A Cultural History of Disability in the Renaissance 9781350028906, 9781350028876

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LIST OF FIGURES

0.1 Da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c.1490

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0.2 Artificial nose, Europe, 1601–1800. Licensed under Creative Commons from the Science Museum, London

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1.1 Woodcut image of a foal with a topknot, from “A Fair Warning for Pride” (Pepys 4.310). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge

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1.2 Woodcut image of a calf with a headdress, from “The Sommersetshire Wonder” (Pepys 4.362). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge

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1.3 Woodcut image of twins conjoined at the navel, from “Nature’s Wonder” (Euing Ballad 237). By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections

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1.4 Woodcut image of standing conjoined twins, from “The True Description of Two Monstrous Children,” HM 18316, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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1.5 Woodcut image of twins with cranial jointure, from “The True Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Chylde,” HM 18392, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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1.6 Image of conjoined brothers, from “The Two Inseparable Brothers” (Roxburghe 3.216–17). By permission of the British Library

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2.1 Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651)

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2.2 Selection of dismembering instruments, from Woodall, The Surgeon’s Mate (London: John Legate, for Nicholas Bourne, 1655), 412

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6.1 Illustration of the tongue and larynx from Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615), RB 53894, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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8.1 Title page of H. M. Herwig, The Art of Curing Sympathetically (1700). By permission of the British Library

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8.2 Title page of [A] New Mad Tom of Bedlam (1695?). By permission of the British Library

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Anderson is Principal Lecturer in English and Head of English at Sheffield Hallam University, where she specializes in early modern literature and drama. She has published widely on interdisciplinary approaches to a range of early modern performance genres and is the author of Echo and Meaning on Early Modern English Stages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her work has appeared in journals including Theatre Survey, Early Theatre, and Cahiers Elisabéthains. She tweets @DrSusanAnderson. Liam Haydon completed his PhD, focused on Paradise Lost and the epic tradition, at Manchester in 2012. He taught Renaissance literature at Manchester and Lancaster before taking up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce at the University of Kent. His work focused on the ways in which the corporation was embedded in early modern literature and culture. His monograph on the topic, Corporate Cultures, was published in 2018. Since October 2018, he has worked as an international development policy manager at United Kingdom Research and Innovation. Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English and affiliate of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is the author of Male-toFemale Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (Routledge, 2016). With Will Fisher and Colby Gordon, she is coediting a special issue on “Early Modern Trans Studies”, forthcoming from the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. She is currently at work on a book about disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies in the early modern period. Edmond Smith completed his PhD, focused on the East India Company’s economic and social networks, at the University of Cambridge in 2016. Since then, he undertook a postdoctoral position at the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce at the University of Kent before taking up a permanent post as Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures at the University of Manchester in 2018. His work focuses on global economic cultures and he has published numerous articles and chapters exploring the role of corporate and mercantile actors in the emergence of a “globalized” economy in the early modern period. Since January 2019, he has led a British Academy-funded project linking research on international borderlands with contemporary policy debates. Adleen Crapo is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her teaching focuses on colonialism and the early modern period. Her research considers disability and masculinity in Renaissance Europe. She is interested particularly in the work of Cervantes, Scarron, and Milton.

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Bianca Frohne is a lecturer in medieval history at Kiel University, Germany. She received her doctorate in 2013 from the University of Bremen, where she studied history and art history. She is a member of the research group “Homo debilis. Dis/ability in Premodern Societies” and a coeditor of the handbook Premodern Dis/ability History. A Companion (Didymos, 2017). Other works include “Infirmitas: Vorschläge für eine Diskursgeschichte des ‘gebrechlichen’ Körpers in der Vormoderne” in WerkstattGeschichte (2015) and “Records of Infirmity: Dis/ability and Life Writing in 16th Century Germany” in Historia Hospitalium (2015). She is currently working on her postdoctoral research project “Experiences of Pain in the Early and High Middle Ages.” Another volume, Corporealities of Suffering. Dis/ability and Pain in the Middle Ages, edited by B. Frohne and J. Kuuliala (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), is forthcoming. Jennifer Nelson is a professor in the English Department at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC; she teaches and studies Shakespeare, Deafness, sign languages, and disability as routine parts of her work. She has published on American Sign Language poetry, Deaf American Prose, Deafness and muteness in film, John Bulwer’s manual rhetoric and the deaf community. Emily Lathrop is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at George Washington University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Iowa and a Master’s degree in early modern literature from King’s College London. Her work broadly deals with audience reception, both early modern and modern, across digital, textual, theatrical, and educational spheres. Her current work is concerned with the ways in which modern theatres construct and enact audience engagement. You can find her work in Cahiers Élisabéthains. Emily is also a theatre practitioner, working as a stage manager, dramaturg, and teaching artist. She is a member of Actors’ Equity. Sonya Freeman Loftis is an associate professor of English at Morehouse College, where she specializes in Shakespeare and disability studies. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Surrogates: Rewriting Renaissance Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (Indiana University Press, 2015), the coeditor of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion (Routledge, 2017), and the author of over a dozen scholarly articles on early modern literature and disability studies. She has articles published and forthcoming in The Disability Studies Reader, Shakespeare Survey, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Shakespeare Bulletin.

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

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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 SUSAN ANDERSON AND LIAM HAYDON

Disability is a categorization of human difference that is both highly historically specific and trans-historically observable. It is both socially constructed and rooted in the physical conditions of the real. The challenge for historical disability studies, therefore, is to maintain a stable object of inquiry while also doing justice to the unavoidable alterity of its manifestations in the past. This collection of essays, furthermore, deals with a range of contexts and cultures that, although they fit into a fairly narrowly defined notion of the European Renaissance (dated approximately 1450–1650), vary considerably. Even within these parameters, the examples and patterns discussed cannot be made to cohere into a singular model of “disability in the Renaissance.” Instead, this book offers evidence of the possibilities for disability that existed in the European Renaissance: configurations of bodies, minds, and collectives that have left evidence of some of the ways that normativity and its challengers interacted in the past. Fiona Kumari Campbell’s definition of ableism is a useful starting point for this purpose because of its flexibility. According to Campbell, ableism is a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. (Campbell, quoted in Shakespeare 2014: 51) Embedded in this statement is an outline of the process of transition whereby ideas about what human beings could be become ideals about what they should be, and eventually standards of what they are. To explore whether and how such networks might be found to have operated in the Renaissance and what kinds of self and body they might have produced, we need look no further than the iconic image of the Vitruvian Man (Figure 0.1), sketched in a notebook by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1490. The figure is drawn in several positions overlaid on top of each other, creating a multilimbed man whose fingertips and toes touch the circumference of a circle and the borders of a square that are also carefully traced onto the paper. These geometrical sketches demonstrate the ideal proportions of the human body, as outlined by the Roman author and architect, Vitruvius. Despite its somewhat surreal doubling of limbs, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man does seem to depict a “corporeal standard.” An emblem of Renaissance humanism, the image is described by Rosi Braidotti (2013) as “an ideal of bodily perfection which, in keeping with the classical dictum mens sana in corpore sano, doubles up as a set of mental, discursive and spiritual values” (13). As such, she considers it a “basic

Note on sources: i/j and u/v have been silently corrected in quotations from Renaissance sources. Capitalization and punctuation have been retained. Publication dates are as given in the text, except the new year is silently corrected to the January 1.

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DISABILITY IN THE RENAISSANCE

FIGURE 0.1  Da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490.

unit of reference” for what constitutes the “human” (143), and one that establishes the parameters for the development of liberal humanism in the Enlightenment three centuries later. Although from our perspective the image may remind us of subsequent philosophical and social movements, it also looks back to earlier ones. The image’s proportionality is an example of the Renaissance interest in Pythagorean number mysticism and the

INTRODUCTION

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burgeoning revival of Neoplatonic philosophy, pioneered by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in fifteenth-century Florence. Leonardo’s drawing envisages the human body as a microcosmic emblem of macrocosmic proportionality, demonstrating that mathematical ratios can be used to express the structuring principles of the universe. These ratios, by their very nature, could be applied at all scales and levels, from human bodies or musical instruments to planetary orbits and the entire cosmos, as envisaged in Plato’s Timaeus (Jowett 1953: 721–2). As such, the image represents an idealized symbol of the form of humanity, not necessarily a depiction of human normativity. Yet Braidotti is right to point out the assumptions the image implies. To start with, the depiction of a naked male body as representative of the human form unavoidably signals particular gendered and sexed categorizations as an obvious norm, alongside further implied characteristics of physical agility and ability to stand as visible physical signifiers of human capability, along with relative hairlessness and visible muscularity as markers of aesthetic desirability. Whether the person depicted in the image is purely imaginary or, as has been suggested, a self-portrait (Nicholl 2004: 247), the specific qualities of this individual create normative expectations when they are incorporated into this image of “the human.” Furthermore, such idealized forms are the aspiration to which physical and real forms reach. The more like its ideal form an object is, the more perfect and more preferable. The Vitruvian Man has thus functioned for centuries as a symbol both of an idealized form (and thus one which is de facto unattainable) and of standard assumptions about actual human forms and their normative qualities. The creator of this image, Leonardo da Vinci, can also be made to figure a range of contradictory notions about human nature. One of the archetypal geniuses of Renaissance art, he was also illegitimate, left-handed, vegetarian (at least in later life), and would probably be considered gay according to modern categorizations, all characteristics that depart from several of the assumed human norms of his society (Nicholl 2004: 11, 18, 43, 58). Leonardo also regularly features in lists of famous and successful people with dyslexia in popular media1 and is routinely cited as dyslexic in academic papers (e.g. Brunswick et al. 2011). This is regardless of the potential ethical and logistical problems with retrospectively diagnosing historical individuals with learning disabilities (Adelman and Adelman 1987; see also Aaron, Phillips, and Larsen 1988). Different elements of Leonardo’s reputation and identity have received differing levels of emphasis over time. During the nineteenth century, he was invoked as one of the quintessential figures of the newly named “Renaissance,” and his combination of scientific and artistic interests made him the original “Renaissance Man” (Barrie 1979; Burckhardt 1990: 104). Combining these various aspects of his life, Leonardo could easily be constructed as an example of the “supercrip,” an unrealistic ideal who denies or “overcomes” any limiting social oppression (Schalk 2016), his superlative talent winning out over any barriers he might have experienced. But such narrativizing only serves to fit Leonardo into another kind of model, and elides the impact of difference on life in the Renaissance rather than elucidating it. Both Leonardo’s work and his life thus demonstrate the way that the Renaissance period can be used to reify and naturalize particular ideals of the human body and mind based on later rewritings of the period and projections of later cultural standards back onto the past, finding origins where there are perhaps only similarities. Instead, discussion of how disability might have been experienced and understood historically must be placed within an understanding of the contexts that shaped it.

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0.1. RENAISSANCE CONTEXTS It is important, therefore, to highlight a number of philosophical and ideological frameworks that dominated European Renaissance thought and culture and that must inform our reading of individuals and phenomena from the past. The humoral conception of the body and its functions; a providential understanding of the body, its shaping, and its power to reveal (or shape) human behavior; and advances in medicinal science, particularly surgery, provided the intellectual frameworks by which Renaissance thinkers understood able and disabled bodies and minds. The idea that the body was composed of humors was part of a conceptualization of natural balance derived from the ancient Greeks. Just as the elements of creation (earth, air, fire, and water) were balanced and synchronous, so too was the composition of natural substances (including the human body) by blood, bile, phlegm, and water. The cause of disease was understood to be the imbalance of humors, or of their moving inappropriately within the body. Hippocrates, debunking the myth that epilepsy was caused by the Gods (and hence known as the sacred disease), argued that it had the same humoral cause as any other disease: All these symptoms he endures when the cold phlegm passes into the warm blood, for it congeals and stops the blood. And if the deflexion be copious and thick, it immediately proves fatal to him, for by its cold it prevails over the blood and congeals it. (Hippocrates 1868: 362) Hippocrates’ model of illness was an imbalance, or more precisely a mis-positioning, of the humoral liquids within the body. The idea of humors persisted into the early modern period primarily through the work of writers like Avicenna, who combined the texts of authorities such as Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, and others into authoritative medicinal compendia. Upsetting the balance or coordination between the humors was thought to be the way in which God acted upon the human body, a viewpoint that combined Hippocrates’ rudimentary understanding of bodily and dietary health with a providentialist view of disease and recovery. The bodily humors were generally understood in the early modern period to be phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile, which might be expressed or manifested within the oppositional pairs of hot/cool and moist/dry. These in turn gave rise to personalities such as phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric (angry), which could be modified or balanced by the correct diet or environment. The humors, and the humoral body, were “thus employed with a wide range of meanings. It could signify material states, qualities, or individual dispositions that were the result of an inherent composition of the body influenced by its environment” (Orland 2012: 444–5). The understanding of health and vitality through the humors led naturally to analogical reasoning, whether in similarities or opposites. If something was caused by an overabundance of heat and dryness, then cool and moist foods such as lettuce were required; alternatively, an imbalance could be adjusted by matching foods to the weaker humor to strengthen it within the body. Beyond the need for a balancing diet, humors were a key part of consumption and digestion; food was broken down by the stomach into a basic state (chyle), which was then “transported to the liver and there concocted (literally, ‘cooked’) into blood, the two biles, and phlegm” (Siraisi 1990: 106). Blood was a humor in its “pure” state, but in fact blood in the body was generally made up of blood combined with the other humors in various proportions, and the mixture of this was carried around the body to nourish its organs. So the body was literally composed

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of humors, and consequently perceived to be generally “liquid” (that is, composed of fluids working alongside and within porous and changeable solids), allowing almost everywhere within it the mixture of substances that gave rise to complex emotional or physical states. The humoral balance differed between adults naturally, hence the variety in temperament, but was also explained by geographical, cultural, social, or physiological difference. People from different countries had a different makeup of humors, as did men and women. Indeed, the difference between men and women was explained by humors present from conception: “heat and dryness made men, cold and wet made women” (Gowing 2014: 7). Humors were also important in the development of children: “children’s uniqueness resided in their humours—their bodies and minds were warm, soft and weak, abounding in the humour blood” (Newton 2012: 221). The balance of humors thus naturally changed over time, with the warm and moist humors of children gradually cooling and drying as they reached “temperate” adulthood and continuing into “melancholic” old age. This humoral model of the normative life course provided a framework for understanding and pathologizing bodies and minds that frequently recurs as the basis for medical and social attitudes in the period.

0.1.1. Providence and religion Another concept that shaped attitudes toward disability in the period was the notion of Providence: the idea that God’s foreknowledge gives all things purpose, including apparently adverse events or undesirable conditions. Some forms of disability, particularly physical disability, came under this categorization in the period. Physical disability in Renaissance Europe, particularly those disabilities arising from birth or appearing in childhood, was generally permanent and often highly visible. For this reason, although the term “disabled” was available, it was generally used by early modern writers in the sense of “barred from” or as an incapacity (whether general or specific) to perform a particular task or function, rather than in any medical sense. For that, early moderns used “deformed” and its cognates, emphasizing the physicality of the non-normative body (Davis 2002: 52; Wilson 2017). Moreover, since God had ordained all things, “monstrous births” became signs either of extraordinary events to come or of moral failings in their parents or the populace more generally (Bates 2005; French 2015: 145–6). The same providentialism meant that those with non-normative bodies were often assumed to have “deformed” minds, either in intelligence or in morality. Though widespread, such a belief was not universal. In his Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione is interested in the perfecting of necessary qualities such as virtue, wit, and reason. The question of how far such perfecting is possible and what “raw materials” are necessary for the work runs through the text with a certain amount of anxiety, as he considers at length the relationship between nature and nurture (what might be termed fashioning and self-fashioning). Castiglione reflects on the fact that nature does not distribute her gifts evenly: Truth it is, whether it be through the favour of the starres or of nature, some there are borne endowed wyth suche graces, that they seeme not to have bene borne, but rather facioned with the verye hande of some God, and abounde in all goodnesse bothe of bodye and mynde. As againe we see some so unapte and dull, that a man wyl not beleve, but nature hath brought them into the worlde for a spite and mockerie. (Hoby 1561: C2v–C3r)

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Castiglione’s understanding of human variation draws on ideas of providentialism. The anthropomorphizing of nature and God (or nature through God) allows for a sense of intentional distribution of positive and negative physical and mental capacities among the human population. Such “graces” are based on divine favor (presumably, given the nexus of stars, God, nature, and fate) in anticipation of particular behavior, though Castiglione leaves open the possibility of an alternative reading: that the “goodnesse both of bodye and mynde” is the cause, not the result, of good actions, since they are most capable of performing the type of good actions he is modeling. Later in his text, Castiglione notes that the fear of being perceived as being judged by God, or otherwise morally lacking, causes people to hide their disabilities: Therfore doeth ech man seeke to cover the defaultes of nature, aswell in the minde, as also in the bodie: the which is to be seene in the blinde, lame, crooked and other mayned and deformed creatures. For although these imperfections may be layed to nature, yet doeth it greeve ech man to have them in him self: bicause it seemeth by the testimonie of the self same nature that a man hath that default or blemishe (as it were) for a patent and token of his ill inclination. (Hoby 1561: Dn3v–Dn4r) Castiglione is actually interested not in the “defaultes of nature” per se, but in the social consequences of belief around the body. These apparent defects are only important insofar as they change the opinion of other members of the court; those perceived to be “imperfect” in body may be unfairly prejudged by those around them. In fact, as the passage goes on to clarify, Castiglione is explicitly rejecting a fully providentialist model: Therfore in case vertues were as natural to us, as heavinesse to the stone, we shoulde never accustome our selves to vice. Nor yet are vices naturall in this sort, for then shoulde we never be virtuous. (Hoby 1561: Dn4v) For Castiglione, then, virtue and vice coexist in human nature, and in fact it is learning, good society, and self-reflection, not the state of the body, which make someone virtuous. As with Montaigne and Bacon (discussed in Section 0.3), while the state of the body may provide some basis for behavior—not least through an ability to perform particular tasks—the link is not predetermined. Individuals must take responsibility for fashioning themselves, regardless of their gifts or difficulties, into virtuous individuals. Though this was by no means a universal opinion—the providentialist model persisted through the Renaissance—it demonstrates the range of thinking about the disabled body that was available in the period.

0.1.2. Medical and scientific developments It should be no surprise, then, that early modern medicinal science took account of disability, and in particular ways to “overcome” physical impairment, usually expressed in the language of supplying a defect. Harry Berger Jr. (2000) has demonstrated the way this logic persists in “the medical and graphic surgeries that mediate the passage from the natural to the idealized body” (115). These are the medical analogies of the selffashioning in Castiglione, a way of modeling and then improving upon nature’s work. The categories of “natural” and “ideal” reveal the way in which the “natural” body is in fact the “defective” body, requiring all manner of prostheses to function well. Early humanists tended to celebrate the technological ingenuity that allowed humanity not just to supply defects, but also to extend the potential of the body. Berger Jr. (2000) offers the example of the camera obscura in which the “increase and refinement of visual

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power is consequent on its being freed, alienated, from the limits of the body” (105). Thus, even the normative body requires technological improvement, especially for specific skills or in fields of particular expertise (painting, in this case). Andreas Vesalius, a lecturer in anatomy at the University of Padua, is generally acknowledged as the founder of Renaissance anatomical studies. His 1543 treatise De Humani Corporis Fabrica (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”) subjected the classical models of bodily function (such as the humoral and Galenic models) to scrutiny via surgery and dissection. The Fabrica details with precision the functions of the organs, brain, and muscles, as well as the bone structure of the human body, accompanied by detailed drawings for students of anatomy. The following year, when Vesalius performed a public dissection of a “hunchback girl who had died of pneumonia” in Pisa, the number of people wanting to attend meant a public holiday had to be declared, and a local surgeon was injured when he fell from the top of the anatomical theatre (Catani and Sandrone 2015: 32). Followers of Vesalius—including Ambroise Paré, discussed in more detail in Chapter 2— spread his ideas on anatomy and surgery. New instruments were developed for surgery, with a particular practical focus on battlefield injuries. The practice of reconstructive surgery began in Italy with the work of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, whose work with replacement noses, lips, and ears was detailed in his 1597 volume De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem. Tagliacozzi seems to have achieved solid results with his methodology, and it found disciples across Europe, with editions of the work being pirated in Italy and printed (legitimately) in Frankfurt for wider distribution (Tomba et al. 2014: 447). The work was dedicated to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, whom Tagliacozzi had treated for an unspecified topical problem with his nose in 1586. Vincenzo was “one of the first Renaissance rulers to abide by the politics of compassion” (Finucci 2015: 66); that is, he showed a sustained interest in the health and welfare of subordinates, prioritizing the treatment of wounded soldiers during warfare by supporting camp doctors. Thus, supporting Tagliacozzi’s work was a natural political as well as personal choice. The coordination between the two men also gestures toward the development of personal scientific and political networks devoted to the development of medicine, especially those treatments designed to eliminate or ameliorate disability, disfigurement, and disease. Tagliacozzi’s description of his method of skin grafting was translated into English by Alexander Read and published posthumously in 1687 as part of a larger treatise on the art and practice of surgery (“chirugery”). The translation focuses on Tagliacozzi’s method, noting that while classical authors had the idea for grafting, they give instruction “so ambiguously, that he, who upon their credit should undertake the reparation of any of these lost parts, would lose his own; and perhaps the Patient his life” (Read 1687: 646). Read, by contrast, offers specific instruction, drawn from his own experience and practice, to achieve the best results for the patient: The only part to supply the Nose and Lips, is the Arm above the Elbow; and to supply the Ears, the Skin behind the Ears. For neither disfigures a Man, since the Arm is covered with Clothes, and the new Ear does indifferently well cover the place behind it, whence it was taken. (1687: 647) The location of the graft was crucial, as Read made clear, because only a similar sort of skin would take successfully. In fact, in order for the skin from the arm to be successfully grafted to the face, the patient had to remain in a sort of frame to hold the upper arm stationary across the face for three weeks. There is, then, a balance of addition and

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subtraction within the body, with a defect not being fully resolved, but simply shifted to a less visible place. The nature of the disability here, therefore, is not so much the lack of the body part but the prominence of that lack. As well as disfigurements from warfare, the replacement of noses in particular was of value to those suffering from venereal disease, especially syphilis. Soldiers, of course, were particularly vulnerable to these diseases, being highly mobile, away from civil society, and presented with opportunities to solicit sex either from sex workers or locals wherever they were camped. The fact that syphilis was so visible (in the “saddle nose”) and carried such social stigma led to the development of high-quality prosthetic noses in early modern Europe (Figure 0.2). Nasal disfigurement consequently figured highly in political satire and popular jest. Marcus Nevitt has teased out the ways in which the cavalier poet William Davenant’s nose, lost to syphilis, was reimagined in poetry, from Hester Pulter’s warning against his “perilous vulnerability to desire” (2009: 288) to John Denham’s attempt to shame Davenant over his poor military service by making him and his book (Gondibert)

FIGURE 0.2  Artificial nose, Europe, 1601–1800. Licensed under Creative Commons from the Science Museum, London.

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“aggregates of detachable bits and incomplete pieces” (2009: 295). The reduction of Davenant’s identity to a missing part creates a corporeal identity figured around absence, fitted to a personal identity similarly defined by absences (from the battlefield, the Royalist cause, or social status) and reconfiguration. The breaking and refiguring of bodies had parallel development in Renaissance art and science. The poetic blazon broke the (generally female) body into its constituent parts, reimagining them as “a collection of passive, inanimate things, like jewels or flowers” (Hammons 2010: 124) to be admired, collected, or owned. In science, too, anatomists were questioning the nature of the human body: if it was not a perfectly unified representation or microcosm of God’s perfect universe, then “what were the units out of which the body was composed, and into which it could be divided and subdivided?” (Sawday 1995: 96). These traditions coalesced in artistically sophisticated anatomy books, whose flaps could be opened to reveal the veins, organs, and other internal workings of the body. The increased interest in the workings of the body led to surgical and prosthetic advancements, but did little to alter the image of the perfectly functioning body that circulated in Renaissance Europe. Physical defects, then, had a certain logic of visibility that established a need and a priority in their treatment, but what about mental illness? Unlike physical disability, it was thought perfectly possible to be temporarily out of one’s wits. Hamlet’s “antic disposition” (Greenblatt et al. 1996: I.v.172) is somewhere between a performance and an extreme form of melancholy, but is in any case resolved when the truth about Claudius is revealed (or at least once Hamlet believes he knows the truth). Likewise, Orlando Furioso details Orlando’s madness, which is proved to be temporary once Astolfo rides to the moon on a chariot and returns with Orlando’s wits in a flask. Astolfo actually finds a large quantity of flasks on the moon, including his own, and for those he believed to be complete fools; from this he concludes that even those who seem to have no mental faculties on earth are potentially curable or able, if only their wits could be somehow restored. The works of pioneers such as Paré and Tagliacozzi tend to be regarded as early iterations of modern practice, but C. F. Goodey (2004) has argued that early medical texts that dealt with what we might now term intellectual disability did so in ways that are not especially compatible with modern understanding (and are certainly not early versions of the same kind of science). Felix Platter (or Plater) was an anatomical professor and pathologist at Basel who produced a student-friendly edition of Vesalius’ Fabrica in 1583. His larger work, Observationum: In Hominis Affectibus Plerisque, Corpori et Animo, focuses on injuries to the brain, which may come from physical injuries to the head or eye, but also (by a parallel to other underdeveloped parts of the body) via idleness or overuse of the brain. These, as well as childhood, old age, or hereditary weaknesses, are the causes of intellectual disability, which Goodey (2004) argues should most appropriately be termed “foolishness,” since it sits “at the same taxonomic level as conditions we would hardly group with intellectual disability: drunkenness, hypochondria, excess emotion, melancholy, mania, demonic possession, hydrophobia and frenzy” (298). Whatever the cause of the decline of mental faculties, Platter is able to confidently suggest a cure—and even those causes that he accepts cannot ultimately be fully cured, especially hereditary problems, social status, or old age, can, he suggests, nonetheless be greatly improved by his exercises. Between these models of mental illness and the developments in reconstructive surgery, it is clear that some paradigms of what we would recognize as “disability” were in circulation in cultural and medical practice.

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0.2. THEORIZING DISABILITY It is an essential premise of this volume that “‘Disability’ was indeed an operational identity category in the English Renaissance,” as Hobgood and Wood state (2013b: 7), even if its meanings are significantly different from our own. Hobgood and Wood are responding here to Lennard Davis’ location of the origins of disability, as we understand it now, in the eighteenth century, saying that before this point: Although there may have been a great number of people with disabilities, one must, however, assume that disability was not an operative category. (2002: 50–1) It is true that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the origination of many of the institutionalizing aspects of disability as a social category. These include the founding of philanthropic societies, charities, medical organizations, and governmental mechanisms that systematized approaches to social issues more thoroughly and consistently than in earlier periods. Davis argues that a relatively large proportion of those “with differences in visual, auditory, or mobile ability can be incorporated into a preindustrial society” (2002: 50–1). That is, without the essentializing and universalizing logic of the factory, labor conditions and expected output are more flexible and more able to account for those who would be deemed “unproductive” under more rigid working conditions. As Haydon and Smith show in Chapter 2, corporations played a significant role in adjusting conditions to allow continued service. Similarly, even if Leonardo da Vinci was indeed dyslexic, it is debatable whether that was functionally a disability in his social context, given that large parts of the population were unable to read anyway. Chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which reading, or the inability to read, might be negotiated in the context of disability. These questions about the relationship between individual body-minds2 and their social contexts bring us to a key philosophical crux in disability studies. Davis’ formulation quoted above establishes a distinction between “people with disabilities” on the one hand and “disability” as an abstract noun on the other. More usually, this distinction is expressed using the term “impairment” in contrast with the term “disability” to denote a division between the conditions of experience and the ideological constructions through which we interpret them. This distinction between ideas and bodies, between theory and practice, between conceptualizations and corporeality, and the relations between and within these binary categories is at the heart of recent debates about how we define disability. Davis puts it this way: Impairment is the physical fact of lacking an arm or a leg. Disability is the social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access. (2002: 12) This distinction establishes the terms required for the “social model of disability,” a way of understanding disability as a form of social oppression, which grew out of disability activism in the 1970s (Thomas 2002: 39). As Thomas notes, this way of understanding disability considers any disadvantage to be caused by “the social relationships between the impaired and the non-impaired, rather than as caused by impairment per se” (40). By refocusing attention on the disabling environment, this model enables activists to challenge assumptions and practices that restrict access to participation in society. The social model has attracted criticism for both essentializing impairment and potentially ignoring it. Abberley, for example, points out that impairment itself is “not ‘natural’ but an historically changing category” (1996: 61). If, as Judith Butler

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(1999:  12) suggests, there is no “prediscursive anatomical facticity” that is not always already mediated through ideology, the “physical fact” Davis invokes will have different meanings in different contexts. On the other hand, Tom Shakespeare argues that the social model’s insistence that disability is caused by context and not impairment risks ignoring the lived experience of disabled people (Shakespeare 2014). Shakespeare argues that impairment itself can still be understood as restrictive in some ways, independently of social attitudes. He highlights the utopian thinking that characterizes barrier-free social ideals, arguing that, when probed, models of a barrier-free world still exclude people with particular kinds of impairments. Historical disability studies can contribute to this discussion by offering instructive comparisons that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but based in social structures that have existed and can thus be tested. These are observable in literature, as well as the medicinal texts described above, or the family, corporate, and legal records discussed in the chapters of this volume. The social model is only one way of understanding disability, of course. It is common practice in introducing work in historical disability studies to outline a range of different models as a way of tracing the development of thinking about disability (e.g. Hobgood and Wood 2013b; Iyengar 2015). Usually, this includes discussion of the way that the social model of disability challenged and displaced the “medical model” of disability. Certainly, in terms of disability studies itself, the development of the distinction between the medical and social models is a fundamental starting point for the discipline. The medical model denotes a way of thinking about disability that locates the restrictions of disability within the individual and presents impairment as a target for medical intervention in order to cure the individual and thus create or restore normality. If cure is unavailable, then, as Thomas puts it, “restrictions of activity and social disadvantage are the inevitable and tragic consequences of being impaired” (2002: 40). Too often, however, it is assumed that the medical model of disability, with its negative and ableist implications, is broadly characteristic of “how things used to be.” The chauvinism of the present leads critics to assume that life for people with disabilities in the past was inevitably abject. The characterization of the medical model as the way in which disability was understood in the past simplifies the complexities of historical understandings of the body–mind. For example, Thomas suggests that the medical model of disability is implicit in “lay, medical, welfarist and other cultural discourses,” and it is these “traditional ideas” that the newer social model refutes (2002: 40). The use of the term “traditional” should alert historians to the potential for further inquiry as to the origins and locations of this discourse. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that the word itself is an immediate sign that such ideas are in fact historically and culturally contingent, and that some of their ideological power is gained by the concealment of their contingency. By examining alternative contexts for understanding human difference, the “traditional” status of these notions can be dislodged.

0.3. RENAISSANCE APPROACHES TO DISABILITY: MONTAIGNE AND BACON Certainly, the contributions gathered in this volume belie the notion that there is anything resembling a premodern “traditional” understanding of disability. Nevertheless, it is useful to examine contemporary theorists’ notions of human diversity to see what kinds of assumptions are in play. The essays of Michel de Montaigne offer a rich source of this

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kind of evidence. Throughout his writing, Montaigne is constantly reasoning through questions and deducing and inducting principles and truths by considering exempla and propositions. This rationalism repeatedly invokes a commonsense notion of the subject, constituted as a stable and individualized quality of humanness. Nevertheless, Montaigne periodically feels the need to restate the boundaries of subjectivity, even if his tone suggests that such distinctions are obvious. For example, in “On Fear” (I.18), he notes that he will “leave aside simple folk” in his consideration of the topic, as he characterizes their fears as irrational superstitions (81–4). Here, Montaigne is making a class-based distinction, but elsewhere he considers mental capacity to be a quality potentially independent of social class. For example, in the 1580 version of “On the Inequality There Is between Us” (I.42), Montaigne praises Epaminondas, a fourth-century Greek general and one of his personal heroes. In noting how superior he finds Epaminondas to other men, Montaigne specifies, “I mean men in their right mind for fools and those made witless by accident are not complete men” (288). Montaigne’s argument in “On the Inequality There Is between Us” is that high social status does not necessarily indicate superior worthiness. But he leaves intact the assumption that some individuals are indeed more deserving. His considerations depend upon the presupposition that the differences between humans are firstly innate, and thus expressive of something essential about each person, and secondly of different moral and social value and thus legitimately hierarchizable. Some souls are better than others, even if worldly hierarchy does not always match this merit properly. Since advantages of birth and luck can be ruined by folly, however, it is nevertheless the individual’s responsibility to actively intervene in their own lives. This conclusion is based upon the assumption of a basic set of normative characteristics and opportunities. In judging the worth of individuals, Montaigne counsels against being distracted by external, inessential properties like clothing and wealth. His list of the questions to ask in this thought experiment conflates physical and moral qualities: Is his body functioning properly? Is it quick and healthy? What sort of soul does he have? Is his soul a beautiful one, able, happily endowed with all her functions?3 Are her riches her own or are they borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? Does she face drawn swords with steady gaze? Does it not bother her whether she expires with a sigh or a slit throat? Is she calm, unruffled and contented? That is what we need to know; that is what the immense distances between us men should be judged by. (289–90) So social inequality is justified, or justifiable, by the different levels of desert of different people. The criteria for desert involve physical health and ability, mental fortitude (through the acceptance of stoic principles), and independence from worldly advantage. The importance of independence is made clear in Montaigne’s counterexample of “the mass of men nowadays, senseless, base, servile, unstable … men totally dependent upon others” (290). Ideals of independence elide the necessity of human cooperation (as Tobin Siebers has pointed out, human society is essentially “a community of dependent frail bodies that rely on others for survival” (2008: 182)). Montaigne’s own position in his country retreat offers independence from court and thus any society that “counts,” supported by the labor of servants whose work is excluded from this calculus of dependency. Montaigne’s wealth and social position enable him to ignore the inevitability of dependence in human society, and thus he excludes it from his sense of its place in what makes an admirable man or, by extension, any sort of man.

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It is not necessarily the case, however, that Montaigne counts himself above the “mass of men nowadays”; that is, sordidly “dependent.” He discusses his own experience of chronic illness in “On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers” (II.37). Here, Montaigne reflects on the way that chronic pain has changed his understanding of what constitutes a life worth living. Inheriting his father’s disposition to kidney stones was one of Montaigne’s worst fears as a younger man, and he describes his youthful support for euthanasia in such cases: “I declared that life should be amputated at the point where it is alive and healthy” (859). But once the dreaded outcome has come to pass, and Montaigne starts to experience frequent painful attacks, he finds that “after about eighteen months in this distasteful state, I have already learnt how to get used to it. I have made a compact with this colical style of life; I can find sources of hope and consolation in it” (859). He reports that he had thought that his “bodily sufferings” would be “so unbearable that in truth my fear of them exceeded the suffering they now cause me” (860). He no longer approves of the legendary Tamburlaine’s practice of executing lepers to free them from suffering, wryly commenting “any of them would rather have been thrice a leper than to cease to be” (859). Montaigne thus comes to recognize the importance of subjective experience over the assumptions of normativity. One of the chief problems with ill-health, it seems, is doctors. Montaigne declares that even in his worst moments “a man can still find things bearable if his soul has cast off the weight of the fear of dying and the weight of all the warning threats, inferences and complications which Medicine stuffs into our heads” (860). This is surely tonguein-cheek, but Montaigne’s intense skepticism of the medical profession is of a piece with his valorization of independence. Montaigne prefers folk remedies and those recorded in Classical sources above those of contemporary medical practitioners. He would rather deal with his illness himself than let “experts” interfere. The responsibility is upon the learned individual—with sufficient wealth and leisure time to do so—to treat themselves according to their own knowledge of medical literature and practice, and if that fails, to make their own reconciliation with chronic illness and death. We might have expected Montaigne to deal further with the topic of disability in his essay “On the Lame” (III.11), but, despite what the title would seem to suggest, this essay is mostly about the nature of knowledge and experience. The idea of lameness is merely brought in as an example of the way that commonly held beliefs (in this case, the notion that lame women are better sexual partners) have the tendency to be confirmed by experience merely because they are believed, and not because experience actually backs them up. Montaigne’s interest in disability is a subset of his interest in the variety of human experience. Indeed, the second book of essays ends with the declaration that “the most general style followed by Nature is variety,” which accords with Snyder’s sense that Montaigne has a broadly positive attitude toward difference (2002: 194), particularly when, earlier in the volume, he declares that “what we call monsters are not so for God” (808; also cited in Snyder 2002). The benign curiosity that seems to motivate the essays and their exploration of this variety is not necessarily consistently benevolent from a disability perspective, however, as is demonstrated by Montaigne’s reflections in “On Physiognomy” (III.12). Here, he draws a distinction between “surface ugliness,” such as facial blemishes where “the limbs are well-proportioned and whole,” and what he terms “the other kind, which is strictly speaking deformity.” Deformity, according to Montaigne, “is more substantial and more inclined to turn its effects inwards” (1198–9). Thus, the differentiation between outward show and inner essential qualities is invoked to assert a correspondence between

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them, which might form the basis of the judgments of a person’s relative worthiness that Montaigne outlined in his justification of inequality. The logical possibilities of this correspondence are explored more fully by Montaigne’s fellow essayist, Francis Bacon, in his essay, “Of Deformity.” Bacon focuses on physical imperfections and their relationship with personality and action, establishing a duality of body and mind. Bacon asserts that there is a balance between body and mind such that “where Nature erreth in the One, she ventureth in the Other” (2000: 133). That is, a deficient body is compensated for by a superlative mind. Thus far, Bacon seems to subscribe to a compensatory model of disability, suggesting that it is a form of deficit that is a quantifiable deviation from the norm that can be matched by a hyper-ability in an alternative mode. Bacon’s implied norm, therefore, rather than constituting a binary opposition to deficit, seems more like the state in the middle of an Aristotelian tripartite model where the center balances between two poles of excess and deficit. Bacon stresses the importance of volition in what the individual makes of these gifts, claiming “there is in Man, an Election touching the Frame of his Minde, and a Necessity in the Frame of his Body” (133). The body, it seems, is fixed, but the mind can, through “Discipline,” be shaped. Deformity, Bacon concludes, is not a sign of a person’s character, then; rather, it is a factor that invariably shapes it in particular ways. In this sense, Bacon seems aware of a sort of proto-social model of disability when he describes the social opprobrium directed toward those with noticeably different bodies: “Whosoever hath any Thing fixed in his Person, that doth enduce Contempt, hath also a perpetuall Spurre in himselfe, to rescue and deliver himself from Scorne” (134). Such experiences, Bacon asserts, mean that, eventually “all Deformed Persons are extreme Bold” (134, emphasis in original). This shared life experience operates as a kind of determinism, meaning that those with visible deformities are highly motivated and cunning. Furthermore, Bacon suggests that their social aspirations benefit from others’ low expectations, to the point where he urges that when combined with “great Wit” (i.e. intelligence), “Deformity is an Advantage to Rising” (134). Bacon’s view of disability is thus framed within an explicitly hierarchized context where disability might be expected to hinder social advancement, along the lines of Montaigne’s valorization of the “able” body and soul. Bacon’s concern about the unexpected advancement of those considered “deformed” verges into paranoia as he compares the position of the “deformed” social climber to that of the eunuchs who earned the trust of ancient kings by being indiscriminately obnoxious to everyone. Bacon assumes that the eunuchs envy those who are not eunuchs, and analogously suggests that the “deformed” persons he speaks of are similarly bitter and envious. These negative traits mean that ancient kings valued the eunuchs’ consequent qualities as “good Spialls, and good Whisperers”; that is, spies and intriguers. Bacon explicitly states “much like is the Reason of Deformed Persons” (134). Bacon ends the essay with an acknowledgment that the social pressures he describes might spur “deformed” persons to become “Excellent” rather than duplicitous, and even provides a list of such worthies (including Aesop and Socrates). But though Bacon acknowledges a social component of disability, he does not consider this either worthy of challenge or capable of changing. Bacon’s argument seems to be that, far from being disadvantageous, disability can provide an individual with the motivation to prove detractors wrong. Bacon’s ideas thus prefigure later formulations of both the “supercrip” and the diabolical villain—stereotypical disablist fantasies that enact the erasure of disability from humanity.

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Both Bacon and Montaigne situate disabled individuals well outside the realm of the subject, even as they recognize the roles that disabled individuals can play in society and, in Montaigne’s case, acknowledge the frailty of their own physical embodiment and its effects on their perception and experience. Their understanding of human difference is fundamentally shaped by an implicit belief that humans are unequal. So although difference may well have been read in radically different ways in the past, “disability” remains an operative category in the history of exclusion and the naturalizing of inequality. Disability as a category has thus metamorphosed considerably over time and yet remains recognizable. As Snyder points out, “disability studies offers a platform and an interdisciplinary arena for the analysis of social meanings ascribed to variations across bodily and cognitive forms” (2002: 193–4). Disability scholarship is thus needed to clarify this fundamental aspect of social meaning in the Renaissance period. The chapters of this volume make use of an extraordinarily broad range of evidence to make early modern disability visible. This includes petitions, corporate records, medical texts, autobiographies, letters, family papers (and other materials such as bibles), hospital records, and various other forms of administrative records, alongside a wealth of literary sources. Disability, in its varied forms, was clearly acknowledged and negotiated as part of daily life in the Renaissance, and each chapter in the volume demonstrates some part of the range of meanings and constructions attached to specific understandings of disability in the Renaissance. Simone Chess’ chapter, “Atypical Bodies,” considers the dizzying range of normal and abnormal bodies depicted in the Renaissance, and the similarly vast range of meanings attached to those bodies—were they punishment or miracle; objects of pity, power, or curiosity; sexualized or isolated; accommodated or valorized? Chess demonstrates that approaches to atypicality were fluid and relational, and so have the power to undermine any concept of a fixed status of disability (or the body more generally) in the Renaissance. Drawing on contemporary ballads and other ephemeral print, Chess shows that Renaissance understanding of the “monstrous” body came by combining categories of observation: moral, allegorical, and anatomical epistemologies were all deployed in contemporary descriptions of atypicality. Moreover, those possessed of atypical bodies were often adept at manipulating these categories and code-switching to establish and safeguard their own place within society. Liam Haydon and Edmond Smith’s chapter, “Mobility Impairment,” uses the idea and records of the early modern corporation to assess the ways in which physical impairment was considered as part of the Renaissance labor market. Petitioners to the corporations stressed their service and usefulness, as well as their need, and awards were made based on the quality of the petitioner and their perceived willingness to be useful, rather than the need or severity of the injury. Mobility impairment came not just from birth, but from injuries in war or at work, and this chapter addresses the cultural manifestations of these acquired disabilities, as well as the social structures put in place to support those who were affected, their families, and their communities. Adleen Crapo’s chapter, “Chronic Pain and Illness,” notes that everyday pain (whether physical or emotional) can be difficult to make visible, and so concentrates on moments of public and/or spectacular pain in executions, torture, and medical works. Where pain is made public, it is used to create a sense of interiority, with the afflictions of the body used to create and examine a sense of self, such as a troubled sufferer, a voyager in search of a cure, or a spiritual penitent. Reformation attitudes to the idea of suffering pain as a spiritual journey (as an imitation of Christ) were complex, with Calvin counseling his

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followers neither to seek out pain nor to avoid it if it manifested itself. At the same time, methods of judicial torture developed in the latter part of the Renaissance emphasized the criminal as a painful or toxic part of the body politic that must be excised. Though sometimes controversial, disciplinary pain was an important part of state activity, not least in the spectacle it provided, further complicating the relationship between pain, the body, and the spiritual self. Bianca Frohne’s chapter, “Blindness,” provides a series of examples from early modern Germany to offer a physiological and cultural overview of visual impairments in the Renaissance. She demonstrates the range of meanings that “blindness” carried in early modern writings, from divine afflictions that could be equally miraculously healed to a symptom of old age and devoted labor, and in particular she notes the ways in which blind people were able to continue work (of various kinds). Taking an intersectional approach, Frohne considers the interaction between blindness and other social categories such as gender, class, age, and education. What it meant to be “blind” in the Renaissance often depended on those intersections, making blindness much more a cultural construct than a specific physical ailment. Jennifer Nelson’s chapter, “Deafness,” examines Renaissance deafness through the prism of “Deaf Gain,” challenging the idea that loss of hearing, with its cultural or cognitive gains, is indeed a kind of “loss.” Such gains are personally and historically contingent, but Nelson finds that in the Renaissance they clustered around the ability to shut out the world (selectively or otherwise). However, since Renaissance society privileged the power of spoken language, most of the representations of deafness—and the gains made from it—are temporary or performative, with the permanently deaf excluded both from society and its representations (in literature or the archive). Consequently, the power to stop one’s ears became an elective defense against the potentially poisonous or corrupting words of others. Susan Anderson’s chapter, “Speech,” further considers the Renaissance as a culture that valorized the spoken word. Anderson considers a range of theological, rhetorical, medical, and legal contexts that show how particular modes of speech were effectively linked to understandings of personhood in the period. In the last part of the chapter, Anderson considers dramatic representations of non-normative speech as a key source for understanding the relationship between speech and identity in the cultural imagination of the Renaissance. Emily Lathrop’s chapter, “Learning Difficulties,” summarizes the myriad ways in which difficulties in learning intersected with other social groupings, particularly the major Abrahamic religions. Lathrop shows that these religions generally advocate respect and inclusion for those with learning difficulties, though this can be at the cost of denying certain privileges or full membership of society. Lathrop also explores the legal and medical understanding of learning disabilities and the slippage between such difficulties and the more generalized “madness.” In doing so, she shows how learning disabilities—and associated conditions such as passivity or stupidity—were used to justify social relations, particularly in guardianship arrangements and as a legal justification for the conquest of the New World. Sonya Freeman Loftis’ chapter, “Mental Health Issues,” demonstrates the various ways in which Renaissance madness was situated as something beyond the reach of contemporary interpretative models, either because of a scarcity of symptoms and causes or an excess of them. Even the terminology of madness (“idiot,” “fool,” “distracted,” “melancholic,” and “lunatic” all circulated freely alongside “mad”) reveals the range

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of meanings and understandings ascribed to mental illness. Loftis shows how such conditions were socially constructed in both diagnosis and treatment(s). In particular, her focus on the association between madness and melancholy reveals the moral, spiritual, and supernatural associations of madness. Her chapter closes with an examination of the Bethlem Hospital, a rare source of records on madness, which demonstrates the ways in which the hospital conceived of itself as a curing institution, though very little actual treatment was offered to prisoners, who became instead sources of entertainment for visitors. The range of topics and approaches presented by this volume provides a starting point for further investigation into the complexities of Renaissance understandings and experiences of disability and its relationships with identity, the body–mind, physical labor, aging, spirituality, justice, and sexuality. Siebers argues that “being human guarantees that all other identities will eventually come into contact with some form of disability identity” (2008: 5); concomitantly, all other cultural formations and constructions will, too, intersect with disability eventually. It is clear that there is no singular mode of experiencing or understanding disability in the period, but this volume demonstrates some of the possible ways of thinking, living, and being in the Renaissance that have relevance for our understanding of disability now.

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CHAPTER ONE

Atypical Bodies Constructing (ab)normalcy in the Renaissance SIMONE CHESS

Malformed animals, conjoined twins, dwarfs, individuals with intersex conditions, several amputees, individuals with mobility impairments, a very fat bishop, two hunchbacks, and a pig-faced woman: representations of early modern atypicality ran the gamut from marvelous to mundane, from abstract to everyday. In this chapter, I will discuss only a small representative sampling of the many types of non-normative bodies that were recorded, discussed, fictionalized, and illustrated in early modern literary and cultural texts, in each case seeking to identify theoretical, psychological, and emotional cruxes in the representations of these atypical bodies. Were so-called monstrous births miracles, messages, or medical phenomena? Were adults with visible disabilities objects of pity or protagonists with power and potential? Could atypical bodies be seen as sexual or romanticized, or need they always be unsexed and isolated? Early modern literary and cultural texts demonstrate an understanding of disability and disfigurement at the tipping point between social/cultural and medical models, where atypical bodies are simultaneously discussed as spiritual metaphors and as medical conditions, and where suggested “cures” for atypicality vary from medicalization to moralization through acceptance, accommodation, and even valorization. In this way, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions and discussions of atypicality are very much early modern; they articulate approaches to disability that are simultaneously fixed and fluid, medical and magical, individual and relational, negative and optimistic. In terms of typicality as a term and idea, the Renaissance is at the cusp of a major change in how normalcy and abnormalcy are understood, categorized, and pathologized. Lennard Davis argues that: Before the early to mid-nineteenth century, Western society lacked a concept of normalcy … Before the rise of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word “ideal.” If one has a concept of the “ideal,” then all human beings fall below that standard and so exist in varying degrees of imperfection. The key point is that in a culture of the “ideal,” physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body. (2002: 105)1 Arguments like Davis’, together with reminders from premodern disability studies that disability was more visible, more common, and more public in the medieval and

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early modern periods, can give the impression that early moderns did not see or make distinctions about disability and atypicality in the way that we do today.2 But early moderns were in fact very aware of the difference between bodies that were simply imperfect and those that they saw as monstrous, deformed, amazing, or disgusting.3 In her analysis and itemization of medical language just in Shakespeare’s works, for example, Sujata Iyengar catalogues 391 disorders ranging from scabs to gout to earwax. At the same time, she acknowledges that “if we are interested in early modern embodiment, we have to consider not only the pathological body but the healthy one, and to historicize the early modern body. That is to say, the body and its processes, diseases and appearances are not themselves immutable and unchanging, but are themselves formed by different social, historical, and political forces” (Iyengar 2014: 1). But all approaches to ability and disability are similarly historically bound. As Tobin Siebers puts it, “To call disability an identity is to recognize that it is not a biological or natural property but an elastic social category both subject to social control and capable of effecting social change” (2008: 4). If normalcy and deformity, disability and able-bodiedness are all subjective and historically bound, what is the benefit of identifying and examining early modern atypicality? Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood have proposed that “Renaissance cultural representations of non-standard bodies might provide new models for theorizing disability that are simultaneously more inclusive and more specific than those currently available” (2013a: 10).4 Early modern attitudes toward atypical bodies can help us historicize contemporary crip and disability representation and experience; at the same time, some early modern texts can provide models for acceptance and inclusion, strategic adaptation, and empathetic identification. Instances of early modern atypicality, then, have the potential to undermine assumptions of linear progress toward disability justice, to disrupt historical stereotypes, and to contribute to the goal of a broader and less fixed cross-historical disability studies.

1.1. MONSTROUS BIRTHS: METAPHOR AND MEDICALIZATION Atypical bodies are celebrated and scrutinized in early modern ballad and broadsides— cheap print texts, often set to music and accompanied by woodcut images—that were sold for popular entertainment, but these representations run the gamut from moralistic and voyeuristic approaches to the body to more complex and nuanced depictions of atypicality. These cheap print formats capture popular fascination with bodies of all kinds, but particularly with bodies born with fetal abnormalities. The ballads in the “monstrous births” genre show emerging attitudes about atypicality, ranging from heavily moralizing interpretations of some births to frank medical analyzes of others; in this array of approaches, they are similar to modern media approaches toward atypicality, which range from exploitative tabloid scandal to “informative” popular science.5 On the extreme end of metaphorical representation are descriptions of births that seem almost entirely to contain heavily moral messages conveyed through the device of the marvelous birth; these representations care less about the atypical body itself and more for the messages it is seen to convey to its audience of readers and interpolators. Two prime examples of this mode of analysis are the ballads “A Fair Warning for Pride” (Pepys 4.310) and “The Sommersetshire Wonder” (Pepys 4.362).6 Both ballads depict farm animals born with craniofacial malformations that look like popular (and popularly derided) women’s hairstyles, and both present the animals more as messages to women than as creatures in their own rights.

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FIGURE 1.1  Woodcut image of a foal with a topknot, from “A Fair Warning for Pride” (Pepys 4.310). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge.

FIGURE 1.2  Woodcut image of a calf with a headdress, from “The Sommersetshire Wonder” (Pepys 4.362). By permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge.

