public loss of his lady’s love, and he reverts to animalistic behavior, living naked in the woods and eating meat raw. His behavior is the extreme antithesis of ideal courtly behavior, and he is only recognizable through the scars on his body that indicate his former status as a knight who fought battles and won tournaments (Chrétien de Troyes 1987). This loss of love leading to a loss of sanity and a reversion to bestial behavior became a common pattern in later romances. It is important to note, however, that the medieval concept of nature and natural behavior was not as straightforward as it might appear. In the Roman de Silence, the character Merlin has chosen to live as a wild man in the woods, running around like a beast and eating roots and berries. Note that, much like hermits and mystics, Merlin’s state of “madness” was self-imposed. However, when the hero of the romance attempts to capture Merlin by luring him with the smell of cooking meat, Nature and Nurture have a debate over which one will win the day. Surprisingly (at least to a modern audience), it is Nurture who argues that Merlin will not eat the meat and Nature who claims that it is natural for men to crave cooked meat (Roche-Mahdi 1999: 280–7). Nature wins, and Merlin is captured and proceeds to act as a prophet and seer at the court, where he is initially ridiculed as a fool and eventually recognized as a prophet (288–91). Thus, Merlin demonstrates the belief that humans were naturally inclined to be civilized, rational beings as well as the necessity of interpreting behavior as either madness and foolishness or prophecy. While Merlin is recognized as a prophet rather than a fool once his predictions are proven to be true, his behavior is originally misidentified as madness. Medieval Christianity considered the behavior of certain saints to be bordering on the behavior of the mad. These figures, much like the characters of Yvain and Merlin, retreat to the woods as hermits, where they live in solitude more like beasts than like their courtly counterparts. Hermits in medieval romance are often bearers of prophecy, implying that they exist in a time outside the secular time of the court. They also often interact with knights who have gone mad, in the case of Yvain, through offering him food (and therefore bringing him a step closer to the civilized world that he has left) (Chrétien de Troyes 1987).

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Certain saints’ shrines were considered particularly efficacious in producing a cure for madness. The shrines of St. Achar (or Acairius) at Haspres, the Abbey of Saint-Vaast of Arras, St. Mathurin of Larchant, St. Dymphna of Geel in Flanders, and St. Hermer of Renaix (or Ronse) were all specifically sought for curing the mad (Verdier 1969: 15–33; Roosens 1979; Porter 1997: 127). While many of the cures produced at saints’ shrines were for behaviors ultimately described as possession,10 possession and madness shared the same behavioral attributes, making it difficult for medieval people to determine which was occurring. The ultimate cure could be a sign of the original provenance—if a religious pilgrimage produced a recovery, then the “mad” individual might be possessed. However, it is important to note that some of the cures were seen as cures of the physical disease of madness, rather than as exorcism. As Nancy Caciola has noted, beginning in the thirteenth century, many of the women who were recognized by some of their contemporaries as saints were simultaneously viewed as mentally ill or possessed by the devil according to their larger community (2003). The Englishwoman Margery Kempe, whose life and deeds were recorded by a confessor who viewed her as a saint, though she was never canonized, is an interesting case study of this phenomenon. Not only were her actions often described as mad by her contemporaries, but before her conversion she also experienced an episode of what she herself described as madness in the opening of her book. The onset of her madness came immediately after the birth of one of her fourteen children, which suggests that familial obligations and expectations can be the cause of madness, as well as a sign of it. While mad, she slandered her family and became so violent that she was locked up by her husband. Later in her book, Margery visited another woman suffering from a similar affliction (Harper 1997). The woman’s husband, who sought Margery in order to ask her help in dealing with his wife, explains that she had just given birth and now “she knows not me nor any of her neighbors. She roars and cries so that she makes folk terribly afraid. She will both smite and bite, and therefore is she manacled on her wrists” (Kempe 2001: 130). The women’s lack of recognition of her husband and, perhaps more significantly, her newborn child was a disturbing symptom of her madness, and could be used as proof. In addition, the woman saw devils attached to all of her neighbors and friends and refused to be touched by any of them. Interestingly, this portion of her madness seems closer to divine madness, with its access to a higher plane of understanding. Thus, narratives about madness reveal certain medieval expectations of familial obligation and recognition. These women needed to accept and recognize their roles in the family, particularly at the tense and potentially fatal moment of childbirth and its aftermath. In addition to biblical narratives and medieval romance, madness also appears in medieval proverbs. In an early twentieth-century compilation of medieval French proverbs, thirty-seven begin “fous est” (Morawski 1925: 28). Many of these proverbial phrases refer to fools as the inverse of the wise, much like biblical treatments of folly. For example, “a fool is one who does not believe counsel” (Morawski 1925: 28), which suggests that fools would not engage with the community in order to come to conclusions, but would act on his or her own. The proverbs reflect the linkages between madness and mental cognition. In one, folly is defined as a lack of memory, since “a fool is one who forgets himself” (Morawski 1925: 28). However, this is a particular kind of memory—memory of the self—which offers a profoundly disturbing image of folly as a loss of self-knowledge. Proverbs also reveal the skewed vision of the mad, since “the fool does not see the nonsense in his folly,” and “a fool who does not do foolish things loses his season” (Morawski 1925: 28). Both of these proverbs provide interesting takes

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on the circularity of folly. The fool is unaware of his own foolishness, but a fool ought always to act foolishly or he loses the appropriate moment. However, one proverb notes the fundamentally changeable nature of folly: “a fool seen at vespers and a sage in the morning” (Morawski 1925: 29). Perhaps the most interesting proverbial lesson is “fools go to court without being summoned” (Morawski 1925: 29), a phrase that is especially evocative given that some legal cases cite the criminal’s willingness to turn him or herself in as proof of madness. The multiple—and in some cases contradictory—understandings of folly in these proverbs point also to the singularity of the fool or mad person. These figures are not interacting appropriately with their fellows: they ignore advice, cannot see their own folly, and take unnecessary actions. Because mental illness was often an invisible condition, the iconography of madness in the Middle Ages generally focused on a set of associated symbols. For example, there are multiple illuminations of Psalm 52 that represent the fool as a bald man or a man with unruly hair, dressed in a short tunic or even naked and carrying a club and a round object, variously identified as a cheese, a loaf of bread, or a globe (Laharie 1991: 105–7; Lermack 2008: 82). In these images, physical disarray is used to represent mental disturbances. In addition to these external signs, mental illness could be indicated through facial expressions, such as open mouths or facial distortion (Jaritz 2014: 106). The fool’s baldness could be interpreted as a literal representation of the imagined physiological effects of a heated brain.