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In “A Fair Warning for Pride,” the author turns monstrosity away from the malformed foal and toward its audience, addressing “O Monstrous Women!” and asking, why will you offend Your Maker, who many sad Judgements may send Upon the whole Nation, for your sin of Pride. According to the ballad’s speaker, women’s Laces, nay, Towers and Top-knots beside: So Gawdy you are, when drest in your Hair, That good sober Christians you perfectly scare; The wrath of high Heaven you have cause to fear. Thus, as we learn from the ballad’s chorus, God’s reaction to the vanity of topknotwearers is made manifest through the atypical body of the foal, whose malformation is described in great detail: Altho’ it be Flesh, yet like Ribbons it Curl’d; Of several Colours, full seven indeed, And when they are handl’d they presently bleed: And likewise again, from the Head to the Main, The likeness of Ribbon is perfectly plain. At the end of the ballad, the foal is brought to Bartholomew Fair, where its body will be staged for profit, entertainment, and, at least in theory, to spread its message about fashion and pride.7 The birth of an atypical calf is similarly metaphorized in “The Somerset Wonder.” Rather than a topknot, the calf is born with a malformation resembling an ornate “commode” headdress measuring “near half a Yard high.” Again, the atypical form of the animal is immediately interpreted as a lesson for young women about their prideful attire. Interestingly, where the woodcut illustration (Figure 1.1) of the foal shows its malformation as resembling a topknot in a way where, while ribbon-like, it still might be an unusual growth, the illustration of the calf (Figure 1.2) shows its growth to be symmetrical, flowing, and carefully patterned with decorative lace. The image therefore confirms that the ballad’s purpose is less to describe the calf’s birth with realism or scientific detail, but rather to emphasize a moral message made possible through the animal’s shape at birth. Both the foal and the calf are displayed first by farmers and fairgoers at the time of their births and then in perpetuity through the ballads and their woodcuts. The atypical body serves as a rhetorical tool, a device through which social values are interpolated and reinforced. In his 1627 satirical poem “The Moone-Calfe,” Michael Drayton uses rhetoric similar to these metaphorized ballads as a way of conveying his own social commentary. From its very title, the poem gestures at bodily difference and deformity: the term “mooncalf” is most well known for Shakespeare’s use of it in describing Caliban in The Tempest. While it stands for general monstrosity in that play, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a more specific association with birth defect, giving the definition “a false conception.”8 The poem plays on this idea of defective conception and reproduction as it opens with the image of the earth, personified, pregnant, and

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in the throes of labor: “The World’s in labour, her throwes come so thick, / That with the Pangues she’s waxt starke lunatic” (1627: 153). Even before the world gives birth, Drayton describes her body, attire, and promiscuity as grotesque: she is “Stuff’d with infection, rottennesse, and stench” (153), clothed in “a Fooles coate, and cap” (153), and her child will be a bastard because “there’s not a Nation  / But hath with her committed fornication” (156). As the earth labors, her contractions described as earthquakes and thunder and avalanches, she confesses that the devil is the true father of her child. With the stage thus set for a monstrous birth, Drayton ends the poem by describing the baby: And long it was not ere there came to light, The most abhorrid, the most fearefull sight That ever eye beheld, a birth so strange, That at the view, it made their lookes to change; Women (quoth one) stand of, and come not neere it, The Devill if he saw it, sure would feare it; For by the shape, for ought that I can gather, The Childe is able to affright the Father; Out cries another, now for God’s sake hide it, It is so ugly we may not abide it. (157) Drayton builds his satire from labor to birth, and then suspends the actual presentation of the monstrous birth; rather than revealing the baby and its body, he shows instead a scene of viewing, where a crowd observes it in shock and terror. In this way, even as he emphasizes the metaphor of the poem—that earth is corrupt, and that the corruption is culminating with monstrous results—he simultaneously demonstrates the power of the atypical body to capture the stare of a broad audience, and to impact each viewer in a deep way. This is the type of “staring” at atypicality that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has described, where “The sight of an unexpected body—that is to say, a body that does not conform to our expectations for an ordinary body—is compelling because it disorders expectations. Such disorder is at once novel and disturbing” (2009: 37). Yet, while Garland-Thomson is explaining a response to atypicality that can feel typical or universal, she also locates the Renaissance as a tipping point in the meaning of that staring gaze. She argues: As the seventeenth-century took hold, seeing developed new forms in a secularizing, democratizing world. Observation replaced witnessing with the rise of rationalism and scientific inquiry … The modernizing world celebrated earthly rather than heavenly sights in art and technology. The early modern period gave us perspective … thus perspective helps to transform the individual viewer into a gatekeeper of knowledge regarding the scene depicted, shutting down the possibility of competing knowledges that might emerge from the multiple points of view suggested by medieval painting or, later, cubist art. (2009: 27–8)9 Drayton’s poem enacts the exact point of transition that Garland-Thomson suggests, so that even though the gods and the devil are among the audience staring at Earth’s monstrous birth, all observers’ views have equal authority. Knowledge of the child, its body, and its significance can be gained, in the poem (and increasingly in the period) both through an interpretation of the body’s symbolic meaning and through anatomical

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observation and analysis. In her discussion of Drayton’s poem in Early Modern Hermaphrodites (2002: 89–92), Ruth Gilbert calls the mooncalf “a grotesquely embodied emblem of social and sexual collapse” (89) and a “hideous confusion of bodies, sex, and gender” (90); Garland-Thomson’s analysis of early modern knowledge suggests that the poem may invite a more empiricist perspective. But the poem resists any single approach, presenting the medical and the metaphor side by side. Earth’s baby, the “moone calfe,” is finally described as a double birth of conjoined, hermaphroditic twins. Drayton focuses equally on the babies’ atypical doubling and on their atypical gender; they are “double” and “side by side,” but also “The Man is partly Woman, likewise shee / Is partly Man.” The satire pauses in consideration of this wondrous birth, meant to reveal the conjunction of the wayward planet and the devil. And, again, it toes the line between the marvelous and medical models for understanding the so-called monstrous birth. Even as the poem interprets the messages of the babies’ conjoinment and queerness, it also wonders about possible interventions and the potential for scientific inquiry. Among the observers of the birth, one suggests that audience make provision, If possible, to part it by incision, For were it parted, for ought I can see, Both man, and woman it may seeme to be. While the poem ultimately resists this medical/scientific impulse, it shows the ways that, even in a satirical text, attitudes toward atypicality were, often simultaneously, deployed for meaning and decoded through scientific inquiry. Drayton’s poem is a fiction where an atypical birth, however anatomized, is well within the realm of the imaginary. But Drayton’s monstrous birth is similar to other unusual births that were showcased, examined, and made available for examination in other early modern popular texts. In fact, the specific, rare atypicality of conjoinment is a repeating theme in ballads, and was obviously a subject popular enough to encourage the writing and printing of several ballads on the topic, along with fairly expensive custom woodcuts displaying the bodies of the affected twins. In “Nature’s Wonder,” a set of twins is born conjoined at the navel; the ballad describes that the twins lived for two days and nights, and makes a point to share that, after the twins had died, their grieving parents brought their bodies “for Chyurgeons [i.e. surgeons] to Dissect.”10 In addition to concluding on a medical note, with attention drawn to the twins’ postmortem examination, the ballad’s accompanying woodcut (Figure 1.3) similarly anatomizes the babies by featuring them naked and with their atypical conjoinment clearly displayed. Another conjoinment ballad, “The True Description of Two Monstrous Children,” offers fewer details, but its title notes with curiosity that, after a pair of female twins (Figure 1.4) lived for a day, “The one departed afore the other almoste an howre.”11 A third broadside, this one in prose rather than ballad meter, “The True Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Chylde,” is even more medically oriented, offering clinical information about the conjoined infants’ times of birth and death, their number of limbs, and the nature of their cranial jointure, which presented as “one Face, two Eyes, one Nose, and one Mouth, and three Eares, one beinge upon the backe syde of the Head, a lytle above the nape of the Necke, having heare growinge upon the Head.” The broadside is accompanied by a double woodcut (Figure 1.5), presenting the babies from front and back views, very much in line with a medical illustration. And yet even this more clinical and less literary example of early modern

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FIGURE 1.3  Woodcut image of twins conjoined at the navel, from “Nature’s Wonder” (Euing Ballad 237). By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

depictions of atypical conjointure ends on a moral tone, with a reminder that the body of the conjoined infants will be brought to London for display—not only for medical inspection, but also as “a warninge of God, to move all people to amendment of lyfe.”12

1.2. ATYPICAL ADULTHOODS If early modern descriptions of conjoined twin births ran the gamut from pure metaphor to something closer to clinical interest with a vestigial remnant of moral meditation, a similar variety emerges in literary and popular depictions of adults with atypical bodies. But where the often short-lived infants described as monstrous births presented atypicality as a rare, usually temporary situation in which their bodies were generally passive, allowing the viewer to interpret the atypicality on their own, adults with atypical bodies in early modern texts are more able to manage or control the narratives that surround them and their bodies. Thus, while atypical adult bodies are still subject to intense curious staring, diagnostic observation, and metaphorizing meaning-making, in many cases they can redirect the gaze, give their own origin narrative, and manage the meanings assigned to their own bodies. These cases further demonstrate the fault lines between the medical and social models of disability and the distinctions between disability and impairment; in many cases, the challenges and successes of atypical adults in early modern texts are determined less by their bodily restrictions and more by whether and how they are able to use their bodies in the world. In this way, while “monstrous birth” texts are focused primarily on interpreting the passively observed body, representations of disabled adults must by necessity take into account the words, actions, and experiences

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FIGURE 1.4  Woodcut image of standing conjoined twins, from “The True Description of Two Monstrous Children,” HM 18316, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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FIGURE 1.5  Woodcut image of twins with cranial jointure, from “The True Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Chylde,” HM 18392, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

of the individuals they describe, however much they may undermine or dismiss them. While these depictions are by no means without moralizing or voyeurism, and while few to none of them are actually written or performed by the disabled people they portray, they come closer to the modern disability rights credo of “nothing about us without us,” which insists that individuals with disabilities should always participate in shaping narratives and policies that affect them.13

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In the realm of ballads, the tonal shift between descriptions of conjoined infants and a conjoined adult is striking. “The Two Inseparable Brothers” features a seventeen-year-old man with a conjoined but asymmetrical (sometimes called parasitic) twin (Figure 1.6).14 While the ballad is similar to those described above, with a detailing of the brothers’ anatomy, it also leaves room for the feelings, experiences, and even expertise of both the dominant and the underdeveloped twin. The dominant twin, Lazarus, is described as “a Gentleman (an Italian by birth),” while his attached twin, Joannes Baptista or John Baptist, is referred to as “the imperfect.” When the brothers are described, the narrative not only includes the details of their anatomy, but also the ways that they communicate: He [the dominant twin] can both read, write, sing, or talke without paine or detraction, And when he speakes the other head, Doth move the lips both Ruby red,/ not speaking but in action.

FIGURE 1.6  Image of conjoined brothers, from “The Two Inseparable Brothers” (Roxburghe 3.216–17). By permission of the British Library.

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In addition to focusing on the capacity rather than incapacity of the Italian brothers, the ballad dedicates several stanzas to a consideration of how the conjoined pair are distinct and how they are one—one had smallpox, but not the other; and one can be pinched without the other feeling pain. While this section appears to mirror the medical inspections of conjoined infants in other ballads, it differs in taking the speaking brother’s first-person accounts as an authoritative source. Thus, the dominant brother is the expert reporting on his own body, deciding which aspects of his atypicality to share from his own perspective, as “he himselfe thus saith.” Similarly, while the ballad attends to religious aspects of the brothers’ lives, especially their baptism as children and their significant names, Lazarus and John Baptist, which carry the implication that their deformity is a sign or test from God, the ballad emphasizes that, when the brothers are available to be viewed as subjects of religious meditation, it will be on their own terms, as they have been traveling the world earning an income by presenting themselves. Even the ballad woodcut shows a shift between the depiction of infant and adult atypicality, with the dominant brother shown dressed in fine clothes and in a gentleman’s stance even as an opening in the front of his shirt reveals his jointure and the body of his imperfect brother. The Italian brothers, even as they enter adulthood, are treated as monsters and marvels, objects best suited for display. But they also have a certain independence and authority over their representation, taking advantage of the reactions that their atypical body elicits and taking control over the information available about them. Ben Jonson’s 1607 play Volpone stages a whole crew of atypical bodies, the attendants to Volpone, a master manipulator (Wilkes 1979: 3–97). While the staging of Nano, a dwarf, Castrone, a eunuch, and Androgyno, a hermaphrodite and fool, is absolutely meant to be a spectacle for the audience (and to do the literary work of dramatizing Volpone’s perversions in a kind of anti-masque to the main plot of the play), they are nevertheless characters who speak for themselves and control their own actions in the subplot.15 Importantly, though the atypical crew is aligned with Volpone for much of the play, during the falling action they strategically distance themselves from him, giving their loyalty (and the keys to Volpone’s house) to his rival, Mosca. In these actions, the dwarf, eunuch, and hermaphrodite fool show themselves to be free agents independent from their benefactor, and able to survive and thrive even as the social and political landscape around them shifts and evolves. In their few speeches, the atypical characters of the play articulate a positive stance toward their differences that helps to explain their resilience and success. In the first act of the play, Volpone calls out his uncommon crew and gives them the space to “make sport,” displaying and discussing themselves in front of the audience. In the second scene of the play, Nano refers to Androgyno as a “creature of delight” (1.2.49) and a “sweet soul, in all thy variation.” When Nano asks Androgyno, “Which body woudst thou chose, to keep up thy station?” (1.2.52), the implication is that a person with ambiguous sex would naturally wish for and seek a bodily correction that would make their body and sex more typical.16 Upending this assumption, Androgyno replies, “Troth, this I am in, even here would I tarry” (1.2.53). In preferring to stay in their own body, Androgyno accepts and even celebrates their atypicality. Further, when Nano attempts to sexualize or fetishize Androgyno’s body, asking if they prefer to stay as they are “Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?” Androgyno shuts down the lascivious assumption about their body with “Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.” Here, Androgyno’s defense of their own body, coupled with their refusal to play into the idea that their hermaphrodism implies a “best of both worlds” sexuality, is in line with

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discourses from the modern intersex movement.17 Androgyno is one of several fictional intersex characters in early modern texts who, while certainly fetishized and medicalized, are also given occasional representation as agential and autonomous. For example, I have written elsewhere (Chess 2016) about Mary Jewit, an intersex individual whose story is told in the ballad “The Male and Female Husband.”18 Jewit, who was raised female and declared themselves male after falling in love with a woman, was subjected to careful medical examinations to determine their sex. In the end, Jewit’s community affirms them as able to live as a man and perform as a husband; Jewit’s story is therefore presented as a “true life” example of how intersex people might pick and choose aspects of masculinity and femininity according to their needs. Later in Volpone, a stance similar to Androgyno’s embrace of their atypicality is taken by Nano about his dwarfism. While the other characters in Volpone’s crew—the eunuch Castrone and the hermaphrodite/intersex Androgyno—have bodies that are atypical in ways that are not visible when they are costumed or clothed, Nano’s dwarfism, at least in theory, would be a more overt bodily difference. As part of a larger discussion about representations of dwarfs in early modern art and literature, Sara van den Berg (2013: 23–42) argues that “Dwarfs, because they can often function normally, both are and are not disabled. Early modern medical texts, for example, barely mention dwarfs in the catalogue of monstrous deformities. As a result, the dwarf body is and is not subject to the social construction of deformity in the early modern era or of disability today” (2013: 24). While I take the point she is making about how some dwarfs might have a liminal relationship with deformity and disability, I find that these texts insist on the differences and distinctions between people with dwarfism and people with typical stature. Thus, I think it is fair and important to include discussions of dwarfism as part of the bigger category of atypicality. It is thus significant when, during a staged debate about whether a dwarf, fool, or eunuch is best, Nano argues his own case and draws attention to his atypicality as a strength and asset: First for your dwarf, he’s little and witty, And every thing, as it is little, is pretty; Else why do men say to a creature of my shape, So soon as they see him, “It’s a pretty little ape?” And why a pretty ape, but for pleasing imitation Of greater men’s actions, in a ridiculous fashion? Beside, this feat body of mine doth not crave Half the meat, drink, and cloth, one of your bulks will have. (3.4.8–16) In this speech, Nano lists the many ways in which his small stature is positive, pleasing, and beneficial. He includes consideration of his intellectual, aesthetic, and economic strengths. Van Den Berg calls Nano’s speech one of “very few instances in early modern literature or life when a dwarf speaks of his own experience” (2013: 30), though, of course, we know that his words were written by a man of average size and may not have been performed by a dwarf. To my knowledge, there are no records of whether the character of Nano was ever played by a little person actor, so it is difficult to know how the rhetoric of this speech would be presented or received. In a 2015 production of Volpone by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Trevor Nunn, Nano was played by actor Jon Key, who is a little person. Still, while this aspect of staging and performance complicates the message of Nano’s defense of dwarfism, as one of only a few speaking

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dwarf characters in early modern texts, Nano’s understanding of himself as equal to, and in some ways superior to those of typical size is a significant reframing of atypicality. Potentially positive associations with typicality of stature are evident in nondramatic literature as well. Discussing Nano together with dwarf characters from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Van Den Berg argues that early modern dwarfs, both living dwarfs serving at court and fictional dwarfs in literature or artistic representation, “could carry political, religious, psychological, and aesthetic meaning, serving as a surrogate for the ruler, the subject, the self, and perhaps the artist” (2013: 23). In this way, characters with dwarfism can be read as typifying Mitchell and Snyder’s narrative prosthesis, where their atypical bodies make them stand-ins for a larger set of ideas and ideals rather than actual embodied characters. And yet, even in Spenser’s highly allegorical poem, where everything is a metonym, some dwarf characters show individual strength and insight that can be read as extending beyond metaphor.19 The four dwarf characters in The Faerie Queene are all attendants and messengers, serving a range of knights and noble ladies, some virtuous and some not. While the dwarves have been read through an allegorical lens as representing “reason, usually at its lowest level of ‘common sense,’ occasionally as ‘the flesh,’ and once as ‘comic realism’” (Van Den Berg 2013: 31), they also function as “narrators, either in words or as signs” (2013: 32). One character with dwarfism who shows the wit that Nano praises as a benefit of short stature is the dwarf who attends Redcrosse Knight when he visits Duessa in the House of Pride in Book I. Though Redcrosse Knight, the book’s hero, is fooled by the glamour of Duessa’s court, the dwarf is savvy and strategic, recognizing the court for the farce that it is and convincing the knight to escape. Of Redcrosse’s narrow escape, Spenser (ed. Hamilton 2007) reports: Good cause had he to hasten thence away, For on a day his wary Dwarf had spide, Where in a dungeon deepe huge numbers lay Of caytive thrals, that wayled day and night. (1.4.45.5–8) Spenser later expands upon the dwarf’s role in convincing Redcrosse to leave, explaining that the dwarf forces Redcrosse to see Duessa’s captives whose case when as the carefull Dwarfe had tould, and made ensample of their mournefull sight, Unto his maister, he no lenger would there dwell in peril of like painefull ploight. (1.5.52.1–4) This dwarf’s heroism continues into the end of the book, when in Canto 8 he brings the heroine, Una, and the savior, King Arthur, to free Redcrosse from yet another trap, this time his captivity at the hands of the giant Orgoglio (himself atypically bodied, in a way that contrasts specifically with the dwarf’s stature). Quoted directly, the dwarf officially inspires Redcrosse’s rescue and his reunification with Una: Then cryde the Dwarfe, lo yonder is the same, In which my Lord my liege doth lucklesse lie, Thrall to that Gyants hateful tyranny: Therefore, deare sir, your mightie powers assay. (1.8.2.3–6)

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Jonson and Spenser’s dwarves’ atypical bodies signify not what we might call disability, but rather enabling characteristics of frugal efficiency, bravery, loyalty, and insightfulness—or, more accurately and more interestingly, they signify a disability that is inherently connected with these positive and generative associations. Importantly, the texts are not using these positive qualities as a way of minimizing or looking away from the dwarves’ atypicality. Instead, they keep the atypical body front and center in their descriptions, indicating that these heroic characteristics are because of, not despite their being dwarves. In this way, early modern representations of dwarf bodies can be read as gains; while the texts stage them for staring, they also allow for those atypical bodies to be valorized, associating small stature with great wit and wisdom.20 Beyond representations of dwarfism, the valorization of atypicality is similarly showcased in texts that discuss other types of bodily difference. Take, for instance, the differences between three ballads discussing individuals with both congenital and earlychildhood limb deformities. These individuals are often referred to by the catch-all term “cripple.” While many early modern texts use this term in a quasi-medical or descriptive way, the word “cripple” later came to be associated with mocking and discrimination, and it fell out of medical and polite social usage. Interestingly, the modern disability rights movement has begun to reframe the term “crip” as a positive and reclaimed selfdefinition. In my discussion here, I use the term “cripple” in its historical context, with the understanding that it carries both the potential for pejorative insult and the possibility of disability pride. Crip representation in the ballad “The Happy Damsel” takes a stereotypical cure-focused approach to the protagonist’s disability, which is framed as a flaw in need of a divine solution.21 The ballad purports to report the story of Maria Anna Molier, who in 1693 was “was perfectly cured by the Hand of Divine Providence, to the great amazement of all People.” While a majority of the ballad focuses on the miracle of Molier’s cure—the removal of her atypicality through faith and prayer—it takes a rather more scientific approach to its analysis of the disability in need of a cure. The ballad’s subtitle, which describes Molier as a “poor lame creature,” also indicates that she “had been a Cripple from her Cradle.”22 But the ballad later gives sensationalized details about an injury that caused Molier’s limb deformity, reporting that When she was barely five Months old, her little Infant-bones were broke. Her Thigh-bone clearly out of place, and likewise her poor Ancle too; Crooked was she in woful case, the like of her you never knew. The ballad presents Molier as a victim of her injury, and it lingers on her atypical body with its crooked limb and stance, and on her atypical movement: a limp that causes children to mock and abuse her as she walks through her town. In this depiction, Molier is purely a victim of her deformity and her best and brightest option is a medical cure, albeit one from a spiritual source. When Molier lifts her voice in earnest prayer, God responds osteopathically, and she had no sooner spoke, but Nerves and Bones did snap amain Thus God who she did then invoke, In love her Limbs restored again.

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Molier’s disability and its cure fit the medical model of disability in which atypicality is inherently a problem (it causes pain, leads to mocking and isolation) and the solution is rooted in fixing the body, snapping the limbs back into typical form. In contrast, other depictions of similar bodies in similar texts highlight more social-disability approaches to limb atypicalities, and some even go so far as to valorize or celebrate the deformities, praising them rather than seeking their cure. In “The Cripples’ Race,” two disabled men from Glasgow compete in a public race, cheered on by their entire town.23 The ballad itemizes the atypicality of the racing bodies, noting that Seven feet was counted and three ein, they had between them both … They had three staves to run withal, because their legs were short. And yet, rather than depicting the cripple racers as pitiful, the ballad celebrates their race, with a chorus of, “Ye never saw, nor never shal, / I think a braver sport.” This ballad hits a middle ground in depicting limb deformity; it acknowledges both the mobility impairments and adaptive technologies used by both racers and emphasizes the excitement of seeing this unusual type of race, but it also celebrates the participants’ athleticism and the winner’s accomplishment as valid, locating the ballad’s enthusiasm not around a cure, but around a celebration of atypical races. In the end, a man called “Young Limpy” is declared the winner, and the town’s able-bodied citizens revel in his honor: And then the shouldiers gave a shout the lasses playd ti hie And all the lads cryd round about Young Limpys won the gree This celebration of Young Limpy is thus best aligned with the social model of disability, as it focuses less on what is medically wrong with Limpy and his rival and more on what they are capable of achieving when their community makes a space for them that allows them access. A third ballad, also about a “cripple,” goes still further, articulating the ways in which, given the right temperament and circumstances, limb and mobility differences can be strategically advantageous. “The Cripple of Cornwall” describes a beggar who, by day crept on his hands & his knees up and downe, in a torn jacket and ragged patcht gowne: For he had never a leg to the knee.24 In describing the Cripple of Cornwall in this way, the ballad emphasizes both his atypical body, his atypical mode of mobility, and his atypical status as a poor beggar and outsider. But, as it turns out, all of these seeming impairments are useful to the Cripple of Cornwall. Despite having been born without his lower leg, the cripple is “of stomacke courageous and stout.” In terms of mobility, like the racers in “The Cripples’ Race,” this cripple has a gait impairment but he has adapted in ways that make him both mobile

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and agile: “To go upon stilts most cunning was he, / With a staffe on his neck gallant and free.” In fact, the Cripple of Cornwall is so ably mobile, and so coordinated with his staff, he leads a double life, begging and crawling by day and thieving and fighting by night. Richard Harvey suggests that the Cripple of Cornwall “feigns being a crippled beggar during the day” (1984: 549); though the ballad certainly plays on the idea that the cripple is not by night who he seems to be during the day, I would argue that it is nevertheless clear that he has a true congenital deformity: his fraud is not in pretending to be disabled, but rather in misrepresenting his level of impairment.25 In the main theft featured in the ballad, the Cripple of Cornwall leads a highway robbery of the Lord Courtney and his men. When Courtney’s crew defends itself, the jolly bold cripple did hold the rest play. And with his pikestaff he wounded them so as they were unable to run or to goe. The Cripple’s staff, which he uses as an adaptive tool for mobility, also functions as his weapon, giving him a skilled advantage in the skirmish and allowing him to escape with Courtney’s money. The OED defines “pikestaff” as a “staff or walking stick, esp. a walking stick with a metal point at the lower end”; this definition of the staff’s primary use as a walking tool helps to make clear the idea that the Cripple of Cornwall’s highly effective weapon—his wounding pikestaff—is also his adaptive mobility device.26 The ballad valorizes the cripple hero, not only showcasing his fighting skills, but also describing his agility and skill in escaping the scene of the crime. As he runs from Courtney, the cripple faces a river that ran their beside, what was very deep and eighteen foot wide. With his long staffe and his stilts leaped he, and shifted himself in an old hollow tree. Here, the Cripple of Cornwall’s atypical limbs transform him not into an object of pity but into a superhero, a Robin Hood enabled by his body and his adaptive tools to accomplish feats that able-bodied people could not, and then hiding in a small space well suited to his unusual shape. This section of the ballad participates in what disability studies calls the “supercrip narrative,” in which a person with disabilities is presented as not only “overcoming” their disability, but also as going above and beyond normative expectations. Yet, because the Cripple of Cornwall is treated without pity throughout the ballad, his extraordinary capacity here seems less about overcoming his mobility impairment and more about the fact that he is less impaired than the reader might expect from his disability. At the height of the ballad’s description of the Cripple of Cornwall’s achievements, it shows how he code-switches his performances of his disability to serve himself best; having fought and fled Courtney using his staffs, he now crawls without them to beg, unrecognized, from the very man whom he has robbed. The Cripple crawls past the very signs posted for his own arrest, and when he sits on his hands and knees in front of Courtney, the man he robbed throws him a crown without a second glance. The Cripple

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thus takes advantage of people’s misperceptions about his ability, using his body to accomplish his goals and to disguise himself from punishment. In the end, after collecting nearly a thousand pounds through begging and theft, the Cripple of Cornwall is captured and hanged for his crimes. But the ballad concludes, Which made all men amazed to see that such an impotent person as he, Should venture himself in such actions as they, to rob in such sort upon the hye way.

1.3. ATYPICAL SEX AND ROMANCE On the stage, the play The Little French Lawyer (1647; ed. Bowers 1994) explores these ideas of amputation and cripple identity through the character of Champernell, a lame old gentleman and double-amputee who is the titular character.27 Like the ballads, the play alternates between staring at and joking about Champernell’s atypical body and, perhaps less expectedly, celebrating it and recognizing its possible advantages. The play does not valorize Champernell in the way that “The Cripple of Cornwall” does its hero, but it does normalize his differences, frankly consider his abilities and limitations, and allow for him to be successful, even (potentially) sexy in his accomplishments. The play opens with Champernell’s wedding procession, meant to be comical because he is an old man marrying a young woman, Lamira; his disability, the result of war injuries, is meant to heighten the inappropriateness of their match. From this first introduction, Champernell’s body is explained with a mix of disdain and admiration. As with the character of Nano in Volpone, we know very little about how Champernell’s character would have been staged. Assuming that the role is not played by a double-amputee, and given how central Champernell’s atypical body is to the play’s plot and physical humor, it is unclear how a non-amputee actor would perform the role; still, textual cues throughout the play draw attention to Champernell’s body and make certain that his disability is a central aspect of the character, at least in the fictional world of the play. When Dinant calls Champernell old and lame, Cleremont contextualizes the injuries and surgical amputations as signs of status and accomplishment: I know him, he has bin As tall a Sea-man, and has thriv’d well b’t. The losse of a legg and an Arme deducted, as any That ever put from Marseils. (1.1.115–19) Because the play introduces Champernell’s atypical body on the eve of his wedding, it makes explicit the audience’s curiosity about whether and how his visible bodily differences will play out in private, in consummating the marriage. Because of his age and amputations, Champernell is figured as already part-dead (“You that already / Have one foot in the grave” (1.1.160–1)), and Dinant suggests to Lamira that “This marriage night, you’ll meet a Widowes bed, / Or failing of those pleasures, all Brides looke for,/Sinne in your wish it were so” (1.1.223–5). Cleremont makes the connection between amputation and impotence more directly when he tells Champernell

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Your tongue is sound, good Lord, and I could wish For this young Ladyes sake, this leg, this arme, And there is something els, I will not name, (Though ’tis the onely thing, that must content her) Had the same vigor. (1.1.260–6) Though Champernell is roundly mocked, the play’s authors give him several opportunities to defend himself. Though he falls over when he is unbalanced by drawing his sword, he nevertheless defends his injuries as noble: I got these, not as you doe your diseases, In Brothells, or with riotous abuse Of wine in Tavernes; I have one leg shot, One arme disabled, and I am honor’d more, By losing them, as I did, in the face of a brave enemy, then if they were As when I put to Sea. (1.1.272–82) To his young wife directly, Champernell addresses the question of his sexual function, telling her   thou shalt not find I am decrepit; in my love, and service, I will be young, and constant, and believe me … I’le meet thy pleasures, with a young man’s ardour And in my circumstances, of a Husband, Performe my part. (1.1.316–24) And Champernell’s vow appears to have been an honest one, as in the morning Lamira’s maid Charlotte comments that, By your Ladiships cheerefull looks, I well perceive That this night, the good Lord hath bin At an unusall service, and no wonder If he rest for it. (1.3.2–5) In this way, even though the play stages the physical comedy of a double-amputee who loses his balance and falls when he attempts to challenge a younger rival, it simultaneously offers an opportunity for the old lame man to bed—and please—his wife, who remains loyal to him and earns his unwavering trust, a trust that allows the couple to prank and make fools of the younger, able-bodied men of the play. While the play offers all the exploits of romantic comedies, including bed tricks and new love matches, the unlikely couple whose wedding procession is mocked in the first act remain partners and spouses to the end. And, not only does the cripple get the girl, he also gets to redeem himself in combat. Despite his atypical, unbalanced body, in the play’s conclusion, Champernell roundly beats the lawyer LaWrit into submission, restoring order to the play and setting the stage for the concluding marriage scene, in which Champernell arranges good marriages for two of his own nieces. Champernell

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the cripple even gets the play’s last words, “Backe then to Paris, well that travel ends / That makes of deadly enemies perfect friends” (5.3.68–9). Plays like The Little French Lawyer can shift the conversation about typicality in the early modern period, by staging an unlikely hero who, despite age and disability, finds his own ways to navigate social and dramatic conventions. A similar model of atypical bodies being presented as simultaneously mundane, even funny, but also sexy and celebrated is presented in comic poetry. One poem, collected in Choyce Drollery, a collection of songs and sonnets first printed in 1656, pushes the genre of poems in praise of “ugly” women to the level of deformity. “In Praise of a Deformed Woman” makes clear that its female subject is not only unattractive by conventional standards, but further that her body is atypical in appearance and function (Ebsworth 1876: 49–50). While the poem begins by praising the deformed woman’s squinting eyes, which create the illusion that she is always gazing at her lover, it quickly escalates to her copper nose, a sign of bad scarring from venereal disease. Not put off by the copper nose, the speaker declares, “I love thee for thy copper nose, / Thy fortune’s ne’re the worse, / It shews the metal in thy face / Thou should’st have in thy purse.”28 In this manner, the poem methodically lists each aspect of the woman’s atypical body, finding a way to praise and admire it. Of her many features, some indicate difference not only in appearance but also in function, and the speaker celebrates these differences as well. For instance, he declares, I love thee for thy splay mouth, For on that amarous close There’s room on either side to kisse, and ne’re offend the nose. In this scenario, a palsied pull to the mouth creates an opportunity for kissing, reframing a facial difficulty as alluring. In other cases, the speaker imitates Jonson’s Nano in reframing disability as economically beneficial, a gain. When the subject is described as having rotten gums and a toothless mouth, the speaker optimistically suggests that “When other wives are costly fed, / Ile keep thy chaps on pap.” In the poem’s conclusion, the speaker runs out of punning rhetoric for praising aspects of his “deformed” subject. Instead, the poem ends on a sincere note, framed in terms of praise of the subject’s curved spine: I love thee for thy huncht back, ’Tis bow’d although not broken For I believe the Gods did send Me to Thee for a Token. Poems in the “praise of an ugly woman” genre generally are satirical, but some, like this one, seem to take a different route, one that opens the possibility for praise and affection toward the atypical body and its amorous possibilities. A different poem in the same collection combines the valorization of the Cripple of Cornwall with the erotic capacity and potential appeal of Champernell or the deformed woman. The poem “Aldobrandino, a Fat Cardinal” features a protagonist so fat that he is a “humane soule … overgrown” and a “Cargazon of flesh,” a “giant” who “now was come / To be accounted an eighth hill in Rome” (Ebsworth, 1876: 17). The ways in which the poem describes Aldobrandino make clear that his fatness is not part of the spectrum of typical body sizes, but something else, more

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monstrous and exceptional. As with the double-amputee, Champernell, the text quickly turns its attention to whether and how this atypicality affects sexual ability and practice. It is worth noting that, while some Catholic cardinals were not given major orders, and were therefore allowed by the church to marry, in general this kind of explicit discussion of a cardinal’s body and sexual practices is part of a broader tradition of anti-Catholic satire. When Aldobrandino is married to a young woman who has been “sacrificed” in order for this “monster” to try to increase and multiply, the couple’s initial efforts at sex are dangerous failures. The poem describes a scene of terror, in which the voyeuristic narrator is himself fearful: Oh how I tremble lest the tender maid Should dye like an infant over-laid! For when this Chaos would pretend to move And arch his back for the strong act of Love, He fals as soon orethrown with his own weight And with his ruines doth the Princesse fright. The poem considers a cure-based solution for Aldobrandino, in which he subjects himself to medicinal cures to change his body and make it more typical. But when these fail, the fat bishop chooses to adapt his sex practices to meet his bodily needs through assistive technology. Using a system of silken pulleys and a team of trained assistants, Aldobrandino lifts himself into the air above his wife. As the poem puts it, he brings art (the silks) to nature’s work (his body). The machine is a success, and Aldobrandino “smiling rise[s] / To the bed’s roof, and wonders how he flies.” Through his use of adaptive technology, Aldobrandino’s atypical body and mobility impairment are transformed from deficits to assets; in a moment similar to the Cripple of Cornwall’s stilt-assisted leap across the river, Aldobrandino is now soaring like an “eager Falcon,” hovering powerfully above his wife/prey. Guided by his nurse assistant, the bishop is lowered to be level with his wife. Aldobrandino is steered like a boat, straight into “Loves Harbour” and “’tween the double fort of her incastled knees, which guard the Port.” The poem ends with a sexual victory for Aldobrandino, one made more magnificent, not less, because of the adaptations he makes to enable his unusual body to accomplish it. Perhaps the most famous atypical body in the early modern literary canon is that of Richard III, as he was presented in Shakespeare’s history plays.29 The relationship between Richard’s body and his mind, the way he is made and the actions he takes, is articulated in the opening speech of Richard III. Richard understands himself to be illsuited for peacetime and domesticity, and he blames his shape for his villainy: But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world scarce half made up,

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And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (ca. 1593; ed. Greenblatt et al. 1996: 1.1.14–31) Richard understands himself to be deformed in bodily and psychosocial ways; his focus on his own gestation mirrors the “monstrous birth” ballads that speculated about the formation of atypical infants. He takes a metaphorizing perspective about his own atypical form, understanding it to be a problem of the body and seeking to link the body to his personality and predilections. Throughout the speech, and indeed throughout the play, Richard fixates on his impression that, because of how he is made, he is not suited for love or romance, and that sense of social isolation motivates his plots against his family. Shakespeare’s depiction of Richard is in line with pitying and pathologizing attitudes toward atypical bodies, amplifying the link between Richard’s atypical body and atypical mind, even as the play shows that Richard’s disability, though it affects his appearance and his gait, is not so impairing as to prevent him from being a war hero, or, for that matter, a king. Shakespeare’s choice makes Richard an archetypal villain, and his disdain for Richard’s body allows him to give him some of the best language in the canon. But what if Shakespeare had instead taken the concurrently available attitude toward atypicality, one of empathy, pragmatism, and even admiration? Why should Richard not use a crutch to fly across rivers, or find a partner who eroticizes his hump? Why should he not engineer a silken sex swing? There are myriad generic, historical, and political reasons that Richard III cannot be an Aldobrandino. His depiction is a clear demonstration of the power and potency of literary prosthesis and the use of disability as metaphor in early modern texts. This use of disability in literature was honed and developed throughout the early modern period, and, of course, persists today. This brief chapter can only barely touch upon the many ways that atypical bodies are presented and represented in early modern texts; certainly, there are many available instances in which disabled bodies are marginalized, mocked, and metaphorized in dehumanizing ways. But marginalized monstrosity is by no means the exclusive norm. The evil crip trope of Richard III exists alongside myriad alternatives, other popular texts that offer unlikely crip protagonists who, while imperfect, are surviving and thriving. They are touting their differences, touring the continent, battling with pikestaffs, and soaring in sex swings. They are visible, weird, and in control of their lives. By including these narratives alongside the more conventional monster metaphors, we benefit from a richer canon of early modern atypicality and a more complex historical foundation for modern disability studies.

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CHAPTER TWO

Mobility Impairment The Body Corporate, Charity, and Injury LIAM HAYDON AND EDMOND SMITH

2.1. INTRODUCTION The experience of mobility impairment in Renaissance Europe was by no means uncommon. Whether at work or at home, during war or peace, surrounded by family or in distant lands, the threat of serious injury was never far away. For those lucky enough to grow old, the challenges of age-related impairments added a further layer of insecurity for individuals, and another group that society sought to support. Yet, in spite of the prevalence of such impairments in early modern society, it can be challenging to recover the lives of individuals living with injury in England. Few left materials relating to their own experiences of impairment, and commentaries regarding impaired people were often highly negative, subsuming their specific experiences into accounts of the poor in general. In theatre, literature, and art, the presentation of injured and impaired people was often used as a metaphor for societal or political problems; only rarely did they treat the injured with personal sympathy. Instead, the most viable sources relating to the daily lives of people with mobility impairment come from institutions and authors who sought to mitigate the negative impact of disability through charitable giving and other methods. Through these materials, we can better navigate early modern perceptions of and responses to bodily impairment by placing the day-to-day experiences of disability alongside literary and political expositions regarding the same. This chapter focuses on the institutions and corporations of England, primarily in the seventeenth century. Some of the institutions discussed here had their parallels in other countries. The development of hospitals and almshouses, for example, was broadly similar in many European countries of the period, and ideas about medicine, disability, and charitable institutions spread from country to country in the lives and work of prominent practitioners, some of whom are discussed below. Ambroise Paré, for example, was a French surgeon who became interested in Italian models of anatomy; his methods were honed on the battlefields of Europe and spread into English practice via surgical treatises. England was unusual, though, in other institutional forms, particularly the embeddedness of the corporation (a theoretically eternal collective able to act as one) in local government, trade, and colonization. Thanks to a relatively weak—or at least decentralized—state, the corporations had a role in social organization, charity, and the

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provision of support for the infirm or disabled beyond the scope of similar institutions on mainland Europe (Stern 2013: 23–4). By drawing on these sources, we are able to place disabled people within the corporate organizations that oversaw many elements of early modern life. Whether the urban corporation (a community within a town or city that elected officials and delivered local government), livery company (an association based around a particular trade, such as grocers or clothworkers), parish, or trading corporation (a group of merchants and investors banded together to trade, usually with a monopoly on a particular geographic area), institutions made up the fabric of early modern society and bore numerous responsibilities. Often in return for privileges regarding the regulation of particular spaces or commercial activities, these corporations were expected to help maintain social order, support their communities, and, in many cases, act as a safety net for the deserving poor (Withington 2005). Undertaking socially responsible activities was not just good for public relations; it was part of a corporation’s very reason to exist. At the heart of early modern business, there was a social contract between corporation and society intended to ensure positive gains for both. When they failed to do so, this would be quickly noted, by merchants, investors, the public, and also powerful political figures on whose support the companies depended. For instance, when the Mercer’s livery company held an expensive public dinner during a particularly difficult year, the Lord Mayor wrote to them suggesting they refrain from such conspicuous consumption and give the money to charity instead (Mercers’ Company Hall, Acts of Court 1595–1629, f. 289–90). Such complaints were rare, though, and corporations rarely required a push to undertake charitable works. Early modern corporations sought to support a wide range of activities to improve the lives of their members and those of people living in the communities within which they operated, as well as using charitable activity as a key part of their self-presentation as socially responsible and collectively beneficial enterprises. Social responsibility was an ingrained part of corporate activity in the early modern period, and their detailed records provide a unique means of examining the lives of disabled people in the early modern world. In this chapter, we will consider bodily impairment through the ways society responded to disabled people. Our focus will primarily be on London institutions—partly because of the fullness of their records, but also because the concentration of institutions in London— private companies, state governance, and the press—allowed substantial and sustained debate about potential responses to disability. Other companies elsewhere in England also dealt with these matters, of course. In 1644, the Merchant Venturers of Bristol, struggling with their finances, cut their support for former members, instructing their treasurer to “pay no pencon or pencons whatsoer to any penconer formerlie allowed by this Society, untill God shall enable the Company better to pay the same. Save only to the almsmen resident in the almshouse” (SMV/2/1/1/1, December 7, 1644). The continued support for the almshouse is interesting, but the lack of supporting institutional records from the Merchant Venturers or the almshouse means it is difficult to piece together how and why this decision was taken. London, meanwhile, was responsible for around 60 percent of the charitable giving in England over this period, not least because of the interaction of the newly wealthy merchant class with established charitable institutions and new ideas about poor relief and the social conditions of poverty, including disability (Jordan 2006 [1960]: 3).

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The next part of the chapter considers how bodily impairment was presented in writing, reexamining the common trope of the injured poor by positioning them within the corporate-social environments in which they lived. Following this is an examination of what constituted the deserving poor and almsgiving, and it will detail some of the ways livery and urban corporations granted aid to certain members of society. Finally, we will consider how corporations upheld their social contracts with employees and the wider community through responsive practices to aid people injured at work.

2.2. CULTURAL MANIFESTATIONS First, though, it is essential to contextualize the Renaissance response to mobility impairment by assessing the cultural undertones that fed into day-to-day practices in corporations, local authorities, and the state. Indeed, in each of these institutions, the concept of the body was well developed as a means of understanding their own state. For corporations, it was the idea of their being a single, united body politic. For the state, the realm together was connected to the Crown through complex metaphors resting on bodily function—a well-functioning state was perceived to act like the body. The famous frontispiece to Hobbes’ Leviathan is one example of the bodily order required for such a leap, as a multitude of interchangeable individuals are brought together under the head of the King, becoming a single assemblage that is both the King and the state (Figure 2.1). However, the body politic was not always an “able” body; in fact, as Emily Russell has shown, “[i]mages of anomalous bodies, often under the rubric of the grotesque, surface throughout cultural expression as a sign for largely abstract concerns” (Russell 2011: 7). Anxiety about the state and social order is manifested in the circulating imagery of the disabled body, at an individual level but particularly at the level of representation. From the very beginning of Henry IV Part 1 (Greenblatt et al. 1996), the civil war that has just ended, and that will return to animate the play, is presented as that most grotesque of infirmities, a body turned against itself: All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in the intestine shock And furious close of civil butchery (1.1.11–13) As immediately as “intestine” (from the Latin “intus,” “within”) creates an image of a body politic, “civil butchery” provides an idea of brutal dismemberment. Such an image was not an unusual one, since the idea of the “body politic” elided easily into a real body both in the person of the King and the popular imagination. The rhetorical tradition of Roman imperial historians adjudged civil wars to be “a persistent disease of the body politic,” although they saw the restoration of monarchy as the cure; by the early modern period, the medical rhetoric around civil war had developed slightly, with the disease being reimagined as a potentially virtuous, or at least purgative, “surgery to remove a gangrenous limb that could destroy the body politic” (Armitage 2017: 88, 163). Just as in the surgical materials of the age, which will be discussed below, occasionally the permanent and immediate impairment of dismembering was preferable to a drawn-out and uncertain process of (attempted) recovery.

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FIGURE 2.1  Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651).

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Henry returns to the idea of the relationship between the body natural and the body politic later in the same speech. Discussing his plans to raise an army for his long-delayed crusade, Henry declares that Forthwith a power of English shall we levy; Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields (1.1.22–4) Just as the crusade will salve Henry’s conscience, it will restore the link between the body politic and its citizens—not now butchered or bred, but rather perfectly molded for the holy fight. However, like most of the ideas of glorious kingship articulated by the play, this is undercut by the behavior of the itinerant rogue Sir John Falstaff. Toward the end of the play, he provides a cynical twist on putting the aged, lame, or impaired to work, taking advantage of his commission by impressing such unsuitable soldiers as he can find: PRINCE HARRY I did never see such pitiful rascals. FALSTAFF Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men. WESTMORELAND Ay, but, Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly. (4.2.57–62) These are men too poor to buy their way out of being impressed, but there is a hint, too, in the frail conditions of their bodies that at least some of these “pitiful” and “bare” beggars are disabled (and if they are not yet, they may well be after Falstaff’s sacrificial tactics). There is an irony here, as Randall Martin points out, since the English were the prime exporters of “catastrophic killing-power” (2015: 85)—and maiming-power, too, of course—via nationally sanctioned advancements in the technology and manufacture of cast-iron artillery. Falstaff, as well as performing some cultural mockery (which he aims at those below him in the social hierarchy as happily as those above), also suggests a correlation between bodily state and worthiness. We have seen this already in the corporate sources—value correlated to willingness to labor—but literary and theological texts often went further, equating bodily wholeness with spiritual wholeness, and consequently a deformity or disability in the body with an equivalent spiritual disability. As often happens, though, the play soon undermines that correlation with Falstaff’s private musings on honor: Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. (5.1.129–33)

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The wounds that are marks of honor for the play’s chivalric class are devastatingly real for the “food for powder” whose bodies are literally sacrificed to fulfil their ambitions— though these sacrifices are usually figured by the chivalric characters as life or death, such as Hotspur’s declaration that if we live, we live to tread on kings; If die, brave death, when princes die with us! (5.2.85–6) Falstaff’s aside reminds the audience of the longer-term disabilities provoked by war, a point reiterated as Falstaff reflects on the three survivors of his band, all of whom will be forced to rely on charity for the rest of their life: God keep lead out of me! I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered; there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive; and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life. (5.3.33–7) The process of begging (whether from individuals or institutions) was a central part of the social life of citizens, cities, and their corporations. By grounding the historic, “honorable” battle in the lived experience of military survivors, Falstaff undercuts the claims to chivalric virtue made by the leading characters and, perhaps, the play itself as a proponent of a glorious national history; like the memory of Prince Hal, which can never be entirely erased by the glory of Henry V, the wounds and injuries of the disabled soldiers linger long after their cause is apparently settled. Although the comparison of the lot of the common soldiers to those of kings is hardly unique, a satirical pamphlet purporting to be the voice of the Army during the civil wars has a strange echo of the language of 1 Henry IV on the issue of honor: have not our hands convinced all our foes and opposers? and brought gallant Fairfax and Crumwell to this high pitch of honour, that they have dared to lay their Soveraignes head under their feet. (The Souldiers Demand 1649: 2) The pamphlet alleges that the leaders of the Parliamentary cause (both the members of parliament (MPs) and the generals) have been raised up by the endeavors of the common people, and then have forgotten the efforts that put them in that exalted position. Like Hotspur, they tread on the King, with the implication that they, too, care not for the deaths and injuries of the common folk so long as their grand political cause is settled and honor, whatever that means, accrues to them. The pamphlet went on to accuse the leaders of likewise accumulating treasure through plunder and taxes (doubly unjust, in that case, because the taxes were hypothecated to the expenses of the wars), but refusing to spend it on supporting the soldiers. Without financial or institutional support the poore souldier is ever hereafter utterly unable to help himselfe, and the poore widdowes and heplesse children left comfortlesse and destitute of any livelihood for want of their husbands travell & labour, but must necessarily turn beggar, and so must the poore criple Souldier. (8) Once more the disability of the soldiers is widened to become a broader social issue—not just those who have served, but their families and dependents are “crippled” by the wars.

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And because they are forced to beg, it is on local people (individually or institutionally), not the Parliament or the Army leaders, that the burden of support will fall. The matter of the “crippled” soldier is especially egregious because of “the good service he has done his worthy Masters,” despite which “the money he had will scarcely buy him a paire of crutches” (8). The link, in other words, between worthy behavior and charitable support is broken. In fact, Parliament, conscious of the perennial difficulties between local and central government in the administering of aid and of the stock complaint of the forgotten, wounded soldier, did attempt to alleviate the conditions of their soldiers. They established a pension for the soldiers and sailors who had been injured in their cause, which was initially paid from confiscated Royalist goods and the proceeds of ships taken as prizes. A number of hospitals and poorhouses were used specifically for the care of those who had been wounded in the wars, such as the Savoy Hospital in London (CSPD 1650: 282, 366). In 1651, the facilities used for those fighting in the English wars were expanded to include the casualties from campaigns in Scotland and Ireland. The Commonwealth’s Navy Commission even investigated the possibility of repurposing Portchester Castle (at Portsmouth) as a hospital for wounded sailors, though the scheme was ultimately abandoned because it “may cost as much to repair as a new house” (CSPD 1652–3: 224). Instead, local magistrates were charged with seeing to the needs of the wounded, with Parliament restating the traditional roles of Justices of the Peace and parishes in providing alms for the poor and injured (Coleby 2002: 41). The shift in emphasis from central provision to local reveals a broader problem in the provision of care and charitable relief in the interregnum and the early modern period more broadly—the central bureaucracy of the state either did not exist or was unable to cope with the complicated accounting and detailed recording of the sick and injured required to administer relief on a national scale. There were a number of occasions on which more money was distributed than had in fact been taken in; MPs were even “hit in their pockets” as a consequence when Hesilrige and other members who had been involved with the army “collected a contribution from every member present towards the relief of widows, children and wounded soldiers and seamen from the battle of Portland” (von Arni 2017 [2001]: 77). The personal cost, expense, and difficulty of national administration, as well as the growing numbers of claimants from the overseas campaigns during the 1650s, convinced Parliament to put the whole matter of charitable relief back in the hands of local institutions. Alongside this increasing visibility of those who were physically disabled, the civil wars saw a rhetorical shift in the way the “cripple” was represented, as the idea of disability, especially the “cripple,” expanded to include those who were unjustly oppressed. In a sermon (allegedly) preached before the House of Commons, Arthur Salway made that link explicit: Thus have many behaved themselves towards you (Honorable Senators) when you cured the Creeples, I meane such as were Creeples in their estates, and liberties; when you took away Ship-money, Monopolies, and the like burdens: when you made the lame to walke, opening the Prison doores unto such as were in bonds: when you made the dumbe to speake, opening the mouthes of many silenced Ministers; then they could say, Oh this is a blessed Parliament! We had been undone if it had not been for this Parliament: but when they saw the viperous brood of malignant Adversaries unto our Religion, and Lawes, in Arms against you; then what multitude of Creeples did

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presently appeare? Most were (I wish I could not say, are) lame on one foot. (Salway 1644: 13) Here, the “cripple” is no longer a physical categorization, but a circumstantial one—all are “crippled” by the onerous imposition of taxation, or the denial of civil liberties in unjust imprisonment or religious suppression. Salway casts Parliament as a modern-day apostle, with the power of faith transmuted into the power of liberty and righteousness, in a deliberate echo of the healing through faith of the apostles, who were able to “make the lame to goe, the blind to see, the dumbe to speake, the deafe to heare, the leaper to be cleane” (Maxwell 1611: 50), and so on. Those who are “lame on one foot” are those uncertain supporters of the Parliament, or otherwise wavering in their convictions. In this way, Salway nods to the idea that bodily impairment was perceived to be a marring of the soul. Offering a translation of the Greek poet Agadius, Thomas Hill’s treatise of physiognomy relied on a perceived connection between inward and outward virtue: Why doste thou limpe and halt, thy minde is lame I see, These outward signes are tokens plain of secrete yll in thee. (Hill 1571: epistle dedicatory) Walking well had a long-established spiritual dimension, and there are a number of occasions in the Bible in which the link between walking well and spiritual correctness is made: “He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart” (Psalms 15:2); “teach them the good way wherein they should walk” (1 Kings 8:36). And the opposite point is made almost as frequently—to walk badly is to be out of favor with God: “He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth his ways shall be known” (Proverbs 10:9); “And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment” (1 Samuel 8:3); “he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walketh upon a snare” (Job 18:8). These verses combine a failure to walk straight or uprightly (in a physical as well as metaphorical sense) with poor judgment and sinfulness, a connection made explicitly in the case of God’s judgment on Jerusalem through Isaiah: the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet. (Isaiah 3:16) Though this is not mobility impairment in the strict sense of physical disability, it is clear that the failure to walk upright is here more than merely metaphorical. Consequently, theological and physiological thought became somewhat conflated: Therfore God graunt of his mercy to thre kynds of callyngs in this worlde that they may walk truly, obediently, & charitably, in the sight of God and man. Those three professions are the Church (“the mouth betwene God & his flock”), the Magistrate (“ryghteousnesse may be ministred, and Justice, observed”) and the Physician, who ought to “marre not, or caste awaye that whych God hath so richlie garnished with the Giftes of Nature whiche is Mankinde” (Bullein 1562: 58). Indeed, the parallels between healing, sickness, and spiritual virtue were frequently and explicitly drawn:

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And if the Phisitions ordeined to cure infirmities of the body, would binde themselves to heale the sorows of the hart: they should in particuler have more patients mustering afore their gates, then in times past were inhabitantes in Rome when it was best replenished: For, so naturall is the sickenesse of trouble and vexation, that though many eschew it, yet few have power to live long exempt from it. What is he either past, present, or to come, who, in his body hath not felt some paine, and in his hart some passion, hath not suffered some losse or spoile of his goodes, or infamye to his person, or at least who can walke so upryghtlye to whome is not done some Injurye, or some Scorne or Reproache spoken? (Fenton 1575: 46) Though by the 1640s, this rhetoric was shifting somewhat—John Wilson argued that God had created a body that could still function if impaired, and that such impairment need not diminish the soul: consider the excellency of the Soule, consisting in the unity and singularity of it. God hath given unto one body two eyes, two hands, and two feete, but he hath given it but one Soule, he hath given two eyes to the end that if one bee blinde the other may see, two hands to the end that if one be weake the other may worke, and two feete to the end that if one be lame, the other may walke, but he hath given us but one Soule, which is a jewel invaluable, a jemme immatchable, & a pearle inestimable. (Wilson 1646: 40) The connection between deformity and morality was not, then, as clear cut as it might appear from the texts that articulated that idea. Wilson’s text may well be drawing on the lived experience of those whose bodies were impaired, either from birth or by accident, for it was increasingly possible for those disabled members of early modern society to play at least some part within it.

2.3. ALMS Such conceptions of bodily, civil, and spiritual health fed into institutional responses to impairment. Underpinning the early modern response to bodily impairment and the responsibilities of society toward people with such disabilities was the concept of the deserving poor. St. Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms supported giving to those who requested it, but also reminded readers to actively seek out those who deserved charity. Augustinian understandings of charity emphasized the value of good works for both parties, but reminded givers of their responsibility to assess the worthiness of those who received charity. This underpinned a doctrine that emphasized the Christian virtues of poverty gracefully borne as well as charity, while at the same time dividing the poor into “deserving” and “undeserving” based on their faithfulness. In an addendum to an epistolary–biographical pamphlet of 1598, “Tyro” wrote of the virtue of giving, and advised that the truly charitable man takes a view of the maners of his relatiue, of his affection, of his laudable partes, rewarding him most freely whom hee findeth most vertuous. Againe, his purse is present where there is most need. He is the Zephirus that breathes on the widow, orphan, and foure-footed criple, and on the true Souldier maimed in defence of our common mother. (Tyro 1598: n.p.)

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While charity is presented as both a personal and a public good, Tyro is clear that there is a link between reward and virtue. Givers are advised to take notice of the “manners” and “laudable parts” of the recipients of charity, and give most to the “most virtuous.” Notwithstanding these personal qualities, there are further categories presented that are inherently more deserving of charity. Three of these—the widow, the orphan, and the soldier—are identity categories, based on professional or personal circumstances, while the fourth—the “cripple”—is a bodily category. Nevertheless, these various categories are clearly to be considered together, all forming types of disability. In fact, Tyro’s model of those in need of charity is remarkably close to the modern social model of disability, since it includes not just those with physical impairments (the “criple” and “true soldier maimed”), but those like widows and orphans who are disempowered under Renaissance social conditions. Poverty and disability clearly overlapped for Renaissance writers; corporations, too, borrowed the rhetoric of social support, with joint stock companies in particular justifying themselves on the grounds that “widows and orphans” who held stock would otherwise be unable to earn a living. Mobility impairment is equally as deserving of charity because, as we shall see, such a disability was often (though not always) perceived as precluding the opportunity for virtue or honest labor, especially if, as in the case of the soldier, it was a disability that was a consequence of service. Institutional giving matched Tyro’s categorization of social disability and understanding of virtue. For instance, when William Mountford approached the East India Company for aid in 1624, “alleging his poverty and infirmity of body occasioned by sundry bruises in his journeying for the company’s services,” he was turned away—a fairly uncommon outcome in this kind of situation—because “it was remembered that he had been a low performer of his duty, always negligent” (BL IOR/B/9, August 20, 1624) and thus not worthy of their aid. This desire to grant charity to the worthy poor was further institutionalized in the almshouse, where orders to extract labor from the inhabitants was part of this broader social trend designed to identify the deserving poor. Unlike preReformation practice, though, this corporate charity was directed by private individuals and institutions, rather than funding the charitable activities of the Church. This did not mean secular charity, however; in addition to hard work or good reputation, bequests designed for the poor increasingly required outward signs of their religious devotion, whether through the administering of a test or the ritual performance of prayer in a particular church (Archer 2002). The corollary was the bodily injury visited on the “undeserving poor” (beggars, vagabonds, those who refused to labor) at whipping posts and in stocks (Berlin 2000: 59–60). Yet, in spite of these seemingly draconian criteria for receiving aid, during the early modern period, people in London alone, especially merchants, “were to provide an almost incomprehensibly large total of charitable wealth” as they sought to assuage the social challenges of the growing metropolis. As bumper profits from new colonial and commercial ventures coincided with a rising population and challenges to the social fabric of the city, there was a growing demand for resources to battle poverty and tackle unemployment. Indeed, between 1480 and 1660, almost two million pounds of charitable benefactions were made through wills by just over 17,000 donors. The average donation was £255 12s 2d—a considerable sum of money that far exceeded the national average rate of giving (Jordan 2006 [1960]: 1–3). These funds were used in a range of different ways as London’s merchants experimented with a variety of ways to relieve poverty in the old, infirm, or otherwise socially disabled. Just over a third of donations were made to specific individuals, while the vast majority was used to establish institutions such as

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hospitals, almshouses, or schools. Even if these funds did not directly support charitable institutions of this type, they were frequently managed by other institutional bodies, particularly London’s livery companies (Slack 2015: 65). Attempts were made by the state to assuage the challenges of poverty—a common consequence of physical impairment. The 1572 “Vagabond Act” enjoined Justices of the Peace to make provision for “all aged poor impotent and decayed persons” (Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/PU/1/1572/14Eliz1n5) by leveling a tax on the community to pay for their relief. A series of subsequent acts (usually grouped together as the Poor Laws) codified and extended the role of the state in providing relief, though the “state” meant the local systems of government and taxation rather than a centralized system. This was not always done willingly, and considerable tension existed between local provision and national orders. When the Masters of Trinity College, an institution expected to do its part to uphold these provisions, petitioned the Privy Council in 1595, they complained of “the manifold inconveniencies generally expected to ensue upon the admission of such strange and poor families amongst us.” Contending that accepting “aged and impotent persons, their wives, children” into the college used up already scarce space and represented an untenable charge. They expressed how they were “much discontented” and were “in fear to be further damnified” (BL Lansdowne MS 79/55) by the arrival of forty more dependents. They begged to be dispended with these requirements and sought to remove themselves from national structures for poor relief. Yet, as Angela Nicholls has shown, there was “considerable overlap between private charity and public provision” (2017: 7), as bequests, poor boxes, parish funds, and corporate levies all intermingled in the provision of alms in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During the Stuart period, “the frontal assault on poverty” included several forms of poor relief that amounted to almost £10,000 a year across this fourdecade period, in addition to the endowment and constructions of almshouses (Nicholls 2017: 88, 135). Some of these provisions were made for the general benefit of the poor in London, but many were made to support social groups connected to the benefactors— members of a livery company would often specify in their wills that their charity should be used primarily for needy constituents of the same institution. Corporations had long held an important role in responding to the challenges facing English society, and the incorporation of livery companies from the fourteenth century onwards had been taken, in part, as a response to social forces. Through incorporation, livery companies obtained rights and privileges that were essential for their continuing relevance—particularly the right to own land—but in doing so, they took on a greater role in society. They sought to regulate the activities of members, sometimes by forcing individuals to curtail activities deemed unsuitable, but also by providing an important safety net and social structure (Unwin 1938 [1908]: 155–75). In this mixed economy of welfare provision, livery companies acted as a last resort for the many poor members of their communities. For many individuals, a place in company almshouses was the best option available for long-term support. These were properties or sets of properties belonging to the parish or a corporation (usually urban, though this might also include a university or even a private company) that were used to house the poor. Almshouses provided housing to those who could not afford to rent or purchase; they also sometimes offered “food, clothing, fuel, or a weekly cash stipend” (McIntosh 2011: 7), but even this was basic relief and generally insufficient to sustain life, especially for those of working age. They might also offer religious support, and, in the case of the Drapers’ company’s almshouse, “morning and evening prayers [were] ordered to be

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read to the almspeople in Towerhill” (DC, MB 13, January 12, 1628). The Drapers’ minute books reveal a discussion about how to best use their charitable funds, but rather than paying to admit more infirm people, it was instead decided that “books [would] be provided and the minister paid £20 per year” (DC, MB 13, January 12, 1628). As this suggests, the provision of relief for poor and disabled individuals was rarely separated from contemporary conceptions of the moral economy and the deserving poor. Urban corporations increasingly took over the running of almshouses after the Reformation, with charitable relief becoming an increasingly secular concern in its administration, if not necessarily in social theory (Brodie 2012). In London, almshouses remained a popular means of supporting the poor, and they were both maintained and expanded by livery companies throughout this period. For example, in 1621, the Haberdashers’ livery company agreed that “when the stock of the company shall be increased,” a “hospital, almshouse or houses for the poor” (GL, MS 16842/001, ff. 222, 303) would be built in London, a promise that was met with the purchase of land for this purpose eighteen years later. For the Drapers’ company, we can trace the development of their new almshouse throughout the 1620s. Supported in part by properties left to the company by Sir John Jolles, who specified that the rents from five tenements in Mark Lane must be used to pay for eight people in the almshouse, the company was able to take in more people (DC, MB 13, November 26, 1621). However, even with this additional space, the company soon had to start turning more people away. First, they agreed only to house “the company’s poor” rather than strangers, but soon only admitted people in situations where they met further criteria (DC, MB 13, June 13, 1627). Thomas Frilder, “a poor man of near 80 years of age,” was admitted only “in regard of his age and poverty” and that he had “long lived in or about Bow and Bromley” near the almshouse (DC, MB 13, January 12, 1628). Another, Robert Knightsmith, obtained admittance because he was “a poor, aged, lame man of this company,” while three suitors less deserving were turned away with only twenty shillings to share between them (DC, MB 13, February 28, 1628). As these examples suggest, almshouses only went so far in protecting infirm, old, and poor people from destitution in times of need, and in spite of new buildings and new funds becoming available, many impaired people would have been turned away. They would likely have to have sought a grant to beg for charity in the street, a last resort for those deemed deserving by the state. Or they may simply have joined the increasing number of unlicensed beggars created by the “structural changes in the English economy” from the 1580s onwards, which meant growing numbers of “under- and unemployed workers” (Hindle 2011: 302) from traditional industries such as textiles. This growing unemployment meant that assessing who was deserving based on attitudes to work became much more difficult, often relying on character witnesses or, in the case of the livery and trading companies, a preexisting record of good service in and to the company. In addition to funding almshouses, the account books for a number of livery companies reveal ongoing provisions for the poor across the period. For example, in 1612, the Clothworkers’ recorded fourteen pensions for “aged and impotent persons,” and in 1627, the Drapers’ gave £25 to the company’s poor in general and £20 to the poor widows at Bull Wharf (The Clothworkers’ Company, CL/B/1/4, fol. 85; DC, MB 13, December 11, 1627). In Bristol, the Society of Merchant Venturers made similar provisions, such as an agreement in 1640 to give Elizabeth Davies, “the late wife of John Davies mariner,” a weekly allowance of two shillings and six pence “for and towards the relief and maintenance of herself and six small children” (SMV/2/1/1/1, fol. 34). These

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specific agreements were supplemented with regular collections held to raise funds and the distribution of clothes and others essentials to the poor (DC, MB 13, May 2, 1604). In addition to payments and charitable gifts to specific individuals, injured, old, and otherwise impaired individuals were often able to present petitions directly to the leaders of such organizations asking for support (Smith 2017). The petitions they granted often related to injuries sustained on the job: Joseph Ward found that of thirty-six petitions granted by the Carpenters’ Company from 1609 to 1624, thirty-two related to an inability to work due to age or physical impairment (Ward 1997: 66). Though places in almshouses were given on the basis of inability to work, the companies often did, in fact, find some sort of employment for their petitioners, such as small ceremonial duties on feast days or intellectual labor such as overseers of work. Longer-term employment could be found for almsmen by making them beadles, or, in the case of Oliver Garwood, “a poor brother” of the Drapers’ company, being appointed almshouse porters (Ward 1997: 68–9; DC, MB 13, June 13, 1627). In other cases, companies might relax regulations to assist petitioners, such as the license granted by the Clothworkers to William Hunter to join in partnership with William Webb in respect of his age and need for support from a younger man, who he could presumably mentor or otherwise give the benefit of his experience (The Clothworkers’ Company, CL/B/1/4, fol. 234). As part of a general trend in private giving and support for the poor, from the late sixteenth century, corporations played a crucial role in poor relief—they raised funds through their membership, provided physical spaces for the poor to inhabit, and found alternative employment for those who were impaired. At least initially, this came from a responsibility to their own members (whether as a guild or simply as a large employer), with corporations supporting their workers, even after their employment had finished, if they fell on hard times through bodily infirmity (whether through old age or injury), as well as their wives or widows. This relief was granted through petition, with petitioners asked to prove their hardship, their willingness to work if able to do so (or their hard work prior to their injury), and their good behavior in order to be granted relief. Corporations thus contributed to a secular version of Augustine’s distinction between just and unjust poor, for in the creation of a community of “deserving” employees who received relief, they also created a corollary set of “undeserving” poor who did not. This only partially mapped onto the distinction between “able-bodied” and “disabled,” but the intersection between those categories was an important one for the development of charitable institutions and the public perception of disability in the Renaissance.

2.4. INJURIES AT WORK It is through tracing the charitable responses to some of these “deserving” employees that we can most effectively assess the early modern experience of mobility impairment. Many companies were aware of the constant risks faced by their employees and their members, and they were particularly careful about supporting people injured through no fault of their own. Indeed, the injured worker was a common theme both in lives and literature. For instance, Marvell’s mower poems, a series of texts detailing the work of Damon, the mower, are usually read as an extended allegory on humankind’s interaction with nature (Colie 2016 [1970]: 30–5). They take as a generic model the harmony between nature and the rural worker–poet that is the mark of pastoral poetry; Damon, however, due to his unrequited love for Juliana, attempts to violently restore that harmony by disfiguring nature:

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The edgèd steel by careless chance Did into his own ankle glance; And there among the grass fell down, By his own scythe, the Mower mown. (“Damon the Mower,” in Donno 2005: 76–80) This moment, in which the scythe slips into his ankle, is at once a shocking break from the pastoral model, in which the body of the worker–poet is made incomplete or ineffective, and its apotheosis, for Damon, after becoming one with the grass, springs up again due to his knowledge of nature: “Alas!” said he, “these hurts are slight To those that die by love’s despite. With shepherd’s-purse, and clown’s-all-heal, The blood I staunch, and wound I seal.” (“Damon the Mower,” 81–4) Damon is fortunate; his “hurts are slight,” and he is able to treat his wound, though not his lovesickness; as the close of the poem informs us, only death, the ultimate mower, can cure that. But the poem nevertheless offers a glimpse of the risks of carelessness while working. The bodily danger, so vividly imagined, moves us way from the broad allegorical concerns of the poem (nature, death) and into the dangers of the lived experience of working life in the early modern countryside. In so doing, Marvell opens up another front in which Damon’s violence shatters the pastoral ideal, refusing the perfection of artistic depiction to insist upon the real dangers of working life. Working with machinery without modern safety standards, long hours, poor lighting, and even the lack of safe drinking water combined to make manual work exponentially more dangerous than it is today. The image of a laborer brought low by his own labors was not uncommon. Hamlet, for example, describes his scheming as a way to have the “engineer, hoist by his own petard” (Greenblatt et al. 1996: III.iv). Labor frequently made its mark upon the body of the laborer. With relatively high levels of work-related injury (in manufacturing, agricultural, and military labor especially), charitable and social systems in England had to be created or adapted to provide for those who had become impaired and their own dependents. When Mrs. Atkinson, “the wife of Richard Atkinson,” appeared before the East India Company, this was precisely her concern. She recounted how her husband had been working “at the lathing of a mast in the Company’s yards” when “the tackle broke [and] it broke his leg into many pieces to the extreme peril of his life.” The company was immediately supportive, granting twenty shillings of aid on the spot and agreeing that they would “forthwith send for Mr Woodall the company’s surgeon and gave him great charge to cure the man, and promised him that the Company will see him satisfied for the same” (BL IOR/B/9, August 13, 1624). When Mrs. Atkinson returned just over a month later “for the Company’s charitable benevolence towards the relief of her husband and 5 small children,” they agreed to give her a further forty shillings, “considering the poor man’s misery” and remembering that he “broke his leg in the Company’s service” (BL IOR/B/9, September 18, 1624). Working for the company gave Atkinson certain protections against bodily impairment and even in the face of this serious injury he could depend on the company to uphold their social contract and provide support. Such forms of bodily impairment were obvious markers of “deserving” poverty, since an injury that prevented easy movement and therefore work was usually visible. Thomas

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Smyth, another “one of the labourers in the Company’s service at Blackwall,” also “broke his leg casually in doing his labours.” Much like Atkinson, he petitioned the company for support and was granted twenty shillings after presenting “the attestation of Mr Stevens and one John Hunt,” who could confirm he had been injured in their service (BL IOR/B/9, November 24, 1624). The process by which an individual became injured could dramatically influence how society responded to them. A printed brief by the Lord Admiral in 1590 starkly demonstrates how the cause of an injury might affect how bodily impaired people might be treated in early modern England. The brief, given to William Browne, gave him permission to “beg alms in all churches and chapels throughout England,” and did “earnestly entreat you and every one of you, throughout the City of London and the dominions of her Majesty’s realm of England, to have a Christian and pitiful regard of [his] extreme want and misery.” However, it was not Browne’s want and misery that had resulted in the Lord Admiral’s support, but the context of his injuries. As a gunner, Browne had “served in her Majesty’s service against the Spaniards, in the Barque of Faversham, and in that service was shot through his body, and grievously wounded in sundry places, and by means of the same maimed forever” (BL Lansdowne MS 144/13, fol. 53). It was this service, and by suffering injury while working for the Navy, that secured his benefactor’s support. It was in a similar vein that Richard Limney gained admittance to an almshouse, not only because he was a “poor aged seaman,” but in consideration that he “went out with Captain Drake in 1601 and afterwards went in the Hector for the Indies” (BL, IOR/B/17, February 18, 1635). Becoming bodily impaired during service demonstrated the “deserving” qualities of disabled actors and enabled them to access what limited support was available. Injuries sustained on board ship, especially those related to gunnery, frequently led to permanent disability in their “curing.” Ambroise Paré, in his treatise on gunshot wounds, discussed the enormous damage early modern shot did to a body, noting that “it is no meruaile if after such wounds made by Gun-shot, there follow dolor, inflammation, feaver, spasme, Apostume, Gangrena, mortification and even death” (1617: 78–9). Paré recommended a course of suppurative medicines (designed to draw out infection) since “the Bullet being round and massiue, cannot make any entrance into our bodies, without great contusion and bruising” (1617: 94). He offered a number of case studies, all of which involve damage to the bones and risk of amputation at the hands of “lesser” doctors, until Paré intervenes and by his skill as an apothecary the patient is cured. One of these examples is the case of Charles Phillipes de Croy, who received a musket wound in the upper thigh that became ulcerated and infected. Paré asks if he will accept a course of medicine administered by incision: He answered, that he would willingly indure whatsoever I thought convenient, yea, to the amputation of his legge, if I thought it necessary. Then I was verie joyful, and presently after I made two Orifices to give issue to the Matter that lay about the bone, and in the substance of the Muscles, wherby there issued forth a great quantity. Afterwards, injection was made with wine, and a little Aqua-vitae, wherein there was dissolved a good quantity of Egyptiacum, to correct the putrifaction, and to dissicate the loose & spongeous flesh. (1617: 88–9) Paré’s case study reflects the desperation of a patient whose wounds cause such pain that he is willing to undergo permanent loss of the leg rather than continue to experience ongoing disease and infection. And, though Paré prefers to have the patient vocalize it rather than make the case in his own narrative voice, the reader is led to believe that,

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since de Croy’s illness is worsening, amputation or dismemberment would be the ultimate end point of his current treatment. In this case, though, Paré claims success: once his “decoctions” begin to cure the ulcers and break the fever, the patient is able to sleep and eat again, and so restore his body. Paré’s cure allows the nobleman to swap a severe impairment to his mobility (either with disease or the loss of a leg) for a lesser, though still permanent, one: “Onely it remaineth that he cannot wel bend his knee” (1617: 92). Here and elsewhere in the text, Paré presents amputation as a last resort that a skillful doctor–surgeon should be able to avoid. For Paré, the loss of a limb is destructive for patients and surgeons alike. It is also worth noting that, while effective, the cure Paré offers is slow, difficult, and expensive, and so unsuitable for either widespread implementation or critical injuries such as those on a battlefield. In 1676, when Richard Wiseman published a collection of his own extensive treatises on surgery, he was not deviating much from the accepted medical wisdom of the previous century of seafaring and overseas adventure when he advised, “if you have no probable hope of Sanation, cut it off quickly … But if there be hopes of Cure, proceed rationally to a right and methodicall Healing of such Wounds” (1676: 420). His manuscript is largely a collection of his own medical notes, designed to improve the decision-making of surgeons in the military and at sea, and indeed he frequently berates the other surgeons mentioned in his narratives, either for not being decisive enough, or, more frequently, racing to judgment on a wound when proper medical knowledge would know to wait and cure by other means than amputation. Even his passage on the necessary evil of amputation contains a hopeful narrative for his patients: If it be the Arm, some of them will scarce be kept in the Hold while the Ship is close engaged in Fight. In the heat of Fight I cut off a man’s Arm, and after he was laid down, the Fight growing hotter, he ran up, and helpt to traverse a Gun. (Wiseman 1676: 420) That amputees could offer further service, even immediately, speaks to a hard-headed understanding of bodily impairment that was echoed in other surgical and medical manuals. In his Mellificium Chirurgie, a surgical compendium for those at sea or serving with the Army, James Cooke offered a series of ways to treat different fractures, and placed particular emphasis on ensuring as full a mobility and usefulness was preserved as possible. For fractures of the hands and feet, for example, he recommended regular extension and reduction after setting, “lest it lose the most fitting figure for the patients use and benefit” (1648: 203). Cooke also gave clear instructions on how to treat dislocations, which meant a patient “cannot extend the leg without pain, nor stand upon their toes.” These were to be pushed back into place against “a pin of wood pretty thicke which must bee lapped with linnen cloaths” (1648: 214) and placed next to the leg as a guide. Afterwards, the patient was to be treated for “Atrophia or wasting of the part” (1648: 218) by exercise and an ointment. In this way, the surgeon also became involved with a long-term cure, acting as a sort of physiotherapist to ensure that the patient recovered as much mobility as possible. John Woodall was appointed as the first surgeon general of the East India Company in 1613, after extensive involvement with the Virginia Company, for whom he supplied surgeons’ chests to be used on board ships and in the colony (Brown 2011: 36–7). The Company primarily used Woodall to guarantee the supply of provisions and to oversee the selection of surgeons:

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Mr. Woodall to provide two small chests of all kinds of chirurgery beyond the proportion usually sent, to be brought to the East India House by the 10th of March, ready for the Company’s two ships; also two experienced chirurgeons for Surat and Persia, besides those designed for the ships. (BL IOR/B/17, February 4, 1635) This was mainly a supervisory and advisory role, which also guaranteed him (through the Company of Barber–Surgeons) a monopoly on the supply of surgeons’ chests to the East India Company until his death in 1643. However, although he does not seem to have gone on any voyages to India, Woodall evidently took a slightly more active role in treatment from time to time, since in October of 1635 he invoiced the company for treatment of one of its servants: Payment ordered of a bill of £2 8s. presented by Mr. Woodall, the Company’s surgeon, for attending John Sutcliffe, who was dangerously hurt in the Jonas. (BL IOR/B/17, October 9, 1635) The same meeting also ordered £50 to be given to Woodall to restock the surgeons’ chests. Woodall had produced a pamphlet, The Surgeon’s Mate, to be carried on board ship, which set out the instruments necessary to be carried in the chest, including a saw and catling: These two instruments are to be used in dismembring; as namely, they are to amputate, or to take off any offensive member or part of man’s body: I mean all the fleshie part, or whatsoever may be incised even to the bone: And also in dismembring of the legge or arm below the knee or elbow, you shall have occasion to use the incision knife to cut asunder betwixt the bones or elsewhere, whatsoever the Catling or dismembring knife cannot come at by reason of their greatnesse or unfitnesse; and then proceed to the sawe. … They are both very needfull instruments to be at hand upon all occasions in the Surgeons Chest. (Woodall 1617: 2) Although he felt, like Paré, that “dismembering” ought to be a last resort, Woodall acknowledged it was a necessary evil when patients would otherwise not survive, and devoted a whole chapter of his guide to the process (1617: 156–60) (Figure 2.2). Indeed, so important a process was amputation for surgeons at sea that Woodall produced a further publication in 1628 devoted entirely to the treatment of gunshot wounds. Here, Woodall outlined a number of strategies such as dressing and unguents, but ultimately advised that “you are rather to make present Amputation” if “the remaining part can doe no service to the bodie, but will indanger the life of the patient, and be a hinderance” (1628: 6). Yet even when injury had been sustained during service, corporate actors were by no means guaranteed to offer aid. When making petitions and seeking to obtain aid, it was important that injured individuals carried evidence of the service and any other circumstances regarding their request. When Samuel Pritchett, a mariner from Limehouse, approached the East India Company, he was unlucky enough to present them with not one but two injuries he had suffered during his service. First, he had “received a hurt in his shoulder in doing them service in the Indies, by means whereof he is become lame of his said shoulder and arm,” and more recently “by the fall of the topmast aboard the London he had broke his thumb.” Quite what he was doing with the use of only one arm on the London was never explained, though it does suggest a certain willingness to hire disabled workers, as well as the necessity of the disabled worker finding work rather than seeking alms (at least until further injury was sustained). In any case, neither his own

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FIGURE 2.2  Selection of dismembering instruments, from Woodall, The Surgeon’s Mate (London: John Legate, for Nicholas Bourne, 1655), 412.

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statement nor his appearance was enough to obtain aid—this would only be provided “if he can bring good certificate of the said hurt” (BL IOR/B/9, January 5, 1625). Similarly, in the case of John Purre, “a lighterman who was hurt with a bale of silk that fell upon him out of the Dolphin,” he was initially refused aid once it was revealed that he had failed to disclose a previous boon of 2s 6d. Even if he brought a “certificate that he be hurt” to a later meeting, he would only receive ten shillings, certainly a helpful sum, but less than the usual twenty (BL IOR/B/9, September 20, 1624). For both Pritchett and Purre, neither their service nor their injuries were enough to obtain aid; they required further statements regarding their suitability for charitable aid, a burden of proof that surely exacerbated the challenges of obtaining charitable support in a period when it was already hard to come by. Where people with bodily impairments were most successful was in situations where they exhibited evidence of good work before the injury, as well as a willingness to obviate the injury and continue to offer service. For the shipwright Robert Roffe, who had “served the company formerly in a voyage to the Indies in their ship the Ascension,” his slow recovery after a “fall into the hold” meant he was only now able to work. He requested that the company “entertain him and his servant in their work at Blackwall,” and while the company “would not meddle with his servant,” they did promise to hire him personally once he was fully fit (BL IOR/B/9, February 28, 1625). Gaining a position in the dockyard was a significant benefit for Roffe, and by stating his willingness to work in addition to his prior service, he demonstrated his creditability to the company. The commitment to continue work, then, was an important one in receiving institutional support for a disability or impairment. As we have seen, surgeons tended to see impairment as occasionally necessary, but not necessarily limiting for the patient (assuming they survived the procedure and their other wounds or disease). In 1657, Henry Stubbe, a pamphleteer and keeper of the Bodleian Library, who would soon turn his attention to medical practice, wrote a pamphlet intervening, in defense of Thomas Hobbes, in his long-running philosophical dispute with John Wallis (Jesseph 1999). He aimed to discredit Wallis by attacking his linguistic skill, particularly in etymology, and in one remarkable passage rejects a false etymology for “Empusa” as “one-legged” (“went upon one”). The Empusa (plural Empusae or Empusai, from the Greek “force in”) were shape-shifting servants of Hecate, often shown with one leg, or with a false leg of brass or other metal. Stubbe combines his etymological dispute with a practical jibe at Wallis, tartly noting that “I do not think that she laid her brass-leg over the left shoulder when she walked,” before taking the opportunity for a tangential philosophical reflection on what it might mean to have only one leg: It is further dubitable, whether that same brasen leg were continuous with the body of Empusa, or no? If not, then she had but one leg … yet went upon two, viz. the additional one of brass also. Now that it was, or could be continuous, is a question to be disputed in another place: there being natural philosophers that assert, that when a bough withers upon the tree, it ceaseth to be a part, and to be continuous therewith. (Stubbe 1657: 38–9) Stubbe’s interest, of course, is primarily in whether Empusa could be fairly called onelegged when she had two, even if one of them was a false leg. But, as he acknowledges, this raises a broader philosophical question of how a body with a false leg ought to be defined—is the false limb a part of the body or not? His metaphor of the withered bough

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suggests an understanding of disability as lack or uselessness, while his analysis of the Empusa myth and his emphasis on her ability to use both legs point to an understanding of prosthesis as restorative of the whole, even if some “difference” is now contained within it. In the same passage, Stubbe reminded his readers that even those who could not use their limbs for active work were not completely unable to labor in one way or another: as he whose nerve is cut, may have lost the use of an arm, yet not so totally, as not to be able to lean on it, or upon some occasions to benefit himself thereby. Thus, do not infer the total disuse of any servant. (Stubbe 1657: 39) Though Stubbe does allow a certain degree of loss of mobility from the loss of use, nevertheless he contends that this does not constitute a total “disuse” of the limb. Consequently, the servant retains some laboring potential, even though they cannot serve in either war or active labor, tying worth to practical, economic productivity. Stubbe’s logic, in fact, suggests a certain degree of “retraining” for those who have lost the use of a single limb and so cannot serve as effectively, and this reflected at least some real-world experience. Perhaps the most extraordinary corporate response to a petition was to a former employee of the East India Company, Thomas Joyce, who came before the company after his “right hand was cut off by an Arabian at the siege of Ormuz.” Joyce was not even requesting aid, only seeking re-employment in a future voyage that he insisted he was still suitable for, “having learned to write well with his left hand.” The company was skeptical, requesting that he “brought testimony to approve the truth of his petition” (BL IOR/B/9, September 8, 1624). He returned ten days later with a letter signed by “Mr Bangham and Mr Willis,” and the Company chose to “bestow upon him twenty nobles [£10]”—a huge sum—and promised to consider him for employment on all future voyages (BL IOR/B/9, September 18, 1624). Taking this extraordinary step of retraining to overcome his bodily impairment meant that Joyce received far more support than any other petitioner to the East India Company during this period. Living with injury in the early modern period could be managed, and the corporate system of support did look positively on many individuals who had been harmed during service, but for most, replicating Joyce’s experience would have been impossible.

2.5. CONCLUSION: CHARITABLE CORPORATIONS In the second half of the seventeenth century, corporate links to social welfare declined and the lives of people with injuries and other impairments were increasingly left in the hands of state-driven initiatives. Vocal groups, such as Royalist soldiers injured during the Civil War, gained personal interests in centers of power and waged long-lasting petitioning campaigns to obtain benefits and security (Stoyle 2003). Others, though, struggled even more to obtain support. The declining wealth and influence of livery companies, alongside the changing roles and responsibilities for joint-stock enterprises like the East India Company, meant fewer efforts were made by corporations to balance their commercial activities with responsibilities to constituencies in England. Corporate charity increasingly focused on (former) members and investors rather than the community as a whole. Instead, where corporate bodies did seek to assuage the lives of injured and poor people, it was more likely to be in the form of less responsive and less understanding

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projects. For instance, in 1681, a corporation was established specifically “for setting the poor French protestants to work at Ipswich in the linen manufacture,” and it attracted support from many of London’s leading merchants and even a £10 investment from the Royal Africa Company (Pettigrew and Brock 2017: 46–9). Although not particularly profitable, the concept behind the company was to combine public good with private profit—a shift in direction from earlier corporate responsibility for the poor. Indeed, this organization did little to consider individual circumstances or assuage the lives of people unable to work. Instead, it only offered investment (essential though it was) for politically important migrants to gain employment in a for-profit workhouse. In 1701, a more ambitious initiative went even further and sought to set the “loose and idle” poor to work. In this proposal, little effort was made to assess the skills, backgrounds, or social links the poor might have—or the cause of their poverty—but operated from a perspective that understood that “the increase of the poor is become a burden to this kingdom.” Condemned as contributing “to the depravation of manners” in England, the proposal argued that the “poor who are not able to help themselves” should “be compelled to labour.” To do so, the tract suggested a corporation should be chartered “to continue for ever, in all cities, boroughs, towns corporate, and market-towns” outside London, which would build hospitals, workhouses, and houses of correction and have funds to employ the poor. It was not intended to replace charitable almshouses or other provisions, but to provide a national defense against the threat of poverty-stricken masses (Anonymous 1700: 1–2). Throughout the proposal, the language of corporate responsibility that would have been familiar a century before was largely eroded. Gone were expectations that corporate bodies should be and always had been responsible for supporting the common good, gone was the consideration of an individual’s particular circumstances, and gone were attempts to reintegrate any impaired persons back into employments that may have maintained them in the past. As these examples suggest, the Renaissance conceptions of the injured body politic, of alms, and of social responsibility had all begun to deteriorate by the seventeenth century in England. Traditional models by which one might understand social order had been upturned by the civil wars and by a shift in power from the Crown to institutions such as Parliament and governing corporations. Discourses of the deserving poor, alongside advances in medicine and surgery, further complicated traditional narratives of relief and support. At the same time, charitable works were becoming increasingly divorced from localities. Relief for bodily impairment was—albeit somewhat erratically—increasingly seen as one of the functions of the developing state bureaucracy centralized in London, ultimately breaking the link between the giver and receiver of charitable relief.

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CHAPTER THREE

Chronic Pain and Illness Understanding Pain in the Renaissance ADLEEN CRAPO

Attitudes to pain and suffering in the Renaissance were the product of sometimes overlapping, sometimes intertwined religious and legal discourses from the GrecoRoman period to the Reformation. In some early modern ideas of pain and disability, we see the genesis of today’s thinking about pain. In examining others, it becomes clear that the early moderns had a greater range of interpretations and explanations of pain’s origins and its possibilities. Furthermore, there are barriers to understanding earlier depictions of pain, and especially early modern pain. One critic (Moscoso 2012), for example, uses Don Quixote to note that due to the abundance of spectacles of pain, “theatricality does not eliminate the pain, but it renders it partially invisible, relegating the spectacle of cruelty to the intimate sphere” (47). Pain can be hard to see, especially when it stares readers in the face. At the same time, the public and spectacular nature of early modern pain, which will be discussed below, renders it especially apt for an analysis by literary as well as historical scholars. Pain—at executions, in textbooks, in illness, and in creation—never lets readers or viewers forget that it is there. Some of our current social attitudes to pain and disability were beginning to calcify by the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the same time, the rise of institutions to house the infirm, the influence of the Reformation, and the systematization of judicial torture meant that early modern understandings of pain and infirmity were complex and influenced by overlapping practices. Classical and medieval ideas of pain persisted, while great political changes were underway. At the same time, though Harvey had described the functioning of the circulatory system in the early seventeenth century, medical science had not yet fully applied his knowledge of the circulatory system to understanding the body. Several possible barriers remain in considering early modern attitudes to pain from a current perspective. Firstly, it is difficult to separate physical pain from emotional pain (suffering) in the early modern period; this study will focus as much on physical pain as possible, but will take into account the experience of suffering. Secondly, the predominant medical model of the humors derived from the works of Hippocrates and Galen, which enabled people to consider physical and psychological symptoms together, also precluded a mainstream medical interest in treating pain: Galenic considerations of

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bodily disease rarely consider pain by itself. Instead, Galen and those he inspired treated pain as a component or side effect of a larger problem. Finally, the question of historical periods is important; because ideas often traveled from Italy to Spain and then France, the Netherlands, or England, it is impossible to make each area’s early modern period align. This study will focus on the years 1450–1650 in order to consider Europe during a critical formative moment: renewed contact with the culture of classical Antiquity and contact with indigenous peoples of the Americas. This chapter will particularly examine the role of pain in judicial proceedings and religious trials. It will also contrast two early modern Christian doctrines of pain. It will end by demonstrating the way in which pain sometimes made literary representation of the body possible when the typical rules of propriety might have foreclosed it. Since there is no one early modern discourse of pain, but rather overlapping, contradictory, and competing discourses, this chapter will lay out some of the most influential ideas. In the early modern period, the rise of dissection brought great change to the medical field. Doctors nevertheless persisted in relying on works by Galen and Hippocrates for much of their knowledge and training. Though Galen and his later readers might not have been interested in treating pain in and of itself, he did put forth a theory of pain’s causes and its mechanisms. According to Roselyne Rey’s discussion of Galen and his borrowings from and revisions to Hippocrates and Aristotle, much like today, doctors were forced to use qualitative methods to discuss and describe pain. Galen did attempt, unlike Hippocrates, to locate precisely where the pain originated. Much like diseases had internal and external causes, pain did too. Sometimes, pain was caused by a particular balance or imbalance in a person’s constitution. This suggests the view (as often is the case today) that pain can indicate a larger problem (not always true). Rey indicates that there is “a type of pain which exists on its own in the afflicted part as a result of an abnormal change in the crasis (combination of humours) independently of outside influences,” though, of course, since the humors existed in a delicate balance between environment and other factors, it would probably be quite difficult to ascertain what pain indicates which issues. Galen used descriptive language of pain and the sensations it evokes, such as “gravis” and “tension” (Rey 1995: 29). His attempts at description and understanding only went so far, and it would not be until the early sixteenth century that the medical field would begin to call classical models into question. At the same time, the rise of what Foucault deemed the “spectacle of suffering” in the political realm, where the state made public and systematic use of violence, had unintended consequences for the field of medicine. In some Italian city-states such as Bologna, it became the policy to perform autopsies on those who had died of unknown or suspicious causes, while elsewhere in Europe, executions were followed by the dissections of criminals’ bodies (Moscoso 2012: 119). These judicial policies in turn led to advances in the field of anatomy, and thus surgery. Though it may seem contradictory to today’s readers, in the sixteenth century, surgical guides discussed “external anatomy,” while “internal medicine” was left to doctors (Rey 1995: 58). Surgery remained a separate and less respectable field (some said trade), though it was on the rise thanks to the work of battlefield surgeons such as Ambroise Paré. A new understanding of the body’s workings often led anatomists and thinkers to realize that Galen’s model of the human body was lacking. Doctors continued to refer to Galen, but with an increasingly nuanced and skeptical perspective.

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Surgical guides did a better job of anticipating and discussing pain as an aftereffect of surgery and other interventions. Similarly, women practitioners of healing recorded recipes for pain relief in their receipt (or recipe) books, suggesting that outside of mainstream and masculine medicine, there was an interest in treating pain, and not just the impairment or imbalance that pain might indicate. Otherwise, a person experiencing pain might consult an astrologer to understand its cause, effects, and possible cures; a search of the digitized casebooks of the astrologers Simon Foreman and Richard Napier for the years 1596–1634 returned 1,229 entries when “symptoms” were described as “pain or pricking,” “burning and inflamed,” and “Gripings, gnawings and stitches,” and 180 for “morbus” as a general medical term. The casebooks comprise 48,518 entries (Casebooks Project, n.d.). What is significant is that practitioners received a significant number of queries about physical pain, in addition to the many entries that concern some sort of emotional suffering, such as relationship problems and grief. In England, for example, the Great Poor Laws had drawn a distinction between “sturdy beggars” and the “natural fools” who benefited from charity; to prevent fraud, the legislation took care that those whose disabilities or whose pain and suffering remained invisible would not be entitled to aid. Though the English legal system had been attempting for several centuries to differentiate the disabled from the dishonest, with the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, it became critical for Parliament to delineate how existing social and religious organizations would take on the responsibility for alms.1 On the continent, the rise of institutions to house the poor and infirm, as documented by Henri-Jacques Stiker, served as the forerunners to the nineteenth-century institutions for disabled and infirm people. In popular culture, characters with painful infirmities were represented by Pantalone in the commedia dell’arte, and they were depicted visually in the works Brueghel, Jacques Callot, and Jacques Lagniet. As Western European attitudes had not yet hardened as they later would, terminology for disability and for pain remained fluid. For example, the French writer Paul Scarron, whose spinal deformity is now thought to have been caused by autoimmune disease, described himself as “un raccourci de la misère humaine,” or “a shortcut of human misery,” turning his body into a visual symbol of human pain. His friends and fellow writers, like the Scudéry siblings and Jean Segrais, agreed that painful illness caused the most suffering, since it prohibited (in their libertine eyes) the enjoyment of bodily delights. In this conclusion, they were drawing on Epicurean and other classic writers. At the same time, early modern French rules about representation and politeness meant that few bodily topics were appropriate. However, pain did authorize a bending of the rules of appropriateness, especially when it was part of a saintly or sacrificial illness. In Catholicism, up until the late seventeenth century, hagiographic texts continued to focus on pain and martyrdom as a part of salvation, whether for missionaries in the New World or for sufferers of disabling illnesses. The decades following the Council of Trent saw a proliferation of texts and new artistic rules focused on depicting martyrs’ sufferings (Noyes 2018: 116–64). The martyrs faced illness, persecution, and torture, all of which served as proving grounds for their devotion. Gendered attitudes to pain and ideal portrayals of the masculine, controlled body made acknowledging pain a complex task.2 Renaissance literature foregrounded situations in which pain allowed male writers and literary characters to create or examine the impression of their own interiority.3 One critic names Montaigne as an example of an author who depicted pain as a way of creating the impression of interiority; her argument

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that the Essais are as much about the interior of the body as the mind is reinforced by the fact that Montaigne’s lesser-known but still crucial work, Journal de Voyage, is the journal of a trip across Europe in which he sought a cure for chronic kidney stones (Rey 1995: 51–68). As Truman (2009) notes about Hamlet, the reader gets a sense of the protagonist from his soliloquies, which are entirely constructed around suffering, particularly Hamlet’s desire to make physical and visible his psychic and emotional pain—a “technology of affect,” to borrow Lisa Jardine’s term, “a discursive structure designed to control the responses of an audience … to frame the ‘appropriate’ response.” Javier Moscoso makes a similar argument for the importance of pain in Don Quixote: the pain that Don Quixote constantly seeks out is the novel’s way of addressing the readers; “woe,” he argues, “is the driving force of the story,” drawing readers into impressions of the protagonist’s interiority (Moscoso 2012: 36). Hamlet’s emotional woe might be the engine of the story, but the early modern period would not make the distinction between his emotional and physical pain, nor would it, as later readers have done, render Hamlet’s distress more noble than physical pain. New historicist critics suggest that although the Renaissance did not truly introduce or create the individual, its searching examinations of the self, including the self’s relationship to pain, permitted this impression. At the same time, as characters lay bare their suffering as part of a relationship with an audience or reader, they cede power, requiring validation and admitting that they are traversed by sensations beyond their control. Perhaps this vulnerability is why physically disabled authors from the early modern period make a serious effort to discuss the ways in which their impairments, received in the line of patriotic duty, impede their functioning without referring to pain. For example, John Milton and Miguel de Cervantes were both born able-bodied men who became disabled while in their prime. While Milton lost his eyesight to disease aggravated by overwork, Cervantes was wounded in battle against a large Turkish naval fleet. Milton figured his disability as being patriotic in origin, as a choice he made repeatedly over the course of a long career writing on behalf of Cromwell’s government. At best, Milton will admit to emotional suffering caused by his disability, as he does in his sonnets and prose Defences: When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” Paradise Lost III.40–44) Here, the sonnet’s speaker focuses on the psychological suffering caused by his disability, which, as we have seen, is not easily separated from physical pain. The same humors that, when out of balance, led to blindness could also cause melancholy, and in doctors’ case notes the two were often linked.4 In Spain, another author was similarly defensive when he figured the relationship between pain and suffering and disability. The popularity of Don Quixote’s first part led to a false part II, written by a man named Avellaneda. As part of the false Don Quixote, Avellaneda wrote a prologue insulting Cervantes, Don Quixote’s real creator. Cervantes saw the insult as a chance to foreground his stoic response to disability and pain. Cervantes

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(2005) feigns upset that Avellaneda mocks his war wounds; he contrasts this upset with his acceptance, if not pride, in disability. He notes: What I cannot help taking amiss is that he charges me with being old and one-handed, as if it had been in my power to keep time from passing over me, or as if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see. If my wounds have no beauty to the beholder’s eye, they are, at least, honourable in the estimation of those who know where they were received; for the soldier shows to greater advantage dead in battle than alive in flight. (455) Cervantes uses references to his disability to show that he has met pain stoically and finds his rival’s refusal to understand the honor of battle the real cause of his emotional pain. Cervantes’ insistence that he is a misunderstood hero would also be a familiar narrative to his co-nationalists. Spanish religious practice foregrounded suffering and pain as part of a holy life. In Cervantes’ Spain, Catholic spiritual practices of mortification of the flesh were practiced openly by men and women (Moscoso 2012: 51). The faithful were reminded of the importance of philopassianism in several ways; firstly, Spanish treatments of pain abounded, including “guides to penance, sinner’s guides, treatises on the vanity of the world”; one mystic described life as “torment” or “martyrdom” (64). Spanish interest in the passion and deaths of the saints was deepened and mirrored by interest in “comedias de santos” and “autos sacramentales,” relics of the medieval era that survived well into the early modern period. The nascent Spanish state and the Inquisition had worked to ensure a Catholic country, expelling Moors, Jews, and others whose practice of religion was suspect. No doubt the public spectacles of Inquisitorial punishment worked as negative reinforcement, while communal plays of saints’ martyrdom worked as positive reinforcement; in either case, pain reminded viewers how the body was a necessary part of religious practice. Numerous autobiographical accounts of women’s spiritual practices in the premodern period make public cloistered nuns’ self-abnegation. This self-documented feminine suffering began with one of the first autobiographies by a woman in Spanish, Teresa of Cartagena’s Grove of the Infirm. Cartagena’s discussion of her deafness and its humbling impact on her body and then her spirit was widely read in late medieval Spain. Cartagena (1988) figures her illness and subsequent disability as a kind of crucifixion (or pasyones)—this is the closest Cartagena comes to linking pain to its Latin word, poenas, or punishment. Overall, however, her painful ailments make her a more active, holy sufferer. Illnesses, she claims, goad us with their spurs, making us run along the narrow path mentioned above. Although it may seem that the afflicted stays still at home, he traverses more roads than we think and, even bedridden, in the grip of a fever or some other painful affliction, he walks more, I believe, than a fifty-day journey. (55) Her voice would be joined to those of Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila as important models for women penitents. In the seventeenth century, the spiritual descendants of Teresa of Cartagena were writing autobiographies of their own suffering and voluntary penitence. The importance of pain as a vehicle for spiritual purification was so pronounced in these works that one nun, María de Vela y Cueto, described life as the most painful torment

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possible, “a reminder of Christ’s Passion” as part of her “inexhaustible desire for suffering” (Moscoso 2012: 54). As Truman argued in his analysis of English pain and subjectivity, depicting pain deepens the impression of interiority. In a Spanish Catholic context, nuns built on the models they knew, ad nauseam, in the hopes of arriving at a particular holy state; at least their accounts gave the impression that their pain had brought them there. Teresa of Ávila, a well-known saint of the seventeenth century, noted the evolution in her spiritual practice and beliefs. As a child, she was inspired by hagiographic texts: When I read about certain women saints who endured martyrdom for the sake of God, I concluded that death was a small price to pay for the utter joy they were given in return when they were whisked away to heaven. (Teresa of Jesus 1957: 6) By the time she is a novice nun, however, her understanding of pain and its necessity in spiritual practice has grown deeper. Her background as a coddled child, combined with her tendency to illness, allow her to posit the especial challenge that the cloister poses: The spirit of evil suggested to me that because I had been raised with wealth and comfort, I would not be able to bear the hardships of religious life. But this just made me think about all that Christ had to go through, and that I decided that the least I could do would be to endure a few hardships for his sake. (15) Still, Teresa finds her illness insufficient by the standards of Catholic accounts of martyrdom. Only a fellow nun’s infirmity, in which the woman is covered in suppurating ulcers, appears holy enough: I begged God to send me whatever illness he chose, as long as it would instill that kind of patience in me. I don’t think I was afraid of being sick. I was so hungry for heavenly blessings that I was willing to obtain them by any means necessary. (24–5) Eventually, Teresa joins her sister in infirmity. She figures her illness as the answer to her prayers and a chance for her to be tempted by the devil and to prove her faithfulness. Instead of a painful but quick martyrdom, the pain teaches her both the importance of resisting constant temptation and the importance of patience in her faith. Her pain and illness allow her to suffer over an even longer period than Christ did during his crucifixion. The treatment for her illness is its own martyrdom: “With my delicate constitution, I suffered terribly. I barely survived the radical treatment. At the end of the two months, the cure had almost killed me” (28). Illness forces her to reconsider her attitude to pain, ensuring that Teresa can truly leave behind past worldly attitudes. Her faith becomes mature, and because her illness remains chronic and painful, the reader can understand how Teresa’s spiritual growth becomes an ever-renewing opportunity, a choice she can make daily to dedicate herself to Christian patience, a kind of permanent penance. At the same time as his contemporaries were experimenting with painful self-discipline and resignation to illness, Ignatius of Loyola was elaborating and advocating his own austere, dolorous regime. His spiritual exercises posited that prayers should be made while imagining, for example, the physical torments of hell, the anguish of the damned, and the landscape of hell (Ignatius of Loyola 2000: 59). These mental exercises were complemented by self-mortification and physical punishments designed to make a penitent feel the pain caused by sin. The embodied nature of Ignatius Loyola’s model rendered the body as a vehicle for redemption, in accordance with Catholic considerations of martyrdom and sacrifice.

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The embrace of suffering and martyrdom in the name of religion spread to Spanish literary depictions of nationalism and pride. Cervantes’ later work is quoted above. However, long before Don Quixote, he wrote plays based on his experience as a captive in North Africa, foregrounding martyrdom and its religious and nationalist implications. The opportunity that his countrywoman Teresa of Ávila had dreamed of—that is, being a Christian in the land of the “Moors”—was granted to him when pirates took him to Algiers to live. A common feature of Cervantes’ (1966a) early captivity plays, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel, is a young boy (or pair of young boys) who are subjected to martyrdom. Typically, the martyred characters use national and Catholic examples like Justus and Pastor, martyred schoolboys from Cervantes’ native Alcalá de Henares, to encourage themselves to choose death instead of apostasy (one child notes to his brother: “I wish to be a new Justus / And you a new Pastor”; Act II, 343). The Trato de Argel even opens with the martyring of a Christian priest in Algiers, one who dies via drowning, burning, and stoning (Cervantes 1966b: 18–19). Cervantes draws on his own experience of torture after an escape attempt to display the bravery of the Spanish (213). The character who shares Cervantes’ chosen second surname, Saavedra, even reminds audiences that the suffering of Christian captors leads to heaven. By the time Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, pain marks his quest at regular intervals. Two Spanish doctors surveying the novel have catalogued the vocabulary of pain— “molido” and “moli” (more severe pain) and “dolor/dol” (more common pain) (Fraile and de Miguel 2003: 346–55). The violence that Don Quixote suffers, as well as the pain of Sancho Panza, carry symbolic weight throughout both parts of the novel. Critics have noted the Freudian aspect of Don Quixote’s torture when he is suspended from a window by his hand (Gaylord 1933: 118–34), as well as the classist aspects of Sancho’s punishments, which are equally comical but always base. In addition to physical pain, Don Quixote also suffers from the noble affliction of lovesickness for Dulcinea. His narrative is marked by the suffering he endures as he attempts his quest in an unchivalrous place, the typical lovesickness of noble protagonists in early modern literature, and the pain of the violence that others inflict on him. Elsewhere on the continent, pain occupies a significant role in European culture and religion. Period documentation describes processions of male penitents, such as in the Journal de Voyage, where Montaigne observes as a procession files by him in Rome. The reasons for the focus on mortification of the flesh in post-Tridentine Catholicism were numerous, but one of the chief ones was that: Whereas chastity and suffering were both performable and sufficiently meritorious to mark out those who embraced them as potential protagonists for the next generation of saintly biographies, other behaviour which could be imitated, such as attending mass and saying prayers, or practising such virtues as charity and humility, could be categorized among the attributes of any devout Christian, and was insufficient, in itself, to mark one out for sainthood, while other qualities which would mark one out more specifically as a saint could not be reproduced on demand. (Yamamoto 2014: 62) Though Catholicism encouraged penitence through an embrace of pain and martyrdom, religious attitudes to pain among Protestants differed greatly. As we have seen above, the early modern period recognized that the Latin word for punishment, “poenas,” evolved to “pain” or “peine” or “pena” (depending on language), words that all imply that pain resulted from earlier transgressions. It is easy to see how today’s readers might assume that early modern people considered pain a kind of divine punishment for either a person’s sins or original sin. This was not necessarily the case, however.