8.6. CONCLUSIONS Medieval understandings of mental illness were complex and multifaceted. On the one hand, the mentally ill were imagined as uncontrollable, disordered, and potentially dangerous, both to themselves and to others. On the other hand, they were integrated into their communities rather than being ostracized, and there was an expectation that they would be cared for and protected by their families or by guardians. There was no single discourse that took precedence in discussions of mental disturbance, so terminology came from medicine, theology, and the law. Though intellectual discussion of mental illness often made minute distinctions between these different terms, often in practice those differences were blurred. If we return to the case of Robert Layné with which we began, we can see that his madness was identified by members of his community, not by experts. They interpreted his behavior (refusing to eat or drink, wearing no clothing, and threatening to attack others without cause) as disruptive and evidence of mental disturbance. Because of this behavior, they viewed him as a threat to himself and to others. However, he was not removed from the community as a result. Instead, he was treated by his neighbors and was seen as sufficiently recovered to return to his usual activities. Despite his “recovery,” his neighbors still knew and acknowledged that his madness could return at any time, especially if he was provoked, and they did everything in their power to try to avoid that (Saunier 1993; Pfau 2008: 259–60). Though there were certainly negative ideas about mental illness in the Middle Ages, the legal system sought to provide communities with mechanisms to cope with perceived difficulties without excluding or incarcerating them.

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The shaping measures of the expected or typical body are helpfully addressed by Lynne Vallone (2017: 258–65). 2 Throughout this chapter, I conceive the “normate” body largely as it is defined by Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1997: 8): “The normate … names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.” 3 I use disability here in the social and cultural meaning with which it has been invested by modern disability studies scholars. For an excellent brief history of the evolution and potential shortcomings of this use, see Eyler (2010: 4–6). 4 Here, as elsewhere, I render personal names as they are generally given for a modern Englishlanguage audience, unless there is reason to provide them in their original form (thus “Egil Skallagrimsson” in place of “Egill Skallagrímsson,” “Njal Thorgeirsson” in place of “Njáll Þorgeirsson,” etc.). 5 Translations, here and throughout unless otherwise noted, are those of Hreinsson et al., Complete Sagas (1997). 6 Scholars have proposed that Egil likely suffered from Paget’s disease, a disorder with symptoms matching Egil’s remarkably closely. See, for example, Byock (1995: 82–7) and Hardarson and Snorradöttir (1996: 1613–14). 7 Jakobsson (2017: 31–5) offers a clear discussion of the “cultic paranormal beings” (31) operating in medieval Scandinavian literature and intersecting with constructions of human experience. 8 Bragg is also skeptical about the use of the bones described in this final chapter of the saga as evidence for the diagnosis of Paget’s disease by Byock and others. 9 The saga’s description of these bones is followed by a fascinating moment in which the skull is subjected to a curious experiment: Skafti Thorarinsson, a priest present at the exhumation, “took a fair-sized hand-axe in one hand and struck the skull with it as hard as he could, to try to break it.” The skull is marked but unbroken by the blow (Egil’s Saga ch.86). Throughout this episode, the bones are treated as alien, sufficiently atypical as to disrupt the reverent process of exhumation and relocation to become an object of curiosity and experimentation—a glimpse of the atypical body in its most subject position. 10 Davis (2013: 14ff) argues that “normality” as a cultural concept is undergoing decentralization as an organizing principle of neoliberal thought in favor of “diversity”; for Davis, disability remains a problematic premise within this new order of thought, the “remainder of normal at the end of normal” (14). 11 As in my use of “disability” above, I employ “impairment” here as a term of convenience. Impairment indicates the distinction between, on the one hand, the experience of an individual body to the extent that its lived experience deviates from the default normate experience (and only to that extent). Disability, on the other hand, delineates the degree to

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which impairment, and the creation of asymmetrical categories of exclusion, results in issues of social judgment, access, or disenfranchisement from an otherwise expected position. Though these terms are widely used in disability studies scholarship, they are, in my view, necessarily subject to the contingent nature of “atypical” as a category. Scurvy, in particular, has an interesting contextual significance, being as it is tied to local habits of food and drink, but also to climate and culture. The term “scurvy,” originating from Norse skyrbjúgr in the medieval period, is one example of this sort of link; see Shetelig and Falk (1937: 316). These are, of course, three different points of comparison, but medieval and modern thinkers alike are often casual about differentiating among them. Bernard of Clairvaux (1993), The Life of Malachy, trans. and ed. Pauline Matarasso, 61. New York: Penguin. Canterbury Tales I.388. These include Curry’s assertion (1919: 597ff) that the Pardoner is a eunuch of long standing and Rowland’s conclusion (1964: 58) that the body in question is a “testicular pseudohermaphrodite of the feminine type.” For a thorough response to these assertions, see Benson (1982: 337–46). In a startling rhetorical moment, the text follows this with a statement introducing legal capacity with the assertion that “With God there is no distinction of any man whomsoever, but among men differences are recognized.” Metzler (2010: 27), notes (citing Sanders 1991: 75–89) that medieval Islamic culture, with “the [social] boundary between male and female … drawn even more firmly” than in most Christian societies, was more likely to turn to juridical intervention in assigning sex identification to an intersex person. An important contribution is Evans (2018: 120–31), whose essay introduces the 2018 issue of Postmedieval (9.2) on the subject of “Medieval Intersex: Language and Hermaphroditism.” Translation my own. Edward Wheatley’s proposal of a “religious model of disability” (2010: x) clearly informs my thinking here and in what follows, though I ultimately differ in my interpretation of the institutional pressures that define medieval constructions of disability. Skinner (2017: 6) offers “the numerous impairments encoded in the epithets of the Carolingian royal dynasty” as an indication of this. The specific association of cleft lip with a pregnant woman frightened by a hare is of long standing—see Ma (2000: 489–90) for an example from China in the second century BCE. The nickname klaufi (“cleft”) is most likely not admissible, as it is more likely to refer to a clumsy person with hands as useless as hooves (Peterson 2015: 179). Translation my own. This treatment is also cited in Skinner (2017: 185). Crawford (1999: 95) argues that the evidence of this burial suggests a child with a cleft lip. The poor condition of the remains in the burial, however, makes this impossible to determine with certainty. See also Drinkall and Foreman, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, 10, for discussion of the archeological evidence. Bhattacharya et al. (2009: S5) note the visibility of cleft-lip people in statuary dating back to the eighth century BCE; cosmetic surgery on an eighteen-year-old is reported in the fourth century BCE in China. One example of the survival into adulthood of a person with a cleft palate is the find at Canterbury dating to the late eleventh century (Anderson 1994: 466–72). William Ian Miller’s observation that “There are few things that are more unnerving and disgust-provoking than our partibility” (1997: 27) might reasonably be extended by my argument here.