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This link between pain, suffering, and punishment recurs in Paradise Lost’s discussions of Satan, and specifically of his post-rebellion suffering and ugliness. For Satan, readers recognize his fall through disfigurement, sarcasm, and physical pain. Similarly, women were held to suffer pain in childbirth as a direct result of Eve’s actions in the Garden of Eden. Overall, however, religion interpreted pain as more than a mere effect of someone’s prior sin. Calvin, for example, both normalized pain (he spent much of his life infirm, experiencing chronic pain from renal problems) while counseling believers not to court the painful martyrdom visited on believers in majority-Catholic countries. As we have seen above, Catholicism encouraged a more straightforward embrace of pain and physical torment as part of a believer’s imitation of Christ, called “philopassianism.”5 In response to philopassianism, Calvin and his followers tread a careful line, neither suggesting that believers avoid God-given pain nor that they claim their pain as a call to sacrifice or imitatio Christi. One later English Calvinist argued that “one cannot actively choose to suffer with Christ, since this would amount to an arrogation of Christ’s divinity, yet [one] can willingly embrace suffering when it presents itself” (Dijkhuizen and Enenke 2009: 11). Calvin reads Romans 12:1–2 as a strict injunction against imitatio Christi and reminds Reformed readers that “being reconciled to God through the one only true sacrifice of Christ, we are all through his grace made priests, in order that we may dedicate ourselves and all we have to the glory of God. No sacrifice of expiation is wanted; and no one can be set up, without casting a manifest reproach on the cross of Christ” (Calvin, n.d.). Calvin recognized that pain and sacrifice are not always physical: he also reminds readers to avoid the pitfalls of Stoicism in response to emotional pain. Though Stoicism was an attractive philosophy to Calvin, he recognized that it could easily mislead Reformed believers into sin, as it could convince them that they alone could defeat temptation via reason, a belief that obviously derived from pride (Bouwsma 1990: 49). Calvin uses the illness of Paul’s friend, Epaphroditus, described in 2 Philippians, to decry the dangers of Stoicism. When he realizes his friend might die, Paul “acknowledges that he felt some uneasiness and pain from his bonds, but that he nevertheless cheerfully endured these same bonds for the sake of Christ.” In fact, to Calvin, “we give proof of our obedience, only when we bridle our depraved affections, and do not give way to the infirmity of the flesh,” and Stoicism was considered one of these infirmities (159). Instead of the Reformed believer who recognized his need of divine aid, Stoicism created a “man of iron” and encouraged “obstinacy”—that is, the belief that human will alone could overcome obstacles. Elsewhere, in arenas where religion and the law both competed for the right to legislate behavior, some European legal systems allowed for torture, as it was believed to permit the expression of the truth through an alternative bodily language. Today’s readers may be surprised to see that judicial torture was not as widespread or systematically implied as our popular culture implies. In fact, the use of torture in Western Europe varied greatly depending on the individual states, as well as religious institutions. Nor did the use of torture remain consistent, even within the same area, over the early modern period. Moreover, the use of pain and torture to treat crimes against the church could not easily be distinguished from the state’s use of torture to prosecute temporal crimes. Religious crimes (e.g. being a member of the minority religion in a contested part of France) were often prosecuted and punished in secular courts and public spaces. In early modern England, on the other hand, the state began to rely on torture during the period 1540–1640. It is important to note that the medieval Catholic Church had

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banned torture across Europe, but torture re-emerged on the continent as a judicial tool in the thirteenth century with changes in jurisprudence. Not all accused criminals could be tortured, as it was a judicial tool that could not be used on members of higher social classes and clergy of the (recognized) church. In Reformed countries like England, torture’s heyday was linked to the fear of Catholic or recusant plots. It was in fact not a common tool in the English legal system, but it was employed to ferret out Catholic plots against the Anglican establishment (and thus both church and state). Father John Gerard’s case is one of the better-known accounts of torture during the late sixteenth century. Father Gerard’s narrative emphasizes some of the Catholic attitudes to religious persecution that we have already seen: I could hardly utter the words, such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms. All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands and I thought that blood was oozing from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin. But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them … The pain was so intense that I thought I could not possibly endure it, and added to it, I had an interior temptation. (Gerard 2012: 135) Torture provides Father Gerard with the opportunity to demonstrate his orthodox response to pain: “The Lord saw my weakness with the eyes of His mercy, and did not permit me to be tempted beyond my strength. With the temptation He sent me relief. Seeing my agony and the struggle going on in my mind, He gave me this most merciful thought: the utmost and worst they can do is to kill you, and you have often wanted to give your life for your Lord God.” Gerard figures his suffering as a prelude to martyrdom, his ultimate goal. “In Catholicism, the human identification with Christ’s Passion not only formed a central locus of officially sanctioned religious experience, but also served to legitimate various forms of lay spirituality” (Dijkhuizen and Enenkel 2009: 10). Martyrdom was so doctrinally significant that it broke down hierarchies in the Church and bridged the lay/consecrated divide. French Calvinism, as we have seen, worked to reject the painful martyrdom to which Catholics were told to aspire; instead, Calvin sought to convince his followers that martyrdom was not equivalent to sacrifice, particularly that of Christ (Cottret 2003: 245). Rather, inspired by him, Protestants across the continent took up the idea of living with suffering as the kind of sacrifice required by Christian life, as opposed to Christ’s paschal sacrifice. As we will see below, however, Calvinist Genevans employed torture in religious trials, subjecting others to state-sanctioned violence; just as Christ suffered, so too would heterodox citizens in Geneva. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (2012) described at length the “spectacle of the scaffold” and the “ceremonial of justice” that the nascent Western European state employed in the early modern period (37). He recognized that the “body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime” to early modern thinkers (44). Early modern Europe did indeed see extensive use of public trials and executions, including torture. This section will describe judicial and extrajudicial torture in a few cases, as well as a few early arguments against its use. It is important to stress that judicial torture was not applied across the board, and nor was religious torture. This section will then consider the example of France, where torture was employed extensively. It will consider critics like Silverman, who demonstrates the overlap between the legal and religious discourses in discussions of torture in France, and torture’s relationship to the imitatio Christi up to the period of the Enlightenment. It will examine the ways in which crowds usurped

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judicial torture and often carried out public penalties themselves. Finally, the section will use colonial narratives to demonstrate that despite laws in the metropolis, unofficial torture and the infliction of pain and disability on the enslaved or brown body were deployed consistently by colonizers. Rationales for torture abounded in France. At a moment when political theorists were beginning to represent the state as a body, a criminal featured as a kind of defect in the body, an impairment that could easily turn toxic: The criminal is an infection of the social body. Mercy for a decayed limb can only imperil the whole. Determining the degree of corruption—and the corresponding method of purgation—is the task of the judge. In the context of this metaphor, torture must be understood not as a punitive procedure, but as an exploratory one. (Silverman 2010: 59) The Renaissance idea of a decipherable or readable body also lent itself to justifications of torture. The body of the criminal became as a series of signs to be deciphered; “the accused’s bodily responses, their tremblings, tears, and sighs, their pallors and faintnesses … might betray the knowledge of crime” (60). In essence, the body could perform the work of the mouth, and in so doing, save the criminal’s soul. Torture was widely believed in because it was thought that the body had its own language, one that never misled, in contrast with the mouth. Supporting the practice of torture involved a particular understanding of the body, its relationship to language, and its ability to produce language. Historians have conflated three separate issues within the single phrase “language of the body,” failing to distinguish them clearly from one another … The third Language of the body is language from the body, language coaxed or coerced from the body, the voice of the self brought to speaking by another, in scenes of mesmerism, hypnotism, and torture. (Silverman 2010: 62, emphasis in original) The bodily language of torture, then, paradoxically allows for the tortured to save their souls through the suffering of their bodies, as pain will prevent untruths, which would have added to the wrong they had already committed. Instead, tortured bodies became sources of irrefutable truths, despite the dubious character of the alleged criminal. The Italian Renaissance saw a similar interest in the use of torture and a similar overlap between the secular and religious authorities’ use of torture. The Italian peninsula was of course not yet united into present-day Italy, and the negotiations of different local governments with Rome illustrate how often torture was a contested activity for the varying authorities. Conflicting jurisdictions was a serious problem (110). The various governments of city-states and religious courts sometimes cooperated in judicial procedures. Local Inquisition courts relied on Rome for permission to torture and for trial instructions. The Italian Inquisition provides another example of the indeterminacy of the Inquisition and the civil powers regarding torture. In theory, Italian states were subject to the Inquisition in Rome, and their judicial processes, including torture, were overseen by Rome. In practice, however, the local Inquisitions did not always wait to get word from the Holy See. The Inquisition’s own rules on torture meant that inquisitors were not allowed to shed blood (112). This meant that, in practice, sometimes local authorities agreed to bloodier torture procedures on Rome’s behalf. Instead, the Inquisition suspended prisoners in order to dislocate or twist their limbs. At the same time, some of these practices crossed over with those of the secular authorities, who also

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used the strap or cord. More rarely, secular authorities employed tactics such as placing a criminal’s feet to the fire.6 Despite the tension between religious and political authorities over the right to torture, torture’s acceptability was not something all thinkers agreed on. One example of an early opponent of torture was Juan Luis Vives (1620), a Spanish humanist charged with educating Mary Tudor. He indicates the extent of the contemporary controversy in a commentary on Augustine: “it has become a commonplace among rhetoricians to speak for and against [torture]. But while what they have to say against it is very powerful, the arguments in favor are weak and useless.” Vives’ opposition to torture came from his knowledge that, although Augustine had allowed for the practice, he had directed much of his writing to a pagan readership, not Christians. In fact, torture was a relic of an earlier pagan time, “not only contrary to Christian charity and meekness, but also against humanity” (715). Christians had to consider that men were “endowed with every humanitarian sense” and thus that it was supremely contradictory to “torture men in order that they may not die innocent” (716). Vives’ arguments originate in a different set of early modern beliefs, and in particular, the increasing importance of the conscience in moral thinking. Vives locates the truth in a person’s conscience, which he argues to be inherently opaque. Magistrates, he says, judge them whose consciences they cannot see, and therefore are often driven to wring forth the truth by a.) tormenting innocent witnesses. And what say you when a man is tortured in his own case, and tormented, even when it is a question whether he be guilty or no he be (b) innocent, yet suffereth assured paines then they are not assured he is faulty. (715) Vives also goes against cant and tradition when he notes that the suffering body holds no special key to truth. In fact, torture makes people lie. Vives’ other objection is pragmatic: a magistrate tortures innocent people to prevent executing innocent people, but in so doing, often kills the innocent. As he explains: Nay, which is more Lamentable, and deserveth a sea of tears to wash it away, the Judge in torturing the accused, lest he should put him to death that is innocent, oftentimes through his wretchd ignorance killeth that party being innocent, with torture, whom he had tortured to avoid the killing of an innocent. (716) Finally, torture often has inherently wicked (and un-Christian) results. Because pain does not work on the conscience, but rather the body, it has destroyed the perseverance of the innocents, “made them their own accusers, to put them to death as guilty” (716). This also affects the morality of the judges, who are forced into wickedness, which goes against their mandate. These positions, including privileging the idea of the conscience over the body as a site of truth, arguing against the nonsensical tradition for its obvious (though unintended) results and thus noting its anti-Christian possibility of forcing people to commit a grave sin just before death, made Vives a convincing Renaissance opponent of the practice. Though France embraced the use of torture in criminal cases, its courts abandoned violent, often torturous heresy trials in the mid-sixteenth century, citing a high caseload. Instead, the use of torture and violence in sixteenth-century France, as Natalie Zemon Davis documents, devolved into an extrajudicial practice carried out by mobs. These mobs typically followed earlier government precedent and followed the form laid down by earlier spectacles of punishment. “Official acts of torture and official acts of desecration of

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the corpses of certain criminals anticipate some of the acts performed by riotous crowds. The public execution was, of course, a dramatic and well-attended event in the sixteenth century, and the wood-cut and engraving documented the scene far and wide. There the crowd might see the offending tongue of the blasphemer pierced or slit, the offending hands of the desecrator cut off. There the crowd could watch the traitor decapitated and disemboweled, his corpse quartered and the parts borne off for public display in different sections of the town. The body of an especially heinous criminal was dragged through the streets, attached to a horse’s tail” (Davis 1973: 62). These practices were taken up in extrajudicial murders by crowds during the Wars of Religion in particular. Davis notes that crowds even publicly tortured and executed suspected heretics in places where judicial public executions typically occurred. Notorious and well-publicized cases in France used torture; Martin Guerre’s imposter, Arnaud du Tilh, for instance, was tortured to discover his true identity. Torture must have seemed an especially accurate tool after the Guerre trial; it had succeeded in correctly identifying the imposter’s body when the man’s own wife could not. The certitude that the verdict produced in interlocutors actually fueled Michel de Montaigne’s (2003) condemnation of torture as a method that overdetermined the results of an investigation. Instead, he argued for its suspension—he feared a legal system that claimed it could ascertain the truth without any doubt at all. In “Of Cripples,” Montaigne notes that in legal situations, it is best to couch verdicts in uncertain terms: In Rome, the legal style required that even the testimony of an eyewitness or the sentence of a judge based on his most certain knowledge had to be couched in the formula, “It seems to me that …” You make me hate things probable when you thrust them on me as things infallible. I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward, terms such as “perhaps,” “somewhat,” “some,” “they say,” “I think” and so on. (1165) Montaigne’s criticism of torture and the false certitudes it could produce were unusual; so, too, was his condemnation of torture in the context of Eurocolonialism. In “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne refuses to condemn cannibalism wholesale when he realizes that his own society is often much crueler. In his denunciation of France, he alludes to the rites of violence and incredible cruelty that French people inflicted upon others, even those who were not their personal enemies, as a matter of course in religious disputes: I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read, but lately seen, not among inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under color of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. (235–6) Despite these objections, France did not abandon its practices of torture, though they became more centralized as the Ancien Régime progressed. The often-calculated barbarity that Montaigne condemned continued. Though to contemporary readers torture must seem incredibly arbitrary, in fact its use in France was delimited in legal documents, and never “applied arbitrarily at the will of interrogators.” In fact, “carefully considered procedural rules suggested its use in specific circumstances and with the authority of specific courts. Although judges exercised considerable discretion in determining which cases met these rules and, hence, in determining which prisoners to

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torture, they were not free to choose the specific methods of torture or the length of each session of torture” (Silverman 2010: 24).

3.1. PAIN AND THE SUBALTERN This careful regulation of pain and the increasing centralization of laws regarding its use is obvious, especially in discussions and condemnations of Eurocolonialism. Early modern nationalist prejudices often focused on Spain as an especially cruel imperial power. Eventually called the “Black Legend” by historians, the narrative of exceptional cruelty in Spanish colonial excursions derived from accounts of Spanish treatments of their indigenous subjects, beginning with Bartolomé de las Casas’ (2003) denunciation of the Spanish enslavement and brutalization in the New World. de las Casas described the “strange cruelties” and “torments” visited by the Spanish on the indigenous peoples they encountered; the term he uses extremely often, “tormentos,” had connotations of both psychological and physical torture. At one point in his history, de las Casas describes how lower-ranking indigenous people whose families had sought refuge in the mountains, away from the invading Spanish, were punished as the Spanish “cut off their hands and hung them round the victim’s neck, saying ‘Go now, carry the message,’ meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains” (34). de las Casas also describes the punishments meted out to high-ranking nobles or royals, which would clearly be seen by his readers as a violation of early modern mores. Nobles and chieftains “were frequently lashed to a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them” (34). de las Casas condemns the Spanish use of unjust wars as a pretext for pillage but also torture; the suggestion is that in some contexts, there are fair uses of force, and perhaps even physical punishment. However, the disabling use of pain and torture against an innocent people, instead of a focus on conversion, rendered Spanish actions illegitimate. Though we have seen that the French use of judicial torture was well established in the Old World, in France’s colonial holdings, the Code Noir (1685) ostensibly forbade torture for slaves. It did not, however, proscribe the disciplinary use of pain for black and brown bodies. Article 38 allowed slave-owners to cut off ears and brand a slave “with a fleur de lys on one shoulder” if captured after being escaped for a month; after two months the slave would be sentenced to “have his hamstring cut.” In Article 42, which ostensibly outlawed slave torture, stating masters were “forbidden however from torturing [slaves] or mutilating any limb,” it was nonetheless thought acceptable for masters to “chain [slaves] and have [slaves] beaten with rods or straps” (France 1698). Colonial practices still mutilated, disabled, and inflicted pain as punishment. The outlawing of torture merely meant that slaves experienced pain not as part of a larger judicial strategy to extract the truth, suggesting that their words were less important than their compliance. Unlike with European prisoners, who sometimes asked to be tortured to demonstrate their truthfulness and consistency, slaves tortured in the New World often used silence as a way of resisting judicial power. Though the early modern Europeans might not have understood the tactic, it persisted as an act of refusal (Wagner 2012: 99–124). Torture fit well with colonial and imperialist missions outside Europe, even when it was employed by non-state actors. Edmond Smith (2018) has documented the use of judicial torture by the East India Company. The company’s agents were careful to send reports to London describing its adherence to English law, even when those who were subject to torture were not English subjects.

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“There were countless people that I saw burned alive or cut to pieces or tortured in many new ways of killing and inflicting pain … [b]ecause the particulars that enter into these outrages are so numerous they could not be contained in the scope of much writing, for in truth I believe that in the great deal I have set down here I have not revealed the thousandth part of the sufferings endured by the Indians” (de las Casas 2003, 40). Here, de las Casas anticipates an argument of twentieth-century theorists of pain when he considers the limits to what his account can represent of indigenous peoples’ trials. Elaine Scarry’s (1985) Body in Pain, a seminal work in the field, similarly suggests that pain escapes representation. However, applied to other early modern contexts, her work is not without its problems. James Truman, among other critics, has noted the individualistic nature of her analysis, more appropriate to the twentieth century than an earlier one. Problematically for early modernists, Scarry holds that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4), and that “to witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the prelanguage of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language” (6). In fact, the early modern period would have considered pain’s relationship to language very differently, allowing it a much more productive and positive creative force. To wit, in an early modern context, pain permits representations of embodiment and disability that are otherwise impermissible. The rules of propriety dictated the acceptable topics of representation and conversation. In much of French literature and culture, it was considered indecent to discuss the body and its ills. However, pain paradoxically could also allow one to represent the body. The Catholic embrace of pain as a kind of imitatio Christi, as seen above, persisted as well. Critics have claimed that the body is largely absent in seventeenth-century literature due to rules of civility (“bienséance” or “honnêté”) and that it mainly features as part of a larger “return of the repressed.” The psychoanalytic theorist Mitchell Greenberg notes that, “Banished from the realm of acceptable representation, the body returns, both the represented body—in and as text— and, more insidiously, the actual bodies of the 17th century reading public” (67). Section 3.2 will describe some of those effects on style and the ways in which pain authorized otherwise illicit discussions at the end of the early modern period, indicating ways in which authors relied upon discourses of pain to allow them to represent situations that were typically forbidden.

3.2. THE POWER OF PAIN IN REPRESENTATION Madame de Lafayette, author of the first French novel, The Princess of Clèves, pioneered the classical, restrained, “honest” style. She also compiled an account of the life and death of Henrietta of England, called Madame, whom de Lafayette served as a lady-in-waiting. The death of Henrietta allows the author, whose writing was the epitome of classicism and decency, to discuss in depth a scene of embodied suffering. Henrietta’s fatal illness comes on suddenly. At first, it seems that de Lafayette’s (2001) description of her illness and pain will reinforce the truism that pain leads to a death of language or representation: the pain that Madame suffers is “inconceivable,” something the account tells readers twice (de Lafayette 2001: 92). Her pain is “something she’s

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never felt before” (95). Interspersed with discussions of Henrietta’s pain are moments in which de Lafayette goes further to break the rules of propriety. She notes frankly that the ineffectual remedies Madame is given cause her to vomit, and the text describes her as vomiting “some phlegm” and “part of the food she’d eaten … incompletely” (93). Because Henrietta had taken ill so suddenly, she and her servants wondered if her death had been brought on by poisoning; the possibility of poison offers her another opportunity to die according to the rules of Catholicism. By embracing a sacrificial death as advocated by her confessor and encouraged by the important clergy who visit her, Madame renders her death representable, no matter how gruesome. When her bed is “spoiled,” she is forced to move to the ruelle, or passage between her bed and the wall, to rest. The ruelle is significant—it is the area where women of Henrietta’s class received visitors when they hosted literary salons, like the one de Lafayette and her readers were part of. This is a literal example of what pain makes possible for Madame and de Lafayette—death, however messy, can occur in a public and literary space. Madame declares that she wishes to “die by the rules” (“mourir dans les forms”) (98); pain is what allows her death in all its gory detail to be portrayed in a literary work. Madame dies with a “crucifix fixed to her mouth; only death could make her abandon it” (102). Though her death occurred too quickly to be a drawn-out, saintly martyrdom, her pain and desire to die by the rules enabled a writer otherwise known for her propriety and restraint to frankly discuss the body. In this, Henrietta died according to the rules laid out by her religion, as well as by literary politeness. The sacrificial attitude encouraged by her priests and confessor serves as a model for other readers who wish to make a good death. Madame’s painful (implied) martyrdom makes her an example, a royal woman whose death can be “spoken of” and written of, all of it “by the rules.” Not all seventeenth-century French writers embraced classicism and its strict rules of propriety. Instead, they turned to popular cultural forms, such as parodies of Greek and Roman epics. These parodies were in many ways still a form a high culture—after all, they required author and readers to have an extensive knowledge of classical culture. However, these parodies, controversial for the advocates of classicism, propounded a vision of the world in which heroes like Aeneas were made ridiculous, the body dominated characters’ concerns, and events given major importance in history were the result of petty or unimportant forces. This section will consider the ways in which pain was shown to produce, enable, or justify writing of the burlesque, an alternative to the sober, classical aesthetic. Pain featured in the parodic or burlesque, and according to some early modern doctors and writers, it contained its own cure—humor (which writers interpreted to mean humorous literature). Beginning in the sixteenth century with doctors such as François Rabelais and continuing into the seventeenth century, an influential strand of French humorous literature argued for its importance as a possible cure for various illnesses. Early modern doctors had a vested interest in promoting a reasonable amount of laughter, as according to premodern theories of medicine, laughter could work a curative or therapeutic effect on a variety of painful ailments. The lack of distinction between physical and mental anguish in the period meant that any relief of suffering could be curative. A particularly apt illustration is the work of one early modern physician, Laurent Joubert (1579), who published a treatise in 1579, Traité du Ris (or Treatise on Laughter). His work highlights several of the key attributes of laughter as seen by Renaissance medicine: “The dignity and excellence of Laughter are enormous, since it so reinforces the spirit, that it can suddenly change the state of a sick person, and from

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mortal render [it] curable” (335). Others have noted that Joubert’s fears and anxieties about laughter—namely, that it can “weaken the body through the great dissipation of humours it effects—which in its turn produces the diminishing of natural heat. Those who are weak are further weakened by laughter … Laughter is evoked by an abundance of blood and heat which means, of course, that some will not benefit from the humoral changes it provokes” (Ghose 2004: 26). In the end, Joubert also seems anxious about the power of laughter, for good or ill. Ghose notes, “Like all constituent factors in Galenic physiology, it is susceptible to human control. The wider backdrop to Joubert’s work on laughter is formed by the emergence of a culture of civility in the early modern period” (27). Paradoxically, the culture of civility, which regulated how one could discuss the body and illness, actually imbued laughter with much of its power to cure (or, like many medicines, to kill). In the court of Louis XIV, which had a culture of civility, pain was the rare experience that allowed the body to be made visible; by the same token, by regulating human behavior and decency, civil culture gave laughter much of its subversive and healing power. Painful deviations from perfection allowed healing and the relief of others’ pain. François Rabelais, writing in the early moments in civility’s development, sought to evoke and harness some of laughter’s power. Though he has been remembered in history as a humanist, skeptic, and humorist of the French Renaissance, he was also a doctor, famed for his knowledge of Hippocrates. His learning was extensive, as was his influence on humorous literature through his prose series The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Like his contemporaries such as Joubert, his professional training made him interested in laughter. As we have seen, humoral theory did not often consider pain in and of itself as an important issue, and it did not make the same distinction between mind and body that contemporary medicine does. Fortuitously, these aspects of humoral theory enabled theories of laughter that posited its curative potential for a variety of ailments (both “physical” and “mental,” according to today’s terminology). The five-book series allowed Rabelais (2006) to address readers and noble patrons directly in the introductions before each book. Rabelais used these moments to argue for the importance of humor in curing illness. His rhetoric uses overstatement to both undercut and argue for the importance of the comic book as a medicine. One example includes a letter to the reader before the fourth book of his series. Rabelais posits that many languorous people, or otherwise angry and sad, had by the reading of [these books] tricked their worries, passed their time with joy, and found a new happiness and consolation. To whom I am in the habit of responding that I wrote them for the enjoyment, not to claim any glory or praise, I had only as my intention to by writing give the little relief I could to the afflicted what little relief I could to the absent sufferers and sick, which gladly, when there is need, I give to those who take aid from my art and service. (641–2) Although Rabelais mocks this persona of writer–healer, he also begins each book with an epistle situating his work (however comically) within the medical tradition. In early modern French, “languorous” (“langoureux”) people could have indicated those with either psychological or physical illnesses, according to the Renaissance definition of the word; those who languished in the early modern French medical lexicon were those whose malady, perhaps somatoform (or psychosomatic), also made them hunch over, whose psychological state had perhaps broken their backs.

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The idea that writing healed pain retained its currency into the next century. More importantly, it was joined by the idea that pain could also lead to writing and creation. Paul Scarron, a writer of popular burlesque parodies of classical culture, had a reputation for being disabled and a reputation as a writer; his nickname, “The Queen’s Invalid,” derived from the fact that he received a pension from Queen Regent for his verses, and that is how she described him. Scarron’s spine developed a severe curve when he was almost thirty. This led to semiparalysis, a noticeable deformity, and chronic pain throughout his body. Because there was no hiding from his infirmities, Scarron incorporated them into his literary persona. He ensured that people knew that they would only see him in his literary salon, since he rarely left home, and that they knew to bring him tributes (food, wine, and money), as he lacked a regular income. Scarron occasionally translated Spanish short stories, including work by Cervantes, and he was very familiar with early modern Italian and Spanish writers whom he plagiarized, adapted, and translated. Between his burlesque parodies, his politics, and his translations, he was well known and much discussed, especially in Paris. When Scarron (1988) began publishing parodies of Virgil’s Aeneid, book by book, part of his public strategy included addressing epistles to prominent patrons or nobles. He also enjoined famous friends from the literary community to write small endorsements. His strategy of publicity included linking his literary production very directly to his illness: like many of his contemporaries, he invokes the Muse Erato throughout each book of the Aeneid. However, unlike his contemporaries, he always portrays his muse as being deformed, much like himself: a sick writer requires a sick Muse, and her deformity is the source of his deformed poetry and the characters he describes; the pure form of the classical tradition is as deformed as her nose when Scarron begs her presence: “Come to me, my Muse / Come my little flat-nosed Muse / Whose nose is not aquiline” (51). Elsewhere, Scarron depicts his Muse as sick with hunger. Clearly, her suffering transfers onto him and, it is implied, generates his works, an impression that is reinforced by his invocation of a deformed Muse before many of his books of the Virgile Travesti and his prose writings. Scarron’s parodic epics allowed him to take the low road and to talk about his pain, which could have been emasculating in other contexts. However, he had no need to present himself as a noble person, because he preferred ugly genres that (he felt) mirrored his deformity. His friends noted both the portrayal of his Muse and Scarron’s frequent allusions to illness, poverty, and pain, and made those part of their endorsements. Writers of other proto-novels like his contemporary, Jean Segrais, insisted that Scarron’s writing must be a miracle, and that the miracle would soon spread to curing his illness, since he had cured the illnesses of many with his humor. Scarron should soon be able to “dance, jump, run / Ride a horse, or at least a mule. / Whoever can make Vergil ridiculous / Can also find the way to be cure” (Segrais 1876: 51). These words could imply several things: firstly, that the spectacular literary talent should enable a cure or, perhaps, that the will required to write could also be used as a cure for disability; or secondly, of course, that Scarron is as likely to succeed in moving again as Virgil is to be ridiculous. In any case, the physical tasks that Scarron should one day resume would bring him closer to a “normal” life. Another contemporary of Scarron, Georges Scudéry, who coauthored with his sister many popular prose romances, also vaunted Scarron’s ability to cure. Scudéry claims that Scarron’s work balances his humors and serves as an antidote: “You resuscitate my joy. /

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You re-establish my Reason / For the humour that assassinates me / Your Book is the medicine / And the only antidote” (Scarron 1988: 47). Even a prominent member of the Académie Française, France’s body regulating language and literary genre, weighed in as well. Francois le Metel Boisrobert, a renowned playwright, highlighted Scarron’s impairment in all the promotional material he wrote for Scarron. Boisrobert underlines the contradictions in Scarron’s situation and the contrast between the author’s comedic work and his “suffering.” Boisrobert refashions Scarron’s disability as a “bizarre lot,” but cannot seem to condemn it entirely as bad luck, because he links it to literary production. Boisrobert focuses mostly on Scarron’s physical pain. He notes that “Suffering like the damned, you live, and can write” (Scarron 1988: 48). The other implication of his statement is perhaps a religious one, linking pain to the punishment of sinners in hell. Readers who see Scarron “will not be able to keep from crying,” but if they read him without seeing him, they will “be suffocated with laughter” (48–9). Just as Scarron attributed his writing to a deformed Muse, Boisrobert blames her for Scarron’s pain: “How can you be so complacent with your Muse? / She laughs in your face when pain overwhelms you” (49). Boisrobert gives the Muse the power of painful inspiration, implying that she is responsible for Scarron’s suffering. But should she be capable of curing, more so even than the literary productions that she inspires? Boisrobert then reverts to the idea that comedy writing and disability are in opposition: “How can you host so pleasant a wit / So burlesque and so gay, in a miserable body? / How can you take time to laugh with the nine Sisters / Seeing as your whole life is filled with bitterness?” (49). Boisrobert opposes Scarron’s wit and his body, as well as Scarron’s suffering and his ability to write comedy, exposing the seeming contradiction—a miserable-looking writer is the one who is able make things funny. Boisrobert suggests that the most difficult aspect of Scarron’s disability is that due to his inability to enjoy his body because of pain—perhaps this is his true disability—he will “Never taste pleasures nor sweetness” (1876: 49), but that somehow, “All of this hanging from the end of your pen / You can share a good that you don’t have / And we see flowing by some unknown way / From your visible maladies visible charms / From eternal heartbreak an eternal joy” (Scarron 1988: 49). Boisrobert expounds on a kind of suffering that is both physical and mental, something that, as we have seen, is typical for his period. The pity Boisrobert feels for Scarron as someone who cannot enjoy embodiment is not foreign to his time, either. As much as Catholic theologians encouraged the faithful to embrace physical suffering as martyrs had, an undercurrent of libertine and skeptical thought encouraged the contrary. As part of this milieu, Scarron would have been familiar with pan-European libertine thought and its possible responses to pain. The liberatory possibility—that writing comedy from a place of illness can heal— is one that is brought up in another seventeenth-century response to Scarron, this one by Guez de Balzac, a writer, correspondent, and nobleman. He immediately notes that Scarron’s writing, like that of Rabelais, has the power to heal. First [his writing] served as a remedy, and relieved me of an oppression of spleen that was going to suffocate me, without help in his regard. I hope it will do so further if I use it more. It might heal me from my serious heartbreak and my sad philosophy: maybe I will learn to rhyme petitions and lives of saints, and I will become gay by contagion.7

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Though de Balzac is being hyperbolic, his continued reading of Scarron’s works, despite skepticism, suggests that Scarron’s writing can heal, can relieve pain, and might eventually cure readers of their “sad philosophy.” By the end of his commentary, the writer-as-healer convention has evolved to accommodate a newer metaphor, one in which the “contagion” of Scarron’s comedy cures the reader. Conventional associations between books and contagions were negative; bad books spread disease (whether moral or spiritual). The early modern period often discussed books as capable of spreading contagion, especially when the books in question were considered morally suspect; de Balzac displaces Scarron’s disability (often portrayed as an “illness” in the time’s vocabulary) onto his book, and as a way of spreading joy, a positive contagion. Perhaps Scarron serves as a kind of scapegoat or lightning rod for pain and fear of mortality. As we have seen, there was a wide diversity of Western European approaches to pain in the Renaissance. France received much of the attention of this analysis due to the wide-ranging uses and attitudes to pain in the period. French texts allow present-day readers to see the limits to understandings of pain and the contradictions in the way it was interpreted, employed, and discussed. This chapter has considered the ways in which this earlier moment embraced complexities, paradoxes, and tensions in approaches to pain. Though the early moderns were on the cusp of a paradigm shift that would lead to the Scientific Revolution, including more “modern” approaches to anatomy, the body, and knowledge, an examination of their conceptions of pain shows how our contemporary era has oversimplified and ignored these diverse understandings of pain and the experience of pain, whether physical or mental. Pain even provides opportunities for creativity, and, if Scarron’s admirers are correct, serves as a catalyst for literature that acts therapeutically on its readers. By the final decades of the seventeenth centuries, early modern Europeans would begin to experiment with opium on a wider scale than before. They nevertheless still understood that something so multivalent as pain required varying remedies. Medical practitioners, from doctors to barbers to astrologers, advised patients on treatment. Outside the medical realm, writers offered bibliotherapy as the strongest antidote in their arsenal, positing that laughter, a dangerous social force, could also have positive medical benefits.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Blindness Diverse Approaches to a Complex Phenomenon in the 15th and 16th Centuries BIANCA FROHNE

4.1. INTRODUCTION Blindness, as a social and cultural phenomenon, features prominently within the field of premodern disability history. Medieval conceptions of and attitudes toward blindness have been the focus of influential monographs (Wheatley 2010; Singer 2011); as one of the “classic” impairments that is mentioned regularly in medieval texts, it also plays a significant role in recent studies and overviews on medieval disability in general. Mentions of blind persons can often be found in the same social and cultural contexts as so-called “deaf,” “mute,” “mad,” or “lame” persons, especially within medieval religious, legal, and literary discourses (Metzler 2006, 2013; Eyler 2010; Turner and Pearman 2010; Kuuliala 2016). However, although blindness and lack of sight have been studied extensively with regard to the Middle Ages (for further literature, see Barasch 2001; Büttner 2010, 2017; O’Tool 2010; Katz Seal 2017) and within aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific contexts from the midst of the seventeenth century onwards, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are largely “blind spots.”1 As is characteristic of this physiological phenomenon, the invisibility of a section in an otherwise seemingly coherent picture is not due to a lack of external information, but to perception: there is in fact a wealth of detailed early modern source material on practices, concepts, actions, and attitudes relating to blindness and blind people, ranging from theoretical and pragmatic writing (e.g. ophthalmological treatises or remedy books) to historiography, hagiography, literary, and iconographic sources, ego-documents and life writing, family papers, hospital records, supplications, administrative accounts, material culture, etc. Some of this material can be found in studies and overviews on either blindness or disability that cover the early modern period (Stiker 1999; Barasch 2001; Weygand 2009; Hobgood and Wood 2013b; Frohne 2014; Schmidt 2017), as well as in studies on medical conditions that could be accompanied by blindness, such as syphilis or epilepsy (e.g. Schattner 2012). This chapter does not aim to create a complete picture of blindness in the Renaissance, but instead will draw on a range of examples, primarily from early modern Germany, to give a sense of attitudes toward, constructions of, and manifestations of blindness in this context. It argues for an intersectional approach that also takes into account the various cultural concepts associated with blindness within their respective discursive traditions and practices of representation.

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4.2. TERMS, CONCEPTS, AND CATEGORIES OF BLINDNESS To study premodern disability history is to be confronted regularly by a lack of a specific vocabulary, as well as often vague and generalizing references (Riha 1996; Metzler 2006; Nolte 2009; Frohne 2017a). On the one hand, even between texts that are meant to convey relatively detailed descriptions of individual cases, such as medical case studies and consilia (medical advice in response to individual cases), testimonies from trials or legal disputes, supplications, hospital records, miracle accounts, or (patient) letters, the language, vocabulary, and detail can vary considerably. On the other hand, people without any formal medical training or medical education can often be found using the same nomenclature and general vocabulary as medical professionals, referring to the same physiological concepts, and attempting diagnoses and prognoses. The available ophthalmological vocabulary, ranging from anatomical terms for each part of the eye and the orbit to a specific nomenclature of illnesses, conditions, and remedies (Koelbing 1967), sometimes found its way into patient letters and diaries, administrative or legal documents, and even literary texts (Stolberg 2007; Singer 2011). When it comes to different grades or types of diminished vision, however, there was no precise terminology or numerical system that would have allowed for a distinct categorization. A descriptive approach to individual cases was common (Riha 1996; Frohne 2015a). Consequently, terms like “blindness” or “bad” or “weak” sight (e.g. blödigkeit des gesichts; Sonntag 2013) were used rather indiscriminately and often relied on further information or additional markers. To determine any remaining visual faculty of blind individuals, daily life experiences were often used as reference points, outlining, for example, whether the person in question needed a guide, could distinguish between light and dark, or could identify a familiar object. Sometimes the maximum distance between themselves and a familiar person at which they could still recognize the person was given as an approximation (Jütte 2000: 126–7; Kuuliala 2013: 240–1). To convey a complete lack of sight (e.g. in order to verify the need for public support or to testify to a miraculous cure), additional markers like “completely blind” as opposed to “nearly blind” or “half blind” were used. In German vernacular, the terms stock blind or star blind can be found regularly. The latter referred originally to being blind from cataract, but was also used in a general sense. Both of these distinctions were used incongruously; where one person would use the term stock blind, another would merely refer to blind (e.g. Vanja 2013). The famous oculist George Bartisch, who was responsible for the first comprehensive ophthalmological textbook (Straub 1988), states that he does not know how the affliction called star came to this name; he states, however, that “this term is so common and well-used that townspeople as well as peasants, learned and unlearned people alike know about it, and when they hear of or see or talk about an altogether blind person, they do not know any better than to refer to the star, and they would say, he is starblind” (Bartisch 1583: fol. 42b).2 Any study of blindness in premodern cultures must approach all terminology with caution. This is even more significant with regard to the social implications these terms could hold. The attribution of a status such as “disabled” or “visually impaired” did not follow along the same lines as today and might stem from completely unfamiliar categories and systems of thought. It is therefore of central importance not to assume familiarities due to terminology or concepts that seem close to those of our own time. It can be highly misleading to try and analyze “blindness” as a straightforward, transhistorical physical condition. Blindness is neither a biological or physiological fact, nor a

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fixed social or cultural category. Instead, we are dealing with complex and essentially fluid sociocultural constructions that, rather than being tied to fixed categories of meaning, can often be found to have emerged situationally as a pragmatic, flexible framework of social interaction and interpretation (Turner and Pearman 2010; Metzler 2013; Turner 2013; Frohne 2014; Kuuliala 2016; Nolte et al. 2017). In order to uncover the varying categories of meaning that could be applied to blindness in premodern societies, it is helpful to approach the usage of the term “blind” (and its variations) according to the concept of embodied difference, where the body is employed as an analytical category. This means to look specifically at texts, images, and situations in which a person or a group of people is made out to appear as “different” or even as representative of “otherness” through categories that refer to their corporeality, thus creating a specific kind or type of body inscribed with discernible meanings, attributes, and values. This approach is especially promising as, in premodern societies, “blind” was apparently used as a recognizable social category. An illuminating example can be found in a German genealogical register from the fifteenth century (Frohne 2014: 123–4). It details the marriages, dates of death, burial sites, and descendants of each generation. Among one list of descendants can be found the following information: “Skolastica is blind” (Skolastica ist plint).3 Skolastica, one of three surviving children of Margareth Groland (d. 1449) and her husband, is the only person within the whole register who is characterized by an attribute that does not refer to occupation, marital, or social status. While her sister is said to be a nun in a nearby cloister and her brother is described as a courtier, Skolastica embodies a seemingly altogether different category, one that is not based on a discernible social position, but on a physical characteristic. It might be inferred that within the context of genealogical writing, “blindness” was regarded as a social position in its own right. In this case, however, its precise significance is lost to us. While it is possible that Skolastica would have been able to either marry or enter a cloister, at the time of writing she had done neither. It is unclear whether her blindness had prevented her from taking up either role. All we know is that her blindness was deemed significant enough to be entered into the family history. Furthermore, the compiler of the genealogy assumed that its readers would know what to make of this sparse information. It is instances like these that point to the sustained usage of blindness as a category of embodied difference. On the other hand, however, they also highlight the limits of historical research, as without context we often have little to no idea of the social implications carried by the term “blind.”

4.3. SOCIAL ATTITUDES: BETWEEN METAPHORICAL STATE AND INTERSECTIONAL CATEGORY In order to approach social attitudes toward blindness during the Renaissance era, it is necessary to distinguish between blindness as cultural construct(s) and the social attitudes toward blind people within the culture in question. This is of even greater importance when it comes to analyzing the attribute “blind” as attached to metaphorical uses of “blindness.” Drawing specifically on this metaphorical dimension, especially on theological concepts where blindness was associated with blindness of spirit and mind, Edward Wheatley has recently proposed a “religious model of disability” (Wheatley 2010, 2017). Over the course of the later Middle Ages, according to the religious model, metaphorical readings of blindness as signs of religious deficiency and sinfulness spread to other discourses

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and interpretative frameworks, and were transformed into a self-contained, cohesive imagery that was rich in negative stereotypes: blindness would be associated with greed, arrogance, gluttony, and lecherous behavior. Building on this model, Wheatley proposed to study phenomena of impaired vision as a cultural condition that was linked to a state of social marginalization. However, blindness, like any sickness or impairment, is not only a cultural, but also a social construct, as Julie Singer has demonstrated by drawing on examples of blind musicians from Renaissance Italy: “Impairment, in specific reference to the late medieval period, is very much a social phenomenon: the performed social behavior of the blind virtuoso, for instance, stems directly from his atypical configuration of sensory activities. Seen in terms of social performance … late medieval impairment is less a physiological phenomenon than a nonstandard balance of abilities” (2010: 40). Moving further beyond the examples of well-regarded blind virtuosi in premodern cultures, it is essential to note that the experiences and social meanings of being blind, as well as the cultural frameworks of blindness that were actually invoked, recognized, and therefore activated in a given situation or context, could vary massively. It is therefore of equally vital importance to employ an intersectional approach to the study of blindness by incorporating categories such as gender, race, social status and/or social standing (including legal status), age, erudition, political privilege (often contingent upon inherited rights; e.g. with regard to office-holding), and (dis)honor into the analysis, and furthermore to apply situational factors to individuals as well as groups of blind people (Eyler 2010; Schmidt 2013: 167–9; Frohne 2017c). This section focuses on a variety of social contexts that current research supposes to have played a particularly significant role in producing social connotations and social positions for blind people, as well as the stereotypes derived from them. It should be noted, however, that even in cases where we have detailed descriptions of social contexts and individual or collective attitudes, we still do not know anything about the physical conditions of blind persons and their social consequences. The sources that are available to us in this regard are usually not interested in the experience of blindness or the lived reality of blind people. Most of them refer to blindness only when it became relevant as a social category within distinct discourses and pragmatic contexts of text production. While these written instances are of particular interest to the historian, it should be noted that these sections only represent small extracts from the complex and diverse constructs that were premodern blindness, and often followed very explicit writing traditions, narrative tropes, and established imagery. We should keep in mind that those written extracts provide a very limited picture, considering that in later medieval and early modern times, large parts of the population still relied on oral communication, and that even in letters between family members some matters were not written down, but only hinted at or conveyed orally by the carrier who delivered the letter (Frohne 2014: 156–87). One of the most far-ranging discourses of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period is centered on the values and dangers of voluntary and involuntary poverty. It is therefore not surprising that one of the most well-known images that has shaped the history of premodern disability in the eyes of the public remains the blind beggar (Barasch 2001: 92–121; Weygand 2009: 18–23, 33–5). This imagery not only entails the characteristic notions of charity and almsgiving that are often inextricably linked to the experience of disability within the framework of individualistic models of disability (Schmidt 2013: 163–6), but also alludes to the possibility of fraud and simulation (Metzler 2013). Over the course of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, begging

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legislation underwent massive changes, which led to bans on begging in some places and partly encouraged the denunciation of beggars as lazy and morally corrupt throughout Europe. Regulations of begging, such as rules for giving and receiving alms, can be found in Nuremberg as early as 1370; comparable rules were set down in Memmingen (1527), Würzburg (1533), and many other towns and territories (Jütte 1994; Weygand 2009: 24–5, 28–30; Nuckel 2013: 100–2). Nevertheless, while many texts and images paint blind beggars in an especially negative light and seem to encourage their audience to ridicule, abuse, and betray blind people, it is still unclear whether these literary tropes were actually linked in any way to the emergence of a new system of poor relief (Barasch 2001: 96–110; Röcke 2005; Coxon 2010; Wheatley 2010: 90–128; Horn 2013; Metzler 2013: 86–8). The permission to beg for or receive alms was increasingly only granted to those who were too “infirm” to earn their living in any other way. This could indeed place blind persons who were able to work in a precarious position. However, it is difficult to estimate the numbers of blind persons as receivers of alms as opposed to those who were left to find another way to sustain themselves or their families. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, the residents of the Parisian hospital for the blind, QuinzeVingts, were granted special privileges regarding the permission to seek alms. On the other hand, there is also evidence that some hospital members had additional income through work; for example, as tavern keepers on the hospital grounds, by spinning thread, or by weaving (Weygand 2009: 27). According to surviving administrative documents, such as alms lists, receivers of alms were often granted public support due to the simultaneous occurrence of challenging circumstances, among them physical or sensorial impairments, old age, the necessity to support young or infirm family members, loss of working opportunities, and the death of caregivers. Hospital records show that these factors were applied in similar ways in order to determine whether a person was granted admission. There is, however, no indication that blind people were categorically denied support unless they were also physically infirm (Weygand 2009: 29–30; Ritzmann 2013: 75). The decision to grant a begging permission or admission to a hospital was often based on other factors such as the absence of a caregiver, whether or not the applicant had learned an occupation, and whether they could actually be expected to find work. Often only the supplications of successful applicants survive today, so it is difficult to know the circumstances of those who had to fend for themselves. Individuals who lacked the stable reputation and goodwill that was usually built upon longstanding relations with family, neighbors, colleagues, public officers, and magistrates were more often denied access to public support systems (Dinges 1998, 2007). There is no question that blind persons who were far from home or led a vagrant life faced considerable challenges and hardships. These groups in particular were regarded with suspicion and were regularly denied the permission to ask for alms. Foreign beggars would often be expelled from cities and territories, and even faced charges and the possibility of corporal punishment (Jütte 1994). Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that the majority of blind people were overwhelmingly in danger of leading a life in poverty, or even that societal attitudes in premodern cultures were widely based on such assumptions. While the case can be made for a certain correlation between poverty and acquired blindness based on the association of poverty with harmful living or working conditions that posed a higher risk of accidents and illnesses that could lead to blindness (O’Tool 2010: 16–18, 23–4), there is also evidence to the fact that blind persons without considerable means were often able to sustain themselves and continued to earn their living. Supplications and administrative

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records show that it is often not blindness itself, but a change in circumstances (e.g. the loss of work, advanced age, the loss of a spouse, or the necessity to support additional family members) that is highlighted in requests for alms, begging allowances, or admission into hospitals. Although valuable insight can be gained from studying blindness from the point of view of poverty, poor relief, and hospital care (Weygand 2009: 18–27; O’Tool 2010), some of the most readily available sources, which stem from supplications and administrative writing by public officers and hospital staff, by their very nature highlight or even enhance aspects of deficiency, neediness, and passivity, leaving little room for the highly diverse experiences of being blind and the varying social significance attributed to blindness. On the one hand, this is where the value of the intersectional approach to the study of blindness as a social construction in the early modern period becomes apparent. On the other hand, an intersectional approach often means analyzing individual “cases.” At this point, it is not possible to make any valid claims as to how blindness (as a cultural construction) had an overall impact on different social groups. Even less is known about the dynamics of the underlying categories on which these groups were based and how they would interlock. This is partly due to a lack of research and partly due to the scarcity and fragmentary character of the source material that is available. Taking this into account, it is all the more important not to fall back on individualistic or medical models of blindness and to avoid writing histories based on “tragic” cases and famous instances of “overcoming” blindness. As the above-cited example of Skolastica showed, the concept of embodied difference can be helpful in order to avoid these pitfalls during the study of individual cases. The following examples demonstrate that even during the life of one clearly identifiable person from a distinct social group, different writing contexts and social situations could make blindness as a social category appear and disappear, while the available source material only offers glances of these dynamics and various intersections. The case of Ursula Grundherr (1570–83) illustrates this point. It is based on archival sources, among them a series of letters from Ursula’s mother, Helena Kress (1545–85), a wealthy descendant from a Nuremberg patrician family. In her correspondence, she frequently mentions her little daughter. For example, in a letter to Helena’s brother, Wilhelm, she lets him know that Ursula often refers to him and always mentions that he will return soon and will play and dance with her. When the family asked Ursula where Wilhelm was, she answered that he was in Myaun—a funny way of mispronouncing “Lyon.”4 There is no indication in the surviving correspondence that Ursula, who was about six years old at the time of writing, was blind. As was a common feature of fifteenthand sixteenth-century family correspondence (Beer 1990a), the letters are written in such a way as to convey Ursula’s state of mind from her (typically childish) perspective, to recount some of her activities, and to maintain the emotional bond between Wilhelm and his niece during his long absence. A very different picture emerges, however, from the surviving family papers and account books of Ursula’s family. According to these texts, Ursula had been blind since birth. While this characteristic was not significant within the context of family correspondence, presumably because each of the participants knew about this fact, entries dedicated to Ursula within the context of family history and genealogical information very decidedly place emphasis on what was apparently perceived as a form of embodied difference. Ursula’s father, Karl Grundherr (1535–1605), kept a register of his descendants, like his father before him. His entry concerning Ursula’s birth reads as follows: “1570/On the 24th of February, half an hour after two o’ clock after midnight … my wife had a

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daughter, alas, God have mercy, who has been born blind.”5 When Ursula died (perhaps during an epidemic) at the age of only thirteen, her father did not forget to mention her blindness in the respective entry: “On the third of September, God almighty took our dear little daughter, called Ursula, who had been born blind into the world, from this life [away] with him …”6 Ursula’s blindness was apparently considered an essential characteristic that would not be omitted from family papers even if there was no blood relation or personal connection. In his family book, influential Nuremberg magistrate and head of a trading company, Endres Imhoff (1491–1579), wrote about Helena, who was a daughter of his son-in-law, but from the first marriage: “Furthermore God the Lord endowed her with a pitiful birth, namely a little girl who was born completely blind, on February 22 in the year 1570, [and] she was named Ursula.”7 Taken together, these entries place Ursula, a descendant of old and influential families, in a position of social ambivalence: on the one hand she is mentioned affectionately by her father, while on the other hand it is obvious that her blindness could be regarded as an unfortunate occurrence and a pitiful fate destined by God. It is unclear if the interpretation of blindness as an ill-fated tragedy stems from the genealogical discourse in which it is placed or whether it reflects a general attitude. In fact, as was the case with the family book entry concerning Skolastica, we do not know why Ursula’s blindness was consistently mentioned in these family histories. There is no clear indication whether congenital blindness was thought to be transmissible down the generations, even though some chronic illnesses, such as “gout” or “paralysis,” were thought to be hereditary (Metzler 2006: 81; Frohne 2014: 258). A temperamental— that is, humoral—condition that was considered detrimental to the eyes or to vision could well have been counted among hereditary causes. However, there is no explicit reference to such a causal connection. Furthermore, as far as common genealogical implications are concerned, there are very few formal reasons for blindness to be entered into genealogical accounts. According to Roman law, which also heavily influenced the Nuremberg municipal laws during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, blind persons were able to inherit and to give away property without limitation, provided their wills followed certain formal procedures that were laid down specifically for blind testators (Küster 1991; Metzler 2017: 296–7). Restrictions to the ability to hold inherited land in fief, as can be found with regard to congenital blindness in medieval codes like the Sachsenspiegel, no longer applied in general during the period in question, and might only become significant where imperial fiefdoms were concerned (Laske 1980: 275–6; Frohne 2014: 198–205). According to canon law, blindness was not a marriage impediment either, as a lack of sight did not limit the ability to consent, and no sensory impairment was among the causes that could lead to a rightful dissolution of marriage (as opposed to, for example, impotence; Schmugge 2012). After the Reformation, Protestant church law did not change fundamentally regarding physical or mental impairment as a cause for separation, and spouses were explicitly encouraged to support each other in case of accidents, impairments, illnesses, and infirmity (Dieterich 1970; Frohne 2014: 281–8). However, it may have been the case that Ursula’s future marriage prospects were thought to have been limited by her blindness, which might have been regarded as a major disadvantage to her and her family. It was not at all uncommon for members of elite families to stay unmarried, and indeed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, many younger sons from Nuremberg patrician houses instead worked abroad for the family trading companies or found positions at universities, at court, or as soldiers.

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Nevertheless, these options were highly gender specific and were usually reserved for male offspring. After the Reformation, in Protestant territories, female descendants of patrician families no longer had the option to enter a cloister. They usually were expected to marry to their house’s advantage and thus forge alliances that would preserve and add to their family of origin. As German family books show, not all female adult members of patrician families managed to fulfil these expectations. In fact, being part of an influential, politically active family might have limited the supply of acceptable marriage offers to the extent that being from a patrician family may have been a greater obstacle to marriage than a sensory impairment would have been for a woman of non-patrician descent (Frohne 2014: 281–98). As Ursula Grundherr’s example suggests, congenital blindness, in combination with gender, might have implied social disadvantages specific to a politically privileged, exclusive group. By contrast, almost the opposite would have been true for male members of this elite group who acquired blindness at an advanced age. There are many examples of highly influential Nuremberg councilmen and magistrates who left high offices due to increased impairment of sight and/or hearing (examples in Fleischmann 2007; Frohne 2014). In fact, these causes were so commonly referred to in official documents, administrative notes, and family books that they might have been known as an elegant and welcome excuse to leave the council and formally “retire” from an unpaid, timeconsuming office without suffering any loss to reputation and social status. In these cases, age was a central category that intersected with male gender, social status, and exclusive political privilege in a specific way. While lack of vision and blindness were described as a deficiency and a cause for disqualification from office, in this specific social constellation, it was at the same time widely accepted and even judged positively, as it was in accordance with the natural process of aging. Similarly, the intersectional category of erudition could, at least in some cases, provide an amount of social prestige that made the social category of blindness almost invisible. Again, this only pertains to specific social constellations that were based on socially exclusive positions, and, more importantly, were mostly accessible by men only, such as elite positions among the learned, academic positions and high church offices. For example, Protestant priest Balthasar Sibenhar (born 1541) mentions in his memoirs that, during his time as a student in Wittenberg, a doctor of medicine called Vendius had been “a very old, starblind (completely) blind gentleman” (ein gar alter, und staarblinder Herr) whose academic assistant “led and guided him to the disputations by the hand into the college” (Bickel 1901: 268). Another famous example is Nicasius van Voerden (born ca. 1440), who had become blind in his early years as a side effect of smallpox, and later studied at the University of Leuven and became a doctor of law. Among other posts, he taught canon law and civil law at the University of Cologne. He had even been granted the privilege to be ordained to priesthood even though he was blind (Weygand 2009: 28–9). Good eyesight was a requirement for Catholic priests, especially in their left eye (the so-called oculus canonicus) because this was the eye that was to be used to read from the Mass book during services (Salonen 2017: 158; Schmugge et al. 2017; Stöhr 2017: 158). Such an irregularity could be overcome by Papal dispensation, especially if the defect (defectus corporis) in question was minor and did not cause offence (scandalum) among the community. However, records from the Apostolic Penitentiary show that dispensations for priests with diminished eyesight were comparatively rare (Salonen 2017: 159). For example, between the years 1458 and 1464 (during the pontificate of Pius II), only forty-

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five dispensations were granted to priests with imperfect sight out of a total number of around 15,000 petitions (from all strata of the population and for various reasons). Among those, very few were dispensations were from an irregularity caused by diminished sight in their left eye. Those who were completely blind in their left eye should not, in general, receive dispensation (Salonen 2017). Nicasius van Voerden seems to have been an exception that might be explained by his academic position, which set him apart from regular priests who had to fulfil specific requirements in order to be allowed to celebrate Mass. In general, dispensations granted from irregularities varied considerably with regard to individual factors, regional differences, and changes over time (Schmugge et al. 2017: 270; Stöhr 2017). Over the course of the early modern period, Papal institutions responsible for dispensation became more specialized, and printed treatises were published regarding canonical irregularities and impediments. From those records, it is apparent that the deciding factor still seems to have been the ability to correctly perform liturgical acts, not the defect itself (Röder 2017). The two examples above show that the intersectional category of learning and erudition, in combination with academic achievement, could be an important factor in the social construction of blindness. The social and cultural estimation of learned men (and, in the later seventeenth century, women; Kreschmer 1925: 159, 168–72) who were blind is underlined by the ongoing fascination with the question of whether blind people could learn how to write. References to the teaching of blind persons with the help of letters cut from wood or with tablets with engravings of the alphabet go back to the early Middle Ages. A reference to this practice by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1531 apparently inspired learned writers like Pedro Mexia and Girolamo Cardano to expand on this topic (Kretschmer 1925: 132–4; Weygand 2009: 30–2; Forrester 2013: 576). In his compilation Silva de Varia Leccion (1543), Mexia explained the way blind persons have learned to write by working with engraved tablets: by following the form of the letters with a needle or stylus over and over, the blind person would be enabled to transfer this knowledge of this form to other writing materials: “And he [the blind person] got so accustomed to this that little by little, and with great care, the image of each of the letters impressed itself upon his memory, and afterward, he taught himself to make them on something other than the tablet such that sometimes he failed and sometimes he succeeded.”8 In his work De Subtilitate, published both in Nuremberg and in Paris in 1550, the famous humanist and professor of medicine Girolamo Cardano (1501–67) referred to the same method in a section about “people who have taught the blind to write in this way.” However, acquiring this ability seems to have been a mostly academic question, since Cardano stressed the difficulties of the time-consuming exercise and concluded that it was admirable, but of little use.9 Zina Weygand (2009: 31) has convincingly argued that learned men usually had access to secretaries, scribes, and readers, so that, for a visually impaired person of higher social status, acquiring the ability to write would have been considered unnecessary. This does not mean, however, that blind persons had to be part of the learned elite in order to receive basic education. Sadly, due to the scarcity of sources, we know of very few examples from the centuries before the first schools for the blind emerged. The records concerning the above-mentioned Ursula Grundherr, who had been born blind, are an exceptionally rare find. They suggest with some probability that Ursula did have access to a student who presumably taught her and her younger sister at home.10 From her father’s surviving account books, we know that he was paying a student named Michael Dürr for his children’s home tuition when Ursula was thirteen years old. At this

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point, the other surviving sibling next to Ursula was eight-year-old Maria, who was at an age when she would have trained her skills in reading and writing. It is unclear whether Ursula was able to read and write or if her family wanted her to acquire these skills. Her private lessons might also have focused on moral, religious, or musical education (Beer 1990a: 332–3; Frohne 2014: 307–8).11 In an account book entry from 1581, Ursula’s father put on record that, while his widowed sister-in-law had sons who were suitable for an (expensive) academic career (zum studieren tüeglich), he himself had a blind daughter who needed her own person (ain aygens mensch), which is presented as a significant expense. The person in question was probably a guide or a personal servant, but might have also have had educational tasks.12 Lastly, the many ambivalences within the social construction of blindness can be underlined by an example that shows that, in some social constellations, the social category of education might not have been enough to preclude societal disadvantages following from infirmities due to advanced age: the sixteenth-century autobiography written by Daniel Greiser (1504–91), a Protestant priest as well as a high-ranking church official of Dresden, contains explicit complaints about the hardships he experiences in his office due to his advanced age, as well as several pleas for support in recognition of his achievements and ongoing labor for the church. The text, which was published as a guide to his successors in office, explicitly served as a petition in order to secure provision for Greiser’s old age. He specifically remarks on his increasingly diminished sight over the last two years of his life and states that although all his life he has been able to read even very small letters without the help of eyeglasses, now, at the age of eighty-three, his left eye suffers from a “flow” (fluss) down from his head. This flow makes the eye water and has damaged it in such a way that he cannot read with it anymore. He expects his vision to diminish further, comparing himself to biblical figures who, at advanced ages, found that “their eyes became dim and they could not recognize one person from another” (Greiser 1587: fol. o[iv]r-v). Interestingly, Greiser also mentions that he has never used eyeglasses in his life, the reason being that they pinch the nose and change a person’s voice (1587: fol. o[iii]r-v). This detail might point to a fear of ridicule, maybe regarding the situation during a sermon. Greiser goes on to point out the infirmities of old age and highlights his fears, including the prospect of him lacking proper care and being regarded as a burden. According to his claims, academic learning and a respected office did not lead to a social position that would necessarily preclude ridicule and a loss of social reputation as a blind and infirm old man. The example shows that an intersectional approach is needed to account for the various, diverse, and often contradictory attitudes toward blindness and blind people in premodern societies.

4.4. CULTURAL CONCEPTS, KNOWLEDGE, AND REPRESENTATION The Renaissance is traditionally associated with a heightened appreciation of the ability to see: vision was increasingly placed at the top of the hierarchy of senses, accompanied by the invention of printing and a renewed interest in optics and the development of optical instruments. Some Renaissance artists and philosophers expressed outright horror at the thought of losing one’s sight: Leonardo da Vinci famously compared blindness to being buried alive (Weygand 2009: 32; Jütte 2017: 338). Nevertheless, there is no indication either in learned writing, in iconography, or in social attitudes that attitudes

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toward blindness or the lived experience of blind persons underwent radical changes during the Renaissance period that fundamentally differed from those of earlier centuries. It should be noted that sentiments expressed by artists and theorists have to be considered within their discursive contexts and placed within longstanding traditions. They often addressed only a very small, very specific audience section and expected their readers to know what to make of the imagery, arguments, and tropes (Nolte et al. 2017: 76–90). Following Edward Wheatley’s religious model, it could even be argued that, during the later Middle Ages, the importance of the ability to physically see the Eucharist during elevation implied more drastic and far-reaching social consequences to visually impaired persons. However, it is not advisable to offset the religious model of blindness against an early modern version—what could be deemed the “aesthetic” model—as both discursive traditions can be traced back several centuries, respectively endured far longer than their attribution to specific eras would suggest. For example, Michael Camille has convincingly argued against the long-held assumption that the invention of one-point perspective during the Renaissance was “the very foundation of human subjectivity,” and he suggests that during the later Middle Ages, at least in some discursive contexts, vision stood at the very center of cognition (Camille 2000: 198, 202). More importantly, it is questionable whether either of these models ever achieved hegemonic status within the complex, dynamic, and ever-shifting fields of concepts, perceptions, and experiences that made up “blindness” in premodern cultures. In his seminal study on blindness as a mental image in premodern thought, Moshe Barasch has highlighted a curious fact that supports this approach: “Blindness is not a central theme in Renaissance imagery. Neither in literature nor in the visual arts is much attention paid to the sightless person” (Barasch 2001: 115). This is even more surprising, Barasch remarks, considering the emphasis and cultural significance placed upon the ability to see during this period (2001: 115–16). While this does not mean that there are no depictions of blind people either in art or in pragmatic production contexts (such as medical or anatomical illustrations) to be found at all, there seems to have been little interest in works of art exploring or conveying the lived experience of not-seeing by blind people, which would have been a fruitful subject within the established Renaissance discourse and practices surrounding sensory experiences and mimetic simulations of touch. Images stemming from more pragmatic contexts of production, such as memorial books or depictions of miracles, do usually not transcend the traditional imagery associated with blindness, such as closed eyes (while the head is held upright) or unseeing eyes staring straight ahead, sometimes combined with additional attributes such as crutches or sticks. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, numerous pictorial series of miracles that occurred at a specific shrine were produced, ranging from painted book illustrations to woodcuts and large wood panels. These works usually depict blind persons with their eyes closed and in a praying position: on their knees, hands folded, face raised upwards, and directing their attention to heaven (Brunner 2002: fig. 9; Büttner 2017: 460, fig. 95). Sometimes they are seen in a kneeling position with (already) seeing eyes (Brunner 2002: fig. 23). In rare cases, people with eye afflictions are depicted with bandages around their eyes (Brunner 2002: fig. 28). However, in these instances, the images do not attempt to capture the actual illnesses, daily life situations, or experiences of the healed, but rely on traditional iconography—and often accompanying texts—to convey the fact that a miraculous cure took place. The memorial books produced for the foundation of Twelve Brothers during the sixteenth century, a hospital for twelve artisans who could not

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sustain themselves anymore due to old age in Nuremberg, traditionally depict all socalled brothers as active artisans in their workshop. This deliberate anachronism, meant to honor the residents’ past working lives that allowed them entry into the house as “worthy” poor people, is combined consistently with depictions of physical impairments and distinctive features, such as missing limbs, an amputated nose, eye afflictions, or blindness. In case of the latter, blind brothers are usually depicted sitting or standing in their workshop, fulfilling their regular working tasks, while their eyes are closed. It is important to note that in most cases, the lack of vision was acquired after they had gained entry to the hospital, as the accompanying texts reveal (Nuckel 2013: 106–8; Frohne 2014: 222–4). To the anticipated audience, it was obvious that these images were not depictions of actual experiences of blindness, but a nonlinear, layered construction of symbols and references in accordance with contemporary notions of worthiness, social honor, and individual prestige. From this perspective, they offer valuable insights into the norms and ideals associated with early modern German communities, and also point to the social positions blind people could occupy within this order. At the same time, Barasch has noted that from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, the imagery of the blind beggar in the arts seems to disappear. He confirms that depictions of blindness are decidedly metaphorical and emblematic during this period and, in most cases, clearly separated from real-life experiences (Barasch 2001: 121–3). What is more, a renewed interest in the literary topos of the “blind seer” seems to follow up on the traditional theories and interpretational frameworks cited by writers in the fourteenth century (see above; Singer 2010, 2011). Barasch summarizes: “Blindness, the condition of looking inward, is the sign of both the divinely inspired sage who contemplates the secrets of the gods and of the poet and the artist who are immersed in the process of creation” (2001: 136). This is in accordance with the finding that, even though blindness in the Renaissance could certainly be associated with spiritual deficiency, arrogance, or insufficient knowledge, it could just as easily be depicted as a means to inspire humility and “true” insight (as opposed to superficial impressions). Both viewpoints, it should be noted, stem from learned discourse and emerge from established traditions of classical, late antique, and medieval writings that survived well into the early modern period. Julie Singer, who has studied the discourse surrounding Francesco Landini (b. 1325), the blind musician of Florence discussed above, refers to contemporary texts that suppose that blindness enhances intellectual abilities, drawing on theories about inward and outward ways of “seeing.” Singer points out that “in a number of fourteenth-century texts blindness constitutes not only an impairment of the sense of sight, but also an enhancement of another sense, namely hearing (or musical ability)” (Singer 2010: 40) Landini’s celebrated intellectual capacities and his superior insight were explicitly linked to the fact that he did not see with his “eyes of the face.” In Francesco Petrarca’s (1304–74) compilation of dialogues, De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae, a blind person has to be reminded repeatedly that although the “eyes of the face” might have been lost, the inner sight, the “eyes of the soul,” still remain. Because the “eyes of the face” are also portals that often fail to separate the sinful outside world from inward sight, blindness can be regarded as a blessing. Singer has shown that the composition of this dialogue also serves as a means to sharpen the intellectual capacity, as a remedy against despair following loss of eyesight (Singer 2011). Petrarch’s dialogues were repeatedly reprinted in the early modern period and translated into the vernacular in various countries. A German translation printed in 1532 (Von der Artzney bayder

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Glück) is particularly impressive due to its numerous famous illustrations, which in part gained a tradition of their own and were reprinted separately by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The book, which soon became known under the title Trostspiegel (“Mirror of Consolation”), is among the most widely read publications of its time and was reprinted in seven official editions during the sixteenth century alone (Scheidig 1955: 7). The anonymous artist who crafted the illustration of the passage on blindness shows a man strapped to a table for an operation on his eyes. He is holding a book, which, according to Scheidig (1955: 7), could be a symbol of diminished eyesight, but might also refer to his wish for continuous erudition in spite of the inability to read with one’s own eye. Behind the table, a woman, apparently a queen, can be seen stabbing herself with a dagger while a bird is scratching at her eyes (Von der Artzney bayder Glück 1532: fol. x[v]r-x[iii]v/cap. 96). While the origins of this image are unclear, as they are referenced neither in Petrarch’s text nor the translation, it has been assumed that the woman represents someone who has lost the light of her soul’s eyes long before the eyes of her face, seeing as the outward eyes are described by Petrarch as servants of avariciousness, a lack of chastity, and other vices. In contrast, a blind pilgrim, who can be seen in the background being led by his dog, presumably stands for someone who has lost the strength of his eyes, but is not truly blind due to being enlightened by the eyes of the soul (Scheidig 1955: 299). Going by the available sources, “blindness” seems to have been more easily available as a cultural construct than as a physical condition until the late seventeenth century. While blindness is present in a variety of singular social situations as well as in exemplary debates, there is no coherent concept or discourse surrounding blindness. Finally, there were several different, and partly contradictory, theories on the physical and physiological processes involved in the act of seeing. Theories based on the concept of spiritus—particles so fine as to be practically immaterial that were thought to act as an intermediaries between the outward senses and the inward production of sensory information in the brain—played an important role in perception theories. However, opinions on the actual processes and dynamics involved in the act of seeing differed. Among the fundamentally contested points was the question of whether the eyes were sending out rays to physically connect with the sensory object; that is, whether seeing was conceived as an active or a passive process (Nelson 2000; Nichols et al. 2008). The so-called extramission theory was highly influential far into the sixteenth century (Koelbing 1967: 22–5; Camille 2000: 214). Next to this model of perception, the intromission theory, going back to Aristotle’s theories on seeing (Koelbing 1967: 19–22), had entered into European thought through the works of Arabic scholars, most notably Avicenna. Michael Camille has outlined the fundamental shift that occurred during the later Middle Ages due to the change in perception theories: “For a proponent of extramission like Augustine, the senses are the dangerous open doorways reaching out to embrace cupidity, bridges between the world and body that have to be strictly guarded. For an Aristotelian like Aquinas, by contrast, the bridges of the senses are crucial creative conduits for taking in, grappling with, and ultimately understanding the world through the body” (Camille 2000: 206). These two models persisted next to each other (and partly intertwined) throughout the Renaissance, as the ongoing popularity of this model within the reception of Petrarch’s writings over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exemplifies. Similarly, within medical discourse, a multitude of illnesses, humoral conditions, environmental circumstances, and very specific personal behaviors were thought to be able to cause afflictions of the eye and/or blindness. In one of the earliest printed

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ophthalmological treatises in the German vernacular, a wide range of activities detrimental to the eyes and sight is listed: These are all things that are harmful to the eyes and the spiritus [geystern] of sight: acrid fumes/acrid cold/and warm air/much wine/garlic/much salt/fornication/pepper/milk/ cheese/unbaked bread/onions/radish/leek/mustard/peas/beans/lentils/and everything that causes vapours/Chunky beef/beef and pork sausages/sleeping with shoes on/much sitting by the fire/much looking down/looking at white things/reading new books with small letters/fornicating with menstruating women/many vigils/much fasting/much bloodletting on the arm/not least elaborate, artistic preparation of dishes. (Ein Newes hochnutzlichs Buechlin 1538: fol. c[i]v)13 It could be argued that this wide range of possible underlying causes of eye afflictions lead to the situation that, while they are regularly mentioned as symptoms in medical writings, there are few treatises on blindness itself. From the sixteenth century onwards, ophthalmological treatises were more widely available, often translated into the vernacular or written by practitioners and eye specialists (e.g. Bartisch 1583; Blanchard 1996). However, most of the afflictions mentioned deal either with diminished sight or, to a greater extent, with conditions that could lead to a loss of sight, such as inflammations, tumors, and obstructions of various kinds. While there are remedies for watering, red or itching eyes, noxious flows, as well as various operations on the eye, eyelids, and orbit to be found, there was no way to treat either congenital or acquired blindness, except for cataract operations. Even if many physicians and surgeons refused to perform this difficult and dangerous procedure, there are numerous examples of cataract patients who underwent operations by eye specialists. However, cataracts were only one of many causes of blindness (Jütte 2000: 121–5; Frohne 2014: 276–81). The “New and Highly Useful Booklet” on eye afflictions mentioned above (Ein Newes hochnutzlichs Buechlin) is made up of two distinct parts that are highlighted and advertised in the title. The first part is theoretical and contains an anatomical figure showing the eye from the inside (Anathomia eines augs/wie es innwendig gestaltet). The booklet promises for its second part “a great many useful and well-proven remedies, such as purgation, plaster, eye drops, sieff [fine powder], powder, ointment and eyewash, how to produce and use them, useful for every household” (anzeigung viler nutzlicher vnd bewerter hülff/als Purgation/Pflaster/Collirien/Sieff/Puluer/Salben vnd augen wassern/wie mans machen vnd gebrauchen soll/einem jeden haushalt nutzlich). Its theory on seeing is in accordance with traditional concepts: the eye is conceptualized as the instrument of the spiritus of sight, which are constantly at work. They go out from the brain and through the nerves to transmit the visible object to the spiritus of the soul. The treatise mentions rather vaguely that a lack of sight can be traced back to the spiritus themselves or to the canals (die geng) they have to pass through in case they are injured or obstructed (Buechlin 1538: fol. a[ii]r).14 Lack of sight is attributed to either an excess or deficit of the spiritus of sight, which is compared to changes or imbalances in the three different fluids of the eye (feuchtin). These can also be afflicted by a change in temperature caused by an imbalance of the bodily humors (böse complexion), so that the fluids become either too thick or too thin. In the following passages, some specific afflictions are attributed to an excess of the four cardinal humors (blood, phlegm, and two types of bile or choler). An excess of blood, for example, is indicated by blood vessels in the eye being highly visible, red, and widened. Possible remedies are, among others, bloodletting, potions, and purges. On the other hand, afflictions of the eyes that are accompanied by flows of pus

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or viscous water point to an excess of phlegm in the body. All things that help to digest or discharge phlegm are considered a helpful remedy (Buechlin 1538: fol. a[ii]r-a[iiii]r). Other afflictions are attributed to environmental influences, such as sharp, damp winds or cold (fol. a[iiii]r), as well as accidents and wounds (fol. b[i]r). The significance of the environmental living conditions and personal habits (traditionally subsumed under the socalled sex res non naturales) is exemplified by the passage concerning the development of pterygium, a growth on the conjunctiva (the term fell is used in the vernacular German). Among the possible causes for this affliction are eating habits, namely bad digestion, which leads to vapors rising up into the head and the eyes (fol. b[ii]r). It is rather likely that some if not most of the more basic information on the causes of eye afflictions and their remedies compiled in this small treatise represents relatively widely available knowledge. The above-mentioned usage of medical terms in a variety of contexts, including letters and life writing, supports this assumption. While it is questionable whether some of the technical terms, especially those derived from Latin, were widely known or commonly used, the conceptual knowledge concerning humoral pathology and its implications with regard to effects on the brain, the stomach, or the eyes was not restricted to medical experts. Similarly, concepts of perception, such as the role of the spiritus—or pneuma—or the different functions of the ventricles of the brain were not discussed by medical or philosophical experts alone. Since the later Middle Ages, medieval textbooks on poetry commonly mention the physiology and function of the brain, such as with regard to the imaginatio, and explicit as well as implicit references can be found in many vernacular texts written by and for a lay audience (Camille 2000; Singer 2010; Reich 2011: 37–9). The majority of the early modern population likely had some basic understanding of the most fundamental concepts of the human body and of humoral pathology, including a range of well-known cures such as bloodletting, purging, or adapting diet and daily habits. Patients have been known to regularly contest the opinion of trained medical personnel in favor of their own remedies and cures, and they regularly swapped recipes and medical advice among family members, neighbors, and colleagues (Porter 1985; Jütte 1991; Rublack 2001; Riha 2009; Frohne 2014). In chronicles, letters, family papers, and ego-documents, possible causes for eye afflictions, diminishing sight, and blindness were often discussed in detail, especially when those were acquired later in life. They range from accidents, fights, or war wounds to humoral conditions and side effects of other illnesses. Diminishing sight was often linked to the humoral changes undergone by the aging human body (Jütte 1996: 264; Ulbricht 2008: 322, 324–5, 334–5). For example, the merchant and councilman Hermann Weinsberg from Cologne wrote in his incredibly detailed diary that, in October 1558, he had been treated with bloodletting with three cups on his back by the local barber because he had been told this would be good for his sight. This was the first year Hermann reluctantly “used glasses out of necessity” (deß brils noitz halber gebrauchen) because his vision had become dark and weak, especially in the evenings by the light of candles and when he was reading. He notes that he can see objects in the distance rather sharply, but not things close to him, and he cannot stare at white (Liber Iuventutis: fol. 379v). Apparently, Hermann— or at least those who advised him—thought a change in his humors must have been responsible for his diminishing vision, as the aim of the bloodletting was to get rid of either detrimental material within his body or one excessive humor that had caused an imbalance in his humoral condition. In his diary, Hermann chronicled his change from a sanguine temperament in his youth to a more melancholic one as part of the natural

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aging process; therefore, following common medical lore, it is likely that the changes in his temperament were thought to affect his eyesight as well. One of the causes of diminishing sight that is regularly referenced in private correspondence is excessive weeping. It can often be found in situations of emotional stress, such as family conflicts or economic hardships. During a conflict between Wilibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530) and his sisters, who were nuns in the Nuremberg cloister of St. Clara, one of them asked Wilibald in a letter to settle the dispute. She claims that Caritas, his other sister, had been suffering all year from emotional strain, as her eyes could attest: “she can hardly see anything with them any more” (sy schier nichts darmit kan mer gesechen). Maybe the writer felt that this information might disturb her brother unduly, because later she added “without eyeglasses” (on augengeleßer) (Scheible 1997: 85). Similarly, Anna von Cleve (1517–78), the wife of a Bremen magistrate, wrote during a time of crisis to her son, Thile, and apologized for not having written to him for a while. As a reason, she states that her eyes have become dim (duster), the cause of which was the warm water that has flowed out of her eyes over recent years and will continue to do so (Smidt 1874: 47). A rather unusual cause is referenced in the family book of Ottheinrich Öfelin (1580– 1634). An older relative, Veit Öfelin (1542–92) has “sadly been visited with blindness by God”: he lost his sight due his position as a trumpeter in service of the duke of PfalzNeuburg. During this time, he had often been required to blow the trumpet so forcefully that water flowed from his eyes and blood from his ears and mouth. Interestingly, this happened over twenty years before his blindness occurred. In a letter, Veit announced that he was prepared to suffer his fate willingly and patiently, and found comfort in the thought that even if God would not give him back his sight during his lifetime, he would still henceforth gain eternal clarity (Nebinger 1982/3: 104–5). This curious reasoning is still a very typical example of dealing with “disability” in early modern life writing (Frohne 2015c). It is characterized by an attempt to explain the natural causes of an infirmity or impairment, while still acknowledging that the decision to impose this fate upon him, as well as the power to take it away, is ultimately God’s alone. There is no attempt to challenge God’s decision, but neither is there an implication of personal sin or spiritual failure. Rather, the prospect of gaining eternal life is set up as a complementary factor to his earthly life, which naturally implies affliction, infirmities, and impairments as part of the human condition. As Singer has pointed out, the assumption that a loss of eyesight would lead to an enhancement of the senses of hearing and touch was common knowledge, and was widely transmitted within popular writing as well as in specialized medical treatises. The fact that, far into the eighteenth century, visually impaired children were encouraged and regularly trained to become musicians also points to the power of longevity of these theories (Singer 2010: 45; Ritzmann 2013: 75; Frohne 2015b: 53–7). However, it should be noted that the social reputation of professional musicians varied depending on whether they occupied well-regarded positions, such as at court or as a town’s organist. A magistrate of the town of Görlitz, Paul Schneider (ca. 1490–ca. 1545), recounts in his diary that, in 1538, a blind musician who had married the daughter of a clothmaker was denied entry into the clothmakers’ guild. The city council had to order the guild members to grant him entry and his accompanying master’s rights. The entry in Schneider’s diary is headed by the line Pfeyffer eyn tuchmacher worden, which reads as “A piper [a professional musician without a fixed position] became a clothmaker.” The guild members’ official reasoning was therefore apparently not the man’s blindness, but

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the fact that, as a formerly irregularly employed musician, he was making a living from what was traditionally considered a dishonest trade. Schneider, who seems sympathetic to the blind man’s cause, recounts that the man had not been born blind, but had lost his sight due to wetagen in blotern (“the sickness of pox/smallpox”). His father, a pewterer, made arrangements to have him trained to play the violin. Schneider claims to have often seen the blind musician being led to weddings, church events, and dances and to “fiddle” (Schulze 1895: 50–1). In this case at least, the choice to become a musician seems to stem from necessity and pragmatism rather than exceptional musical ability, as can be seen by the fact that the blind man sought to leave his precarious occupation for the security of a position in the guild (secured by marriage), a position of regularized work and a higher social status. The example shows, once again, that cultural frameworks of interpreting blindness were ambiguously and incoherently applied to situational causes.

4.5. CONCLUSION Comparing influential recent studies on blindness in premodern thought and representation (see above; Barasch 2001; Wheatley 2010; Singer 2011) and taking into account the wide range of sources available to us from the Renaissance era, it is questionable whether any coherent theories on blindness itself can be found. On the one hand, blindness seems to have been readily available either as a striking foil or as a compelling metaphor within a multitude of discourses, ranging from miraculous healing and spiritual blindness to the late antique concept of the “eyes of the soul,” to literary and theoretical musings on physiology (e.g. the trope that blind people cannot fall in love; Singer 2011), to reformist treatises on the spiritual virtues of work in the context of charity and poor relief (Weygand 2009: 28–30). However, these texts are seldom rooted in a genuine interest in blind people or the experience of blindness itself (Weygand 2009: 28–30). This finding is in accordance with what we know about disability in premodern history in general. As a fluid, flexible concept, “disability” did not occupy a permanent place within premodern discourse; rather, it provided a well-known framework that could be referred to and inferred from (Horn and Frohne 2013). Among the reasons for this finding we might suspect, on the one hand, the very ubiquity of “disability,” and on the other hand, its variability and diversity. Disability was not a minority experience, and there was hardly a way to generalize it without resulting in contradictions and logical shortcomings. As such, “disability” did not lend itself to learned discourse, except in clearly distinguished sections or aspects. Focusing on only one of those aspects will necessarily lead to a onedimensional picture. At this point, much more work is needed to gain access to the complex and diverse, often ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory constructions of blindness in the early modern period.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Deafness Deafnesses and Silences in Shakespeare’s England JENNIFER NELSON

In early modern England, including in Shakespeare’s plays, deafness and silence are frequently used as devices of empowerment by hearing people; to fine tune this concept, deaf people are not allowed a similar luxury (Nelson and Berens 1997).1 I have often been told, “But Shakespeare and other writers show deafness as a Good Thing!” A general example of this positivity might be the phrase “to turn a deaf ear,” which means to ignore someone willfully in order to seize control of the argument or conversation. A notable example of this is Ferdinand of The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. When the Duchess tells her brother that “a scandalous report is spread / touching mine honor,” Ferdinand’s response is as hopeful as it is unsuccessful: “[L]et me be ever deaf to it” (3.1.48). Ferdinand’s inability to be deaf to anything concerning his sister’s chastity finally results in her death, those of her family, and his own; being “deaf” here may have helped this situation. Phrases such as this are used to empower the hearing, not disable them, and many early modern works are rife with these selectively deaf references—hence the “good thing” comment, which ties in with the current concept of “Deaf Gain.” As coined, Deaf Gain is used to “counter the frame of hearing loss as it refers to the unique cognitive, creative, and cultural gains manifested through deaf ways of being in the world” (Bauman and Murray 2014: xv). I will be using the lowercase “deaf” in this chapter for deaf people as the capital D concept was not used in the early modern period. I will use the capital D for Deaf in Deaf Gain as that is modern usage. Although Deaf Gain certainly was not a concept then, it works well in framing how deafness was used and exploited in the literature of the time.

5.1. FINDING A KIND OF DEAF GAIN IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND CULTURE The usual strategy in the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Traherne, and others is either to wish for temporary “deafness” in the face of the world’s voices in order to seize control or to be silent in order to shut out the poisoned outer world and to take control

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(Nelson and Berens 1997). However, this is a very lopsided “good thing,” a partial kind of Deaf Gain in terms of lack of extension to those who are deaf in real life, which ultimately reveals the audism in the concept. According to Bauman and Murray, the concept of Deaf Gain involves a different paradigm and understanding not of loss, but of difference: “To many in the deaf community, being deaf has nothing to do with ‘loss’ but is, rather, a distinct way of being in the world, one that opens up perceptions, perspectives, and insights that are less common to the majority of hearing persons” (2014: xv). As such, marginalized knowledge is now being seen in a gainful and positive way. Looking to deaf people and their language “increases the already astounding variation on ways to be human” (2014: xix). Bauman and Murray further note that Deaf Gain is “itself diverse. We do not posit a universal Deaf Gain. Which gains emerge or are valued are highly contingent on cultural and historical contexts, including the status of deaf people and sign languages in particular societies” (2014: xxiii). Deaf Gain can be diverse—for example, it can be more one-sided. Bauman and Murray note that there are different components to Deaf Gain, and “benefit” is one of them: “The first dimension of Deaf Gain we explore is that of the benefit to the individual. Whereas popular constructions of deafness are defined exclusively by the negative effects—problems with literacy development and social and cognitive development—a Deaf Gain perspective brings forth a number of social, psychological, and cognitive benefits” (2014: xxiv). An unconscious or unacknowledged Deaf Gain benefit is manifested in early modern literature in terms of a clear-cut connection between power and rhetoric, which are mainly the provinces of hearing people at this time. Edna Edith Sayers, writing as Lois Bragg,2 writes, “The story of the Renaissance thrust toward internal colonization of the deaf, among other minorities, and of social control over language, among other human behaviors, promises to be fascinating on its own terms, without any embellishment it might gain by contrast with premodern periods, about which we still know so much less than we would like” (1997: 7). As early as the first part of the seventeenth century, we see a kind of Deaf Gain looking backwards in that rhetoricians like John Bulwer and his experience with deaf people and sign language figures handily in his rhetorical writings about the pinnacle of eloquence in discourse; the ideas that underpin Bulwer’s work have later resonance with theatrical and rhetorical attitudes. Bauman and Murray note: “Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia read like a seventeenth-century manifesto on Sign Gain. Having been influenced by deaf individuals, this rhetorician recognized a supreme Deaf Gain irony: that deaf people are the vanguard in the arts of eloquent discourse” (2014: xxxv). While it is unusual to incorporate knowledge about deaf people and sign language into areas such as rhetoric and thus transform the field via a focus on the body and bodily signs, the early modern period is a time when rhetoricians focused more on the individual and various senses in the creation of language and not so much rules laid down by something higher or omniscient like a God; as such, Bulwer used his knowledge to attempt to infuse and increase a discipline. People like Francis Bacon started to emphasize learning through the senses, and Juan Pablo Bonet (1561–1633), known for his book, The Reduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak, looked at using different senses such as vision and touch to stand in for others or to replace others such as hearing. People like William Holder (1616–98), in his 1661 Elements of Speech: An Essay of Inquiry into the Natural Production of Letters: with an Appendix Concerning Persons Deaf & Dumb started also looking to the education of the deaf via the use of the hands and eyes. Yet while Bulwer writes about how gesture can ironically be the pinnacle of eloquence in rhetoric (Chironomia 1974), deaf people are generally missing from his manual rhetoric works,

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though he writes about them in his Philocophus: Or, The Deaf and Dumbe Man’s Friend (1648), and possibly adopted a deaf daughter, Chirothea (“one who signs”) Johnson (Dekesel 1992–3: 12). Historically, culturally, and linguistically speaking, deafness and sign language are commonly considered negatively, especially when one operates from a standpoint of “normalcy” (Davis 1995), which is odd considering the literary valorization of bodily signifiers such as deafness and silence as often positive attributes for those who are hearing. For the deaf, it is a somewhat different story, as the deafness is almost never seen as a good thing, whereas for hearing people, a sort of lopsided Deaf Gain applies. To “turn a deaf ear” as in Shakespeare and others is a position of linguistic power in that you can ignore someone, not a weakness—but if you are deaf, this does not work the same way. What is positive for one is negative for the other (Nelson and Berens 1997), which is why this chapter’s subtitle says refers to deafnesses and silences in the plural. It seems to have been impossible to conceive of an actual deaf existence apart from a sense of loss or deprivation, and this is reflected in the severe limitations of historical research on deaf people in this time, as the way they lived is very difficult to determine other than through slight references such as legal references to heirs disinherited in favor of younger brothers because of deafness, such as Francis Hay, ninth earl of Errol, whose elder brother, Alexander, was “was set aside on account of physical defect, being deaf and dumb” (Saenz 2004). We also see that David fitz James Barry, de facto third Viscount Buttevant, “succeeded to his lands and honours during the lifetime of his elder brother Richard, who was deaf and mute” (McGurk 2004). We also see many references in biographies like this to people deafened in old age, not born deaf or who grew up deaf, such as Patrick Ruthven, Earl of Forth and Earl of Brentford, whose later deafness was observed to reduce “his function as an effective tactical commander” (Reid 2004). This sort of mention is ultimately a record of privileged and atypical lives, however; where is your average deaf person in this time period? Looking at the literature turns up the “fell on deaf ears” trope for the most part, not lived experiences, and this in itself says a lot about how deaf people were perceived and recorded (or not). Edna Edith Sayers notes the scattered nature of these references to deaf people as well prior to the early modern period (Bragg 1997: 7). She says: “we need to examine the few oblique references to gesturing ‘deaf–mutes’ and to ancient theatrical gesture systems cited frequently in deaf histories. On close inspection, they prove to tell us little and certainly do not document the existence of any sign language” (4). Rather, she discusses how, before deaf education was more widespread in the eighteenth century, home signs were likely developed and used by deaf people: “Communication among the deaf and between the deaf and the hearing would have been, of necessity, sublinguistic or protolinguistic, consisting, that is, of gesture, mime, and context-dependent protolanguage” (4), and that “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” (4). Sayers further notes that in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, people were “somewhat less self-conscious about using gesturing and gesticulating,” as well as more dependent on pantomime and their “fingers for memory and math.” Sayers explains the context further: No sign language in any meaningful sense of that word, and whatever fingerspelling there may have been is all but lost to history. Natural sign language emerges from deaf children who are lucky enough to grow up in deaf communities, and such communities could not have taken hold over generations before the population explosion of modern

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times and the rise of universal schooling, whereas finger alphabets, if they are to be at all widely used, need some application beyond novelty, and this was not found until the invention of deaf education. (Bragg 1997: 24) Later, there are rare, brief indications and descriptions of “home signs” or natural signs that arise when there is more than one deaf person in an area. One such example is noted by Richard Carew in The Survey of Cornwall in 1602, and is astonishingly detailed— Edward Bone, for example, has “verie effectuall signes”—with hearing people and with other deaf people like Kempe, even as Carew is rather audist in defining his friend Kempe as “defected” more than “affected”: These examples I thrust out before me, to make way, for a not much lesse straunge relation touching one Edward Bone, sometimes servant to the said master Courtney: which fellow (as by the assertion of divers credible persons, I have beene informed) deafe from his cradle, and consequently dumbe, would yet bee one of the first, to learne, and expresse to his master, any newes that was sturring in the Countries: especially, if there went speech of a Sermon, within some myles distance, hee would repaire to the place, with the soonest, and setting himselfe directly against the Preacher, looke him steadfastly in the face, while his Sermon lasted: to which religious zeale, his honest life was also answerable. For, as hee shunned all lewd parts himselfe, so, if he espied any in his fellow servants, (which hee could and would quickly doe) his master should straight-wayes know it, and not rest free from importuning, untill, either the fellow had put away his fault, or their master his fellow. And to make his minde knowne, in this, and all other matters, hee used verie effectuall signes, being able therethrough, to receive, and performe any enjoyned errand. Besides, hee was assisted with so firme a memorie, that hee would not onely know any partie, whome hee had once seene, for ever after, but also make him knowne to any other, by some speciall observation, and difference. Upon a brother of his, God laide the like infirmities, but did not recompence it with the like raritie. Somewhat neere the place of his birth, there dwelt another, so affected, or rather defected, whose name was Kempe: which two, when they chaunced to meete, would use such kinde imbracements, such strange, often, and earnest tokenings, and such heartie laughters, and other passionate gestures, that their want of a tongue, seemed rather an hinderance to others conceiving them, then to their conceiving one another. (1602: 139–40, Nn4) In discussing Kempe in this way, hearing society is able to see itself as not “defected” by contrast. The function of deafness and silence as terms in literature reify the “able” body through the lens of “the dependence of epistemological operations … on disabled bodies: the able body cannot solidify its own abilities in the absence of its binary Other” (Mitchell and Snyder 2001: 368). In contrast to involuntarily deaf bodies, if deafness and silence are choices by abled bodies, they often become positive attributes in function—a kind of Deaf Gain and not a defect. Yet while there is an abundance of momentarily deaf ears and silent mouths, anecdotal stories such as that of Edward Bone and his friend Kempe in Cornwall, and mentions of the legal tradition of disowning deaf heirs, there is a virtually complete absence of physically deaf characters other than the allegorical Abessa in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. If one does not include those late-deafened and mocked, such as Corbaccio in Jonson’s Volpone, or partially deaf such as the Wife of Bath or

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Julius Caesar, or those temporarily and “long troubled” by deafness such as Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (Nicholls 2004), actual deaf people really do not show up in literature as characters in their own right until the eighteenth century, when Daniel Defoe’s novel about a deaf seer, Duncan Campbell, appears in 1720. Campbell coincides with increased knowledge about the education of the deaf. Once deaf education becomes more widespread, and people like John Bulwer publish works about manual rhetoric, we move from a kind of exploitive Deaf Gain to a Sign Gain of sorts. Control is key here as a discursive element of power. While deafness and silence are frequently portrayed as empowering in Shakespeare and others, they are ultimately so only if one is already able to hear and speak within an aural cultural matrix—that is, if these qualities are voluntary and metaphoric. In these works, a hearing society oddly often benefits from a one-sided “Deaf Gain” (Murray and Bauman 2014) moment, whereas actual deaf people are not granted the same benefit. Generally, there is no “return to a phenomenology of the disabled body” (Mitchell and Snyder 2001: 368); there is no deaf subjectivity or real deaf experience, because the disability as portrayed supports an auditory and audist structure of society in the end. Disability here functions not so much as an obvious visual marker or a physical lack, but illustrates how the body is lifted into society and power through language even as the actual deaf body or experience is often missing or exploited. Lennard Davis writes, “Language usage, which is as much a physical function as any other somatic activity, has become subject to an enforcement of normalcy, as have sexuality, gender, racial identity, national identity, and so on” (1995: 100). Language and discourse thus become physical markers of disability abstracted from the deaf body and inseparable from power structures in early modern England. The almost complete absence of acknowledgment— and very few records—about the deaf experience is the result of spoken language being a prerequisite for membership in the social body.

5.2. AURALITY, DEAFNESS, AND POWER Early modern England was a heavily aural world (a world in which people regularly listened to four-hour sermons) and as such civilization was only possible through spoken language. Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique, explains this idea by way of a revision of the book of Genesis. “After the fall of our first father,” Wilson argues, God still tendering his own workmanship, stirred up his faithful and elect, to persuade with reason, all men to society. And gave his appointed ministers knowledge both to see the natures of men, and also granted them the gift of utterance, that they might with ease win folk at their will, and frame them by reason to all good order. And therefore, whereas men lived Brutishly in open fields, having neither house to shroud them in, nor attire to clothe their backs, nor yet any regard to seek their best avail: these appointed of God called them together by utterance of speech, and persuaded them what was good, what was bad, and what was gainful for mankind. And although at first, the rude could hardly learne, and either for strangeness of the thing, would not gladly receive the offer, or else for lack of knowledge could not perceive the goodness: yet being somewhat drawn and delighted with the pleasantness of reason, and the sweetness of utterance: after a certain space, they became through nurture and good advisement, of wild, sober: of cruel, gentle: of fools, wise: and of

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beasts, men. Such force hath the tongue, and such is the power of eloquence and reason, that most men are forced even to yield in that, which most standeth against their will. (Wilson 1982: 18–19) Spoken eloquence is, for Thomas Wilson, the constituting force of humanity. But while it is the “sweetness” of the speaker’s utterance that draws in the rude and ignorant, the transformation to civilization “forced” by this eloquence presupposes an audience that has the ability to hear. Similarly, Carla Mazzio notes in The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, that even imperfect utterances, even in the age of vernacular languages—such as stuttering, mumbling, linguistic incoherence, and so forth—were stigmatized in this time, revealing attitudes about religion, law, the body, and other areas (2009: 3), though certainly to lesser societal effect than those who were deaf. The Renaissance in general comported with the concept of the ability to hear as constitutive of humanity; Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) was a humanist philosopher who influenced European philosophy and framed hearing as the highest sense for enabling the spirit. D. P. Walker writes, “The point which Ficino always emphasizes is that music has a stronger effect than anything transmitted through the other senses, because its medium, air, is of the same kind as the spirit” (2000 [1958]: 7). Walker explains this distinction of Ficino’s further, even though “all sensation is by means of the spirit” via a translation of a commentary by Ficino: It is easy enough to see why the three lower senses (taste, smell, touch) are inferior to hearing; they cannot transmit an intellectual content, which music can do, owing to its text. We are left then with sight … although visual impressions are in a way pure, yet they lack the effectiveness of motion, and are usually perceived only as an image, without reality; normally therefore, they move the soul only slightly. Smell, taste and touch are entirely material, and rather titillate the sense-organs than penetrate the depths of the soul. But musical sound by the movement of the air moves the body: by purified air it excites the aerial spirit which is the bond of body and soul: by emotion it affects the senses and at the same time the soul: by meaning it works on the mind: finally, by the very movement of the subtle air it penetrates strongly: by its contemperation it flows smoothly: by the conformity of its quality it floods us with a wonderful pleasure: by its nature, both spiritual and material, it at once seizes, and claims as its own, man in his entirety. (9) It should come as no surprise, then, that in early modern English literature there are virtually no fully realized representations of deaf people: this fact only stands to reason if to be “human” at this time means to be a receptive and perceptive vessel for sounds. Strangely, however, while there are almost no representations of deaf people, there are abundant representations of deaf ears. Quite often, early modern deafness is an empowering, temporary, and voluntary condition in which a god, ruler, or social superior temporarily turns off her or his sense of hearing in the face of an anxious speaker. There is a relationship between early modern culture’s highly selective appropriation of deafness and its inability to acknowledge the humanity of the deaf. The dehumanizing of actual deafness enables selective and metaphorical deafness. Neither the appropriation nor the lack of acknowledgment is exclusively literary, though the literary trope of metaphor does in a sense make deafness more evident in the background as a foil. Deaf people themselves are reduced to metaphor in a process that is played out in a variety of writings

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such as sermons, royal proclamations, and pamphlets, as well as in plays and poems; this virtual absence of the physically deaf ends in the eighteenth century. Literary and cultural representations of the deaf generally begin to coincide with the realization— largely during the mid-seventeenth century because of the efforts of people like Juan Pablo Bonet, the Abbe Charles-Michel de l’Épée of France, John Bulwer, and others who write about educating deaf people—that the deaf are actually educable in English, the majority language of their country, and as a result, become more “representable” on a larger scale within that majority language. It is important to understand what is meant by “deaf,” because in the Renaissance, as it does today, the word carried two meanings that bled into each other—one biological, the other social. Corbaccio in Jonson’s Volpone has trouble hearing, but he can hear—he is still a member of an aural world (Donaldson 1985). Likewise, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar asks Antony to walk on his right side when they talk because his left ear is “deaf” (1.2.213). Caesar’s is the “somdeel deef” of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. However, this difficulty hearing is not the topic of this essay, as they are still members of an aural society. Rather, early modern deafness is more “the adder’s sense” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 112, in which the speaker’s ears are “to critic and to flatterer stopped.” This is a common biblical allusion to Psalm 58—the adder who completely “stoppeth her ear … will not hearken to the voice of charmers” (Booth 1977). Shakespeare’s adder does not simply refuse to listen; instead, the adder deliberately becomes incapable of hearing. This important distinction reveals deafness to be an exertion of power that, for the person possessing the adder’s sense, effectively reduces the speaker’s words to nothing, or in the sonnet’s final couplet: “You are so strongly in my purpose bred / That all the world besides methinks are dead.” Early modern representations of deafness do not manifest themselves on the broad levels of theme, plot, or character; instead, they occur closer to the smaller levels of individual sentences, clauses, or phrases, particularly in Shakespeare. As in the sonnet, most representations of early modern deafness such as phrases like “turn a deaf ear” or “let me be deaf to it,” or people like Abessa who are allegorically deaf, are brief or passing references. What makes these representations important is the consistency with which the appropriation of deafness connects to the exercise of language and power in literature in this time period. Deafness functions as a locus of power, and it is a twisted kind of Deaf Gain: writers and their characters during this time attempt to appropriate this condition in order to assert control over others. Deafness, when temporary, is not a disability per se; yes, the term is in itself negative and draws upon a perceived physical problem, but the effect of this condition is to empower the person who is able to choose not to hear while also silencing the speaker. The epitome of power and control invested in temporary deafness frequently occurs in the context of gods, the divine, or rulers. In this conception of deafness, the god or ruler, isolated from traffic with the common matters of men, may possess impenetrable ears. In Sir Walter Raleigh’s “As You Came from the Holy Land,” we learn of Cupid: Know that love is a careless child And forgets promise past, He is blind, he is deaf when he list And in faith never fast. (Sylvester 1983: 335) While he is always blind, Cupid is only deaf “when he list”—when he chooses to be so. Raleigh links the instability of the love god’s fidelity to the uncertainty, on the part of

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his audience, as to whether Cupid has heard the voice of his supplicant. Similarly, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Cassandra tells Hector that “the gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows” (1973: 5.3.16). To righteous vows only, it is implied, the gods listen. In Sonnet 29, Shakespeare’s speaker cannot “trouble deaf heaven” with his “bootless cries.” This is a selective deafness, often tied with a lack of empathy, on the part of the gods attributed to them by their mortal inferiors. When it suits them, powerful humans (usually rulers, but always powerful) also assume deafness, although representations of humanly assumed deafness are usually more tentative than similar representations of the gods. In Richard II, John of Gaunt fruitlessly hopes that his deathbed exhortation to the King will make Richard change his ways: “My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear” (Shakespeare 1973: 2.1.16). With an identical lack of response on the part of her hearer, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus begs Tamora to “Be not obdurate, open thy deaf ears” (Shakespeare 1973: 2.3.160). In these two examples, the voluntarily deaf ruler must face a pleading interlocutor and reassert his or her deafness. Similarly in Romeo and Juliet, after banishing Romeo, Prince Escalus’ announcement that he will be “deaf to pleading and excuses” (Shakespeare 1973: 3.1.192) is illustrative of Escalus’ status. This rare first-person assertion of empowering deafness deconstructs itself in the act of its own speaking, for to make the statement is paradoxically to engage in conversation even while denying that engagement. But this contradiction allows the idea of playing deaf even while asserting one’s right to membership in an aurally structured society, a privilege deaf people did not have. In a similar vein, we have the tribune Murellus’ characterization of the Roman Commoners in Julius Caesar: “you blocks! you stones! you worse than senseless things!” (Shakespeare 1973: 1.1.35). When an aristocrat is deaf, the assumption of deafness is a maneuver of some kind; with plebeians, the same phenomenon is considered mere senselessness. A corollary to this is that when the plebeians themselves do voluntarily assume deafness, like those who are higher on the socioeconomic ladder, they are denounced for their presumption—much like involuntarily deaf people were denounced in reality. Selective deafness is reserved for the few, the abled, the powerful. In Thomas Harman’s 1566 pamphlet “A Caveat for Common Cursitors,” we learn about one specific kind of rogue, the dummerer: These dummerers are lewd and most subtle people. The most part of these are Welshmen, and will never speak unless they have extreme punishment, but will gape, and, with a marvelous force, will hold down their tongues doubled, groaning for your charity and holding up their hands full piteously, so that with their deep dissimulation they get very much. Harman relates how he helped a skeptical surgeon to expose one such rogue: The Surgeon made him gape, and we could see but half a tongue. I required the Surgeon to put his finger in his mouth, and to pull out his tongue, and so he did, notwithstanding he held strongly a pretty while. At the length he plucked out the same, to the great admiration of many that stood by. Yet when we saw his tongue, he would neither speak nor yet could hear. Quoth I to the Surgeon, “Knit two of his fingers together, and thrust a stick between them, and rub the same up and down a little while, and for my life he speaketh by and by.” “Sir,” quoth this Surgeon, “I pray you let me practice another way.” I was well contented to see the same. He had him into a house, and tied a halter about the wrists of his hands, and hoisted him up over

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a beam, and there did let him hang a good while. At length for very pain, he required for God’s sake to let him down. So he that was both deaf and dumb could in short time both hear and speak. (Kinney 1990: 132–3) The dummerer’s mock disability will not be tolerated by his social superiors. In successful examples of temporary deafness, the deafness is known by all to be voluntary and gainful; in contrast, the dummerer in the example tries to pass himself off as truly deaf and therefore deserving of pity. Like the truly deaf, who are seen as less than human, the dummerer’s apparent lack of certain senses does not qualify as legitimately empowering. From the dummerer we learn, then, that the fantasy of deafness is not just widespread among the powerful, but also that it is an option that the powerful restrict exclusively to themselves: the common folk—and, by extension, deaf people—are not allowed the privilege of deafness.

5.3. THE DANGERS OF HEARING After the early modern period, by the time Milton writes Paradise Lost (published 1667), the already established stakes associated with hearing are even higher. The angels patrolling Eden find Satan Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve; Assaying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list. (Orgel and Goldberg 1990: 800–4) For Milton, the fall of man is ironically linked to hearing, but, paradoxically, hearing is also necessary to hear the voice of God. In Genesis, God also accuses Adam of listening to his wife’s voice, and thus the ear and the voice are the instruments of man’s downfall— first Eve, then Adam, in a chain reaction that leads to their expulsion from Eden. In this case, one assumes more selective deafness on Adam’s part would have been a “good thing.” Here, we move to a complication of Ficino’s concept of soul as accessed by sound; the spirit conduit of hearing is now seen as problematic and is considered on balance in that perilous audition can be dangerous if not shut down or evaluated carefully. The paradoxical dangers associated with hearing in Renaissance England were not imaginary and not solely the creation of poets and dramatists. In December of 1620, James issued “A Proclamation Against Excesse of Lavish and Licentious Speech of Matters of State” in which loyal subjects were not only required “not to give attention, or any manner of applause or entertainment to” treasonous discourse, but also to report to the Privy Council “respective to the place where such speeches shall be used, within the space of four and twenty hours, under pain of imprisonment” and the King’s “high displeasure” (Larkin and Hughes 1973: 495–6). This paradox exponentially increases the anxiety surrounding hearing: the loyal subject must not pay attention to the discourse in order to understand it, recognize its treasonable trigger, and report it to the authorities. This paradox creates a condition significantly more complex than a mere fear of hearing something negative. An Elizabethan example of the simpler situation (written long before the Jacobean “Proclamation Against Excesse”) is John Donne’s Satire 4 (“Well; I May Now Receive, And Die”). Listening unwillingly to a libelous court gossip, Donne’s persona (the speaker) is overwhelmed with prospective feelings of guilt:

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I more amazed than Circe’s prisoners, when They felt themselves turn beasts, felt myself then Becoming traitor, and methought I saw One of our giant Statutes ope his jaw To suck me in; for hearing him, I found That as burnt venomed lechers do grow sound By giving others their sores, I might grow Guilty, and he free. (1986: 129–36) Annabel Patterson describes this anxiety as “not only fear but a subtle form of guilt by association” (1984: 101). There is, however, no obligation upon the speaker to do anything in the face of the gossip’s libel. The speaker chooses “to pay a fine to ’scape his torturing” (142) and flees home. After James’s 1620 Proclamation, Donne’s speaker would be in a far more uncomfortable position: obligated to report the libel, yet culpable for having listened in the first place. The perfect example of this paradox-driven anxiety comes not from Donne’s poetry, but from a sermon he preached in front of King Charles in 1627. Donne’s central text was Mark 4: 24—“Take heed what you hear.” Take heed that you hear them whom God hath appointed to speak to you; But, when you come abroad, take heed what you hear; for, certainly, the Devil doth not cast in more snares at the eye of man, than at the ear. Our Savior Christ proposes it as some remedy against a mischief, that if the eye offend thee, thou mayst pull it out, and if thy hand or foot offend thee, thou mayst cut it off and thou art safe from that offense. But he does not name nor mention the ear: for, if the ear betray thee, though thou do cut it off, yet thou art open to that way of treason still, still thou canst hear. Where one man libels with the tongue, or hand, a hundred libel with the ear; One man speaks, or writes, but a hundred applaud and countenance a calumny. Therefore sepi aures tuas spinis, as the Vulgate reads that place, hedge thine ears with thorns; that he would whisper a calumny in thine ear, against another man, may be pricked with those thorns, that is, may discern from thee, that he is not welcome to thee, and so forbear; or if he will press upon thee, those thorns may prick thee, and warn thee that there is an uncharitable office done which thou shouldst not countenance. Neither only may thy charity towards another be violated by such a whisperer, but thine own safety endangered; And therefore Take heed what you hear. (Simpson and Porter 1962: 7.393–5) For Dr. Donne, hearing is inescapably dangerous, and deafness—a possible escape from the dangers of hearing—an unattainable fantasy. Therefore, defenses must be erected— “hedge thine ears with thorns”—in order to set up a boundary between the independent self and the outside world. If true voluntary deafness were entirely and easily achievable without a sense of control and agency on the auditor’s part, the need for censorship and active screening would not exist: it would reduce the dangers of hearing to nothing. To hear is to ultimately be responsible for what is heard; this agency carries power, too, so even here the ear is privileged, with the aim of “good” hearing via the planting of the “seed” of God’s word via the Parable of the Sower and of the Seed (Bloom 2007: 112). In this way, the hearer is blamed, more so than the speaker overall; by extension, the blame is bigger for those who are actually deaf. Gina Bloom outlines this belief via Shakespeare’s

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plays and sermons: “Protestant sermons on the parable of the sower and the seed are a rich site of investigation for an analysis of receptive agency because they shift much of the responsibility for salvation to their listeners … the importance of the parishioner’s role in salvation results in a privileging of aural over visual sensory experience” (2007: 117). In privileging the aural, Bloom notes that hedging the ears against dangerous discourses becomes even more important, especially in terms of gender; she argues that the unstable area between salvation and danger via hearing is more “disruptive” for men and “constructive” for women, where chastity metaphorizes the closure of the aural space. Bloom argues that refusing to listen (and evaluate) is more problematic for men than for women in Shakespeare’s later plays because men are the ones with more power and agency in society. While men may benefit more than women from opening their ears more freely to receive and judge what they are hearing, I argue that even the feminized “acoustic subjectivity” Bloom speaks of (2007: 112) is privileged over visual language. Bloom writes, “Hearing bodies, I would suggest, can practice inscriptive codes in surprising ways, sometimes transforming constructive aural deafness into disruptive deafness” (2007: 144), where disruptive deafness is a method of resistance and agency, especially for women. The key here is “Hearing bodies,” however. Deaf bodies, though, are not allowed real resistance or agency in society. Bloom herself metaphorizes deafness in her use of “disruptive deafness” in that the deaf are not allowed to resist within society’s discourses. Those who are late-deafened or hard of hearing, like women, would have more disruptive deafness agency than deaf people by virtue of their earlier or partial membership in an aural society. Understanding the dangers and disruptions of hearing in early modern England can help to make sense of Morose in Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (Fraser and Rabkin 1976: 2.1.3). Locked in a house that he has insulated with quilts and having forbidden his servant to speak, Morose labors to save his ears “the discord of sound.” The oddity of Morose’s desire is not that he wishes to embrace silence. Morose wants to turn the fantasy of deafness inside out: rather than becoming deaf, plugging his ears, or extricating himself from noisy London, Morose wishes to escape the paradox of hearing by reducing the entire world around him to silence (Donaldson 1985). In other words, he avoids the negativity of taking on deafness in a sense by projecting it outwards.