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28 An example, of which space forbids full discussion, is the presentation in The Book of Margery Kempe of Margery’s son, afflicted by and shunned for leprosy-like “whelys and bloberys” of the skin (II.28); her husband John’s incapacity due to age and injury; and Margery herself, whose atypical behavior straddles a line between exemplary and disabling. 29 Skinner cites the Annales, noting that “to their co-citizens (and Bartholomew) they were heroes, worthy of economic support now that they were deprived of their livelihood” (120) by their injuries. 30 A useful consideration of the range of interpretation of injury is offered by Patricia Skinner 2015: 81–101; 2017: 116–23). 31 Gaytbayn: “goat leg”; blaiklok: “black-lock-of-hair”; massingberd: “brass-beard”; einhenda: “one-handed”; skarði: “notch” (see discussion above; when used as a nickname, skarð generally indicates a person with a cleft lip or “harelip”); bægifotr: “twist-leg”; unrede: “poorly advised”; brendcheke: “branded-cheek”; liggebiþefyre: “lie-by-the-fire.” AngloScandinavian and English examples are found in Jönsjö (1979). 32 I discuss more fully the rhetorical complexities of Onund’s leg elsewhere (Sexton 2010: 152–7). 33 Translation my own. 34 Translation my own. 35 While it is generally agreed that the popular idea of the pious stigmatic begins with Francis’ affliction, the idea of “bear[ing] the marks of Jesus Christ in [one’s] body” (Gal. 6:17) excited commentators’ interest throughout the medieval period. See Muessig (2013: 40–68) for a survey of historical commentary on the “marks of Jesus Christ”; see also Klaniczay (2015: 119–36). 36 “Images of the disabled as either less or more than merely human can be found throughout recorded history … The disabled are blessed or damned but never fully human” (Gartner and Joe 1987: 2). 37 Peter Brown finds the evidence more compelling: “It seems to me that the public reading of the passio was, in itself, a psychodrame that mobilized in the hearer those strong fantasies of disintegration and reintegration which lurked in the back of the mind of ancient men” (Brown 1981: 82). 38 Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary provides Unhæl: ill, unwell; weak, infirm. Creopera: cripple, lit. “creeper.” Adliga: sick, diseased, corrupted. Untrum: infirm, weakly, sick, ill; in poor form. Paralisyn: paralyzed. Blind: blind; dark, obscure, opaque. Dumba: dumb, silent; speechless.

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A notable exception here would be Hermann of Reichenau (1013–54), or Hermannus Contractus. Having suffered a paralytic condition in his limbs from either birth or early in childhood, Hermann was unable to fulfill the expected duties of an eldest son from a noble family, and so spent much of his life dedicated to learning at the monastery at Reichenau. His written works span history, music, and astronomy. Most of the information concerning Hermann’s condition comes from works written about him, such as the Vita written by his fellow monk and student, Berthold. For additional discussion of his life and works, see Snyder’s (2015) “Introduction” to an edition of Hermann’s works in musical theory. For additional discussion of this issue of terminology, see Kuuliala (2016a: 33ff). For further discussion of the social model, see Metzler (2006: 2).

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Where the social model distinguishes between impairment and disability, the cultural model of disability recognizes that impairment is, itself, socially constructed. For further discussion, see Eyler (2010). See also Godden and Hsy (2013). For discussion of these models, see Metzler (2006: 68–9). See also Siraisi (1990: 120). “The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” The Medieval Sourcebook, 1996. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/lateran4.asp (accessed December 20, 2018). Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, Second and Revised Edition, 1920, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Online Edition Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Knight, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2.htm, q. 85, a. 5 ad 1 (accessed December 19, 2018). See discussion in Cross (2017: 329). For additional discussion of disability and the Aristotelian model of bodily development, see Pearman (2010). For further discussion of amputations in the Middle Ages, see Van Cant (2018) and Ferragud (2015). Judd and Roberts, for example, examined a rural burial site in Britain (roughly tenth to the twelfth century) and found a higher frequency of fractures and injuries than in comparable urban sites. Judd and Roberts attribute this difference to the hazards involved in farming compared to urban crafts (1999: 229–43). See also the chapter on “Law” in Metzler (2013b). Interestingly, Metzler (2013b: 13) notes how corporal punishment establishes a sort of hierarchy of impairments, with second-time offenders losing an appendage where third-time offenders would be blinded or lose an ear. Dequeker et al. (2001) itemize each individual in the drawing in an attempt to diagnose. Although diagnosing subjects, real or fictional, from the past is problematic at best, Dequeker et al. provide useful analysis of the physical features of each subject. For the account of Cünradus, see Wolf (2011: 176). Godden and Mittman (2019) discuss this thirteenth-century manuscript containing The Story of Merlin—the central images and text describe the battles of Arthur, but around the margins, and not mentioned at all in the text, are disabled figures with crutches and other mobility aids. See Hernigou (2013), who places Paré in the history of early prostheses, from Greece and Rome to the European Middle Ages. For another example of miraculous limb replacement, see Walter (2016). Walter discusses the case of a man whose leg is rotting. He makes devotions to Saints Cosmas and Damian, who come to him while he is asleep and replaces his rotten flesh with the healthy leg of a recently deceased Ethiopian man. This miracle appears in several collections, including The Golden Legend and The Scottish Legendary. For further discussion of prosthesis in the Middle Ages, see Godden (2016). Metzler (2013b) notes that “potente” and “potence” are used to describe walking sticks for figures of old age in both Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Roman de la Rose. MED, potent(e n. (a) A crutch; a staff, support; also fig.; crosier [quot.: c1400(a1376)]; bi potent, with a crutch; (b) crossed potent, a staff with a crosspiece, crutch; (c) potent henge (garnet), a kind of T-shaped or cross-garnet hinge. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middleenglish-dictionary/dictionary/MED34183/ (accessed December 18, 2018). For further discussion of this encounter, see Baswell, who describes the mutual benefit for Ghillie Michael and the King—Ghillie Michael “enact[s] Edward’s definitive move from corruptible morality to sanctity” (2003: 28). See, for example, the numerous mentions of disability in Farmer (2002). From the B-text of Piers Plowman (1995):