5.4. DEAFNESS AND SPIRITUALITY But with all of these images of temporarily deaf ears, pervasive anxieties about hearing the wrong thing, and a desire for silence, the question that remains is: Why were there virtually no representations of real deaf people? While there are many instances of deafness in early modern England, these fantasies involve deafness only in hearing characters who have something to gain by a temporary escape from perilous audition. Deafness is generally an appropriated and exploited quality at that time, but there is one significant exception—Abessa in Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. When Una approaches Abessa, she to her gan call To weet, if dwelling place were nigh at hand; But the rude wench her answer’d nought at all, She could not hear, nor speak, nor understand;

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Till seeing by her side the Lion stand, With suddaine fear her pitcher down she threw, And fled away: for never in that land Face of fair Lady she before did view, And that dread Lions look her cast in deadly hue. (1.iii.11, emphasis added) Abessa is not putting on a performance; she is actually, not voluntarily, deaf. However, Abessa is the exception that proves the rule, as she is completely outside the culture and outside the sphere of divine salvation. Her name alludes to abbess, and it fits in with anti-Catholic sentiments. Additionally, as she is deaf, she personifies religious error and superstition. She cannot hear the true will of God and allegorically represents the Catholic Church in opposition to Una, who represents the “true” Anglican Church. Abessa cannot perceive spiritual truth, and this representation places her outside the realm of redemption, with a concomitant negative message attached to deafness as an unsalvageable state. She is perhaps the only physically deaf character in English literature prior to 1720 when Daniel Defoe published his novel about a deaf seer, Duncan Campbell. What Abessa indicates is that only hearing people—those who already belong to the mainstream, “normal” world—can in any way enjoy the privileges pertaining to deafness. Rachel Hile writes that “Spenser’s allegories of physical impairment aim to create emotional rather than intellectual reactions from the reader—specifically, emotions related to disgust and rejection—to lead readers to the desired moral interpretations” (2013: 89). Additionally, “Abessa’s impairments are understood by Spenser and his contemporary audience as making it impossible for her to learn and understand the truth”; in other words, as “unteachable” (95). A brief return to Epicoene will clarify Abessa’s situation further. By trying to create a world where he can drown out other voices, Morose attempts to find refuge in a silent world where he can hear only his own voice, but he does this only because he can already hear other voices. Silence in Morose’s case, as in elective deafness, is salvation only for the hearing; consequently, for Abessa, neither her muteness nor her deafness is a refuge, and she is irrevocably outside salvation. In Abessa’s case, her silence entails deafness, and neither is elective. Non-elective deafness and silence are thus set up in opposition to a conscientious silence conducive to meditation and communion with God, or an active screening out of undesirable sounds and voices. Silence operates in much the same way as the fantasy of deafness: one can only benefit from silence if one is hearing and can selectively ignore the world or choose not to speak; voluntary silence is an act of will and desire. Since, as we first saw in Ficino and in Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, eloquence and oratory are constitutive of humanity, only from within humanity can the conditions of deafness and its corollary, silence, be gainfully beneficial. With Abessa, we see for the first time that there are spiritual as well as secular consequences to deafness. Spenser condemns Abessa for her non-elective deafness; however, by implication, there are potential advantages for an elective spiritual deafness—or silence. In The Poetry of Meditation, Louis L. Martz has described the widespread growth of a continental meditative tradition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. “Meditation,” according to Martz, thus comes to be regarded … as an exercise essential for the ordinary conduct of “good life” and almost indispensable as preparation for the achievement of the highest mystical experience. (1962: 16)

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In the works of Thomas Traherne, the attributes of deafness—but, once again, only elective deafness—are conducive to such mystical experience. For Traherne, to be deaf is to move inward more easily, away from problematic voices and penetrable ears, and toward a reliance on the self in its solitary purity. In “Dumnesse,” Traherne suggests that a presumably hearing person is best able to achieve divinity through deafness and silence. These qualities enable one to take in God’s works in preparation for a later invasion by breaths that carry the poisonous voices of others. Only by being mute can one shore oneself up in the face of the evils of the outside world that are carried on verbal symbols: Sure Man was born to Meditat on Things, And to Contemplat the Eternal Springs Of God and Nature, Glory, Bliss and Pleasure; That Life and Love might be his Heavnly Treasure: And therefore Speechless made at first, that he Might in himself profoundly Busied be: And not vent out, before he hath t’ane in Those Antidots that guard his Soul from Sin. (Traherne 1958: 1–8) To be “speechless” is a necessary preparation for later salvation; in such a way, “Man” can contemplate the wisdom and glory of God in nature. From this comes a reliance on the self: “in himself profoundly Busied be.” With such a strong foundation anchored in the mute self, rather than business outside, come the “Antidots” that will help when one must finally speak. Deafness, allied with “Dumnesse,” is necessary for the development of a divine character: Wise Nature made him Deaf too, that he might Not be disturbd, wile he doth take Delight In inward Things, nor be depravd with Tongues Nor Injurd by the Errors and the Wrongs That Mortal words convey. For Sin and Death Are most infused by accursed Breath That flowing from Corrupted Intrails, bear Those hidden Plagues that Souls alone may fear. (9–16) Human speech carries within itself a potentially corrupting influence on the soul, akin to a “Plague” or sickness. A preemptive deafness is one way to forestall this mental disease, at least until the soul is fortified to withstand the onslaught of the voice breathing out from the “Corrupted Intrails.” The narrator in the poem goes on to discuss how he himself was in this “Blessed Case” (17): “before / There any Mixture was …” (28) with external voices, before the “Living Vehicle of Wind / Could breath into me their infected Mind” (25–6). He rhapsodizes about how he was within a “World of Earth, before my self could speak …” (18–19). He notes that God’s “Work … did in me lurk” (37–8), and that this work was composed of seeing “all Creatures full of Deities” (40) with “Cleerer Eys” (39), a common compensatory trope for losing or reducing a sense. Silence, solitude, and inwardness are all required in order to protect oneself from later assault by the world:

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To reign in Silence, and to Sing alone To see, love, Covet, hav, Enjoy, and Prais, in one: To Prize and to be ravishd: to be true, Sincere and Single in a Blessed View Of all his Gifts … (49–53) The human qualities of hearing and speaking, then, are combative; the previously silent and deaf body is a fortress against invasive thought carried by the tongue and ears. Prior to this invasion, everything is represented as divine and natural: Thus was I pent within A Fort, Impregnable to any Sin: Till the Avenues being Open laid, Whole legions Enterd, and the Forts Betrayd. Before which time a Pulpit in my Mind, A Temple, and a Teacher I did find, With a large Text to comment on. No Ear, But Eys them selvs were all the Hearers there. And evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue, And evry Gale of Wind a Curious Song. The Heavens were an Orakle, and spake Divinity: the Earth did undertake The office of a Priest; and I being Dum (Nothing besides was Dum;) All things did com With Voices and Instructions; but when I Had gaind a Tongue, their Power began to die. Mine Ears let other Noises in, not theirs; A Nois Disturbing all my Songs and Prayers. (53–70) When the outer world finally does enter, it is presented as a ravishment with the “Avenues being Open laid” and “Whole Legions enterd, and the Forts Betrayd” (55–6). For Traherne, the internal world is pure and virginal: before the voice invades and takes effect, the life of the mind inside is similar to one spent behind a pulpit. Sins are effectively blocked out before one learns to pay attention to the outer world’s voices. Even though silence and observation of nature are exemplary here, as opposed to outside voices, vision is nevertheless rewritten as speech and hearing. That is, “No Ear, / But Eys them selvs were all the Hearers there” (59–60). This is a circular movement that starts with “No Ear” and circles around back to “Hearers.” In such a way, the eye can compensate for the ear even as it must be tied to the ear; in this way, Ficino’s idea of spirituality as tied to the ear still holds true. Even vision, “Eys,” has at its heart speech, the governing framework of society. The ultimately voluntary nature of this portrayal of silence is revealed by its rhetorical description. This double reading of silence and deafness continues, as every stone and star has “a Tongue” and “every Gale of Wind a Curious Song.” Speech inheres within Silence, as the “Heavens were an Orakle, and spake/Divinity.” When the narrator finally “gaind a Tongue,” he becomes unable to hear the divine tongues of nature: they are drowned out by the clamor of “other Noises.” Similarly, in “Silence,” Traherne intimates that silence is akin to a more innocent or purified state, and that words may corrupt it:

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A quiet Silent Person may possess All that is Great or High in Blessedness. The Inward Work is the Supreme: for all The other were occasiond by the Fall. (1–4) Voluntary silence enables a person to be as one with God and blessedness; the rest of the poem describes at length an Eden-like state of being, the making of the perfect internal world. To be perfectly within oneself is to be within God: A vast and Infinit Capacitie, Did make my Bosom like the Deitie, In Whose Mysterious and Celestial Mind All Ages and all Worlds together shind. Who tho he nothing said did always reign, And in Himself Eternitie contain. The World was more in me, then I in it. The King of Glory in my Soul did sit. And to Himself in me he always gave, All that he takes Delight to see me have. For so my Spirit was an Endless Sphere, Like God himself, and Heaven and Earth was there. (75–86) Traherne focuses on creating a world of one’s own within silence rather than on trying to change the surrounding world. “The Second Century” further exemplifies Traherne’s project of mental, internal world-making: For God hath made you able to Create Worlds in your own mind, which are more Precious unto Him than those which HE Created: And to Give and offer up the World Unto Him, which is very Delightfull in flowing from Him, but much more in returning to Him. Besides all which in its own Nature also a Thought of the World, or the World in a Thought is more Excellent than the World, because it is Spiritual and Nearer Unto GOD. The Material World is Deaf and feeleth Nothing. But this Spiritual World tho it be Invisible hath all Dimensions, and is a Divine and Living Being, the Voluntary Act of an Obedient Soul. (1.102, emphasis added) The implication is that an interior world of one’s own creation is more valuable than that which is already created. To feel and recognize spirituality is to have a soul, whereas the body and material world are “Deaf” to the spirit. But by extension of this logic, people who are born deaf and mute are stuck within the physical body because they are subject to that silent condition involuntarily, so Traherne is in practice excluding deaf people from anything spiritual. Actual physical deafness and muteness do not come from the inward, glorious soul, but from the weak body.

5.5. CONCLUSION: DEAF VOICES By the time Traherne began writing the Centuries in the late 1650s, an unprecedented and sudden burst of interest in the education of the deaf was already well underway.

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Before the 1640s, education to “cure” deafness was generally thought impossible. New interest in deaf education does not result in literary representations of deaf characters, or any real representation of a deaf subjectivity; rather, there are curious glances at the actual condition of deafness and discussions of how to deal with it. It is tempting to see Traherne’s writings and works on manual rhetoric and deaf education by John Bulwer as products of the new interest in the interplay of the senses and deaf education stemming from Juan Pablo Bonet and others; it is even more tempting to consider the partial recognition through a kind of Deaf Gain of the humanity of deaf people—and the fact of any attempt to educate them entails such a partial recognition (Nelson 2014). However, the narrative suggested by this link exaggerates the seemingly partial recognition of the deaf by early modern English culture out of its proper proportion. Such a reading would be a tale of progress in which the cultural appropriation of deafness by the hearing evolves into a recognition of the deaf as human with its attendant attempt to educate them, and hearing society comes out looking pretty good. Instead of an evolution in which hearing society comes to accept the deaf on the deaf people’s own terms—as Bauman and Murray note, a recognition of “deaf ways of being in the world” (2014: xv) is necessary for true Deaf Gain—we see a continuum in which the way the deaf were being educated by the hearing replays the literary appropriation of deafness. Rather than emphasize the cultural evolution that deaf education might suggest, there is a continuity of hearing values imposed upon and shaping the deaf. However, as Bauman and Murray say, “which gains emerge or are valued are highly contingent on cultural and historical contexts, including the status of deaf people and sign languages in particular societies” (2014: xxiii). As such, there is a kind of lopsided Deaf Gain in early modern England, even though educators of the deaf begin to write about them as people and not just as conditions to be appropriated. These inclusions of the Deaf and their characteristics in literary and educational history can ultimately be seen as fantasies that say more about the hearing and what it means to be hearing than as true representations of the deaf. The Deaf are silenced, not silent in the Trahernian sense. In the Renaissance, as today, we are a long way from a world in which silenced “voices” can be heard.

CHAPTER SIX

Speech Speaking Well and Ill in the Renaissance SUSAN ANDERSON

In his 1607 exploration of humoral psychology, Thomas Walkington rejects the idea that external appearances give reliable information about a person’s inner character. Instead, he claims, “our usual saying is, that the tongue is the hereauld of the minde” (D2r).1 To really understand a person, Walkington suggests, you must listen to them speak. This is perhaps unsurprising coming from a clergyman who spent a good deal of his life preaching. Walkington embodied the importance of orality in the period and the centrality of the spoken word to religious, political, and social life.2 Walkington’s aphoristic language (“our usual saying”) implies that the link between tongue and mind is common knowledge. This chapter probes the implications of this assumption and its corollaries: that different ways of speaking were seen to reveal different kinds of person, and that these categorizations were hierarchized. Speech is both a socially inflected phenomenon and a technique of physical embodiment (see St Pierre 2012: 11). Its acquisition and expression are thus intimately linked to the interplay between the unique embodiment of an individual and their specific cultural context. This chapter therefore uses the social model of disability to explore the exclusionary effects of Renaissance ideas about who should speak and how. Codes around speech, then as now, reflected wider ideologies of gender, race, and class, intersecting with each other and with individuals’ unique embodiment. These factors also interacted with larger historical forces in the period that affected the way in which speech and language were constructed and understood. Most notably, these included: the spread of technologies of printing, which sped up the means by which ideas could be communicated; the development of scientific experimentation, which offered challenges to received ideas and began to supplant humoral models of the human body and mind; and the large increase in global trade, resulting in contact between language groups and forms that had been previously much more isolated from each other. To be educated in Renaissance Europe meant to be able to read and speak Latin and Greek. Educated speakers in the Renaissance also had access to a large body of advice about effective speech in the form of rhetorical handbooks. Their words were being heard in the context of widespread awareness of the techniques of effective—or perhaps even manipulative—public speaking, both in formal legal situations and also in popular sermonizing. Thus, alongside a confidence in the capacity of speech to give access to truth was a concomitant suspicion that speech could be used to deceive. Such contradictory positions were characteristic of the ways in which speech and speaking differently were understood in the Renaissance.

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To help us understand what might have constituted non-normative speech patterns in the period, this chapter begins by outlining a range of theological contexts that shaped Renaissance assumptions about speech and language, most notably by creating an ideology in which language variation was seen as a problem and in which certain forms of language were privileged over others. The chapter then moves on to considering the ways that speech was related to body and mind in contemporary medical discourse by looking at definitions of speech “defects” in the later part of the period, as well as discussing some ways in which humoral theory might have accounted for variations in speech. This is followed by a section focused on the implications of rhetorical discourse for understanding non-normative speech. Rhetorical theory about effective and ideal forms of speech reveals some of the underlying assumptions about speaking that provided a basis for the legal disqualification and disenfranchisement of certain groups of people. In this way, the chapter shows how those who were unable to speak in particular ways were effectively excluded from personhood in the period. The last part of the chapter considers dramatic representations of non-normative speech, focusing mainly on early modern English drama, after a short consideration of Italian stage representations. The emergence of drama as a newly professionalized genre in the Renaissance is in itself a telling piece of evidence of the continued importance of orality and oral forms in the period. Performed drama is constituted through both body and word, meaning that the drama of the period furnishes us with evidence for the importance and effect of speaking well or ill in the cultural imagination of the Renaissance. This contextual material does not present a coherent or unified picture of how speech was understood in the period, because such a thing would be an oversimplification. Instead, it provides a confluence of conflicting ideas that shaped expectations about normative kinds of speech, about who was permitted to speak and how, and about what speaking itself meant, creating a context in which those who spoke in different ways would be heard—or ignored. The chapter will show that, despite the increasing importance of the written word, speech—and speaking rightly—were highly valorized in the period. As Carla Mazzio has pointed out, in the so-called “age of eloquence,” the inability to speak well, or to perform one’s speech correctly, was a disabling position (Mazzio 2009). The ability to express oneself in spoken language was so central to the age of humanism’s conceptualization of being human that to lack speech was to lack personhood.

6.1. THEORIZING SPEECH DIFFERENCE: THEOLOGICAL POSITIONS The etiology of speech difference in the Renaissance is too varied to be succinctly summarizable, but one thing is clear: speaking differently is described as a “defect” or “imperfection,” and sources that discuss speech utilize this language of falling away from a norm. In some ways, this was a microcosm of the widespread notion in Christian Europe that the world is a fallen and imperfect place more generally, deriving from a theology in which all human beings are defective because of original sin. Thus, a notion of generalized insufficiency provides an important backdrop for discussions of all forms of human frailty in the period. For example, when George Gascoigne (1576) complained that “none serve God, but only tongtide men” (C3v), he was participating in a tradition of complaint that takes as understood a fallen world of inevitably inadequate human effort. Nevertheless, the implication of this statement is also that serving God adequately would mean not being tongue-tied, making speaking an integral part of the ideal godly life.

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Having said that, it must be remembered that devotional vows of silence as a spiritual practice formed an important element of many if not all major monastic rules in the period, including the Benedictine and Dominican orders. Such complete prohibition of speech is perhaps extreme, but forms the logical extension of an association of verbosity with worldly turpitude. Samuel Gardiner, for example, who published a commentary on the story of the prodigal son, was deeply suspicious of language and rhetoric. He asserts that “The holie spirit of God taketh a great grace, in shrowding and cowching matters of maine moment under the fewest words that may be. It is the fashion of the world in their fabulous discourses to use tedeous circumstances” (S4r). This statement is somewhat ironic, given the length and detail of Gardiner’s extensive examination of every aspect of the parable he is discussing. Gardiner also makes clear that the manner of speech is an important tool for judging the speaker, not just what is said. Through attending to the way a person speaks, Gardiner suggests, a listener can estimate the identity, cultural background, and moral state of the speaker. Gardiner cites scriptural authorities to argue: The mind of this man is known by his words, his mouth bewraieth what maner of man he is. As the Ephramites were knowne to bee Ephramites by their kinde of speech, being not able to pronounce Shibboleth: as the Damsell that kept the doore knewe Peter by his voyce, that hee was a man of Galilee: so commonlie mens workes are knowne by their wordes to be good or evill. … as golde that hath not a good sound may be thought to be counterfeit: so the man that hath not a good sound cannot be perfect. He that is of the earth speaketh earthlie: and the mouth of a foole (sayeth the wisdome of Salomon) blurteth out foolishnesse. As a man by his blistered and exulcerate lippes is knowne to have an Ague: so by our swelling and corrupt wordes we are knowne to have an inward and spirituall Ague. (B8r-v) Gardiner’s extraordinary sequence of similes pathologizes language, making speech into an expression of physical disease and moral degeneracy. Foolish speech is indicative of a foolish mind. Gardiner’s examples also show that speech is connected to geographical or ethnic identity. In particular, his invocation of the story of the slaughter of the Ephramites from Judges 12 frames speech difference in a context of potentially fatal consequences. The King James Bible of 1611 renders the story thus: And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12, 5–6) Gardiner is not interested in the rights and wrongs of this massacre, merely that the story provides an example of the close link between the aural quality of a person’s voice and the ability of a listener to accurately judge their identity. Another foundational myth for Renaissance conceptualizations of speech and language is that of the Tower of Babel, which presents the entire existence of language variation as a symptom of fallen humanity’s failure to live according to God’s wishes. For example, Godfrey Goodman (1616) suggests that the “confusion of tongues first began at Babell, and is now generally spread over the face of the whole

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world”  (292). Goodman makes clear that he considers language diversity (tellingly termed “confusion”) to be a punishment, preventing humanity from learning easily from one another. Furthermore, he claims that language is still under an ongoing process of degenerating, and laments that languages like Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Chaldaic are no longer widely spoken (in his experience). Instead, Goodman finds that the tongue is confounded with many base and barbarous languages, some of them very harsh in pronunciation, that a man must wrong his owne visage, and disfigure himselfe to speake them: others without gravitie or wisdome in their first imposition, consisting only of many bare, and simple tearmes, not reduced to any certaine fountaines, or heads, which best resembleth nature: Many of them hindring mans thoughts, and wanting a sufficient plentie of words, cannot significantly expresse the quicknes of invention or livelily expresse an action. (293) Although Goodman laments all language variation as being part of God’s punishment, there emerges a clear hierarchy here. Some languages, Goodman suggests, require the speaker to contort their face, and this alone is enough to condemn them as “base” and “barbarous.” Other languages do not appear to Goodman to have the capacity to express complex or precise concepts. Patricia Palmer (2001) traces the ways in which judgments about language were characteristic of European colonial exploration and conquest, both in Spanish encounters in the so-called New World and in English relations with Ireland. Palmer argues that “the link forged between reason and eloquence implied a consequent equation between defective tongues and defective thinking” (30). Certain kinds of speech, therefore, rendered certain peoples less than human, supposedly justifying their conquest and subjugation. As Palmer notes, for example, Edward Topsell’s 1607 The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, a catalogue of animals, included an entry categorizing pygmy people as apes because “though they speak[,] yet is their language imperfect” (cited in Palmer 2001: 220). While global trade and expansionism meant that linguistic chauvinism had international consequences, commentators like Goodman also acknowledged that language varied on a more local scale, noting that “in the same tongue you shal observe a great diversitie of dialects” (294). Models of linguistic difference explained this by literally mapping them onto regions. For example, Paul Cohen (2003) notes how Guillaume Bouchet’s 1598 description of linguistic diversity in France attributes differences in pronunciation, tone, and facility to climate and geography: the more the people are in the south, the more they speak from within the stomach, and with heart, and with a voice full of consonants, without vowels, bruskly [sic] pronounced, and with many aspirations: because of the force and nature of the spirits, which are very present there, and from the impetuosity of the intense heat. But those who inhabit the southern hemisphere … and the Midi, who have their body heat tempered, and their minds weakened, pronounce softly … Language even takes on certain characteristics of water, which alters voices and languages, so that those who live near rivers, are more likely to stutter. (Cohen’s translation: 9) The idea that local conditions produced permanent bodily changes matches contemporary climate theories of race, which linked variation in the physiology of human populations (e.g. in skin tone) to the region in which they lived; that is, hotter or cooler areas of the

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globe (see Floyd-Wilson 1998). Such differences in local conditions, Bouchet suggests, also changed the physical capacity for language of the people who lived in different areas.

6.2. SPEAKING BODIES The consistently metonymic use of “tongue” in Goodman and in other English sources to mean both a language and the way in which it was spoken reflects a conceptual conflation of speech and body that demonstrates the way that speech is indeed a combination of social context and physical capacity. The tongue’s role in speaking was examined more literally by Helkiah Crooke in his Mikrokosmographia. First printed in 1615, this monumental work offered a new way of looking at many aspects of medicine and disease through an encyclopedic tour of the human body. Crooke includes a discussion of the anatomy of the tongue and offers an explanation for a range of speech difficulties. Crooke suggests that the tongue is faulty sometimes in magnitude, sometimes in the very substance together with his muscles. For if it be bigge it filleth up the spaces of the mouth and the Chops, and then it cannot moove so deliverly or nimbly as otherwise it would, and such men are called blaesi and balbutientes, that is Lispers and Stutters, especially if (as it happeneth most what) it bee also too soft or moyst. (626) The Latin terminology cited by Crooke was still in common use. As Marc Shell points out, the etymological link between balbutientes and barbarians reveals that both also refer to “those people who, although they do speak our language, do not speak it ‘in our way.’” It does not matter much whether these people speak English with a foreign “accent,” domestic “dialect,” or more general speech “impediment.” (73) Crooke suggests that speech impediments can also result from “the muscles being little,” with the result that the tongue “is mooved too swiftly and so implicateth or doubleth the speach and maketh the words come hudling together” (626). He also describes what is now commonly referred to as tongue-tie: The Tongue also sometimes is too short when the Bridle thereof is not enough cut, so then it is hindered that it cannot apply it selfe on every side to the Mouth. (626) Crooke also draws emphatic attention to what he sees as the connection between ears, palate, nose, and throat. For example, somewhat alarmingly, he suggests that “if you goade the Tympane of the eare with a Pen-knife it will presently cause a drie Cough” (701). Crooke goes on to claim: Those which be halfe deafe do speak but stutteringly and their voyce is made through their Nose. Againe, those who from their Birth are deafe, are in like manner άλαλος, that is, are dumbe. Crooke’s hugely successful handbook influenced anatomy and surgical practice, but it also shows the increasing physicalization of medical discourse. No longer relying on references to venerable sources, Crooke provided anatomical drawings giving an unflinching portrayal of usually unseen parts of the body (Figure 6.1).

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FIGURE 6.1  Illustration of the tongue and larynx from Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (1615), RB 53894, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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This movement toward a kind of empiricism must be held alongside the scholastic, humoral-based understanding of the voice in the period. Indeed, Crooke himself offers humoral explanations when he refers to the levels of moistness of the tongue above. A link with humoral moistness is also put forward by Crooke as the explanation for stuttering’s presence in childhood. Hence it is that Infants and those children that are moyster then ordinary doe speake slower then others, because of the softnesse and loosenes of their Tongues and the muscles thereof, till when their heate by their age encreasing the over aboundant moysture be consumed. (626) Such humoral reasoning seeks to explain bodily symptoms through reference to balance or imbalance in the four bodily humors alongside qualities of dryness, moistness, heat, and cold. Although accounts of humoral medicine rarely agree on the causes and cures of the ailments they describe, this ancient system for understanding the human body and mind persisted in popularity through the Renaissance period. The basic principles of humoral theory were often invoked as common knowledge in descriptions of speech. For example, William Painter’s story of “A Ladie Falslie Accused” in Tome 1 of The Palace of Pleasure offers two examples of tongue-tied speakers, whose difficulties in getting their words out come from opposing emotional states. The first is the wicked steward, whose plot to implicate the virtuous lady of the house is the core of the tale. As his lies take hold, he finds himself temporarily unable to speak: the Traitour, whose sense was so confounded with gladnesse, that thinkyng to beginne his tale, his wordes so stucke in his mouthe, as he was not able to utter a worde. (fol. 120) This villain’s joy at his success creates a block that temporarily prevents him from speaking. Eventually, he manages to convey his story to the master of the house, a jealous man who is only too ready to believe the lies he is told about his wife: The lorde hearyng these pitifull newes, which perced his harte more depe, then any two edged sworde, at the first was so astoned, that he could not tell what to saie or doe, savyng the ardente furie of Cholere, made hym distill a certaine Melancholique humor into his eyes, whiche received the superfluous vapours of his braine. At length breaking that forthe, whiche troubled hym within, and grindyng his teethe for furie, with stuttering and uncertain voice, fetching sighes betwene, saied. “O GOD what newes bee these that I heare?” (fols. 120–1) In both cases, halting speech is indicative of emotional turmoil. In the latter case, the overflowing brain vapors emerge as tears, spilling out of the lord’s eyes uncontrollably. By contrast, his voice is inhibited and a lack of control is denoted by juddering, stuttering speech. The mixture of choler and melancholy as underlying the lord’s response matches the mixed sense of the underlying humoral causes that contemporary sources posit as the cause of inhibited speech. Turning to Robert Burton ([1621] 1989), we find a typically inclusive and encyclopedic collection of ways in which bodily motions and actions might be linked to emotional states: Weeping, Sighing, Laughing, Itching, Trembling, Sweating, Blushing, hearing and seeing strange noyses, visions, winde, cruditie, are motions of the body, depending upon those precedent motions of the mind. (1.422.12–14)

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A person’s predominant temperament (“precedent motions”) can thus be read through a range of expressive symptoms. Burton goes on to report that a melancholy disposition is indicated by stuttering, that is “stutting, or tripping in speech” (1.382.23–4). In extreme cases, further vocalizations are listed among the symptoms, which include “laughing, grinning, fleering, murmuring, talking to themselves, with strange mouthes and faces, inarticulate voices, exclamations, &c.” (1.382.25–7). The link between these symptoms and melancholy, Burton reports, is dryness (contra Boorde, below): “they that stutter, and are bald will be soonest melancholy (as Avicenna supposeth) by reason of the drynesse of their braines” (1.202.15–17). Francis Bacon agrees that stuttering is caused by dryness, but links this to a choleric disposition, saying “many Stutters (we finde) are very Cholerick Men, Choler enducing a dryness in the Tongue” (4.386). To be fair, Bacon also notes that this is rare, ascribing most cases of stuttering to coldness of the tongue, which he suggests can be relieved by a moderate intake of wine. The relationship between alcohol consumption and speech fluency may have a physiological component that can be observed trans-historically. Drinking a small amount of alcohol has been shown in recent studies to improve pronunciation and fluency in second-language speaking (Renner et al. 2017) and to decrease anxiety and enhance selfperception of performance in public speaking (Stevens et al. 2017). The emphasis here is on small, however, and the difficulty of getting the correct dosage is apparent in Robert Heath’s “On Stut” (1650): The more Stut strives to speak, he stams the more; But his cold tongue wel oyld, and hot with store Of wine, he speaks not like an Oracle then, But much, and loud, and plain as other men: Such Eloquence hath pow’rful wine: but he Drinks oft til he can neither speak nor see. The Remedie here is worse then the disaese, [sic] Better then none, a tongue imperfect is. (F4r) The vignette depicted here outlines schadenfreude at the sense of frustration experienced by the thwarted speaker in a mocking tone that matches the comedic stage stutterers discussed below. Above all, however, Heath confirms that to not speak is worst of all, and that an “imperfect tongue” is better than none. The poem collapses difference into abjection, the overdose of wine meaning that “Stut” can now no longer see, nor speak at all, leaving him in sightless silence. One extremely common explanation for stuttering was in fact imitating a stutterer. The scientist Robert Boyle (1627–91), for example, credited his own stutter to his acquaintance with some children of his own age, whose stuttering habitude he so long counterfeited, that at last he contracted it; possibly a just judgment upon his derision, and turning the effects of God’s anger into the subject matter of his sport. (Boyle 1744: 6) Boyle’s account of the origin of his stuttering is placed alongside the death of his mother as one of the two “great disasters” of his childhood, suggesting that his stammer was a source of comparable anguish to him. Although he notes that he was subjected to many attempts to cure him, he does not detail what these were, only to say that they were “tried

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with as much successlessness as diligence.” Nevertheless, his stammer is not mentioned in the subsequent reminiscences of his schooldays at Eton, and although his musical studies were curtailed because of his “bad voice,” he reports that he was able to acquire native fluency in both French and Italian during his travels in Europe, minimizing the impression that stuttering might have had any impact on his later life. In addition to the notion that stuttering is contagious, Andrew Boorde (1587) adds two further causes: one doth come by nature. The other doth come by humiditie of the senewes of the tongue, and the third commeth to be in the companie of a stutter or stamerer. (21) To address the issue of contagion, Boorde suggests avoiding those who stutter (a “remedy” that may have encouraged those with speech impediments to keep quiet rather than risk ostracism). For the humidity of the tongue, Boorde recommends a concoction of basil, cowslips, and wine, or of figs, honey, and “Castorie.” For those whose stutter is congenital, however, “it can not be holpen, except it be reformed in youth by some discrete tutor.” Stuttering speech could thus indicate a more generalized and permanent condition, whether there was a consistent humoral explanation for that or not, but equally, it is clear that Renaissance commentators recognized stammering as a localized reaction to particularly emotive circumstances, whether joyful or rage-inducing (as in the example from Painter above). For example, Burton notes Scaliger’s point that “the voice of such as are afraid, trembles, because their heart is shaken” (I.422.15–16), connecting the trembling of fear with both inner and vocal trembling. The possibility that speech can reveal the emotional state of the speaker thus makes rhetorical training a useful skill, not only in terms of cultivating a level of control over one’s speech, but also in terms of exploiting the signifying power of vocal qualities to create intended effects.

6.3. DEFINING SPEECH: RHETORICAL AND LEGAL POSITIONS Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) is one of many textbooks of the period that outline ideal kinds of speech against which readers might measure themselves and aim to remedy their own “defects” by adopting the writer’s advice. The prevalence of such textbooks in the period demonstrates the importance of rhetoric per se, but also a more general importance attached to speech and to speaking “well.” Wilson describes hemming and hawing as a fault in speech that makes the speaker look stupid, and links it to a broader lack of structure in rhetorical speech. Being an effective orator is possible, he says, if we orderly observe circumstaunces, & tell one thyng after another from tyme to tyme, not tumblyng one tale in an others necke tellyng halfe a tale, and so leavyng it rawe, hackyng & hemmyng as though our wittes and our senses were a woll gatheryng. Neither shoulde we suffer our tongue to runne before our witte, but with much warenesse sette forthe our matter, and speake our mynde evermore with judgement. (fol. 59) Wilson prizes structure and fluency. An effective speaker, he suggests, plans the order in which to say things, takes their time, and refrains from interjections. To “hack”

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and “hem” is to interject non-semantic sound into one’s speech, a habit that is usually represented today with words such as “ah” and “um.” Whether intentional or not, this common technique has the effect of giving an improvising speaker time to think without giving the audience the impression that the speech is over. For Wilson, however, such verbal noise makes a speaker appear witless, making clear the link between levels of intellect and kinds of speech that is implied by the idea that the “mind” is revealed through the tongue. Such supposedly inadequate forms of speech are also scorned by Franciscus Junius, who, in 1638, observed “they are deservedly laughed at, who going about to tell a tale doe nothing but stutte and stammer, belching out some abrupt & pittifully chopt speeches” (315). The legal consequences of speaking in ways that are unexpected or do not conform to the ideals articulated by writers like Wilson and Junius could be severe. Leonard Cox (1532) claims that disordered speech can be a sign of guilt, for example. Cox notes that an orator can justifiably argue that a suspect willingly did the crime of which they are accused “yf after the dede was done he fled or els whan it was layed to his charge: he blusshed or waxed pale or stutted & coulde nat well speke” (E6r). Cox thus states that the manner of speech in a legal case is valid grounds for believing or disbelieving a defendant’s claims. Those who stutter in the dock already seem guilty to Cox, whether that stutter is related to their temporary emotional state or to a more permanent condition. Legalistic definitions further demonstrate the ways that language difference was a focus for exclusion in the period. Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals points to the etymology of the word “infant” in order to explain how those underage do not have the right to enter into contracts on their own behalf (in this case, he is interested in marital contracts). Although published posthumously in 1686, Swinburne’s views reflect his sixteenth-century training at Oxford in the 1570s and his subsequent legal career in York before his death in 1624. Swinburne suggests that “infants” denotes those Younglings and Babes which as yet cannot speak, for so this Substantive (Infans) an Infant, doth import, being compounded of in and fando, of not speaking, the Praeposition (in) standing for (non). (p. 18; also cited in van Sant 2002: 48) Swinburne then goes on to show how the word denoting the life stage of infancy is transferred to denote a particular legal status: Our Temporal Lawyers no less significantly than usually, do call them Infants which have not attained yet to the Age of One and twenty years, because until that time they are as it were Tongue-tied, being unable to speak, at least effectually; and though they speak naturally, yet do not the Laws understand, or acknowledge their words to be of any force, either for Alienations or other Contracts, more than if they were young Infants, naturally destitute both of Speech and Judgment. (19) The lack of recognition in law of a person’s ability to express their wishes and interests effectively silences those who are defined as underage, not to mention, as Ann van Sant points out, women, Jews, male and female religious, and any others who do not fit the normative concept of “free and lawful men” (Pollock and Maitland, cited in van Sant 2002: 48). Swinburne’s assumptions here bring together the ability to speak and a mental capacity to make judgments. That capacity is, in a circular fashion, conferred by conformity to the social and cultural categorizations outlined in law. John Rastell is another early modern lawyer who outlines a range of criteria for judging mental capacity. In his glossary of legal terms, he includes the following description:

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Ideot is he that is a foole naturally from hys birth, and knoweth not howe to accompt or number twenty pence nor cannot name hys father, or mother, nor of what age hymselfe is, or such like easie and common matters: soe that it appereth he hath noe maner of understandinge of reason nor governement of him selfe what is for his profit, or disprofit &c. (Rastell 1579: S4v-S5r; see also Metzler 2016: 149) Rastell’s prescriptions make clear that the manner in which this capacity is to be judged is through speech. A person must be able to “name” their parents, and this involves speaking aloud. Counting to twenty is also, presumably, a test that requires that the individual speak the numbers aloud. These “easie and common matters” are thus only accessible through speech. To be fair, Rastell also suggests that what he calls “the light of reason” (and thus avoidance of the categorization of “ideot”) can also be assumed to be present in a person who can reade, or lerne to reade by instruction and informatyon of others, or can measure an elle of cloth, or name the daies in the weeke, or begette a childe. (Rastell 1579: S5r) Rastell’s prescriptions suggest that individuals are required to demonstrate proof of their worth to society, and that insufficiency in speech places an individual in a liminal category where their worth is to be doubted. This possibility of doubt in the inherent worth of individuals who fail to conform to normative expectations around speech comes through in the autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (ca. 1582–1648). Although he writes with the confidence of an extraordinarily privileged aristocrat, Herbert nevertheless seems oddly insistent on his linguistic abilities and medical knowledge. In the early parts of the text, Herbert is at pains to emphasize his facility in language learning, boasting of having taught himself Spanish, French, and Italian (in addition to his knowledge of Greek and Latin). He also outlines at length various medical remedies that he recommends and an anecdote in which his intervention cured a family servant who had been given up for dead by doctors. These assertions are telling when juxtaposed with his account of speech delay in early childhood. He describes his infancy as “very sickly,” and outlines an inability to speak, which he blames on frequent discharges from his ears that he ascribes to epilepsy. There also seems to have been a psychological component here, as he describes having feared saying something “imperfect or impertinent,” preferring not to speak at all rather than risk this outcome. When he did speak, he reports asking some precociously philosophical questions that made his nurse and other carers laugh at him. It was because of this, Herbert claims, that his younger self refrained from speaking, even though he could understand what was said. This had the result that “many thought I should bee ever dumbe” (11) and that, because of the “defluction” from his ears, nobody thought “fitt to teach mee soe much as my Alphabet” (13). Herbert’s childhood symptoms placed him in the liminal category outlined by Rastell, not given the opportunity to learn to read until these symptoms ceased, which Herbert reports was at the age of seven. Far from seeing his case as evidence that his early symptoms were not cause to abandon his education, Herbert instead suggests that it shows that hereditary diseases, among which he includes epilepsy, must be cured in infancy or not at all. Thus, Herbert is able to distance himself from the outcast “infans” in both senses: he is no longer a child, and he is no longer unable to speak. He is now able to assume his hereditary role as heir to his patrimony, becoming a courtier, diplomat, philosopher, and writer.

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Herbert’s experiences demonstrate that even those in the most privileged tranches of society were at risk of exclusion from legal personhood if they were unable to speak. His autobiography defensively positions himself as diametrically opposed to this alternative identity that haunted his childhood. Hesitancy in speech, repeating syllables, or unorthodox pronunciation were considered habits that should be left in childhood, as specifically mandated by St. Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (KJV, 1 Corinthians 13, 11). Herbert prefers to leave his stammering in his childhood and, like Boyle above, once his account reaches his adulthood, he portrays his linguistic abilities as exceptional.3 An expert in medical matters and a confident speaker in several languages, Herbert’s self-portrayal seems defined against the specter of his former child self, at risk of rejection and neglect. In contrast to Herbert, Niccolo Tartaglia (ca. 1506–57), the renowned Venetian mathematician, seems to have had a lifelong speech impediment, signified by his name, Tartaglia, meaning stutterer. According to Smith, he was reputed to have been injured as a child by a saber cut to the mouth during the invasion of Brescia in 1512 (1958: 297). Nevertheless, he was able to participate in learned discourse, reputedly feuding with fellow mathematician, Cordano, and contributing significantly to the mathematical advances of the day by showing how to solve the cubic equation. Even for someone of Tartaglia’s remarkable mathematical talents, however, difficulty with speech was what gave him his nickname, further confirming the close links between kinds of speech and identity.

6.4. PERFORMING SPEECH: WORDS AND DRAMA “Tartaglia” was a nickname denoting stuttering, or some sort of impeded speech. When read in conjunction with European drama history, this does not seem to have been a particularly flattering gesture. The name was also in use for one of the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, the traditional Italian improvised theater. Tartaglia was usually a minor figure, brought on for a set-piece scene. His characteristic stutter was, as Rudlin (1994) points out, an opportunity to generate comedy emphasizing rude syllables or the proliferation of synonyms in order to avoid particularly difficult sounds (155). The opportunities presented by this kind of character were extended musically in Italian opera. It is in the very nature of music and song to extend and exploit the sonic properties of language. Syllables are stretched and repeated and the rhythm of spoken words and sentences is disrupted. In Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (1639), Monteverdi included a singing stuttering character. The opera retold the myth of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. Monteverdi’s version of the story included a character called Iro, based on a figure mentioned only once by Homer. In the opera, Iro’s role is expanded, but only as a form of comic relief. As Rosand (1989) points out, he is entirely superfluous to the plot (147). Having been living off handouts from Odysseus’ rivals, Iro’s livelihood is threatened by the return of the hero. Once his patrons have been killed off by Odysseus, death is apparently Iro’s only option. Iro’s final aria leading up to his suicide is a bravura vocal display, starting with a howl of anguish and disintegrating into repeated syllables. As Rosand (1995) puts it, Iro “begs for consolation” and receives none, as his language dissolves into meaningless noise (albeit rendered musically). The irony here is that a role that depicts a lack of competence in speaking requires exceptional skill from the speaking (or singing) performer.

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In terms of understanding speech in the period, however, it is clear that speaking (or singing) strangely on stage was a source of mockery and entertainment, indicating foolishness and thus a demand for ridicule. For example, the character of Amoretta in Ford’s The Lady’s Trial (1639) speaks with a lisp, represented by the frequent use of “th” in much of her dialogue in the text. For example, upon hearing music, she exclaims: Dentlemen then ye ith thith muthicke yourth, or can ye tell what great manths fidleth, made it tith vedee petty noyth, but who thold thend it [Gentlemen then ye. Is this music yours, or can ye tell what great man’s fiddles made it? Tis very pretty noise, but who should send it?] (H1r) Although English spelling was by no means regularized in the period, it is clear that the orthography here represents unusual pronunciation. We see a range of potential moments of difference from standard speech. In addition to the “th” sound, there is the “d” sound at the start of “gentlemen” and in the middle of “very,” and the rendering of “pretty” as “petty.” One of her suitors, Futelli, highlights her idiosyncratic way of speaking as a means to flirt with her, saying that, rather than asking futile questions about the music, her “lips are destind to a better use, / Or else the proverbe failes of lisping maids.” As Hopkins (2011) explains in her edition of the play, lisping girls were proverbially supposed to be good at kissing (122), and Futelli is playfully suggesting that instead of talking, Amoretta should use her lips for that. This moment brings together a confluence of misogynistic ideas around speech, combining infantilization of Amoretta as a childishly lisping maid with sexualization of her through presenting her mouth as a sexual organ. Furthermore, it also draws on a broader misogynist trope of silencing the garrulous woman, whose mouth is axiomatically talkative and better used for responding to male sexual overtures. Female characters on stage in the period regularly repeat and condone these kinds of stereotypes, even when they do not embody them. The Duchess of Malfi, for example, goes calmly to her death, relinquishing speech and what she describes as the “woman’s fault” of talkativeness (The Duchess of Malfi, 4.2.218; Anderson 2017: 110). Amoretta seems unfazed by Futelli’s banter, telling him to “come behind with your mockth [mocks].” Of course, these women, imagined by men and played by boys on stage, do not offer us a view of how women actually might have spoken, but these representations do offer us a glimpse of the gendered context in which voices were heard. A grieving Lear describes Cordelia’s voice as “ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman” (The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.246–7), despite having disowned her at the beginning of the play for not speaking as fulsomely as his ego had required. At the end of the play, death prevents her from speaking at all. Even when not presented as explicitly having speech impediments, women on stage consistently speak too much and too little, and speech in and of itself was an unavoidably gendered act. Boy actors occupied a liminal state between male and female kinds of speech (children were routinely grammatically gendered neutral with the pronoun “it” in the period). Gina Bloom (1998) speculates about the impact of puberty on boys’ performances as female characters, and she suggests that the instability of a breaking voice might be a feature of boy actors’ performances rather than necessarily a problem. Certainly, boy actors were a mainstay not just of commercial theater, but of civic pageantry and private performances as well, making boys’ voices a ubiquitous feature of the sound of dramatic performance in the period. Their ability to inhabit and ventriloquize voices of different genders made them a frequent vehicle for testing ideas of speech.

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In The Lady’s Trial, Amoretta’s mistaken attitude toward marriage is not explicitly linked to her idiosyncratic speech patterns, but does correspond with the foolishness of her attitudes and helps to establish the necessity of her “reformation” (C3r). The scheme to gull her is meant to cure her of her unreasonable expectations of marriage and bring her to accept that she must marry someone of comparable social standing to her own (as opposed to the rank to which she aspires). Amoretta’s lisping is not cured along with her unrealistic views,4 but her unorthodox pronunciation is clearly meant to complement a sense of her as foolish and laughable. The way she expresses herself is meant to be as ridiculous as the things that she says. In The Birth of Merlin, a magically induced inability to speak altogether is represented by the Clown’s repeated “hum.” This spelling indicates that the previously loquacious character is reduced to close-mouthed noise, and his dialogue on either side of his forced muteness suggests we are to imagine that he is trying to say “let me speak” while his mouth is forced closed. In this case, the use of “hum” to represent textually a noise denoting a frustrated desire to speak is clear. The Clown is an example of the way that inhibited speech seems to be often associated with characters who in other ways are actually extremely—even excessively—eloquent. This showcases a performer’s skill in replicating complex and varied speech patterns, as well as perhaps offering potential delight for the audience in unexpectedly seeing an actor who usually plays this kind of role shutting up temporarily. Captain Tucca of Poetaster, for example, is a very verbose character whose aggressive language is part of his “skeldering”—that is, hustling and swindling. David Bevington suggests in the Cambridge edition that his odd speech patterns are modeled on a historical person, which seems likely given the play’s participation in the War of the Theatres. It is when in character as Mars that Tucca is described as stuttering with anger (Jonson 2012: 4.5.69), though there is no textual representation of this kind of speech in the play. Nevertheless, the reference to him stuttering brings in the kind of irony alluded to above, where a character’s usually active flow of speech has been interrupted by anger or strong emotion. This is most obvious in Marston’s What You Will, a play in which the apparently permanent stutter of Captain Albano is a significant driver of the plot and source of comedic action. Albano, supposedly lost at sea, comes home to find his wife about to remarry and everyone he knows mistaking him for someone else. These distressing circumstances do eventually give rise to his signature stutter, but not before he has delivered three fairly long speeches in 3.2. It is of course possible that, in performance, an actor could improvise extra stuttering, but it seems unlikely given the length of the scene. Furthermore, the effect seems rather to be one of extended verbal disquisition on the unpleasantness of what Albano is facing, building up in a kind of crescendo to a climactic spluttering. Albano may be a stutterer, but he is also very talkative. When plotting to prevent Albano’s supposed widow from remarrying, the conspirators, unaware that Albano is indeed alive, select Francisco the perfumer to impersonate him, as he is: ADRIAN: Exceedingly the strangest nearly like In voice, in gesture, face, in— RANDOLPHO: Nay he hath Albano’s imperfection too, And stuts when he is vehemently moved. (381–4)

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Albano’s “imperfection,” his stutter, is something that is a permanent aspect of his character and yet one that only manifests at moments of excitement. It is at one and the same time an idiosyncrasy that marks him out as unique, as clearly as his clothes and other mannerisms do, and yet also something that enables him to be replicated when he is being impersonated by Francisco. Francisco’s stutter matches Albano’s as effortlessly as his face does. As soon as Francisco is wearing the appropriate clothing, the transformation is complete. When encouraged to “grow in heat and stut” (971) by Jacomo in practice for the trick, Francisco obliges, and his speech excoriates Celia’s new suitor as “An odd phantasma, a beggar, sir, a who-who-who-what you will, a straggling go-go-go-gunds, f-f-f-f-fut—” (972–3). Part of the comedy here surely lies in the potential for suggesting blasphemous or otherwise taboo speech without actually articulating it fully. The repetition of the play’s title is also a potentially pleasurable release for the audience, standing in for an unsaid profanity and drawing attention to its own metatheatricality. In the subsequent scene, Albano repeats Francisco’s outburst, again in imagining Celia’s suitor. This time, it is in relation to Albano’s son who is about to acquire a step-father or father-in-law, his father-in-devil, or d-d-d-d-devil f-f-f-father, or who-who-who-who-what you will— The repetition here of the titular phrase What You Will reinforces the similarity between Albano and Francisco’s speech. It resounds elsewhere in the play, too, occurring six times in the main action and four times in the Induction. As a phrase, it gestures to an unspecified, unsaid thing, and thus draws the play as a whole into a process of avoidance and of not being able to say what is surely about to be said but never comes.5 Albano’s experiences leave him in confusion, to the extent that he begins to doubt his own identity. As his state of mind deteriorates, his speech continues to be represented as fragmented and enraged. The final straw comes when he meets his brothers, who mistake him for his own imposter. Albano comes to believe that the rumors of his death must be true, concluding “I was drown’d / And now my soule is skipt into a perfumer.” It is language that renders this transformation complete. When a servant addresses him as Albano, he rejects the name on the grounds that if his own brothers think that he is Francisco the perfumer, then he must be. A name is lacking substance and is not something he “could tast or touch / Or see, or feele,” but is only “voice, and ayre.” Instead, he concludes he must be Francisco, and as a tradesman, he adopts the catchphrase of a street seller: “What do you lack? what ist you lack right that’s my cry.” Language in the form of his name has no power to render identity, but as a performed act, language turns him into the embodiment of Francisco, peddling his perfumes. If speech is the means to know a person’s mind, then Albano’s radical alienation from himself is also accomplished through speaking with a voice that is at once his own and someone else’s. Albano’s misery is untangled by the end of the comedy, and he is restored to his true identity and reunited with his wife. But the play’s exploration of the role of language in creating and confirming identity implies that it requires constant renewal and restatement. To be himself, Albano needs to speak (and be heard by others) as himself.

6.5. CONCLUSION The power of speech to constitute identity is made most clear in the theater. Theatrical drama presented a forum through which voices and identities could be ventriloquized, challenged, dismantled, and reinforced. Albano’s identity is created within a framework

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of explicit theatricality precisely so that it can be destroyed and then restored. The theater is thus a space in which fictional speech can be employed to explore the implications of speaking selves speaking as other selves for understanding questions of agency, identity, and moral responsibility. In drama, idiosyncrasies of speech become distinguishing features that differentiate character on stage, but that also come to signify character traits, evidence of inner qualities and of individuality. The consolidation and expansion of professionalized drama in the period thus enabled the repeated demonstration and exploration of the complexities of the relationship between speech and identity. Drama therefore, by its very nature, stages and makes explicit what the rest of this chapter has shown: that in the Renaissance, performed utterance was legally, historically, and socially the basis of articulating one’s personhood. The alternative and underprivileged speech variants discussed demonstrate how the cultures of a period only just moving to the printed word acted to socially disable those who utterances were “imperfect.” For some, speech defects could be safely explained away as childhood aberrations or emotional outbursts, temporary conditions that bore no significance for their social identity. For others, by implication, speaking differently could be heard as an irrevocable stamp of difference, of particularities of geographical location and social hierarchy, and of thresholds of mental and intellectual capability that barred entry into social discourse. Although it is no longer possible to hear these lost voices, their traces make clear that in the Renaissance, speaking differently could effectively become not speaking at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Learning Difficulties The Idiot and the Outsider in the Renaissance EMILY LATHROP

7.1. INTRODUCTION The American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities homepage defines an intellectual disability as “a disability characterized by significant limitations in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior, which covers many everyday social and practical skills. This disability originates before the age of 18.” This is generally how learning and intellectual disabilities are perceived in the twenty-first century—as disorders that are genetic or that occur in youth, unless caused by trauma later in life. Today, the category encompasses communication disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, specific learning disorders, and motor disorders, among others. While modern perceptions of intellectual disabilities are always in flux, particularly when it comes to terminology, the process of diagnosing such disorders is consistently rooted in medicine in a way that Renaissance conceptions of intellectual and learning difficulties were not. As is the case with modern terminology, there is a great deal of slippage in how intellectual disabilities were discussed and portrayed in the Renaissance period. As C. F. Goodey has noted in A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”, conceptions of intelligence and disabilities are historically situated rather than trans-historical (Goodey 2011: 2). People with intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period could be called “idiots,” “fools,” and/or “lunatics,” and the boundary between the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill was much more porous than it is today, allowing for these definitions to grow in and out of each other. Because of this, it is difficult to parse definitions of specific intellectual disabilities during the time. Furthermore, because conceptions of intelligence and ability are historically situated, it is important to frame the use of period terminology with care. Though these terms would not be used to describe people today, I will at times use “fool” and “idiot” to discuss those with learning and intellectual disabilities in the period in order to accurately represent the historical discourse. In the period, idiocy and foolishness could occur at birth or arise from trauma. Fools could be holy and innocent or dangerous and potentially demonic. Fools and idiots were often coupled with the insane medically and legally, in terms of rights and land ownership. To complicate matters further, people in the Renaissance also applied discourses of ability to groups of people who were not intellectually disabled.

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Women, the lower classes, and people of color were often portrayed as intellectually inferior, with different biological makeups, which allowed for specific groups in power to denigrate them. This chapter aims to cover as much ground as possible, but I acknowledge that the scope neglects many Eastern and African traditions and non-Abrahamic religions, as well as a multitude of scholarship written in languages other than English. The chapter is organized into sections exploring how intellectual disabilities were viewed religiously, medically, legally, and educationally. For the final portion of the chapter, I will turn to the ways in which these discourses of mental ability were applied to lower classes, women, and people of color. For each of these groups I will also turn to how these ideas were represented on the Renaissance English stage, by discussing Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew and The Tempest. I am bringing in drama for two reasons. First, theatrical representations illuminate negotiations of the boundaries of normativity in the period. Second, these plays are consistently produced in the twenty-first century, allowing for new audiences to experience these depictions of disability. While I am dividing this chapter under headings, it is important to note that each of these subfields affect and form out of each other. Educational and medical thought in the period evolved out of and responded to prevailing religious thought, just as legal frameworks and colonial policy responded to and used medical and religious terminology to form their own discourses of disability.

7.2. RELIGION The Abrahamic religions influenced cultural approaches to idiocy and lunacy in the Renaissance period, particularly concerning constructions of the rational soul as intrinsically human and of the difference between holy fools and those who have been influenced by evil spirits. These religious constructions similarly influenced educational practices, though there was a marked difference, particularly between Christian and Jewish thought, on how and whether idiots should be educated. While there was of course variation in various religions’ conceptions of learning difficulties, the Abrahamic religions, in their texts, advocated for treating individuals with potential learning difficulties with respect, even while denying them certain privileges. In Judaism, people with intellectual disabilities often appear alongside other population groups in scripture. For instance, regarding who is compelled to attend temple, the Mishnah states: All are bound to appear (at the Temple), except a deaf man, an imbecile and a minor, a person of unknown sex, a hermaphrodite, women, unfreed slaves, the lame, the blind, the sick, the aged and one who is unable to go up on foot. (Merrick et al. 2002: 56) The imbecile, an individual with intellectual disability, is grouped with people with other physical disabilities (the blind, the deaf, the sick, and the old), as well as sexual outgroups (women, hermaphrodites, and people of unknown sex), unfreed slaves, and minors. People with disabilities were often afforded the same status as minors legally and religiously in the period. While individuals with intellectual disabilities were not compelled to attend temple, Judaism in the Renaissance did differentiate between levels of intellectual disability. People with severe intellectual disabilities, who were deemed unteachable, were exempt from commandments and should also be cared for and protected (Merrick et al. 2002: 57). For the person who was seen as capable of learning

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but who might have difficulties, Jewish thought saw education as a right of that person, and parents and teachers were charged with accommodating their needs. Here, all children should be taught the Torah, whether or not they were disabled, and anyone who attempted to withhold education from a student was seen as stealing their inheritance from them (Merrick et al. 2002: 61). Jewish texts specifically focus on the relationship between student and teacher. The Talmud states that imbeciles and those who have difficulty learning should “attend the school even more regularly,” and the Gemarah states “that if you see a student whose studies are difficult for him like iron that is a sign that no one is explaining to him face to face” (Merrick et al. 2002: 58). Teachers should continue instructing the student, no matter how many times they might have to repeat themselves. Rabbis and Jewish thinkers consciously thought through access to education for those with disabilities, even taking into account the importance of class size, stating that classes with students who have learning difficulties should not exceed eight students. Similarly, the education of students with disabilities did not solely fall to parents and educators, but also to the community. As Merrick et al. have pointed out, there are reports from the sixteenth century of students tutoring and helping those with learning difficulties in their class (Merrick et al. 2002: 61). While people with intellectual disabilities were not in temple or compelled to follow the commandments, their inclusion in pedagogic practice suggests that they were still considered fully in the Jewish community. When they do discuss those with learning disabilities, Abrahamic religions focus on the importance of care. Islamic thought in the period dictated that children with intellectual disabilities were to be treated with respect and cared for by the community, since all are the children of Adam (Morad et al. 2002: 68), and Renaissance Catholicism offered care for the intellectually disabled and viewed them as children of God. However, intellectually disabled people were not given the sacraments in the Catholic Church, so while they were seen as children of God, they were also cut off from engaging in acts of worship (Smalley 2002: 100). Care and access to religious teachings were not always concomitant. Medieval and Renaissance Islamic thought approached intellectual disability medically, religiously, and through magic: A Muslim might turn to a practitioner of Galenic medicine. He might trust in God entirely and take no active measure to ameliorate his condition, or he could adopt a more active religious life, including prayer and sacrifice. He might resort to the saints or the supernatural healing of the Christians and Jews. And one might turn to Prophetic medicine or magic. (Dols 1992: 10) While these avenues mostly dealt with curing the insane, there was, as is typical for the period, crossover between approaches to mental illness and intellectual disability. Furthermore, similar to Christian belief, the mad and the intellectually disabled could be holy figures. Here, divine madness allowed the person to live piously and generally in seclusion to become closer to God. The holy or wise fool, as in Christianity, was a figure who could not seem to commit crime or sin and was pure and therefore closer and more receptive to God (Dols 1992: 12–13). Christian thought in the period was interwoven with the medical. As C. F. Goodey has discussed, there was a moral hierarchy in the organization of the faculties: the rational soul was closest to God, reason and intellect were in the middle, and the external senses were the furthest from God and purity (Goodey 2011: 53). This hierarchy helped give rise to the separation between human and animal intelligence, and divinity. In other

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words, man’s intelligence and soul is exceptional among other beings on Earth. This focus on the divinity and importance of men’s souls and intellect helped bolster comparisons between discourses of mental ability and animality, offering a vocabulary for many to denigrate people with intellectual disabilities, as well as other minority populations. This rhetoric was echoed in Christian thought on the origins of intellectual disabilities. While there were holy fools, seen as perhaps less intellectually capable but closer to God, there were also demonic fools who were seen as potentially threatening. This construction of foolishness encompassed changeling children, demonic influence, and people whose behavior was deemed aberrant. The cultural existence of changeling children, thought to be put in place of the human child stolen by fairies, offered people a way to explain children with different abilities without placing blame on the parents. Intellectually and physically disabled children, then, were at times seen as something other than human. Christian thought also allowed for demonic influence on humans, alluding to the ability of demons and spirits to alter mental state and capacity, which again created a crossover between approaches to intellectual disabilities and mental illness in the period. In addition, the category of the dangerous and demonic fool included those seen as sexually aberrant, specifically women. As McDonagh has discussed in Idiocy: A Cultural History, representations of women with intellectual disabilities “consistently emphasize sexual or other physical appetites” (McDonagh 2008: 105). There was, in the religious thought of the period, a consistent tension between representing people with intellectual disabilities as innocent and pure and representing them as dangerous and, at times, less than human. These discourses of ability and humanity grew out of Renaissance religious thought and became entangled with medical theory to create specific images of foolishness, idiocy, and disability, as we shall see below.

7.3. MEDICINE Medically, idiocy and foolishness could either be innate and permanent—a trait that the individual was born with—or something that was acquired through an accident later in life and therefore potentially curable. There was a preoccupation with permanence in diagnosing intellectual disability in the time period, particularly in legal frameworks. Similarly, permanence and temporal specificity helped differentiate between idiocy and lunacy, which at the time often merged into and out of each other. While there was still holdover from religious thought into the causes of intellectual disability at the time, medical thought generally divided causations into natural and unnatural, and it focused on humoral theory and physiognomics, particularly as they affected intelligence in terms of speed. One of the prevailing schools of medical thought in the Renaissance was humoral theory. This theory posited that the body is composed of four humors (black bile, red/ yellow bile, phlegm, and blood), each tied to specific textures and environments (dry, wet, cold, and hot), and that an excess or lack of any one humor would affect a person’s ability, intelligence, and personality. While I will discuss the social effects of intelligence constructions in humoral theory later in this chapter, particularly as they relate to women and people of color, this section will focus primarily on actual medical practice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, humoral theory affected perceptions of learning difficulties in the time period across multiple regions; as Irina Metzler has already traced, Galen discussed types of intellectual disability in his second-century CE work, De Locis Affectis. While Galen’s work predates the Renaissance, his work was influential and continued

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to be of substantial authority well into the period. In the text, he categorized “cognitive decline as dullness (morosis, dementia) or foolishness (moria), both due to diminishing powers of reasoning,” and anoia, “a paralysis of the thinking faculties and which could be due to senility, excessive coldness of the brain or humoral damage of mental faculties,” as well as melancholy and swelling in the brain from phrenitis (Metzler 2016: 57). Here, humoral theory imagined the material aspects of the brain, focusing on temperature and texture, as well as potential damage done to the brain either naturally or traumatically. Variations of humoral theory can be found in other regions. Galen’s humoral theory eventually influenced Islamic medical thought. Though the ninth-century Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi was at times critical of Galen, he referenced his work on the brain and its ailments, paying particular attention to the temperature of the brain and how variations might cause illness (Dols 1992: 56). Ibn Sina’s Qānūn also dealt with humoral theory, noting that stupidity, memory loss, and insanity might be caused by excesses of bile and heat in the brain. As in Europe, bloodletting was a common treatment for these ailments, meant to help balance the humors in the brain and the entire body (Dols 1992: 77). Though these are medieval texts, humoral theory continued to be influential in Renaissance Islamic thought. Aztec medical thought also posited that an excess of phlegm in the chest could cause stupidity and lunacy. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano’s book Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition outlines the ways in which the Aztec imagined illness and ability. Citing Molina’s definition of “yollomimiqui (literally ‘dead heart’)—dumb, stupid,” he notes that the heart rather than the brain was thought to house intelligence, meaning any excess of phlegm in this region would directly impact mental ability. Similarly, the Badianus Codex’s treatment for “mental stupor” states that rather than using bloodletting, the Aztec used the herbs tlatlacotic and yolloxochitl to force the affected person to vomit in order to expel the excess phlegm (Ortiz de Montellano 1990: 157). Humoral fluxes were seen to affect brain speed, which eventually evolved as a means of measuring intelligence. Mental speed was constructed as the ability for logic, abstraction, and information processing, storage, and retrieval within a certain time frame (Goodey 2011: 39). Each mode, like other conceptions of mental ability at the time, had varying moral implications. Fools and idiots had slow mental speed, which might tie to melancholy and lack of morality, but can also be seen as a more efficient way to access God and divinity, tying to the image of the holy fool. Similarly, fast intelligence speed could lend itself to genius as well as uncontrollable frenzy. The third mode, a mean between the two, seems to be the desired mode for much of Europe’s population at the time. Medical discourses of intelligence in the period were in flux, incorporating humoral theory and evolving to include physiognomy—the study of face and head shape—to glean information on an individual’s character. Here, physical and internal traits were combined to create a picture of mental ability: “a certain shape might be an external sign of “stupidity,” a condition at once physical and behavioral, reducible to laziness and inertia” (Goodey 2011: 222). Humoral theory, mental speed, and physiognomy as indicators of intelligence evolved alongside constructions of expected social identity. For Goodey, the interplay between wit, grace, and honor is perhaps more constitutive of intelligence in the period (Goodey 2011: 64). This conception of intelligence is of course classed; honor, grace, and wit are social constructions that, combined, created the perfect image of a (presumably) upperclass man. There was an anxiety in Renaissance Europe over upper-class individuals failing to live up to this model, either through actual intellectual disabilities or through

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perceptions of mental and fiscal inadequacies. This anxiety over fissures in expected social behavior and order directly led to certain legal frameworks being put in place to uphold social hierarchies in the event of a breakdown in normal social order.

7.4. LEGAL As previously discussed, the lines between the terms idiocy, lunacy, and foolishness often blurred in the period. While this chapter is not focused on mental health, it is important to determine the ways in which lunacy or insanity interacted with idiocy, particularly in the medical and legal realms. The Prerogativa Regis, a thirteenthcentury document that detailed the rights of the Crown, divided those with intellectual disabilities into natural fools or idiots and those non compos mentis: “fools” never developed past childhood intellectually, “natural fools” were those who were permanently congenitally disabled, and “idiot” seems to be able to be applied to natural fools as well as those who developed intellectual disabilities from accidents. Non compos mentis functioned as an umbrella term, applying to anyone who had an acquired disability and, as Neugebauer points out, this term was eventually replaced by lunatic in the fifteenth century (Neugebauer 1996: 25–6). Perhaps the most vital legal difference between lunacy and idiocy at this time was duration: idiocy was generally a permanent handicap, whereas lunacy could have pockets of lucidity. Prerogativa Regis explicates the Crown’s duties toward not only wealthy people with intellectual disabilities, but also their lands. The Crown was able to become a guardian for natural fools and idiots, providing them with caretakers, and also gaining control of their property. If the person was a natural fool, the Crown was able to receive revenue from their land, keeping any profits that accrued during the Crown’s guardianship over them and after their death. However, for those non compos mentis, any profit gained during the Crown’s guardianship was returned to the family once the lunacy lifted (Neugebauer 1996: 26–7). While the King remained guardian of idiots and those non compos mentis, he usually offloaded the responsibility onto private citizens, rewarding them financially for taking on guardianship. These citizens then generally employed caretakers for those individuals. This anxiety over upper-class people with intellectual disabilities was also apparent in Tuscany, particularly in terms of land and guardianship; as Elizabeth W. Mellyn states, upper-class people with disabilities, specifically men, were seen to disrupt “the safe passage of patrimony from one generation to the next—one of the most important obligations a man of property owed the future of his lineage. He was simultaneously a mark for grasping relatives and a menace to the social and financial stability of his family” (Mellyn 2014: 25). While many families delegated guardianship and care privately, some used civic courts in order to decide who should take up the role (Mellyn 2014: 56). The anxiety over potentially disrupted order and lineage caused guardianship to be a contentious state, particularly if one side of the family had more to gain from the subject’s disability, resulting at times in the appointment of a guardian from each side of the family (Mellyn 2014: 31). More so than in England, petitioning for guardianship and care of people with intellectual disabilities was seen as a community effort, requiring “the consent and approval of all relatives and the notification of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances” (Mellyn 2014: 34). Guardianship was at once a system of care for the individual and also a means of easing tension caused by an upset in social order.

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Islamic law similarly lays out frameworks for guardianship of the insane and those with intellectual disabilities. Like in other legal systems, these individuals were on a par with children within legal frameworks. According to Michael W. Dols, free men in Islam possessed control over their lives and affairs (wilāya), but this power was transferred when an individual was considered incapable of understanding and executing legal rights for themselves (Dols 1992: 441). Generally, guardianship moved to the male head of the family—either the person’s father or grandfather—but might also go to the mother or a court-appointed guardian. This guardian should be a Muslim of good reputation. The guardian (wasī) was in charge of all legal matters for the individual and was charged with caring for them. As Dols states, “guardianship is considered to be a religious duty and can only be declined for important reasons approved by the qādī” (Dols 1992: 441). In Islamic law, then, there was again a sense of community and care, but also a focus on maintaining the rule of law and protecting property. This preoccupation with property ownership shows up again in examinations to determine mental ability. Determining idiocy and lunacy took the form of examinations in Renaissance England, focusing mainly on intelligence, orientation, and reasoning (Neugebauer 1996: 28). Questioning explored whether the individual was actually disabled and, if so, when the disability occurred and if it was permanent, whether the individual held property, and whether the individual had an heir (Neugebauer 1996: 28). As the Renaissance period progressed, inquisitions evolved to include literacy tests and questioning of habits, and they saw an increased interest in the individual’s capability with finances. As Neugebauer points out: At his examination in 1615, Thomas Pope was said to have been “very well able to discern and know the difference of all pieces of silver of the Queen’s coin and the perfect value of them from xiid to an half penny.” Similarly, the commissioners who examined the alleged idiot German Bradshaw in 1597 reported that he “numbered 20 forwards and backwards and counted money and divided and discerned the same.” (Neugebauer 1996: 28) Elizabeth M. Mellyn similarly discusses cases involving intellectually disabled people in Florence and the ways in which many cases focused on financial incompetence as a sign of intellectual disability. While the cases Mellyn discusses dealt more with individuals deemed as lunatics, there was a similar ideal in Europe at this time tying mental capacity (whether of an idiot, fool, or lunatic) with fiscal capacity. Where Neugebauer and Mellyn focus primarily on legal apparatuses surrounding the care of upper-class individuals with intellectual disabilities, Jonathan Andrews explores the care given to lower-class individuals. Andrews uses parish records to explore the ways communities cared for impoverished individuals deemed either insane or idiotic. Like many upper-class individuals with intellectual disabilities, guardianship of lower-class people with disabilities was usually given to family members. For those cared for by the parish, temporary nurses were often provided for minors and, depending on the nature of the individual’s disability, permanent nurses were available as well. These nurses tended to be women and also cared for children, the ill, and the elderly (Andrews 1996: 82). For those of lower class, care for these individuals still saw an emphasis on economic means, with the parish providing payment for clothing, food, cleaning, and burial. Indeed, parish records primarily recorded expenditures for care (Andrews 1996: 83). The English legal system also provided a framework for criminal charges against idiots and the insane. Lord Chief Justice of England Sir Matthew Hale wrote in depth about

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how and whether someone with intellectual disabilities could be tried criminally (Walker 1968: 35). Hale discussed idiocy as well as “‘fatuitas a nativitate’ (stupidity from birth) and ‘dementia naturalis’ (in-born witlessness),” and also saw the deaf and dumb as idiots under law unless they “could be shown to have ‘understanding’” (Walker 1968: 36–7). While idiots and lunatics could be brought to trial in England, this often depended on whether their disability was thought to be permanent at the time of the criminal act and at the time of the trial. If someone was thought to be a natural born fool or had suffered an accident that had disabled them intellectually, they likely would be acquitted. However, for those seen as lunatics, criminal charges depended on whether the person experienced periods of lucidity. If someone committed a crime while sane but went through a period of insanity during the trial, they would be held until they were again lucid. While Hale saw insanity as a valid defense, he did suggest the need for proving the mental state of the accused via a jury to avoid criminals faking madness to avoid trial. If the person in question was not of sound mind during the crime and trial, then Hale argued for a full pardoning (Walker 1968: 221–2).

7.5. EDUCATION As previously discussed, approaches to education in the Renaissance period overlapped with religious thought. Religious figures were often tutors and instructors, and in many places the Church influenced curricula. For many, the Church was the only institution in which they could participate in education, outside of labor training. While the Church afforded certain populations access to institutions of education, namely grammar school and university, they also educated the masses socially, using memory and gesture to help express proper identity formation to the congregation. Evelyn Tribble and Nicholas Keene use extended mind theory and distributed cognition to chart the ways in which memory, education, and religion intersected in the Renaissance (Tribble and Keene 2011). While their work does not focus specifically on disability, the ways in which they discuss memory can be illuminating, especially since memory seems to be a flash point for diagnosing idiocy. As previously discussed, the ability to remember and recall personal, fiscal, and societal information was frequently tested in order to determine whether an individual could be legally considered a fool. It is therefore vital to understand how memory functioned within educational and religious spheres in the period. Tribble and Keene do this by utilizing the theory of cognitive ecologies: an ecological approach such as this has the capacity to bridge the divide between individual, psychologically situated accounts of memory, which tend to view cultural and social elements as “interference,” and culturally oriented accounts, which privilege the social but often have an attenuated account of the internal mechanisms underlying memory. (Tribble and Keene 2011: 13) Here, memory and cognition function as a part of a historically situated system. If one is always reacting to environmental and social alterations cognitively, learning difficulties must always be in flux as well. As one part of the ecology shifts, the rest must shift with it and might, in reaction, create new pitfalls. Similarly, each cognitive ecology can result in different cognitive difficulties and disabilities. As Tribble and Keene point out, the Reformation caused a massive cognitive shift in Europe and forced people to adapt to new ways of learning, remembering, and worshipping: the Reformation “attempted to establish a new cognitive ecology based

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upon reordering of mnemonic and attentional priorities” and “the new divisions of the distribution of cognitive tasks among individual worshipper, priest, and the social and material surround” (Tribble and Keene 2011: 13). Catechism and the Book of Common Prayer helped foster this shift, emphasizing the ability to memorize scripture in order to then follow religious doctrine and lead a moral life. This was put in opposition, of course, to the common claim that Catholicism only utilized “mindless” repetition. This emphasis on the worshipper’s ability to memorize, however, might have resulted in solidifying the exclusion of specific individuals from worship and education. If the Reformation privileged the ability of the individual to memorize, recall, and enact scripture, then the inability to do so was a kind of learning disability in the realms of both education and religion. Education in this period served to help cultivate social and religious identity. While there was an opening up of access to the middle classes due to urbanization and increases in trade, most grammar schools and universities were still designated for middle- to upper-class men. Education, as a system, was exclusionary and at times helped to create the social learning difficulties discussed in this chapter. While some grammar schools in the period provided tuition subsidies and at times covered costs for educational materials, most still charged for admission (Green 2009: 60–4). The economic aspect of education at the time cut off large parts of the population from receiving education outside of the church, in part helping to create the common stereotype that lower-class people, women, and people of color were in their nature more foolish or idiotic. For those who were, by birth, allowed to access education, an inability to achieve their expected intelligence level and social role became a type of learning difficulty. As others have pointed out, the wealthy male who failed to take on his presupposed social place or failed to properly care for his affairs is seen as a kind of idiot (Rushton 1996: 49; Goodey 2011: 138). A breakdown in pedagogical, social, or religious learning could result in the legal ramifications discussed earlier in this chapter, leading to the seizure of lands. Women’s education in the period was, of course, classed. While upper-class and noble women were able to access tutors, the same was not true for women of the lower classes. While most women were barred from educational institutions in England, there were countries where women were allowed access. Elizabeth Teresa Howe has investigated women’s education in the Hispanic world during the Renaissance, discussing De Institutione Feminae Christianae by Juan Luis Vives, which focuses on the difference between educating a monarch who is female and educating women. For Vives, “in a woman, no one requires eloquence or talent or wisdom or professional skills or administration of the republic or justice or generosity; no one asks for anything of her but chastity. If that one thing is missing, it is as if all were lacking to a man” (Howe 2008: 101). While Vives did advocate for teaching women certain subjects, most of these center around the domestic sphere, unless a student was particularly gifted and, in such cases, the tutor should be male. Even when educating women, women were not allowed to take up the role of tutor (Howe 2008: 102). Even as Hispanic countries began creating educational institutions for women, the emphasis on chastity and appropriate feminine social behavior remained. Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros founded an institution for girls in Spain in the early sixteenth century, focusing primarily on girls and women in poverty: “observing that women were driven by poverty and hunger to prostitution while others were forced into convents by family members for economic reasons, Cisneros determined to remedy the situation for both groups through the foundation of a unique double institution” (Howe 2008: 105).

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Similarly, multiple schools in Madrid were created for girls throughout the sixteenth century (Howe 2008: 109). While these schools did intend to support girls and women in lower classes, the requirements still hinged upon religious and social expectations. Early modern education, across regions, aimed to create learned and moral citizens and worshippers. Because of this, those who were unable or unwilling to worship or act in socially acceptable ways were considered lesser, often marked as idiots or fools and, at times, marked as dangerous and inhuman. Disability discourses were mobilized in the period to assert power over specific populations. Language used to describe individuals with actual intellectual disabilities was applied to those in the lower classes, women, and people of color. These discourses often focused on childlike or animalistic qualities in these groups, emphasizing perceived mental capacity or the lack thereof. Discourses of mental ability allowed traditionally powerful populations (namely upper-class, white Europeans) to brand more vulnerable populations as lesser, allowing for economic suppression both in Europe and abroad. For the final sections of this chapter, I will look at how these discourses were mobilized in colonial, social, and religious discourses in the period, and I will explore how these discourses then presented themselves on the English stage in The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest.

7.6. LOWER CLASS For the lower classes, particularly those outside of urban spaces, foolishness became a class identifier. This can be seen in Thomas Willis’s De Anima Brutorum, in which Willis distinguished between “connate” and “congenite” fools, or rather, hereditary and accidental fools. The “connate” fool often came from the country and their foolishness lay in the texture of their brain, rather than brain function. As C. F. Goodey has argued, for Willis, the internal nature of the “connate” fool “is an indicator of their class stupidity, that of country people beyond the honour society and the learned doctor’s professional remit” (Goodey 2011: 242). People of the lower classes who resided in the country were particularly seen as foolish, regardless of any actual disability. For some, the country was a disabling space, a place where one could actively lose mental ability: “failure to perform was also identified in faculty psychology terms, with the countryside. Country people’s faculties were dulled by nature” (Goodey 2011: 137). Those born in the country were then almost automatically seen as having a lesser mental ability, simply because of their social class and their geographic location. The lower classes were also associated with alcoholism, a stigma that can be seen on the Renaissance stage and one that has continued into the modern era. In the period, alcohol ingestion was seen as potentially debilitating. Hale distinguished a third type of stupidity, in addition to the stultitia and fatuus discussed earlier in the chapter. This third type, dementia affectata, stemmed from the notion that alcohol could alter mental ability. For Hale, “if heavy drinking had caused “an habitual or fixed phrenzy” he should be treated by law as if he were involuntarily contracted” (Walker 1968: 39). Similarly, European representations of drunkards often referenced humoral theory, alluding to alcohol’s ability to directly alter the balance of the brain (Lederer 2006: 38). The notion of alcohol as debilitating was present outside of Christian Europe in this period as well. Islamic thought in the period saw alcoholism as an addiction that can disable: “drunkenness is a state that afflicts a man with the filling of his brain with vapors that

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rise up into it, so that his reason, which distinguishes between fine things and foul, ceases to function” (Dols 1992: 105). Here, the effect of alcohol on the brain was again tied to humoral imbalance, directly affecting the ability of the person to reason properly. One of the most direct examples of representations of the foolishness and drunkenness tied to the lower classes, particularly lower-class men, can be found in Shakespeare’s early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew. The character Christopher Sly, usually excised in performance, is in fact a key character in the text of The Taming of the Shrew. Sly, a lower-class drunkard, begins the play fighting with the hostess of an inn over bottles Sly has destroyed in his drunken state. As the hostess leaves to fetch the authorities, Sly passes out. After stumbling upon him in this state, a lord and his party decide to play a trick on him. The party refers to Sly as “drunken man” (1.1.34), “swine” (1.1.32), “simple peasant” (ind.1.134), and “beggar” (1.1.39), highlighting his drunken state and using beastly imagery to describe his body and his class. The party also comments that Sly is “warmed with ale” (1.1.30), referring to his outwardly drunken state as well as the thought that alcohol warms the brain and causes a humoral imbalance. Already, Sly’s drunkenness and class are discussed in terms of mental ability. The party continues, stating that they should “balm his foul head in warm distillèd waters” (1.1.46), perhaps referring to the common practice of using water and temperature to help balance humors in the head. Because he is not only of a lower class, but also a drunkard and therefore a type of fool, the party believe they can trick him into forgetting who he is, and they succeed in doing so. When planning the trick, they mimic typical examination questioning, as I discussed earlier in the chapter, saying that they will ask him about his apparel and about his daily life (1.1.158–60). The lord goes so far as to explicitly state that they will “persuade him that he hath been lunatic” (1.1.61). While here the focus is on lunacy rather than idiocy, later on in the scene the lord and a player do reference “veriest antic” (1.1.100), which is tied more to foolishness, and the lord describes Sly to the player as having “odd behavior” (1.1.94). When Sly awakes, he accuses the party of trying to “make me mad” and states his name before listing his professions (ind.2.16–19). These professions, “cardmaker,” “bearherd,” and “tinker” (ind.2.18–19), reassert Sly’s lower class as well as his proclivity for alcohol, since “tinker” was a colloquial term for drinker. The lord does eventually convince him that he has been in a “strange lunacy” (ind.2.27), tying to the notion that some intellectual disabilities like lunacy are not permanent, and he convinces him that they are all happy to “see your wit restored” (ind.2.75). Wit is of course tied to reason and intelligence, suggesting that, in the fictional world of the trick, Sly did not possess his reason, but now does. By convincing him he has had a period of lunacy, the lord, in a way, produces an actual state of confusion and even lunacy for Sly, one that never quite leaves. Perhaps the most important portion of the induction scenes occurs when the lord introduces the play to Sly. Because Sly’s state has altered his blood and caused a “frenzy,” the players will put on a comedy to “frame” his “mind to mirth and merriment,” which will hopefully help balance the humoral excess in his brain (ind.2.129–34). The induction scene then frames the entirety of the play as a cruel joke played on a “simple peasant” and “drunkard.” The party believes they can trick Sly into thinking he has had a fit of lunacy because they believe him to already be an idiot. This trick, which is rooted in intellectual discourses and humoral theory, frames the entire play. As I will discuss in the next section, discourses of humoral theory, manipulation, and mental ability carry over into the play within in a play that is often staged as The Taming of

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The Shrew, and these are mobilized against Katherine. In order to “cure” the fictional imbalance in Sly’s brain, the players must depict the violent “curing” of Katherine’s perceived humoral and mental imbalances.

7.7. WOMEN In his discussion of Renaissance societies, C. F. Goodey argues that, in this period, the line between those with actual intellectual disabilities and those outside of the honor society was shakier than it is now. This is why women, people of color, and those in the lower classes were often described as idiots or fools, without being either (Goodey 2011: 125). While women as a population did not have intellectual disabilities in the modern sense, many Renaissance cultures perceived them as having a lesser capacity for intelligence and reasoning, and their humoral balances and nervous systems were thought to be different from those of men (McDonagh 2008: 110). Because of this, women were seen as being naturally foolish and inconstant. They were not fully capable mentally, and therefore needed men to guide them and protect them. This reasoning helped keep women out of many educational institutions. The natural foolishness of women caused anxieties over childbirth, nursing, and childrearing. Some doctors believed foolishness could be passed through parentage or learning. This anxiety tied to others in the period over the ways race, intelligence, ability, and gender might be spread through nursing. Not only did men have to worry about a mother potentially passing on foolishness through lineage and nursing, they also had to worry about any wet nurse that nursed the child (Howe 2008: 102). As McDonagh points out, “child-raising, that most fundamental of traditional female responsibilities, was not exempt from concerns that it was dominated by the ignorant and unlearned” (McDonagh 2008: 109). This is one reason tutors in the period tended to be male, though most caretakers of fools, idiots, and the ill were women. The Taming of the Shrew, as a play, is preoccupied with education and correction. As discussed in the previous section, the play is framed by a trick hinging on correcting a fool’s humoral disposition. The play within the play, which is most commonly produced as The Taming of The Shrew, focuses on the education of two daughters, Bianca and Katherine. In order to woo Bianca, male characters take up the guise of tutor: Lucentio “will be schoolmaster/and undertake the teaching of the maid” (1.1.189–90) and Hortensio will dress as a schoolmaster in music to “have leave and leisure to make love to her / and unsuspected court her by herself” (1.2.134–5). Neither Lucentio nor Hortensio are tutors and neither can actually instruct Bianca in the subjects they espouse. Rather, this guise of tutelage is simply a means of gaining access to her personal space, in the hopes of wooing her and gaining her hand in marriage. Education, here, is equated with intimacy and a deceitful form of seduction. This wooing, however, is contingent on another form of tutelage for Katherine. Because their father has declared Bianca cannot marry before her sister Katherine, the men in the play create a scheme to marry off the supposedly hellish shrew. While the two men pretend to tutor one sister, they find another man for the other, though Petruchio means to correct Katherine’s social behavior through inherently violent means. Before Petruchio meets Katherine, she is described by Hortensio as being “intolerable curst/and shrewd and froward” (1.2.88–9), and as famous for “her scolding tongue” (1.2.99). She is seen not only as loud and annoying, but also as a figure that disrupts

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patriarchal power by refusing to respect or marry men. Petruchio is not intimidated, and claims that he will be able to not only handle her, but also tame her: “I will board her though she chide as loud / as thunder when the clouds in autumn crack” (1.2.94–5). Before meeting her, Petruchio has decided on using violence as a corrective in Katherine’s education on acceptable social and gender behavior. While fools are referenced throughout the play in regard to both Katherine and Petruchio, Katherine is at first described as mad. Tranio exclaims that she is “stark mad or wonderful froward” (1.1.69) and needs to be married off so that her father can “rid the house of her” (1.1.142–3). When her father, Baptista, asks Gremio and Hortensio if they would marry her, Gremio responds with “to cart her rather, she’s too rough for me” (1.1.55). Rather than marriage, Gremio offers to publicly humiliate, abuse, and correct Katherine by driving her through the streets. This punishment is in the same vein as public punishments for scolds in the period, and Petruchio does refer to Katherine as a “brawling scold” (1.2.185). In Renaissance England, scolds or shrews, figures who behaved outside of accepted social norms, were often punished publicly, dunked in water via a trebuchet. As Nigel Walker discusses in Crime and Insanity in England, this form of social punishment was also in line with water immersion as a “traditional form of treatment for the insane” (Walker 1968: 48). Public humiliation and punishment, both in Renaissance European life and in drama, at times functioned as an educational and medical curative. Petruchio picks up Gremio’s language of punishment and continues it throughout the play. He claims that he is “born to tame” her from “a wild Kate to a Kate / conformable as other household Kates” (2.1.277–9). Characters in the play acknowledge that Petruchio is violent and somehow worse than Katherine, stating that compared to him, she is an innocent fool: “she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool to him” (3.2.155). Though people are aware he is violent, they still allow Katherine to marry him as a way to solve the “problem” she poses in their community. Petruchio uses inherently violent and medical means to tame Katherine, withholding sleep and food from her in order to “curb her mad and headstrong humor” (4.1.199). Katherine’s shrewishness is tied to her humoral makeup, something that is seen to be unbalanced and therefore in need of correcting. Petruchio is often described as frantic and mad, but his disposition is instead seen to be mimicking Katherine’s in an attempt to tame her. In addition, Peter claims that Petruchio “kills her in her own humor” (4.1.170), referencing their similar humoral imbalances, while at the same time referencing the violence that Petruchio is inflicting upon her. Nathaniel B. Smith has also analyzed the ways in which the play deals with humoral theory. For Smith, the play parodies the humors via speech acts, noting that “neither Katherine nor Sly undergo any humoral transformation over the course of the play; their shifts in speech and behavior are parodic and performative” (Smith 2014: 198). While characters acknowledge this physical and linguistic violence, Petruchio’s methods seem to be deemed acceptable, so much so that Tranio describes Petruchio as the master of a taming school “that teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long/to tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue” (4.2.57–8). Whether Katherine truly gives in to Petruchio depends on each performance, but in the text, she does respond to his taming. While I agree that the violence inherent in The Taming of the Shrew is both linguistic and physical, I am not convinced that Katherine has, as Smith states, “fashioned her own version of homeopathy that attempts to heal—or at least to tame— Petruccio by giving him a potent dose of his own misogynistic rhetoric” (Smith 2014:

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205). By the end of the play, Katherine is subdued and obedient to Petruchio. Her final speech, depending on the delivery, is dedicated to convincing other women in the play, and perhaps the audience, to obey their husbands. She states that she is “ashamed that women are so simple to/offer war where they should kneel for peace” (5.2.167–8), calls women “froward and unable worms” (5.2.175), and tells them to cease their willful natures (5.2.182). Katherine now describes women as “simple” and “unable,” and she references willfulness as a weakness, something to be curbed and halted. Petruchio’s use of violence has tamed and taught her. The play does not return to the framework with Sly and closes instead with the end of Katherine, with Hortensio and Lucentio discussing her taming. There is no end to the trick on Sly, just as there is no end to the trick on Katherine. The lack of framework resolution combined with the focus on humoral nature and taming produces a play that ultimately offers up violence as an educational and medical tool to cure, tame, and alter scolds, fools, and other figures who do not fit neatly into their expected role in society.

7.8. OTHERS The Renaissance period saw individuals in positions of power mobilizing the language and discourse of intellectual disability to rationalize asserting power over outgroups, including people of color. This discourse typically merged environmental, medical, and religious theories on the causes and effects of intellectual disability and was then applied to whole groups of people seen as lesser, whether they actually had intellectual disabilities or not. Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery was often used during this period as a way to rationalize conquest. For Aristotle, natural slaves were a category of man that did not have full control of their intellect or had not fully developed their intellect and lacked reason. This formulation posited the natural slave as being intelligent enough to follow orders but not intelligent enough to rule themselves. While this acknowledged the ability to comprehend and learn, it did not allow the individual to learn enough to free themselves from this category (Pagden 1987: 42). This tension between the capacity of natives and the need for colonists to rationalize conquest showed up frequently in the period. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra explores the ways in which Renaissance Spain used environmental and medical rationales to assert domination over the native inhabitants of the Americas. Colonists saw the Americas as a “humid, and thus emasculating” land, and one that was “ruled by those new, negative constellations that Europeans had recently discovered and charted in the Southern Hemisphere” (Cañizares Esguerra 1999: 37). Here, the environment of the New World, seen as both potentially dangerous and pleasurable, was used to create difference between colonizers and indigenous peoples, helping create the notion that native populations were inherently different from Europeans in their bodily makeup. The Spanish also used humoral medicine to explain not only why natives looked different from themselves, but also as a means of rationalizing conquest. The humid complexion of the native population “explained why they, like women and castrati, did not have beards and were passive, stupid, and Slothful” (Cañizares Esguerra 1999: 47) and why they were “slow-witted phlegmatics who needed to be forced to work” (Cañizares Esguerra 1999: 37). Again, medical terminology was used to paint an entire population as lesser intellectually than Europeans; the indigenous populations were seen as “slow-witted,” but not so intellectually disabled that they could not work. Colonizers forced labor onto the native population as a means of curing their “slowwitted” and “slothful” nature—physical labor and violence were framed by Europeans as

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curatives for slowness, both mental and physical. Depictions of race and mental ability were twisted to rationalize forcing entire populations to provide labor. Religion and particularly Christian conversion was also used to rationalize Spanish expansion in the New World. Patricia Seed charts the ways religion was deployed to question the capability and capacity of indigenous populations for conversion, noting that “what was most usually meant by the word ‘capacity,’ [capacidad] or ‘ability’ [habilidad] was the potential of the natives to become Christians”: capacity here seems to be the keyword when discussing mental capability in a Spanish, Catholic religious context (Seed 1993: 638–9). The capacity of native populations became a flashpoint for political and religious debate. If the native population was not capable of rational thought, as might be suggested by some humoral theories, then Spain did not have a stake in controlling the New World. However, if indigenous populations were capable of being converted, then Spain could gain control of the new world through Papal donation, given with the intent of converting these populations. The gap between these arguments hinges on mental capacity and the ability to learn: But if they were some sort of intermediate term—human but insane or mentally deficient, or perhaps belonging to one of the monstrous races of medieval legend— then there was the possibility, discussed at length by St Thomas and others, that they were men “lacking the use of reason” hence also “incapable.” These three positions, that the Indians were fully human (capable of Christianity) (having “rational souls”); or men lacking the use of reason (generally “incapable”); lacking capability altogether (“beasts”); were the central positions argued in the political debates over the natives’ “humanity” on Spanish political circles. (Seed 1993: 639) The perceived mental capacity of these populations—whether they were incapable of higher thought and therefore able to be enslaved or whether they were lacking reason but could be taught—directly impacted Spanish power in the Americas. While some populations converted, others were resistant. Rather than seeing this unwillingness to convert to Catholicism as a reinforcement of native peoples’ pride in their own culture and an act of resistance, the Spanish saw this as a lack of mental and learning capability: “If they refused or resisted the imposition of a new religion they were ‘more stupid than asses.’ If they merely mouthed its precepts while refusing to conform his behaviour to European expectations they were ‘like parrots’” (Seed 1993: 644). Religion was deployed as a curative force, something to be used by the colonizer to convert and to enlighten native populations, something to pull them out of their perceived ignorance. However, religion could not fully “crip” this population without education; in order for Spain and the Catholic Church to have a hold on the land and people of the Americas, then the native population must have some sort of intellectual disability, some perceived learning difficulty, but they could not be severely disabled because they must be able to be taught and converted. Discourses of learning, mental ability, religion, and race all converged in the New World to bolster European colonialism. In The Tempest, Prospero’s treatment of Miranda, Ariel, and particularly Caliban mimics many of the strategies used by Europeans in the Americas to convert and subjugate native populations. Prospero, the shipwrecked nobleman and magician, is deeply invested in his own brand of education. Act 1, Scene 2, the first with his daughter Miranda, is stocked with educational language. Prospero calls Miranda “ignorant” of her past (1.2.18), which he will “inform” her of further (1.2.23). He questions her memory (1.2.43), echoing the importance of memory recall in determining idiocy, and he consistently asks if she

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is listening to him: “I pray thee mark me” (1.2.68), “mark this condition and th’event” (1.2. 118), “hear a little further” (1.2.135). The repetition of “mark,” combined with his reference to himself as her “schoolmaster” (1.2.174), contextualizes their relationship as educational and familial and reinforces the importance of hearing and remembering in Renaissance education. This importance is underscored again when Ariel enters the scene. Where Prospero inquires into what Miranda might remember from her past, he cruelly orders Ariel to remember their own. He asks the spirit, “dost thou forget / from what a torment I did free thee?” (1.2.150–1), and then he repeats his question, “thou liest, malignant thing; hast thou forgot / the foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy / was grown into a hoop? Hast thou forgot her?” (1.2.258–60). While Prospero and Ariel’s relationship is not rooted in education, Prospero does utilize discourses of memory and education to manipulate and reassert power over the native inhabitants of the island. The second scene of the play goes even further into these discourses upon the arrival of Caliban, whom Prospero has enslaved. Before the audience sees Caliban, he is described as a “poisonous slave, got by the devil himself” (1.2.320–1). As the scene progresses, it is revealed that Prospero and Miranda attempted to teach Caliban at one point, though the relationships between them have clearly broken down. While Prospero plays the role of educator and master throughout the play, Miranda appears to be the one who tutored Caliban: Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill; I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing of other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race (Though thou didst learn) had that in’t which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock Who hadst deserved more than a prison. (1.2.353–63) Repeating the rhetoric of enslavement, Miranda claims that she attempted to educate Caliban out of pity. She claims that Caliban was incapable of knowing his own meaning and that he would “gabble like/a thing most brutish” (1.2.357–8). Here, Miranda is casting herself as the moral European educator, one who pities native populations for their perceived ignorance. She similarly echoes racial discourses of the time, referencing Caliban’s “vile race” (1.2.358), which renders him incapable of morality in her eyes and barred from properly receiving the endowment or gift of education she is attempting to bestow upon him. However, it is not Caliban’s inability to learn that causes the breakdown in the relationship, but rather his ability to do so without losing his own identity. As discussed previously, European colonizers trod a fine line between educating native populations enough to manipulate and control them and educating them too much. This anxiety is realized in Prospero and Miranda’s education of Caliban, leading him to be punished and imprisoned on his own island. Miranda and Prospero are not the only Europeans to treat Caliban as an idiot. Stephano and Trinculo, thinking Caliban is unintelligent, manipulate him into serving

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them. The two refer to Caliban as “a very shallow / monster” (2.2.141), “a very weak monster” (2.2.142), “a most perfidious and drunken / monster” (2.2.147–8), “a most scurvy monster” (2.2.152), “an abominable / monster” (2.2.155–6), and “a most ridiculous monster” (2.2.162–3). The repetition of “monster” as a qualifier for Caliban reinforces the beastly picture painted of him throughout the play, as well as the “otherness” of the native population. He is not simply an idiotic man, he is instead a shallow monster. The distinction allows for Europeans on the island, in this case Stephano and Trinculo, to take advantage of him with the aid of alcohol, just as the lords manipulate Sly in The Taming of the Shrew. Caliban acknowledges the trick they play on him by the end of play, exclaiming, “what a thrice-double ass / was I to take this drunkard for a god / and worship this dull fool” (5.1.296–8). He not only refers to himself as an ass for falling for their manipulations, but also relates the two to drunkards and fools, flipping their image of him back on them. The Tempest, as a play, is deeply engaged in discourses of ability, education, and power, and it offers depictions of how these discourses were spun and put onto native populations and others in the Renaissance period.

7.9. CONCLUSION Perceptions of people with intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance world were unstable. Medical thought, evolving from humoral theory, attempted to rationalize the ways in which intellectual disabilities occurred and why. These rationalizations often intersected with religious thought, seeking to understand the nature of those with disabilities. While Christian and Islamic thought focused on spiritual ability and whether disabled people were capable of sin and salvation, Jewish thought primarily focused on education and accessibility, and all three Abrahamic religions discussed how to care for people with disabilities. Still, religious thought did contribute to negative depictions of disabled people, allowing for these discourses to be picked up and wielded against minority populations and those without power. Women, the poor, people of color, and people with intellectual disabilities were often kept out of places of power and education, further cementing the stereotypes already placed upon them. If intelligence is a historically contingent construction, something that is always in flux, then intellectual disabilities must be as well. Going forward, I believe that Tribble and Keene’s work on cognitive ecologies can offer new ways for scholars to think about intellectual and learning disabilities in the period. Scholars also need to expand the ways in which we think through Renaissance conceptions of both people with disabilities and those who have been “cripped” for ideological purposes, and how those conceptions might overlap with twenty-first-century ideologies. Finally, current and future productions of Renaissance plays must be more attentive to depictions of disability on stage and how those depictions might affect a variety of audiences.

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Mental Health Issues Madness in the Renaissance SONYA FREEMAN LOFTIS “To be mad what is it but to be anything other than mad?” —Polonius, Shakespeare’s Hamlet “The tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms.” —Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy The two epigraphs above suggest some of the paradoxical troubles inherent in defining madness in the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s bumbling politician, Polonius, asserts that when one is mad, it is self-evident: he claims that madness is a state that is clearly not in need of further explanation. I need not outline the obvious problems with such an interpretation, although it seems all too common among my students of Renaissance literature even today (my students often claim that if a Shakespearean character is “mad” then we need not look further for explanation of their behavior, for in the face of madness, there need be no logic, rationality, or explanation). It is an inherently ableist assumption, of course, to imagine that madness has no stories of its own, no explanations or rationalities to tell.1 Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy offers an opposing definition of madness, but one that may have the same interpretive end result—like Shakespeare’s Polonius, Burton finds madness difficult to define. Madness is hard to explain, Burton claims, primarily because of its plethora of potential meanings: Renaissance melancholy is a veritable chaos of symptoms. Ironically, both speakers deem madness “unreadable” for opposite reasons—Polonius because of mental disability’s imagined deficit and Burton because of mental disability’s imagined excess. In either case, madness is presented as something beyond the (presumed normate) viewer’s interpretive skills.2 Indeed, an explanatory paradox in which mental disability symbolically oscillates between deficit and excess, rendered “unreadable” at either extreme, is a stereotype of mental disability that has endured from the Renaissance world and into the modern one.3 This chapter explores perceptions of and stereotypes about early modern mental disability (some are stereotypes that have long since vanished from modern discourses of disability, while others have continued into our contemporary moment), with a particular focus on the Renaissance’s interest in melancholy figures as symbols of madness. The chapter goes on to explore the perceived relationship between mental disability and the supernatural during this time period, demonstrating the complexity of the various models of disability evident in Renaissance understandings of madness. Concluding with an examination of “Bethlem” Hospital, my discussion ends by addressing diagnostic practices and treatments used during the early modern era.

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8.1. TERMINOLOGY AND STEREOTYPES: EARLY MODERN DISCOURSES OF MENTAL DISABILITY The terms that early modern people used to describe mental disability were often inherently ableist, vague, and ill-defined, and they were very different from the terms used today.4 Indeed, these differences in terminology reflect the early modern era’s very different approach to thinking about mental disability. Those who were perceived to have mental disabilities were usually divided into two broad categories: the medical regulations of the times (such as they were) attempted to distinguish between “idiots” or “fools” who had lifelong intellectual disabilities and were generally considered to be “incurable” and those who were variously described as “mad,” “distracted,” or “lunatic,” with the latter group generally believed to have a mental condition that was both temporary and potentially curable. What records remain to us are sketchy: we can learn what people of the Renaissance thought about those who were described as “mad,” “distracted,” or “lunatic” primarily by looking at the records of Bethlem (St. Mary of Bethlehem) Hospital, an institution that came to specialize in the care of those with mental disabilities during this era; by examining the records of physician Richard Napier (1559–1634), a doctor who traveled throughout England treating those with mental disabilities; and through reading the literature of the time (fictional prose, plays, and poems on the topic), which displayed an unusual preoccupation with mad subjects. None of these documents can ever give us a complete or definitive record of madness in the Renaissance, and some of these records are the subject of extensive historical dispute—occasionally, what records remain regarding the lives of mad folk during this era raise more questions than they answer. Indeed, of the various terms used during the Renaissance to describe what might today be termed “mental disability,” “psychosocial disability,” or “mental illness,” “mad” was neither the most frequently used nor the most clearly defined. As Carol Thomas Neely explains, “‘madness’ is not a unified or especially validated term during the Renaissance; it is only one (not particularly common) word among the many that denote mental distress” (2004: 1). In this time period, the term “mad” could refer to “almost any excessive expression of emotion: anger, especially, but also lust, jealousy, folly, stupidity. ‘Madness’ can also name extreme forms of mental distress,” and it is a term less well defined and specific than other terms in use during the time period, such as “melancholy” or “mopish” (Neely 2004: 3). I have chosen to use the term “madness” as the primary term in this chapter in part because the word’s long history draws a (perhaps anachronistic, perhaps politically necessary) connection between the modern mad pride movement and those with mental disabilities in the early modern period: it is one of the few terms in use to describe mental disability in the Renaissance that is still in use (and used in a recognizably similar way) in modern discussions of disability identity. It is important to note, however, that comparisons between the term’s disparate meanings during the 2000s and the 1500s and 1600s could easily lead us to the wrong conclusions. One primary difference between early modern conceptions of the term “mad” and modern uses of the word is that the word in its early modern context does not necessarily imply a social identity. Madness circa 1450–1650 was regarded as a temporary state of mental disability from which one might recover. The modern era has given birth to the notion that mental difference is difference—a difference in neurology or genetics or brain makeup from which one is not expected to be “cured” (and from which some groups, such as many involved in the modern neurodiversity movement, do not desire to be “cured”).5 In the Renaissance, madness was a temporary disability that could (presumably) happen to anyone: it was not generally considered a permanent state of

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being (let alone a lifelong identity), and there seems to have been no widespread sense that one might be born predisposed to madness. As Michael MacDonald explains, the Renaissance held “the prevailing view that every person harbored passions that could overthrow the balance of his mind if they were aroused to too high a pitch” (1981: 150). This is, of course, extremely different from some contemporary notions about disability and identity and fundamental brain differences. In fact, the shift to thinking of those with mental differences as somehow fundamentally different (and thus to regarding madness as a generally lifelong and “incurable” state) may not have arisen until the 1700s, with the advent of terms such as “insane” (Neely 2004: 4) (Figure 8.1). The term “insane” (“from the Latin root in-sanus not sound, not healthy, not curable”) was not in frequent use until the 1700s and 1800s (Neely 2004: 4). As Neely argues, the very use of the term “insane” suggests a shift in thinking about the nature of madness: a potential shift from the belief that madness is a curable phenomenon that can happen to anyone—an excess of “natural” human emotion—to an incurable difference that only happens to certain kinds of people—a group of people who throughout the 1700s and 1800s might be regarded as less rather than more human than their contemporaries (2004: 4). This is not to suggest that mad people during the Renaissance were never dehumanized by their communities or caregivers. As Margaret Price points out, “Aristotle’s famous declaration that man is a rational animal gave rise to centuries of insistence that to be named mad was to lose one’s personhood” (2011: 9). Stereotypes that equated madness with violence and that regarded mad people as wild or animal-like had been common from classical Antiquity and were certainly attitudes that had been inherited by the Renaissance. In addition to the very vaguely defined term “madness,” many other terms were used during the Renaissance to describe what were then regarded as temporary mental impairments. The most frequently used terms of the time period include “lunatic,” “distracted,” “troubled in mind,” “melancholy,” “mopish,” and “lightheaded” (MacDonald 1981: 115–16). In general, “lunatic,” “distracted,” “troubled in mind,” and “mad” were terms used to describe more severe conditions than “melancholy,”  “mopish,” or “light-headed,” although the early modern era’s use of diagnostic terms was extremely imprecise and such terms were sometimes used interchangeably. It is also important to note that these diagnostic terms (and the stereotypes they implied) were not strictly limited to Renaissance England: many of these types of madness were adapted from familiar forms in classical sources and had parallels throughout European texts—there was a fair amount of consistency in early modern thinking about madness throughout Northern and Western Europe (164). The history of terms such as “lunatic” and “melancholy” was complicated by a variety of factors, as their origins often combined supernatural mythologies and the medical beliefs of the day. For example, lunatics were believed to be influenced by the moon and to be “mad” only at certain times of the month: early modern physicians posited that “lunatics’ brains traveled to the top of the skull as the moon waxed, and descended when it waned, which prevented their reason from controlling their emotions or bodily urges” (Iyengar 2014). The term “melancholy” combined both medical and supernatural explanations for disability, as melancholy was believed to be caused by a humoral imbalance (a medical explanation), but also to be bound up with the sin  of  despair (a supernatural/spiritual explanation). The more “severe” conditions (“lunatic,” “distracted,” “troubled in mind,” and “mad”) were often thought of in terms of either criminality or illness and were imagined to adhere

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FIGURE 8.1  Title page of H. M. Herwig, The Art of Curing Sympathetically (1700). By permission of the British Library.

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to a set of stereotypes that aligned mad folk with one of these two groups (MacDonald 1981: 120). These two dominating stereotypes are not surprising given the historical facts. First, it seems relevant that Bridewell Prison was overseen during the Renaissance by the same board that managed Bethlem Hospital: often, someone who would later be confined to Bethlem was initially brought before the Bridewell board for committing a criminal act (Allderidge 1979: 145). Indeed, there was not really a clear demarcation during this time period between what constituted a “hospital” and what constituted a “prison”; Bridewell Prison originally worked in some capacity as both orphanage and hospital (Allderidge 1979: 145). Consequently, those housed at Bethlem were described as “prisoners” during this era, as though little distinction was made between the inmates at Bridewell and the “prisoners” at Bethlem (151). As MacDonald explains, Legal rules that originated in the Middle Ages identified lunatics as a special class of criminal: together with infants and idiots, they enjoyed immunity from the usual savage penalties for crime. Michael Dalton, in his standard handbook for justices of the peace, emphasized the point in his remarks about murderers: “If one that is non compos mentis, or an idiot, kill a man, this is no felony … Now there be three sorts of persons accounted non compos mentis to this purpose and the like 1. A fool natural … 2. He who was once of good and sound memory and after (by sickness, hurt, or other accident or visitation of God) loseth his memory 3. A lunatic … and is sometimes of good understanding and sometimes is non compos mentis.” (1981: 123–4) In other words, madness was bound to criminality in the popular imagination for multiple reasons: both because of the manner of Bethlem’s governance and because of longstanding legal rules. When mad folk were not equated with criminals, they were often compared to those who were physically ill. Physicians during this time period did not have a way to accurately determine a patient’s temperature: thus, the disorientation and confusion of those with a mortal fever might be difficult to distinguish from the beginnings of “madness” (147). Thus, the concept of “mental illness” as “illness” had logical origins in the inability of early modern physicians to easily distinguish between mental conditions and physical sickness (147). In this way, it was natural that those who were mad or “distracted” might be compared to either criminals or those who were physically ill—such stereotypes arose naturally from the historical circumstances surrounding the inherent complications of early modern diagnosis and treatment. Another common stereotype of madness during the time period emphasized the dress of supposed mad men and women; this stereotype, too, is unsurprising, given the era’s intense focus on costuming and dress as symbols of social status (MacDonald 1981: 131). During the Renaissance, mad people were reputed to tear their own clothing or to refuse to wear any. Clothing during this time period was much more costly than it is today (in terms of either money or labor—especially for common folk), and those who damaged their own garments might be perceived as both extremely unreasonable and self-destructively unthrifty (130). This emphasis on the mad man’s nudity, or on the destruction of his clothing, was not merely a figment of the literary imagination (e.g. think of King Lear’s “answer with thy uncover’d body this extremity of the skies” (1605: 3.4.108–9)): Richard Napier’s records show that thirty-three of his patients had disordered dress, destroyed their clothing, or refused to wear clothing (131). This emphasis on dress (or the lack thereof) as a sign of madness is perhaps a reflection of the Renaissance’s intense interest in social costuming in general: in an era of sumptuary laws and regulations, a man’s social status was linked to his clothing (131). People were

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most likely to be sent to Bethlem rather than Bridewell when their crimes seemed selfdestructive or irrational: in the Renaissance mind, destroying one’s own clothing might be seen as the ultimate symbol of both, since dress was so closely linked to social status (129). Thus, although “Nakedness was included among the symptoms of mania in ancient and medieval times … early modern Englishmen were uniquely concerned about the expressive possibilities of costume and altered and rehabilitated old ideas about the psychological language of dress” (129). Indeed, while those who were mad might be imagined or depicted as completely naked, melancholy figures were often painted in black clothing: “These sad, gloomy people are easily recognized … for they wander around in black, their clothes untidy and negligent, their arms folded, their hats flopping down over their eyes” (Roy Strong quoted in MacDonald 1981: 130). Thus, the strong belief that one’s psychological state could be understood by reading one’s dress was one common stereotype of madness in the Renaissance, and it was frequently applied to a variety of subtypes of madness.