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Tho were faitours afered, and feyned hem blynde; Somme leide hir legges aliry, as swiche losels konneth, And made hir [pleynt] to Piers and preide hym of grace: “For we have no lymes to laboure with, lord, ygraced be ye! Ac we preie for yow, Piers, and for youre plowgh bothe, That God of his grace youre greyn multiplie, And yelde yow of youre almess that ye yyve us here; For we may neither swynke ne swete, swich siknesse us eyleth.” (B.VI.121–8). For some discussion of Langland and disability, see Gianfalla (2010). From the B-text of Piers Plowman (1995): “If it be sooth,” quod Piers, “that ye seyn, I shal it soone aspie. Ye ben wastours, I woot wel, and Truthe woot the sothe; And I am his olde hyne and highte hym to warne Whiche thei were in this world his werkmen apeireth. Ye wasten that men wynnen with travaille and with tene; Ac Truthe shal teche yow his teme to dryve, Or ye shul eten barley breed and of the broke drynke; But if he be blynd or brokelegged or bolted with irens, He shal ete whete breed and drynke with myselve Til God of his goodnesse [garisoun] hym sende.” (B.VI.129–38). See Metzler (2013b: 170ff) for discussion of these texts. Quoted in Farmer (2002: 60). See Tracy (2010) for an analysis of how representations of the Fisher King vary across texts, reflecting the author’s particular time and concerns. As Tracy argues, disability is not a stable state, but rather one defined by a time and a place. 28 For further discussion of how disabled people traveled, and of their generally surprising mobility, see Metzler (2015).

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7

8

My thanks to the volume editors and Dr Kamala Schelling for invaluable comments on the first draft of this chapter. On disabled saints, including those with chronic illnesses, see Chace (2017), Matthews (2016), and Metzler (2006: 129). For similar approaches, see Bourke (2014: 1–26) and Bustan (2016). On cripistemology, see Johnson and McRuer (2014) and Wendell (1996: 8, 69–81). On this, see Charmaz (1991). For all references to the Ancrene Wisse, I refer to the modern English text from White’s 1993 translation. All Middle English text is taken from the 2000 critical edition. That is not to say that hospitals provided a particularly warm welcome to chronically ill patients. Metzler (2013b: 174) notes, for example, that thirteenth-century statutes of hospitals in Troyes and Angers explicitly state that the chronically ill should be turned away. Maclehose’s sources are Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, and the two collections pertaining to Thomas Becket, composed by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury. Metzler (2006: 126–85) discusses miracle tales in detail and provides a helpful appendix cataloging tales drawn from numerous sources (190–259).

NOTES

9

10 11 12

13 14

153

For all references to Douceline of Digne’s biography, I refer to the modern English text from Garay and Jeay’s 2001 translation (Phillipine of Porcellet 2001). All Occitan references are taken from the standard critical edition, Phillipine of Porcellet (1879). Kafer draws here on work by McRuer (2006: 36) and Sandahl (2003: 27) on the formation of such inclusive crip communities. On the signification and function of blood in this image and other similar illustrations in MS Egerton 1821, see, in particular, Thebaut (2009). On God as disabled, see Cox (2017), Eiesland (1994), McLoughry and Morris (2002), Tan (1998), and Taylor and McCloughry (1998). Classification of Christ as disabled typically founds upon the scars from the Crucifixion, which he still bears, even after the Resurrection. I am less concerned with the presence of scars (i.e., markers of past, healed injury) than with the scene of the Passion itself as an instance of pain lived as pure duration, pain transmitted to others’ bodies across time in a perpetual present tense. Similarly, Nyffenegger (2017) argues that the Virgin Mary’s pain is functionally chronic according to the logic of medieval affective piety, in which the reader or spectator is urged to take on Mary’s grief (pain being understood as both emotional and physical) at the loss of her son. On crip time, see Godden (2011) and Kafer (2013: 34–46). The effect of pain on temporal perception has been fairly well studied. Alongside Hellström and Carlsson (1997), see also Morris (2010), Ogden et al. (2015), and Pomares et al. (2011).

CHAPTER 4 1

8

Less socially and theologically complex episodes of Jesus curing blind men are recounted in Matthew 9:27–31 and 20:30–4, and in Mark 8:22–6 and 10:46–52. The blind are also mentioned in groups of people with a variety of disabilities whom Jesus cures; see, for example, Matthew 11:5 and 15:30 and Luke 7:21. The Golden Legend survives in about 1,000 manuscripts, and after 1450, numerous printed editions appeared not only in Latin, but also in every Western European language. The book’s availability in vernacular languages made it more accessible to medieval readers than the Bible, translation of which was limited by the church (Jacobus 1993: vol. 1, xiii). For a consideration of this issue from a sociological perspective, see Hutchinson (2006). Duffy also includes photographs of squints that are still extant in churches in Ipswich and Lavenham (figs. 46 and 53). Frederick Pollock and Edward Maitland (1968) list a number of forms of mutilation used as punishment in pre-Conquest England (“loss of ears, nose, upper lip, hands, feet,” as well as castration; vol. 2, 452–3), but blindness is notably absent from their list. See the case of the attack of Thomas de Bestenoure, in which two of his attackers were sentenced to be blinded and castrated (Curia Regis Rolls 1955: 219–20). These findings accord with Pollock and Maitland (1968), who in their History of English Law sketch a decline in mutilation as punishment for felons as it was replaced “very slowly” during the thirteenth century by the death penalty (vol. 2, 461). Li roi a mis en un repaire



(Més je ne sai pas por qoi faire) Trois cens aveugles route a route. Parmi Paris en va trois paire; Tote jor ne finent de braire: ‘Aus trois cens qui ne voient goute!’

2

3 4 5

6 7

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Li uns sache, li autres boute, Si se donent mainte çacoute, Qu’il n’i a nul qui lor esclaire. Si feus i prent, ce n’est pas doute, L’ordre sera brullee toute, S’avra li rois plus a refaire. (Qtd. in Le garçon 1989: 63; my translation)

9

Richard lists the instances of the game and the bibliographic sources that describe it on pp. 553–4. Unfortunately, his argument, which attempts to ennoble the game by reading it as “a metaphor for mankind’s struggle with sin” (555; my translation), is not convincing.

CHAPTER 5 1

Mystère de sainte Barbe en cinq journées, vv. 1782–5 and 1793–6; translated from Longtin (2001: 184–5). 2 This chapter can only offer a broad survey of the cultural history of deafness in the Middle Ages. For deeper perspectives on the topic, I refer the reader to the studies cited in the bibliography, especially Bragg (1997b), Metzler (2009; 2013b), and Hsy (2016). The present chapter supplements, but is in no way intended to supersede, these works. The author wishes to thank in particular Jonathan Hsy, Anne Koenig, and Christian Schneider for their kind assistance. 3 Since the 1970s, there has been a growing tendency to “use the lowercase deaf when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing, and the uppercase Deaf when referring to a particular group of deaf people who share a language … and a culture”; Deaf culture, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries add, is “historically created and actively transmitted across generations” (1988: 2). I argue in this chapter that no social configuration analogous to contemporary Deaf culture is present in medieval Europe, and so I use lowercase deaf throughout. 4 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Dēf,” accessed November 17, 2017, http://quod.lib.umich. edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED10774. 5 For a summary of these three chapters, especially as they are rendered in the medieval Occitan translation, see Ricketts (2009). 6 He later repeats that congenital deafness is not receptive to treatment (III.9, n.p.). Guy de Chauliac says much the same in his Chirurgia magna, attributing this judgment to Avicenna and clarifying that long-standing deafness is deafness that has already persisted for two years (Book VI, doctrine 2, ch. 2, pt. 3, p. 347). 7 Kenneth W. Berger writes, “In one story about the 3rd Crusade [sic], against the Albigenses in the 13th century, there is a discussion on the comparative merits of different types of animal horns to ‘bring the said words close.’ Mentioned are the horns of the stag, boar, reindeer, and other animals” (1970: 8). I have not identified Berger’s source or confirmed his interpretation of it. 8 Lois Bragg (1997a: 168) remarks that this saga is “antiquarian” in its treatment of physical alterity. 9 Massimo Ciavolella notes that Masetto’s feigned muteness leads the others to presume he is stupid, but not that they also presume him deaf (2014). Howard Limoli discusses the presumptions about Masetto’s intellect as a function of his social class (1965: 285). 10 This may, however, be due to the relative paucity of biblical reference to the deaf (Metzler 2009: 79).

NOTES

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11 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “Dēf,” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type= id&id=MED10774 (accessed November 17, 2017). 12 On Kingston-upon-Hull, see Metzler (2013b: 62, 70). On the confraternity in Trier, which was originally a Society of the Deaf and Blind but whose membership was soon extended to people with impaired mobility, lepers, the ill, and even the able-bodied, see Fandrey (1990: 32). 13 Miracle narratives have long been a go-to source for representations of people with disabilities in medieval Europe, though their particular construction of disabilities as defects to be repaired has sometimes been wrongly understood as a more generalized and “typically medieval” attitude toward disability. 14 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10525355t/f818.image. 15 http://cdm.csbsju.edu/digital/collection/HMMLClrMicr/id/18557/rec/2. 16 http://cdm.csbsju.edu/digital/collection/HMMLClrMicr/id/16400/rec/1. 17 http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90592858/f205.image.r=22532. 18 I thank Christian Schneider for alerting me to this episode. For a discussion of age and disability (but not deafness) in this and other works by Der Stricker, see Classen (2007). 19 This idiomatic expression, roughly translating to “dialogues of deaf people” and meaning “exchanges marked by mutual incomprehension,” is finally beginning to be considered offensive in contemporary France—but in this instance it is an accurate descriptor. 20 While there were no genuine sign languages in medieval Europe, there is evidence for the use of finger spelling. For instance, Bragg (1996) has identified finger-spelled initials in a group of portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer. 21 I quote this relatively common French aphorism as it is stated in the Sottie des rapporteurs, c. 1480 (Recueil Trepperel 1935: I.68). 22 ‘Deaf gain” is the notion that deafness constitutes an advantage (offering new insight, identity, perspective, and community), not a loss; see Bauman and Murray (2014). 23 The character has also been the object of much noteworthy feminist criticism. For an interesting survey of feminist readings of the Wife’s deafness, see Sayers (2010: 86n20). 24 Hsy (2016) adopts Gina Bloom’s language of “disruptive deafness” to characterize the Wife’s strategies of resistance. 25 Kuuliala also discusses the case (2016b: 72–3).

CHAPTER 6 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

Unless otherwise noted, all Latin quotations and translations of the Bible are from the Nova Vulgata and the Douay-Rheims, respectively. Metzler (2014: 60) notes the difference between the Latin term muti, used for the congenitally deaf who were functionally mute, and surdi, used for the deaf who still had speech. Scalenghe (2014: 24–6) provides the Arabic words that refer to muteness, specifically kharas, more commonly the physical muteness accompanying prelingual deafness but also the loss of speech, and bakam, a less common word that is more related to the metaphorical loss of speech rather than the physical. See also Wollock (1998) and O’Neill (1980). See Gates and Marafioti (2014). For discussion of the story, see Robertson and Rose (2001). See also chapter 5, “Deafness and Insight: Disability and Theory” in Davis (1995) for a discussion of Philomela.

156

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8 9

See Tracy (2010). An interesting note: Bobrick (1995) begins with an anecdote about writing a poem when he was a teenager dedicated to the tongue-tied Caedmon, identifying with the poet through his own stuttering. 10 This translation is from La Folie Tristan de Berne. 11 This translation is from La Folie Tristan d’Oxford. 12 See, for instance, their article “Late Blooming or Language Problem?” https://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/Late-Blooming-or-Language-Problem/.

CHAPTER 7 1

The terminology used to describe these issues differs in the UK and the USA. In the USA, conditions like dyslexia, which can cause ongoing difficulties with learning in a typical manner but are not associated with intellectual impairment, are identified as “specific learning differences” in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but are colloquially referred to as “learning disabilities.” In the UK, the term “learning difficulty” is used to refer to these issues, while the term “learning disability” is generally associated with intellectual impairment. The term “intellectual disability” is used more frequently in the USA. I rely here on the explanation provided by the British Institute of Learning Disabilities (n.d.). 2 Wendy J. Turner has written prolifically on these inquisitions for over a decade, producing a book and numerous articles; see, for example, Turner (2013). I have also written about how they relate to the history of intellectual disability; see Buhrer (2014: 333–44) and Buhrer (2013). More recently, Irina Metzler has written about them, drawing upon Turner’s work; see Metzler (2016: 140–84). 3 The manuscript referenced in Moore’s translation is John Mirfield’s Breviarium Barthlomei, Oxford, Pembroke College, MS 2. f. 253 a, col. 1. 4 Public education became compulsory in Britain in 1880 and free in 1891. Dyslexia was first described in the 1870s by Adolph Kussmaul, who referred to it as “word-blindness”; however, it was described in a more systematic way by W. Pringle Morgan, who published a description of a dyslexic fourteen-year-old boy in the British Journal of Medicine in 1896; see Snowling (1996). 5 For more on the history of numeracy in Europe, see Thomas (1987). 6 Augustine, for instance, referred to people “born with faculties akin to brute animals”; see Augustine of Hippo (2007: 41). 7 For more on Hildegard’s understanding of the brain, the humors, and mental disorder, see Phillips and Boivin (2007: 359–68). Like William, Hildegard believed that excessive coldness in the brain caused cognitive impairment. For instance, in Causae et Curae, Hildegard suggested that “if someone’s brain is so chilled that he turns mad, one should cover their head with a mixture of laurel berries, thistle water and wheat flower, and then cover this with a felt cap, until the inside of the head is warmed and the patient falls asleep. This brings warmth to the brain” (cited in Phillips and Boivin 2007: 361). 8 For background on the medieval dissemination of Arabic–Islamic medical texts, see Conrad (2006: 122–5) and Nutton (2006b: 139–46). 9 For further discussion, see Metzler (2016: 53–96). 10 For more on how the theory of the inner senses relates to mental disorder, see Saunders (2016: 411–27).

NOTES

157

11 This and all citations hereafter are from the 2008 online edition of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province’s 1920 translation. 12 The unfortunate term “idiot” is used in the Fathers of the Dominican Province translation of the Summa. As I discuss, Aquinas may have used the term amentia to refer to congenital intellectual impairment or impairment acquired through injury, but we should not assume his understanding of this maps onto the modern concept of intellectual disability. 13 See, for instance, Kings 13:13, Psalms 13:1, Psalms 91, Proverbs 29:11, Ecclesiastes 21:19 and 21:29, and Proverbs 12:16. I discuss how terms associated with foolishness (stultus, fatuus, idiota, insipiens, insensis, ignari) were used in the Bible in Buhrer (2014: 18–19); see also Swain (1932: 10–26). 14 It is unclear why Courson includes deaf and blind people in this group. 15 “Cum ergo parrochianus talis sit quasi truncus ante sacerdotem, sicut non imputaretur ei de confessione trunci, ita nec confessione istius.” My thanks to Andy Galloway for bringing this passage to my attention. For further discussion of how medieval theologians responded to pastoral concerns about cognitive impairment, see Cross (2012). 16 This point is made most strongly in Goodey (2011). 17 ‘Respondeo dicendum quod circa amentes et furiosos est distinguendum. Quidam enim sunt a nativitate tales, nulla habentes lucida intervalla, in quibus etiam nullus usus rationis apparet.’ 18 For further discussion of the sources of jurists’ ideas about mental disorder, see Turner (2013: 31–63). 19 ‘Ablatio et diminutio estimationis, ut in amentia et stoliditate, frigiditatem et humiditatem medie partis.’ 20 As an example of a writer who did not view amentia this way, Bartholomeus Anglicus, the author of On the Properties of Things, asserted that amentia was the same as madness (mania) and affected the anterior cell of the head, leading to the loss of the imaginative faculty (Wallis 2010: 235). 21 This aligns with Aquinas’ view that we acquire knowledge through “abstraction from sensible phantasms,” which requires abandoning sensory attachments. 22 For further analysis of foolishness in Beryn, see Harper (2004). 23 See also Bolens (2008) and Davis (1985). For an overview of scholarship on Beryn and the law, see Higle (2016: 88–9). 24 This poem was originally titled “A Tale of Threescore Folks and Thre” and is in MS Harley 2251 fol. 303–5. Other works in this tradition include Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum (twelfth century), Hans Vintler’s Pluemen de Tugend (1411), and Felix Hemmerlein’s Doctoratus in Stultitia. Analysis of the artificial fool in medieval literature can be found in Zeydel (1944), Turi (2010), Welsford (1935), Zijderfeld (1982), and Billington (1984). 25 For more on folly in Shakespeare, see Heetderks (2014a: 63–75). On performative cognitive disability in early modern literature more broadly, see Heetderks (2014b). 26 For further analysis, see Schieberle (2014). 27 For further discussion of the relationship between folly and sin in medieval literature, see Harper (2004: 299–301).

CHAPTER 8 1

See Psalm 13:1, Psalm 38:9, Psalm 52:1, Proverbs 10:18, Proverbs 14:1, Proverbs 26:8, Ecclesiastes 10:12, Ecclesiastes 20:14 and 20:33, and Isaias 32:5 for insipiens as the inverse

158

NOTES

of sapiens. See Psalm 48:11 and 48:13, Psalm 91:7, Luke 6:11, and 2 Peter 2:16 for insipiens as insanity. 2 Fourth Book of Kings 9:11 and 19:28 (insanus); Prophecy of Isaias 44:25 (furor). 3 Gospel of Mark 3:21 (furor); Gospel of John 10:20 (insanus); Acts of the Apostles 12:15 and 26:24 (insanus); First Corinthians 14:23 (insanus). 4 Deuteronomy 28:28 (amentia and furore mentis); Prophecy of Isaias 24:6 (insanie); Prophecy of Jeremias 25:16 (insanie); Prophecy of Zacharias 12:4 (amentia); Book of Wisdom 14:21–31 (insaniae); Gospel of Luke 6:11 (inspientia). 5 For examples, see AN JJ 115 fo 52 no 114 (1379), AN JJ 130 fo 159 no 282 (1387), AN JJ 146 fo 7 no 14 (1394), AN JJ 174 fo 7 no 17 (1427), and AN JJ 220 fo 52v no 90 (1489). 6 The Laws of the Twelve Tables is the earliest known source for Roman private law, promulgated in around 450 BCE, but only surviving in those fragments collected by later compilers. The Twelve Tables consisted of a list of legal rules, and most of what survives was concerned with family law, property, succession, and the rules for legal process. 7 Book 27.10: Mommsen and Krueger translate “furiosus” as “lunatic,” which I find problematic. 8 I have replaced Mommsen and Krueger’s translation, “he comes to his senses,” with my own here, because the concept of “coming to one’s senses” is too closely associated with madness in medieval French (Book 27.10). 9 Papinian, Ulpian, and Modestinus were all jurists in the third century CE who wrote extensive commentaries on questions directed to them. 10 According to Pierre-André Sigal, 70 percent of all miracle stories about madness describe it as the invasion of a demon (1985: 236).

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INDEX

ableism 57 acedia 117–18 activism 57, 80, 140 Ælfric 33 aging 87 Agricola 88 Albert Magnus 119–20, 125 Aldobrandino of Siena 137 Alfred, King 79 allegory 4, 32, 34, 76, 87, 90 alms 44–5, 70, 143 Alphabet of Tales 17 Amelot of Chambly 44 analogy 90–2 anchoresses 55 Ancrene Wisse 55, 64 Andreas Capellanus 76 androgyny 26 aphasia 102 Aristotle 101 Arnau of Villanova 123, 124 Arnolf 39, 47–8 Art of Courtly Love (Andreas Capellanus) 76 assistive devices 3, 39–43, 48–9, 86 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) 116, 117 atypical bodies 19–34 Audelay, John 79–80 audism 95 Augustine 115–16, 118 Avicenna 112, 139 babbling 101, 110 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 67–8 Bartholomew the Englishman 85 Bartholomew the Scribe 29 Bede 109 beggars 43–4, 45–6, 74–5 “Beggars and Cripples” (Bosch) 39, 41 Benedictine Rule 108 bent-knee peg 41 Bernard of Clairvaux 24 Bernard of Gordon 86, 88, 112

biblical texts 1, 68–9, 90, 99, 102, 103, 105–6, 107–8, 112, 135–6 Black Death 45 blasphemy 103 blindness 1, 4–7, 67–81 Bobrick, Benson 99, 112 bodies, atypical 19–34 Book of Sainte Foy (Sheingorn) 48 Bosch, Hieronymous 39, 41 Bozon, Nicole 95 brain 119, 139 Brant, Sebastian 130 brotherhoods 78–9 Caedmon 109 Carruthers, Mary 102 Cassian, John 125 charity 44–5, 70 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales 3, 25, 96–7, 127, 128 The Legend of Good Women 104, 105 chivalric romances 3, 106–7, 145 Chrétien de Troyes 106 Christianity 26, 31, 68–72, 135–6, 141, 145 chronic illness vs. chronic disease 54 Chronicle (Chastellain) 93 “claiming crip” 63–6 cleft lip and palate 27–8 cofradías 78 cognitive functions 119 comedy 53, 75 “communion with the eyes” 71–2 community 12, 48, 137, 138, 143 compensation payments 78, 79 Confessio Amantis (Gower) 80, 104–5, 124, 127 confraternities 78 congenital impairments 27–8, 36, 37–8, 85, 102 Conte du Graal (Chrétien de Troyes) 106–7 Contes moralisés (Bozon) 95 Corpus Christi Day 71 corruption 22–3, 26 Cosmas, Saint 14–17

INDEX

courtly love 76 criminals 74–5, 137, 142–3 cripistemology of pain 53 crutches 1, 4, 39, 42–3, 48 cultural representation 144–7 cure 1–8, 56–60, 112, 146 post-cure 60–3 Damian, Saint 14–17 Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal 93 De Morbo Sacro (Hippocrates) 136–7 De Parte Operativa 123 De proprietatibus rerum 85, 90 De remediis utriusque fortunae (Petrarch) 96 deafness 83–98, 102 Deschamps, Eustache 95–6 devil 55, 112, 146 disgust 43–4 divorce 142 Douceline of Digne 58–60, 61 dullness of sense 125 dumb 100 dyslexia 156 n4 ear drops 86 Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede) 109 Edward, King, meeting Ghillie Michael 43–4 Edward I, compensation payments 78 Egil Skallagrimsson 20–1 Egil’s saga 87 elevation squints 71 Elsingspital 77 embodiment hierarchy 57 Emma de Beston 137 Etymologies (Isidore of Seville) 84, 85, 139 Eucharist 71–2 Evagrius Ponticus 117 Excellence, Science, Paris et Peuple 86, 93 eyeglasses 70 Eyrbyggja Saga 30–1 family 26, 48, 62, 138, 146 fear 43–4, 139, 140, 142 Feast of Fools 129 feigning disability 45–6, 75–6, 87, 93, 128 Feis Tight Chónain 88 Francesco Landini 79 Francis of Assisi 31 fumigation 86

181

Galen 112 gender 13–18, 25–6, 96–7, 119–20, 146 Gerald of Wales 37, 41 Gerontocomia (Zerbi) 87 gestures 94 Ghillie Michael 43–4, 48 Gilles le Muisit 72 gluttony 125 Golden Legend see Legenda Aurea goldsmiths 78 Gower, John (Confessio Amantis) 80, 104–5, 124, 127 Gregory the Great 125 Grettir’s Saga 30 guardianship 89, 115, 138, 140 guilds 78 Guillaume de Saint-Pathus 4 Guy de Chauliac 112 hagiography 22, 33–4, 47–8, 103 hand blocks 40–1, 48 harelip 27 healing see miracles hearing devices 86 Heliand 106 heritability 86–7 Hermann of Reichenau (Hermannus Contractus) 150 n1 hermaphrodites 25 hermits 145 Higden, Ranulf 124 Hildegard of Bingen 86, 118, 125, 156 n7 Hippocrates 136–7 History and Topography of Ireland, The (Gerald of Wales) 37, 41 History of Saint Edward the King (Paris) 43–4 hospitals/hospices 44–5, 56, 70, 76–8, 138–9 Hugh of St. Victor 121, 125 humoral theory 85–6, 101, 118, 119, 136, 139 Icelandic sagas 26, 30–1, 87, 93 iconography 18, 70, 71, 90, 147 impairment 11 imprisonment 142–3 inheritance 89, 141 inner senses 119, 121 inner vision 70–1 institutions, blind 77–8 intersectionality 13–18, 48 intersex 25 Isidore of Seville 125 Etymologies 84, 85, 139

182

Jacobus de Voragine 14–17, 69, 75 Jesus 1, 31, 64, 68–9, 70 Jews 72 John of Salisbury 124 Kempe, Margery 146 knights 106–7, 145 La Farce du Goguelu 75 Lanfranc, Archbishop 73 Langland, William (Piers Plowman) 45–6, 76, 87 Laxdoela saga 93 Layné, Robert 133–4, 138, 147 Le Folie de Tristan de Berne 110 Le Folie Tristan d’Oxford 110 Le Garçon et l’Aveugle 74–5 Le Mystère de la Résurrection 75 Le mystère de la vie et hystoire de monseigneur sainct Martin 75 Le Régime du Corps (Aldobrandino of Siena) 137 learning difficulties 115–32 leechbooks 28, 29 leg transplant 14–17 legal issues 28, 45, 79, 89, 128, 137–8, 140–4 Legenda Aurea (Jacobus de Voragine) 14–17, 69, 75 leprosy 38, 44 Les Trois Aveugles de Compiègne 76 Liber de natura rerum (Thomas of Cantimpré) 86–7 Liber Vagatorum 75 Life of Christina (Paris) 103–4 Life of Marie d’Oignies (de Vitry) 31 Life of St. Swithun (Ælfric) 33 Lilium medicinae (Bernard of Gordon) 86 Louis IX, (St. Louis) 77 love 76 lust 125 “Madness of Tristan, The” 110 Mansionem apud eum faciemus 95 marginalization 57 Marie d’Oignies 31 markers of disability 1–8 marriage 89, 141–2 Masetto da Lamporecchio (Boccaccio) 87, 95 medical model 26, 57, 70, 85–6, 101–3, 116 medical treatment 28, 29, 52, 86 Melor, Saint 42 Mélusine (d’Arras) 93

INDEX

memory 102 mental health 133–47 metaphor 32, 55, 72, 84–5, 95 Michael of Rhodes 116–17 miracles 1–3, 4–7, 14–17, 22, 32–4, 47, 48, 49, 53–4, 57–60, 61, 62–3, 68–9, 89–90, 93–4, 112 Miracles de saint Louis 86, 89, 93–4 Miracles of St. Hilary 22 Mirfield, John 116 mobility aids 39–43, 48–9 mobility impairments 35–49 modeling disability 10–13 Modestinus 142 monsters 12–13, 20–1 Mortifiement de vaine plaisance (René d’Anjou) 95 muteness 87–8, 94, 100 mutilation 29, 38, 42, 73–4, 102–5, 107 narrative prosthesis 47, 49, 59 Nebuchadnezzar, King 144 Nicetius of Trier 32 nicknames 29–31 Njal’s Saga 26 normality 21–4 Notker, Saint (the Stammerer) 109–10, 111 occupational injuries 38, 78 ocularcentrism 72, 76 ocularnormative 70–2 old age 87 “Old Mother and Emperor Friedrich, The” 87 Order of Fools (Lydgate) 130 orienting disability 8–10 otherness 24, 37 pain 51–66 Paris, William 103 Passion of Christ 64, 70 peg leg 41 Pellegrin, Brother 60–3 Perceval 106–7 Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay 74 Petrarch 96 Philippe de Beaumanoir 142, 143 Philomela 104–5 Piers Plowman (Langland) 45–6, 76, 87 pig-beating game 80 pilgrimage 3, 33, 40, 146 poachers 73 political/relational model 58

INDEX

Posidonius Byzantius 119 poverty 44–5 prodigals 140 prosthetic limbs 41–2 proverbs 146–7 punishment 38, 53, 73–4, 103, 105–7 race 13–18 Regimen sanitatis salernitanum 86 religion blindness 68–72 deafness 89 medicine and 55 religious model of disability 10, 11 René d’Anjou 95 Ricardus Anglicus 56 Rixenda de Fayensa 97 Robert de Béthune 77 Robert of Courcon 122–3 Roman de la Rose 44 Roman de Silence 145 Romance of Alexander, The 80 romances 3, 4, 93, 106–7, 145 ropemaking 79 Rutebeuf 77 St. Mary within Cripplegate 77 sanism 139–44 Savonarola, John Michale 123–4 scurvy 149 n12 self advocacy 79 body and 34 deafness 96–7 semiosomatics 51, 52, 53 sexuality 13 Ship of Fools (Brant) 130 shrines 3, 33, 49, 146 sign language 94, 111 silence 108 Simon de Montfort 74 sin 1–8, 11, 26, 32, 37–8, 46, 57, 68, 69–70, 72, 73, 105, 106–7, 125, 126, 129–30 social attitudes 43–9, 72–3, 88–90, 137–8 social constructivism 8, 10 social model 57 social relationships 48–9, 58 spectacles 70

183

speech impairments 99–113 speechlessness 108 spirituality 10, 11, 22, 31–2, 34, 51, 55, 59, 69 stammering 100–1, 109–10 stereotyping 67, 72, 74–5, 79 stigmata 31 stigmatization 57, 72–3 strokes 102 stuttering 99, 101, 112 Summa Theologica (Thomas Aquinas) 37–8, 121–2, 123, 124, 125, 141 surgery 28, 112 Swithun, Saint 33 symbols 12, 30, 49, 86, 147 Tale of Beryn, The 128 Teresa de Cartagena 97 Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica) 37–8, 121–2, 123, 124, 125, 141 Thomas of Cantimpré 86–7 Thomas of Monmouth 47, 49 tongue 101 removal 102–5, 107 transhuman approach 11 transindividual feeling 53 treatment 28, 29, 52, 86, 112 tristitia 117 Van der Leyen, Peter 77 Vie et Miracles de Saint Louis (Guillaume de Saint-Pathus) 4–7 Villon, François 77 Vision of Gottschalk 127 visual analogy 90–2 visual impairment see blindness war injuries 38 Wife of Bath 3, 96–7 William of Conches 118 William of Norwich 47, 49 William the Conqueror 73, 76–7 witness testimony 140–1 work participation 45–6, 79–80, 88 writing 111–12 Zerbi, Gabriele 87 Zwingli, Huldreich 71

184