8.2. THE CULTURAL CULT OF MELANCHOLY The less “severe” forms of madness during the time period were frequently described using terms such as “melancholy,” “mopish,” or “light-headed,” and each of these categories had a particular set of behaviors and stereotypes associated with it. In general, these “milder” forms of madness were thought to include symptoms such as emotional distress, physical inactivity, and delusions and/or disorientation (MacDonald 1981: 120). The primary symptoms associated with being “light-headed” were rapid and confused speech (142). While melancholy and mopishness were considered related conditions, melancholy people were thought to be especially likely to experience bizarre delusions (142). Renaissance texts often relate stories of bizarre delusions for humorous effect: for example, Tomaso Garzoni’s tale of the man “who beleeving verily that he was a graine of mustard seede, cast himselfe into a great barrell of made mustarde which a chandler had set before his shoppe dore, endamnifying this poore man to the value of eight or ten ducates, who woulde never have beleeved such a thing” (Garzoni D2r). Melancholy, in particular, was a condition that was a special source of fascination in the Renaissance: depictions of melancholy subjects were popular in art and literature. Although melancholy could take many forms, it was commonly associated with “excessive sorrow or lethargy,” and melancholics were often “fearful and sad, for no apparent reason” (Iyengar 2014). One Renaissance medical treatise describes Melancholy as a Delirium joyned with fear, sadness or sorrow without a manifest Cause, and without a Fever, and it is either a deprivation of the Imagination and Rationcination, arising from a Melanchollick Phantasm, by which he is detained in his thought by one Cogitation without a furious anger and a Fever, with sadness and fear; the original of this Disease dependeth upon a certain disposition of the Animal Spirits produced from the mixtion of a Melancholly Humour, to which there follows the sad dark Phantasms, which afterwards rouling the Objects to the Intellect, do stir up this doting and anguish of Mind. (A. B. 1674: M4r-M4v). The signs of melancholy also had some similarities to modern definitions of clinical depression, as melancholy individuals might no longer take pleasure in activities they once enjoyed (Iyengar 2014). Stereotypes about melancholy individuals abounded during

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the period: melancholics were thought to be contemplative, obsessive, and more open to demonic possession and encounters with ghosts (Sedlmayr 2009: 35). While early modern people perceived melancholy as a possible source of mental disability, they also saw it as a source of potential intellectual gifts (Loftis and Ulevich 2014: 60). Early modern stereotypes dictated that melancholy people were intelligent, artistic, and sometimes even particularly wise or prophetic (Neely 2004: 13; Sedlmayr 2009: 42). As Neely points out, “the melancholy constitution creates its own ‘superior’ norms … melancholics are posed between illness and heroic achievement” (2004: 13). The melancholy stereotypes of the Renaissance could be seen as paralleling the savant stereotype so frequently applied to people with mental disabilities in the modern era (Loftis and Ulevich 2014: 60). The “exotic” skills of the modern savant help normate audiences to feel more comfortable with the concept of mental disability: the savant stereotype supports what Stuart Murray calls the “compensation cure,” the belief that special skills in some areas “act to compensate for the disabilities with which they are associated” (2008: 209, 66). Murray’s “compensation cure” may parallel Renaissance conceptions of melancholy, since some might regard artistic ability or prophetic wisdom as “compensation” for melancholy’s potential mental impairments (Loftis and Ulevich 2014: 61). This melancholy “supercrip” also had classical roots; Aristotle had described melancholics as “a superior minority” (Neely 2004: 21). Indeed, “the late sixteenth century saw a fashion for affecting melancholy as a species of wit, since study could trigger the ailment and there was a Continental tradition of respecting learned and melancholic men” (Iyengar 2014). Thus, melancholy was a “popular” condition in the Renaissance because it was paradoxically a sign of both potential impairment and was also romanticized as a potential strength. Another reason for early modern England’s particular interest in melancholy was that it was considered to be especially “aristocratic” in nature. “Mopish” was a term used for milder versions of melancholy—and also the term used to describe lower-class people who displayed melancholy symptoms (MacDonald 1981: 161). Women were more likely to be described as “mopish” than men, and unlike (the predominately masculine) melancholy, it was considered to be a mental disability effecting primarily sensory perceptions rather than reason (MacDonald 1981: 162; Neely 2004: 4) Although the idleness of aristocrats (and aristocrats, of course, were expected to be idle) was seen as a cause of melancholy, idleness was cited as a symptom of “mopishness” among idle common folk: this double standard meant that aristocrats were more likely to be diagnosed with melancholy, while lower-class people were more likely to be described as “mopish” (MacDonald 1981: 162, 152). Literature of the time, such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), clearly influenced the way that physicians diagnosed mental illness based on social class: as Richard Napier’s notes reveal, 40 percent of his melancholy patients were of the nobility, and it seems likely that some nobles were selfdiagnosing during this era (MacDonald 1981: 152). Clearly, class influenced how one was diagnosed with mental disability in the Renaissance—much as gender, race, class, and sexuality can influence how one is diagnosed and treated (or not diagnosed and treated) today. Popular stereotypes about melancholy (it was high class, it could confer special skills) led to both cultural fascination with the subject and a broadening of the diagnosis itself, which eventually became very vague (164). In fact, The Anatomy of Melancholy presents melancholy (rather than lunacy) as the overarching term under which all other forms of madness could be folded (Neely 2004: 4). Melancholy’s defining feature,

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according to Burton, is its all-encompassing nature, for it is “irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse; you may as well make the moon a new coat as a true character of a melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air as the heart of a man, a melancholy man. They are so confused, I say, diverse, intermixed with other diseases.” Indeed, the increasing vagueness of melancholy’s definition throughout the era was not merely a factor of popular appeal or a reflection of literary depiction, but may have also been a political move on the part of early modern physicians (MacDonald 1981: 164). In an era in which a priest was as likely to be called to treat mental disability as a physician, physicians were eager to increase their control over the diagnosis and treatment of mental disabilities: Physicians encouraged the cult of melancholy. They neglected the empirical distinctions … in favor of a vague and confused medical vocabulary. Medical men made few empirically based attempts to improve the nosology of mental disorder before the middle of the eighteenth century. Their preference for the broadest possible application … stemmed in part from the realization that the popularity of melancholy among the educated elite fostered the belief that physicians were the best healers for the maladies of the mind. Doctors were not disinterested taxonomists. They were more concerned to suppress their lay and clerical rivals than to pressure the empirically useful aspects of popular psychology and religious healing. (164) In fact, the diagnosis of melancholy in the Renaissance may remind modern readers of disability theorists’ later observations that mental disability is a cultural construct—and one that is particularly bound up in rhetoric and text.6 The Anatomy of Melancholy, which later influenced physicians’ practices in diagnosing melancholy, became a cultural text in which, as in the modern Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), textual representation and discourse directly create the contours of mental disability itself. As Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic explain, “how experience is represented textually and how that representation is projected onto and via audiences are both central aspects of the experience itself. That is, the representation of disability does not exist separate from disability itself” (2010: 4). In sum, early modern melancholy was very much a rhetorical cultural construct. Melancholy (like many forms of early modern impairment or illness) was believed to be caused by unbalanced humors. Renaissance medical theory dictated that four fluids (blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile) governed the human body, and that a balance of these humors was needed to maintain good physical and mental health (Iyengar 2014). Melancholy, which was associated with an overabundance of black bile, was thus seen as evidence of a humoral imbalance within the body. Because even slight fluctuations in the humors could cause particular personalities to develop (e.g. one might have a melancholy temperament) and humors could shift within an individual for a variety of reasons, this created a medical system in which, in some sense, aberration was the potential norm: The normative states of flux and volatility that characterize early modern selfhood within humoral theory, further, center upon their involvement with a range of environmental stimuli—such as relative caloric and moisture registers—especially worthy of consideration in a disability context. Indeed, the very porousness by which humoral selves were conceived grants them what can best be understood as a receding horizon of normalcy. While the salubrious goal of individual health was an apparently rare humoral equipoise, such moments of humoral stasis were belied by the ostensible norms of humoral imbalance. (Hobgood and Wood 2013a: 12)

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Indeed, under the dictates of humoral theory, the term “melancholy” could be understood to have a variety of complex definitions: “Because the term refers to a material fluid, an emotional state, and a temperament, it acquires a host of meanings beyond its medical ones” (Neely 2004: 4). Not only was the understanding of mental conditions such as melancholy rendered complex by the multiple possibilities of humoral theory, but melancholy, like other forms of early modern madness, also overlapped in various ways with widespread early modern beliefs in supernatural forces. As Lindsey Row-Heyveld explains, early modern people may have understood cognitive difference “humorally, as the corporal result of ‘excess’ or ‘lack,’ both physical and moral” (2013: 78). That melancholy could be an emotional, physical, and “moral” problem leads the condition into the realm of Christian theology. The period between 1450 and 1650 witnessed a shift from supernatural ways of thinking about melancholy (and other forms of madness) to medical ways of thinking about melancholy (Iyengar 2014). Scholars have clearly established the strong predominance of supernatural understandings of disability during medieval times. Edward Wheatley describes this as “the religious model,” explaining that during the medieval era the church had power “over discourse related to disability in a manner analogous to the way modern medicine attempts to maintain control over it now” (2010: 9). However, the Renaissance began to see a gradual shift in control from a religious model to a proto-medical model: Alison Hobgood argues that “the early modern period witnessed neither an instantiation of new ‘modern’ ways of imagining disability nor a disavowal of old ‘premodern’ views but a far messier ‘working though’ of these variable perspectives” (2009). If anything, the slow shift between a religious and proto-medical model of disability that took place during the Renaissance was even more apparent in cultural conceptions of madness than it was in early modern understandings of physical disability. The conception of melancholy as a medical condition remained strongly influenced by religious beliefs: for example, a melancholy disposition was caused by a humoral imbalance, but it was believed to make one more likely to experience demonic possession and other encounters with the devil (Neely 2004: 14; Sedlmayr 2009: 39). Napier diagnosed seventeen of his patients with demonic possession: “As long as men continued to believe that Satan could appear … encounters with him could not be dismissed” (MacDonald 1981: 155). Consequently, the diagnosis of melancholy as a medical phenomenon became bound up in both witchcraft trials and suicide cases. Indeed, lycanthropy was also posed as both a supernatural and pathological phenomenon, as werewolf transformation was believed to be caused by an excess of melancholy. As Tomaso Garzoni explains in The Hospital of Incurable Fools (1586), Among these humours of melancholy, the Phisitions place a kinde of madnes by the Greeks called Lycanthopia, termed by the Latines Infamia Lupina; or wolves furie: which bringeth a man to this point (as Attomare affirmeth) that in Februarie he will goe out of the house in the night like a wolfe, hunting about the graves of the dead with great howling, and plucke the dead mens bones out of the sepulchers, carrying them about the streetes, to the great feare and astonishment of all them that meete him. (Garzoni D2r) Although witchcraft trials were more common in England, werewolf trials continued to take place throughout the 1600s, particularly elsewhere in Europe: accused werewolves, like accused witches, were often executed as a result of such trials (Hirsch 2011: 315). Gradually, medical explanations began to take the place of supernatural ones: “In England witchcraft accusations, trials, and prosecutions increased, peaked (in the

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1580s and 1590s), and later declined … In these years, licensed physicians grew more numerous and medical texts increasingly circulated in the vernacular” (Neely 2004: 6). Brett Hirsch describes this as an “intersection of demonological and medical discourses” in early modern witchcraft and werewolf trials (2011: 308). Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1586) tried to define the differences between supernatural and natural causes so that physicians would know how to testify in witchcrafts trials—but in the Renaissance lexicon “the diagnosis is a difficult one to make because the symptoms of bewitchment and hysteria are identical” (Neely 2004: 319). Some argued that the testimony of accused witches could not be taken at face value because the accused might be experiencing a humoral imbalance rather than a supernatural encounter with the devil: because melancholy was commonly believed to cause delusions, the accused might be testifying based on such delusions (MacDonald 1981: 155). Thus, the early modern period was an era in which attitudes toward witchcraft were in transition: a medical model began to emerge to replace supernatural explanations that had traditionally been based in religious beliefs (Hirsch 2011: 315). Long associated with the sin of despair (the belief that one was beyond the reach of Christian salvation), early modern ideas about melancholy also became a factor involved in the trials customarily held after a suicide (Neely 2004: 14). “Self-murder” was a crime, and it was punishable by both the denial of Christian burial and the government’s confiscation of the deceased’s earthly goods: when suicide was suspected, a trial was needed to determine whether the deceased had been non compos mentis at the time of self-murder (MacDonald 1981: 121). This is, of course, the famous interpretative crux debated by the gravediggers in Hamlet: Was Ophelia’s death a criminal act of Christian sin or an act that should be understood as the result of melancholy madness (1601: 5.1.1–30)? The debate had cultural relevance in the early 1600s precisely because of shifting cultural definitions in which “melancholy” began to stand in for supernatural explanations of suicidal ideation. Ultimately, the slow change from religious to medical understandings of phenomena like witchcraft trials and suicide trials may have reflected political shifts as various early modern groups attempted to discredit the religious beliefs of outlying groups of Christians—for example, using the label of “melancholy delusions” as a way to discredit widespread beliefs in demon possession and thus Catholic exorcisms (MacDonald 1981: 155; Neely 2004: 6).

8.3. THE HISTORY OF (AND CONJECTURES ABOUT) BETHLEM HOSPITAL A plethora of critical work has been written about the history of Bethlem Hospital. In truth, its records during the Renaissance are at best vague and fragmentary: much conjecture has been made on very scanty evidence. Originally called “The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem,” it was founded in 1247 and later came to specialize in the treatment of the mad (most likely in the early 1400s). Its name was often shortened to “Bethlem” or “Bedlam,” and the term became synonymous with madness and disorder. Historians’ opinions on Bethlem (and on the type of treatment and care it offered during this time period) vary widely—in part because what records of Bethlem remain from the Renaissance are difficult to interpret. Thus, little is known about the treatment of Bethlem’s prisoners. For example, an inventory of the hospital taken in 1403 showed six prisoners in residence and listed six sets of chains, but one cannot immediately prove that

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these prisoners were all restrained (although this is a conclusion many in the eighteenth century reached from such records) (Andrews 1997: 115). It is possible, of course, that the chains could have been used for other purposes. For example, Neely argues that “Although a few severely distracted persons did end up in Bedlam … the hospital does not confine madpersons cruelly or indiscriminately,” and that “confinement in Bethlem Hospital, like restraint in the family, was temporary, therapeutic, and without visible gender bias” (2004: 1, 25). Other records, however, seem to more directly suggest negligence and abuse on the part of Bethlem’s administrators: In August 1567 the Mayor and Aldermen of London arranged for confiscated coalsacks to be washed, stuffed and made into “pallets” (straw mattresses) for the poor distraught people of Bethlem, many of whom were reportedly lying on bare boards. And thirty years later [1597] a civic committee reported that the Hospital was “so loathsomely and so filthily kept [that it was] not fit for anye man to come into.” (Andrews 1997: 115) There were reports in 1631 that the prisoners at Bethlem were underfed and “likely to starve” (Allderidge 1979: 161). Historians are conflicted on the topic: Jonathan Andrews and Carol Thomas Neely argue that the hospital was probably run well enough considering the ideologies of the time period and the funding available, while Patricia Allderidge argues that there was obvious corruption and abuse. The truth may be that what scant evidence exists is indeterminate. Although the popular drama of the era (plays such as The Duchess of Malfi (Webster 1614), The Changeling (Middleton 1622), and The Honest Whore, Part I (Dekker 1604)) offers an overwhelmingly negative picture of conditions at Bethlem during the Renaissance, depicting mad people as abject spectacles used for the entertainment of the normate characters, the actual historical records are more difficult to interpret. As Ken Jackson argues, “Separating fact from fiction when it comes to Bethlem is simply no easy task. One of the quite obvious reasons this is the case is that ‘Bedlam’ fictions are not completely separate and incompatible from Bethlem’s real or material history, but part of the same cultural, historical matrix” (2005: 33). It is likely that popular stage representations of Bethlem’s mad prisoners influenced early modern perceptions of madness as much as the historical reality. Since Bethlem was the only hospital in England specializing in treating the mad during the time period, there are simply no other records to be had. Because people were admitted to Bethlem on a case-by-case basis, it is also hard to generalize about Bethlem’s prisoners. We do know that the hospital was very small during this time period: in 1598, Bethlem had twenty prisoners (Andrews 1997: 111). We also know that Bethlem was considered overcrowded by 1624, when it was housing thirtyone people in its twenty-one rooms (Allderidge 1979: 145, 158). During this era, the hospital was run by individual “keepers,” very few of whom had any medical training (indeed, Bethlem did not have physicians as keepers until the 1600s) (Andrews 1997: 114). The keepers were generally picky about who would be admitted to the hospital, usually preferring to accept only those who seemed dangerous to the community and who also seemed potentially “curable” (121). There were, of course, exceptions: the hospital was also more likely to accept those whose relatives or neighbors could be counted on to pay for their care (since their costs need not drain the hospital’s meager budget): “The records in fact suggest that any private person who was prepared to pay the full cost of an individual’s maintenance could have them admitted, if the Keeper agreed” (119, 121). In general, Bethlem seemed to house more men than women during this time period,

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and although few prisoners stayed for the duration of their adult lives, the records do show that some stayed for many years and died in Bethlem (120, 125). In the mid-1600s, many of the patients “had been in the Hospital for at least fourteen years. This suggests that a fair proportion of those admitted were not in fact curable, at least by Bethlem” (125). It was also rare (though not unheard of) for those who opposed the government to be sent to Bethlem; occasionally, an outcry from concerned citizens would cause the accused “madman” to be released (117). For example, a silkweaver sent to Bethlem in June of 1595 who was said to have “had some hard speeches concerning [the Mayor] and in dispraise of his government” was set free after a public riot (117). While the keepers claimed to take only the most violent or needy, it is difficult to determine how closely the keepers followed such admissions standards (particularly since individual keepers might be motivated by the monetary gain of taking prisoners whose families could pay for their upkeep). Bethlem was founded as a charitable institution, and it continued to accept charitable funds from visitors throughout the Renaissance. Although the practice of visiting Bethlem (particularly when viewed through the modern lens of the freak show) seems like a cruel and exploitative practice, various historians have argued that such visitations had a social function as an outlet for charitable impulse. According to Andrews, early modern visitations to Bethlem “can only be properly understood within the context of Bethlem’s evolution as charity. The hospital’s enduring dependency on the good will of its benefactors had rendered public access to Bethlem not only economically expedient, but necessary, while charity had long required ocular proof of sickness and want and long displayed its objects as living exhortations” (1997: 191). There is some debate among historians as to whether visitation took place during the 1500s; it is likely that “the governors began showing the mad to compensate for funds lost in the 1598 reconstruction of poor relief. The practice of visitation that is so much better documented in the eighteenth century seems to originate here” (Jackson 2005: 16). As Jackson has argued, We simply may not have yet the terms or concepts … to grasp precisely what was involved in earlier versions of “visitation,” having only our more distinct modern categories of “entertainment” and “spectacle” and “medicine” and “charity” to employ. And it was the intensifying distinctions between these very categories, we need to keep in mind, that helped end the show in the eighteenth century. (2005: 17) Whatever the historical reality during the Renaissance may have been, one cannot deny that the early modern stage depicts the practice of visiting Bethlem as a matter of entertainment and spectacle completely divorced from charitable impulse. For example, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614) uses a dance of madmen as part of the play’s entertainment. The play’s villain, Ferdinand, decides that he is “resolved / To remove forth the common hospital / All the mad-folk and place them near her [the Duchess’s] lodging / There let them practice together, sing and dance / And act their gambols to the full o’th’moon” (122–6). In fact, the song the madmen perform is overt in comparing the madmen to animals: “Oh let us howl some heavy note, / some deadly dogged howl, / Sounding, as from the threat’ning throat / Of beasts and fatal fowl” (61–4). Thus, Webster’s play depicts madmen as both bestial and spectacular. Certainly, the diagnostic practices and treatments of the day were extremely different from the ones that are commonplace now. As Ellen Samuels has argued, we currently live in an era of biocertification, in which medical records are needed to prove requests for accommodation and in which various kinds of disability (particularly mental disability)

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are rigorously documented in order to “validate” the existence of invisible impairment (2014). The early modern era had very little to offer in the way of biocertification. Former prisoners of Bethlem, “who were licensed to beg,” identified themselves by “wearing as a badge a tin plate on their left hand or arm” (“Bedlam, n.” 2009). However, the number of beggars who had actually been licensed by Bethlem must have been very small indeed; if the number of “mad” beggars presented in the drama and fiction of the era is any indication, the number of unlicensed beggars was much larger (MacDonald 1981: 125). Ballads such as “The Cunning Northene Begger” (1634) betray the strong mistrust that people held toward such figures. The beggar in the ballad is clearly a sham, and he adopts various disguises throughout the song (including the guise of disability) in order to make a profit: I have my shifts about me Like Proteus often changing My shape when I will I alter still About the country ranging. Perhaps the era’s intense concern with counterfeit madmen (commonly known as “Mad Toms” and “Abraham Men”) betrayed by the literature, stage plays, and ballads of the time stemmed partly from the fact that it was up to the community of laypersons to judge who was and was not mentally disabled (Figure 8.2). In practice, social opinion was the best way to determine who was or was not mad: “certification by experts, whether physicians or lay practitioners, was unusual even in disputed cases” (MacDonald 1981: 125). Because individuals were often brought to the Bethlem keepers by family members or neighbors, the decision regarding who was (or was not) mad resided largely with “community opinion” (125). Not surprisingly, an early modern community’s attitude toward what constituted madness might differ radically from modern definitions. To identify madness, early modern laypeople looked for signs that neighbors “were frantic, talked too much, and laughed oddly,” or might observe that “they threatened or had committed some criminal action” (125). However, a disillusionment with one’s family or social role might also be seen by laypeople as a sign of madness (or might make someone displaying other symptoms more likely to be labeled as “mad”): During the seventeenth century the basic garment of social identity was still homespun. The diffusion of individualism had not yet eroded the assumption that every person was before all other considerations the member of a household … Because households were hierarchical networks of dominance and submission, another sign of mental abnormality was a patient’s failure to acknowledge his superiors. Napier used the phrase, “will not be ruled” … to describe mentally disturbed behavior … (126–7) However, it seems worth noting that any disturbance in the social order could be seen as “madness,” and that claims of madness did not always explicitly serve the needs of the time’s patriarchal hierarchy. Men who violently beat their wives could be accused of madness, and men who seemed to manage their households with unusual cruelty were sometimes labeled as “light-headed” or “brainsick” (128). In other words, any aberration from the social hierarchy could be perceived as a symptom of madness, whether it was

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FIGURE 8.2  Title page of [A] New Mad Tom of Bedlam (1695?). By permission of the British Library.

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a refusal to obey one’s parents or husband or a reputation for mistreating one’s wife or children. Not only were early modern criteria for labeling the mad extremely different from our own, but notions of what constituted appropriate “treatment” were also very different from modern conceptions. As Andrews explains, Some forms of medieval and early modern treatment involved what contemporaries would have regarded as therapeutic interventions, but we would not … Bethlem in the early sixteenth century administered “betynge and correccyon” … Physical constraint was also frequently practiced. An indulgence issued in 1446 stated plainly enough that many of the “miserable persons dwelling there … are so alienated in mind and possessed of unclean spirits that they must be restrained with chains and fetters.” (Andrews 1997: 114) If someone was deemed to be possessed by a demon, they might be confined in a dark room and whipped in order “to frighten away the demon inside” (Iyengar 2014). It was also common to treat a perceived imbalance of the humors with bloodletting, based on the belief that an overabundance of a particular humor could be released from the body through such means (Iyengar 2014). Melancholy, in particular, was considered “extremely dangerous … and needed to be treated through both … diet and exercise and medically by purging or letting blood from the so-called head-vein (cephalic vein)” (Iyengar 2014). Overall, very few records remain regarding what kind of medical “treatment” (if any) prisoners at Bethlem regularly received. Given that few keepers during the Renaissance were physicians, it is possible that very little medical treatment was offered to prisoners in Bethlem during this era. Indeed, some might consider the very term “medical treatment” to be anachronistic, since such treatment often overlapped with supernatural explanations and religious practices.

8.4. CONCLUSION In the end, it is hard to make definitive statements about madness in the Renaissance, either as a form of embodied experience, as a cultural phenomenon, or as a medical diagnosis that was seen as warranting treatment or potential cure. The records that have been passed down to us (whether they are an early modern physician’s case notes, the records of an early modern mental institution, or early modern fictional accounts like stage plays) are too diverse, fragmented, and, ultimately, indeterminate and contradictory in the messages they hold. However, it would seem that Neely is correct in her assertion that “although Renaissance conceptions, representations, and treatments of madness seem at first impossibly distant and alien, our own debates about the condition often recapitulate or grow out of those earlier ones” (2004: 1). In spite of the many differences between early modern and modern stereotypes of madness pointed out in this chapter, there are clearly important commonalities as well. Early modern terminology surrounding mental disability was in many ways as messy, as hotly contested, and as heatedly debated as the diagnoses of the modern DSM. The physicians of early modern times were not impartial observers of mental disability any more than modern psychiatrists are: diagnosis and treatment in the Renaissance were effected by social issues such as economics, gender, and social class. In the early modern era, the burden of “diagnosing” mental disability lay largely with the community, and at first glance, this may seem very

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different from our current era in which mental health diagnoses are the source of copious official documentation. But the larger community of which one is a part is still central to definitions of mental disability even today (one is generally evaluated by a psychologist when one’s family or larger community perceives some potential difference). MacDonald argues that in the Renaissance madness was “culturally relative” and that the symptoms of potential madness were “viewed as violations of particular social norms” (1981: 114–15). Surely the same is true today. Neely has argued that writers of the era were particularly interested in madness because it allowed them to rethink the parameters of what it means to be human: in the Renaissance, “The discourses of madness flourished because they were useful in reconceptualizing the boundaries between natural and supernatural, masculinity and femininity, body and mind, feigned and actual distraction,” and contemplations of melancholy in particular “generat[ed] productive thinking about the constituents of the human” (2004: 2, 4). In an era in which various attitudes can still be seen as dehumanizing to people with mental disabilities, in which there are still many barriers (physical, societal, and ideological) to social justice and full inclusion, we are still using madness today (in various ableist and blatantly false ways) to define the supposed limits of “the human.” Although many questions about madness in the Renaissance must remain unanswered, it would seem that at least some of the era’s stereotypes are not so incredibly different from our own.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1

2 3

Such lists often appear on the websites of companies offering educational assessments and tuition. See, for example, the Davis Dyslexia Association International (https://www. dyslexia.com/about-dyslexia/dyslexic-achievers/all-achievers/) and the Helen Arkell Dyslexia Centre (https://www.helenarkell.org.uk/about-dyslexia/famous-dyslexics.php). Eli Clare briefly discusses the configurations of terminology relating to body–mind and dualism (2017: xvi). The pronouns in this passage follow the feminine gendering of “soul” (âme) in the French original.

CHAPTER 1 1 2

3

4

5

Writing in Bending over Backwards (2002), Davis is here describing work that he did in Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995). On the idea that disability was a more visible part of medieval and early modern public life than it is today, see two of the first monographs on medieval disability, Irina Metzler’s Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages (2006) and Edward Wheatley’s Stumbling Blocks Before the Bling: Medieval Constructions of Disability (2010). In Bending over Backwards, Davis challenges the notion of linear historical progress in attitudes toward and quality of life for individuals with disabilities. Calling for more work historicizing disability, he writes, “This cult of the normal is linked to a myth that people with disabilities are better off in the twentieth century than they were in the past. There is an open debate on whether life was better or worse for people with disabilities in the past—an area of study that is only beginning to be researched and analyzed. Moreover, the history of disability is crucial not only to an understanding of what constitutes ‘disability,’ but also to current attempts to formulate theories of the modern ‘body’” (2002: 39–40). Davis articulates this distinction as one of deformity rather than disability, arguing that disability came into use after the eighteenth century when industrialization and factory labor put an emphasis on universal bodily function for all workers (2002: 50–51). In addition to their discussion here, Hobgood and Wood originally mention this idea in their introduction to the “Disabled Shakespeares” special edition of Disability Studies Quarterly (2009: n43). In Shakespeare’s Medical Language, Iyengar includes an entry on “monsters,” which focuses primarily on this genre of monstrous births. The definition reads, in part, “A monster was usually a baby born with some sort of deformity or unusual variation, while a prodigy was a creature not recognizable as human, despite being born from a human mother. Monsters were born as signs of God’s glory and power, or as divine punishments for human sin and

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10 11 12 13

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folly. Notably, twins, even if sound and healthy, were monsters or marvels. Material causes for monstrosity were manifold” (2014: 226–7). “A Fair Warning for PRIDE: / By a Foal which is lately said to come into the World with a Top-Knot on its Head of several Colours, / at Chelcknom in Glocester-shire. Attested by several Persons of good Credit.” Magdalene College, Pepys 4.310, EBBA 21972, https:// ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/21972/image; “The Sommersetshire Wonder.” Magdalene College, Pepys 4.362, EBBA 22026, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/22026/image. For a discussion of this ballad in the broader context of debates about topknots, see Angela McShane and Clare Backhouse (2010). “mooncalf, n.” OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/121906?redirectedFrom=mooncalf (accessed April 20, 2018). In their introduction to Recovering Disability, Hobgood and Wood propose that early modern disability studies asks readers to “grapple with non-normative bodies and minds as well as the radically different social, historical, and literary contexts in which those bodies were assigned and helped make meaning”; further, they suggest that early modern approaches to disability studies might be a means for “more ethical staring practices and hence robust and transformative scholarship” (2013: 1). “Nature’s Wonder,” Euing 237, EBBA 31785, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/31785/ image. “The True Description of Two Monstrous Children,” Huntington Library, Britwell 18316, EBBA 32404, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32404/image. “The True Forme and Shape of a Monstrous Chylde,” Huntington Library, Britwell 18293, EBBA 32225, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32225/image. The phrase “nothing about us without us” is generally credited to disability rights activists in the early 1990s. It was codified by James Charlton’s Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment (2000). “The Two Inseparable Brothers,” British Library, Roxburghe 3.216–217, EBBA 30865, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/30865/image; for longer discussions of the brothers, see Karen Jillings (2011) and Jan Bondeson (2000). For discussions of the atypical crew’s subplot of Volpone, see A. K. Nardo (1977) and Lauren Coker (2013). I here use the singular “they” to refer to Androgyno, who never gives a pronoun preference or binary gender identity. The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), one of the major organizations for intersex advocacy, devotes a substantial portion of its FAQ site to discussing the inaccuracy of the term “hermaphrodite” to describe intersex individuals; the site straightforwardly points out: “The mythological term ‘hermaphrodite’ implies that a person is both fully male and fully female. This is a physiologic impossibility” (http://www.isna.org/faq/hermaphrodite). In terms of sexuality, as Androgyno points out, intersex people can identify with a range of sexualities, none necessarily linked to their sex, hormones, or genitals; see also Alice Dregger (2000). “The Male and Female Husband,” Crawford 257, EBBA 33456, https://ebba.english.ucsb. edu/ballad/33456/image. I focus here on Spenser’s dwarfs, but The Faerie Queene is full of atypical bodies! For a discussion on disability studies approaches to Spenser’s metaphors, see Rachel E. Hile (2013). In this case, the disability “gain” I describe is in the model of the Deaf studies concept of “Deaf Gain,” which has since been expanded by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and others to

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23 24 25

26

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“disability gain” more broadly. H-Dirksen Bauman and Joseph M. Murray (2009: 1) credit the phrase to Deaf performance artist Aaron Williamson, who, at the onset of his deafness, “consulted many doctors, and they all told him the same thing: ‘You’re losing your hearing.’ He wondered why it was that not a single doctor told him he was gaining his deafness.” In a note in the book Deaf Gain, Baumann and Murray further introduce Williamson: “Aaron Williamson is a British performance artist. He asked this question during a lecture to a graduate class in deaf studies at Gallaudet University in 2002” (2014: xxxix). “The Happy Damsel,” Magdalene College, Pepys 2.81, EBBA 20705, https://ebba.english. ucsb.edu/ballad/20705/image. The full title of the ballad is “The Happy Damsel: / OR, / A Miracle of GOD’s Mercy, signalized on Maria Anna Mollier, living / near St. James’s Westminster, a poor lame Creature, who had been a / Cripple from her Cradle, and on the 26th of November, 1693 she was / perfectly cured by the Hand of Divine Providence, to the great amazement / of all People.” “The Cripples’ Race,” Magdelene College, Pepys, misc. 358, EBBA 32066, https://ebba. english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32066/image. “A New Ballad Intitled, the Stout Cripple of Cornwall,” British Library, Roxburghe 1.446, EBBA 30300, https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/30300/image. Susan Anderson rightly suggests that the ballad’s obsession with whether or not the cripple is fraudulent is similar to historical and modern suspicions about the desert of aid claimants. For further discussion of fraudulent disability in the period, see Lindsey Row-Heyvald (2009). “pikestaff, n.1.” OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed. com/view/Entry/143796?rskey=nQ1JSb&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed April 20, 2018). Authorship of The Little French Lawyer play (ca. 1619–23) is attributed to John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, but the play was first published in the Beaumont and Fletcher first folio in 1647. Though there is little current scholarship focusing on The Little French Lawyer, it is recently emerging in conferences and other scholarly conversations as part of the developing canon of early modern disability texts. For example, Matt Carter shared a paper on “Healing Poultices and Normative Embodiment in The Little French Lawyer” in the “Performing Disability” seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2016 meeting. Here, the author is referencing a false nose of the type worn by those who had lost parts of their noses due to syphilitic disfigurement. The 1665 English translation of The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey (London: printed by E.C., 1665) includes a discussion of prosthetic noses similar to the one described in the poem: “Wherefore instead of the Nose cut away or consumed, it is requisite to substitute another, made by art; because that nature cannot supply that defect: this Nose so artificially made, must be of gold, silver, paper, or linnen clothes glewed together, it must be so coloured, counterfeited, and made both of fashion, figure, and bigness, that it may as aptly as is possible, resemble the nature Nose” (563). Richard III is certainly at the core of the emerging canon of texts in early modern disability studies; see Katherine Schaap Williams (2009).

CHAPTER 3 1

For more on the subject, see McIntosh (2011).

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An exception to the rules of stoicism was the topos of lovesickness, as well as jealousy in love. In this arena, mental and physical suffering are hard to distinguish. Petrarchism made lovesickness a popular theme of works from Italy to England. In continental literature, noble characters in the Princess of Clèves (French), in the Cárcel de Amor and El CuIioso impertinente (part of Don Quixote) suffer and die when the pain of love and jealousy overtakes them. James C. W. Truman (2009: 26) names Satan from Paradise Lost, the speaker from Astrophil and Stella, and Hamlet. The case notes of Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (British Library, Sloane 2065) are one such example. Esther Cohen coined this term in her discussions of medieval pain. For more on the concept, see Cohen (1995, 2000). For examples of the latter two tortures by civil authorities, see Cohen (1998). The letter in which Guez de Balzac states this is found in most editions of Scarron’s Virgile, with differing amounts of context. This epistle appears in the 1658 edition of his Lettres, which suggests that seventeenth-century readers recognized the significance of its claims.

CHAPTER 4 1

2

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The so-called blind spot refers to a curious characteristic of the eye: where the optic nerve passes through the retina, the corresponding visual field is incomplete due to a lack of receptor cells in this area. Consequently, a certain part of the visual field cannot be perceived. However, this partial lack of vision goes unnoticed, because the information inferred from the visual field around the missing area as well as information from the other eye are used to complete the visual field, thus creating the illusion of a coherent image. The blind spot was first described in 1668 by Edme Mariotte (1620–84), but did not gain cultural significance until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was widely discussed again (Bexte 1996: 13–44). woher es aber der star genant wird, und woher jhm dis wort star kömbt, kan ich zur zeit noch nicht wissen. denn dieser namen also bekant und breuchlich ist, das bürger und bawer, gelerte und ungelerte darvon wissen. denn wenn sie von einem gar blinden menschen hören sagen, sehen oder reden, wissen sie nicht anders zu sagen, als vom star, und sprechen, er ist oder sey starblind. The register can be found in State Archive Nuremberg (Staatsarchiv Nürnberg), Rep. 52a, no. 58; it has been published (slightly modernized) by von Weech (1861). The Nuremberg merchant and councilman, Erasmus Schürstab (1426–73), had compiled the text between 1464 and 1467; after his death, his son, Sebald (1452–1505), continued the work. The register includes both cognates and agnates, an arrangement that would soon become rather unusual due to the massive amount of genealogical information required. The relevant entry starts as follows: Margret, des Vlrich Grolants tochter, het Hans Sporel von Rotenburg, mit de[m] het sy xvi kinder, als hy h[er]noch geschr[iben] stet, v[n]d sy starb m iiii xlix iar zu Tinckelspuhel, do ligt sy begraben (fol. 34v/von Weech 1861: 67). The letter can be found in: Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (GNM), Historical Archive, Archive of the Kress Family, carton no. XXXII, addendum no. 32, Helena Grundherr to Wilhelm Kreß (unnumbered, no date [probably 1576, according to Frohne 2014: 302]).

NOTES

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8

9 10

11 12 13

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The register can be found in Nuremberg, Municipal Archive (Stadtarchiv Nürnberg), E 13/ III, A 375. The text reads in full: 1570/Adi den 24. february hat mein weyb ein tochter gehabt, ein halb stundt nach zwayen vhren nach mitternach [addendum: der kleinern vhr], laider gott erbarms, die ist blindt geboren, hats auß d[er] seligen tauff erhoben Vrsula Jochim Finoltin, vnd heist das kindt Vrsula (fols 6v–7r). The entry follows the usual formula in that it states date and hour of birth, the child’s sex and name, and his or her godparents. In the entry dedicated to Ursula, the information concerning her blindness is added to the formula in a prominent position. Adi den 3. Septembris [1583] hat Gott der allmechtige vnser liebs dechterlein, Vrsula genandt, so blindt auff die welt geboren, auß diesem leben zu sich genummen, ein viertel vor zwelff vhrenn inn der nacht deß klaineren zaigers (fol. 8r). Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (GNM), Historical Archive, Archive of the Imhoff Family, Fascicle 44, no. 1: Mer hot sie Gott der herr mit einer laidigen geburt, alls einem maidlin, das gar blind auff die welt jst kumen, begabt auff 22. febrer jn anno 1570, das hot man Vrsulla genent (fol. 58r). Helena Kreß (1545–85) was the daughter of Christoph Kress (1515–60) and his first wife, Dorothea Haller. Later, Christoph Kress married Endres Imhoff’s daughter Katharina (1531–74). Les Diverses leçons de Pierre Messie gentilhomme de Séville. Contenans variables et mémorables histoires, translated by Claude Gruget (Paris: Estienne Grolleau, 1552), 177, cited from Weygand (2009: 30). De subtilitate libri xxi (Nuremberg: Johann Petreius), 1550; English translated by Forrester (2013: 876). A basic education in reading and writing was commonly provided not only for the sons of wealthy Nuremberg families, but also for their daughters. Boys and girls went to school masters to be trained in these basic skills, and they often received additional tuition by private teachers. While the education of girls usually ended at the age of ten, boys sometimes went on to schools, where they were taught basic mathematic skills or, if they were chosen for an academic career, attended classes in Latin (Endres 1984; Antl 1988; Beer 1990a: 330–1, 1990b: 97–8). Nuremberg, Municipal Archive (Stadtarchiv Nürnberg), B 13/III, B 125, fol. 43r (June 6, 1583). Nuremberg, Municipal Archive (Stadtarchiv Nürnberg), B 13/III, B 125, fol. 3r. Auch schat das alles den augen/vnd geystern der gesicht. Scharpffer rauch/scharpffe kelte/vnnd warmer lufft/vil wein/koblauch/vil saltz/vnkeyschheit/pfeffer/milch/ka(e)s/vngebachen brot/ zwibel/rettich/lauch/senff/erbis/bonen/linsen/vnnd alles was dempffig macht/Grob rinderin fleysch/rinderin vnd schweinin wirst/geschu(o)cht schlaffen/vil bey dem fewr sitzen/vil undersich sehen/weis ding ansehen/in newen bu(e)chern mit kleiner schrifft lesen/vnkeuscheit mit weybern treiben/so ire mentrua haben/vil wachen/vil fasten/vil zu(o) der aderen lassen an dem arm/nit bald künstliche subtile werck auff das essen treiben. This list has precedents in traditional medical and dietary writing, such as the often copied and translated Regimen Sanitatis Salernitatum, where detrimental factors are subsumed in the chapter De Visus Nocumentis. It lists: Balnea, vina, Venus, ventus, piper, allia, fumus, Porri cum caepis, lens, fletus, faba, sinapis, Sol, coitus, ignis, ictus, acumina pulvis, and concludes: ista nocent oculis, sed vigilare magis (Ordronaux 1870: 108, cap. LXXVIII). Anfencklich/die geyster des gesichts/send das allerhoechst vnd fürnemlichste theyl/als das/so sein gegebne genad von Gott/mit staeter arbeyt/on vnderlaß/durch seinen werckzeug/das aug/ volbringet. Die gesicht aber/gond auß dem hirn/durch etliche neruen/den seelischen geystern/ auß einem gegenwurff entdtgegen zuo bringen/vnd thuond dz durch das instrument/das aug.

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CHAPTER 5 1 Dr. Bradley S. Berens and I were the coauthors for an old, pre-Deaf Gain version of this chapter entitled “Spoken Daggers, Deaf Ears, and Silent Mouths” for The Disability Studies Reader, first edition, ed. Lennard Davis, published by Routledge in 1997. Many, many thanks to Dr. Berens for our initial collaboration; none of this could have happened without him. I have also expanded on John Bulwer specifically in Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes (eds. Bauman and Murray) and the Modern Language Association’s Enabling the Humanities (eds. Brueggemann et al.). 2 Lois Bragg, now Edna Edith Sayers, who has continued to publish widely in the field under this name.

CHAPTER 6 1 In early modern quotations, spelling is as in the originals, though i/j and u/v have been regularized. 2 He even published a sermon on the topic of effective speech in 1608, titled in full Salomons sweete harpe consisting of five words, like so many golden strings, toucht with the cunning hand of his true skill, commanding all other humane speech: wherein both cleargie and laitie may learne how to speake. 3 For a discussion of the relationship between multilingualism and stuttering, see Shell (2006). 4 Thus, this does not constitute an example of the kind of “narrative prosthesis” theorized by Mitchell and Snyder (2000) in their book of the same name. 5 Marc Shell (2006) describes the tactics used to avoid certain syllables in his account of his own experience of stuttering.

CHAPTER 8 1 For more on mad rhetoric and the problems of “rationality,” see the introduction to Margaret Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (2011). 2 I refer to the “normate” gaze here as it is employed in Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997). 3 For more on modern stereotypes that explain mental disability as either deficit or excess, see Stuart Murray’s introduction to Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (2008). 4 Of course, today’s terms are also often ableist, vague, and ill-defined, even if they are dramatically different from early modern terms in other ways. 5 For more on the modern neurodiversity movement, see the introduction to Loftis, Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum (2015). Although the term “neurodiversity” originated in the autistic community, the larger neurodiversity movement has since expanded to include people with a variety of mental disabilities, including some who self-identify as “mad.” 6 On the rhetorical nature of mental disability in the modern era, see the introduction to Price’s Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (2011).

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Wilson, Thomas (1982), Arte Of Rhetorique. The Renaissance Imagination, New York and London: Garland Publishing. Wiseman, Richard (1676), Severall Chirurgicall Treatises, London: E. Flesher and J. Macock, for R. Royston. Withington, Philip (2005), The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodall, John (1617), The Surgeons Mate or Military & Domestique Surgery, London: Edward Griffin for Laurence Lisle. Woodall, John (1628), Woodalls viaticum […] Intended Chiefly for the Better Curing of Wounds Made by Gun-Shott, London. Wright, David (2011), Downs: The History of a Disability, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yamamoto-Wilson, John R. (2014), Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England, Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.

INDEX

ableism 1 aesthetic model 93 aging 97–8, 103 al-Razi, Muhammad ibn Zakariya 137 alcohol consumption 124, 142–3 alms 42, 49–53, 65, 87 amputation 35–7, 55–6, 57 anatomical studies 7, 9, 23–4, 64, 96, 121 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 151, 157–8 Aristotle 146, 157 Arte of Rhetorique, The (Wilson) 105–6, 125–6 “As You Came from the Holy Land” (Raleigh) 107–8 astrology 65 Atkinson, Richard 54 atypical bodies 19–39 Augustine, St. 49 aurality 105–9 autopsies 64 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 137 Aztecs 137 Bacon, Francis 14–15, 102, 124 ballads 20–2, 24, 28–9, 32–5 Balzac, Guez de 80–1 Barry, David fitz James and Richard 103 Bartisch, George 84 beggars 46, 52, 86–7, 163 Bethlem Hospital 152, 155, 160–5 biblical texts 48, 107, 119 Birth of Merlin, The (Rowley) 130 blind spot 170n1 blindness 83–99 bloodletting 97, 137, 165 bodies, atypical 19–39 Boisrobert, François le Metel 80 Bone, Edward 104 Bonet, Juan Pablo 102 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione) 5–6 Boorde, Andrew 125 Bouchet, Guillaume 120 Boyle, Robert 124 brain 9, 95, 96, 97, 123, 137, 142–3

Bridewell Prison 155 Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother, A (Jorden) 160 broadsides 20, 24 Browne, William 55 Bulwer, John 102–3 burlesque 77–81 Burton, Robert 123–4, 125, 151, 157–8 Calvinism 70, 71 Cardano, Girolamo 91 Carew, Richard 104 Carpenters’ Company 53 Castiglione, Baldassare 5–6 cataract operations 96 Catholicism 65, 67, 68, 69, 70–1, 135, 147 “Caveat for Common Cursitors, A” (Harman) 108–9 Cervantes, Miguel de captivity plays 69 Don Quixote 63, 66–7, 69 charity 42, 47, 49–51, 52, 53, 60–1 Choyce Drollery 37–8 Christianity 49, 68, 69, 71, 73, 118, 135–6, 147, 159, 160 Cisneros, Cardinal Jiménez de 141 civil wars 43 Cleve, Anna von 98 clothing 155–6 Clothworkers’ Company 52, 53 Code Noir 75 cognitive ecologies 140–1 comedy writing 77–81 compensation cure 157 conjoined twins 24–5, 28–9 conscience 73 Cooke, James 56 corporations 42, 43, 51, 52, 53, 60–1 Cox, Leonard 126 criminality 72–3, 139–40, 153, 155 cripple 32–5, 47–8 Crooke, Helkiah 121–2 “Cunning Northerne Begger, The” 163

INDEX

“Damon the Mower” (Marvell) 53–4 Davenant, William 8–9 De Anima Brutorum (Willis) 142 de Croy, Charles Phillipes 55–6 De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem (Tagliacozzi) 7 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Vesalius) 7 De Institutione Feminae Christianae (Vives) 141 de Lafayette, Madame 76–7 de las Casas, Bartolomé 75, 76 Deaf Gain 101–5, 107, 116, 168n20 deafness 101–16 demonic possession 159, 165 deserving poor 49, 50, 65 dislocations 56 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 63, 66–7, 69 Donne, John 109–10 Drapers’ company 51–2 Drayton, Michael 22–4 dress 155–6 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster) 101, 129, 162 dummerers 108–9 dwarfism 30–2 East India Company 50, 54–5, 56–7, 59, 60 ecological approach 140–1 education 91–2, 102, 105, 107, 115–16, 117, 140–2, 171n10 Ein Newes hochnutzlichs Buechlin 96 embodied difference 85, 88 Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (Jonson) 111, 112 Erasmus of Rotterdam 91 Eucharist 93 executions 64, 74 Expositions of the Psalms (Augustine) 49 extramission theory 95 eye diseases and remedies 95–7 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 31, 111–12 Ficino, Marsilio 106 Ford, John 129, 130 Foreman, Simon 65 Galen 64, 136–7 Gardiner, Samuel 119 Garzoni, Tomaso 159 Gascoigne, George 118 gendered attitudes 65–6, 129 Gerard, Father John 71 Goodman, Godfrey, 119–20 Greiser, Daniel 92

195

Groland, Margareth 85 Grove of the Infirm (Teresa of Cartagena) 67 Grundherr, Ursula 88–9, 91–2 guardianship 138–9 gunshot wounds 55, 57 Haberdashers’ livery company 52 hagiography 65, 68 Hale, Sir Matthew 139–40 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 9, 66, 151, 160 Harman, Thomas 108–9 Hay, Francis and Alexander 103 hearing, dangers of 109–11 Heath, Robert 124 Henry IV Part 1 (Shakespeare) 43, 45–6 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord (Edward) 127–8 hermaphrodites 24, 29–30, 168n17 Hippocrates 4 Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, The (Topsell) 120 Holder, William 102 Hospital of Incurable Fools, The (Garzoni) 159 hospitals 47, 87, 88, 93–4, 152, 155, 160–5 humoral theory 4–5, 96–7, 123–4, 136–7, 142–3, 146, 158–9, 165 humorous writing 77–81 Ibn Sina 137 iconography 93 Ignatius of Loyola 68 Il Ritorno d’Ulisse (Monteverdi) 128 Imhoff, Endres 89 impairment 10 indigenous populations 146–9 inheritance 89, 103, 104 Inquisitions 72 intellectual disability 9, 133–49 intelligence measurement 137 intersectional approach 86, 88, 90–1, 92 intersex 24, 29–30, 168n17 intromission theory 95 Islam 135, 137, 139, 142–3 James I 109 Jewit, Mary 30 Jolles, Sir John 52 Jonson, Ben Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman 111, 112 Poetaster 130 Volpone 29–31, 107 Jorden, Edward 160 Joubert, Laurent 77–8 Joyce, Thomas 60

196

Judaism 134–5 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 107, 108 Junius, Franciscus 126 Kress, Helena 88 “Ladie Falslie Accused, A” (Painter) 123 Lady’s Trial, The (Ford) 129, 130 Landini, Francesco 94 language differences 118–21, 126 laughter 77–8 learning difficulties 9, 133–49 legal issues 126–8, 138–40 Leonardo da Vinci 1–3, 92 limb deformities 32–5 Limney, Richard 55 lisping 129 Little French Lawyer, The 35–7, 169n27 livery companies 42, 51–3 lycanthropy 159–60 María de Vela y Cueto 67–8 marriage 89–90 Marston, John 130–1 martyrs 65, 71 Martz, Louis L. 112 Marvell, Andrew 53–4 medical model 11, 33, 121, 136–8, 159 melancholy 156–60, 165 memory 140–1 mental capacity 126–7 mental health 9, 151–66 mental speed 137 Mercer’s livery company 42 Merchant Venturers 42, 52 metaphor 20–5, 39, 43, 48, 59–60, 72, 81, 85–6, 94, 105, 106–7, 111 Mexia, Pedro 91 Mikrokosmographia (Crooke) 121–2 Milton, John 66, 70, 109 miracles 93 mobility devices 34 mobility impairment 41–61 monstrous births 20–5, 167n5 Montaigne, Michel de 11–14, 15, 65–6, 69, 74 Monteverdi, Claudio 128 “Moone-Calfe, The” (Drayton) 22–4 “mopish” 157 morality 5, 20, 49, 137 Mountford, William 50 music and musicians 86, 94, 98–9, 106

INDEX

Napier, Richard 65, 152, 155, 157, 159 narrative prosthesis 31 native populations 146–9 natural slaves 146 normalcy 19–20, 103, 105 nose disfigurement 8–9, 169n28 nuns 67–8 occupational injuries 53–60 Öfelin, Ottheinrich and Veit 98 “On Stut” (Heath) 124 opera 128 Orlando Furioso 9 pain 63–81 Painter, William 123 Paradise Lost (Milton) 66, 70, 109 Paré, Ambroise 55–6 parody 77, 79, 145 perceptual theories 95, 96, 97 petitions 53, 55, 57, 60 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch) 94–5 philopassianism 70 physiognomy 137 Pirckheimer, Wilibald 98 Platter, Felix 9 Poetaster (Jonson) 130 political realm 64 Poor Laws 51, 65 poorhouses 47 poverty 49, 50, 51, 86–8 power 76–81, 102, 105–9 Prerogativa Regis 138 priesthood 90–1 Princess of Clèves, The (de Lafayette) 76–7 Pritchett, Samuel 57 Providence 5–6 pterygium 97 punishment 67, 68, 69–70, 75, 80, 120, 145 Purre, John 59 Rabelais, François 78 Raleigh, Sir Walter 107–8 Rastell, John 126–7 reconstructive surgery 7–8 religion 5–6, 29, 65, 67–71, 134–6, 140,  147 religious model of disability 85–6, 93, 159 rhetoric 22, 43, 47, 49, 78, 102–3, 105–6, 114, 118, 125–6, 136, 158 Richard II (Shakespeare) 108 Richard III (Shakespeare) 38–9

INDEX

Roffe, Robert 59 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 108 Ruthven, Patrick 103 Salway, Arthur 47–8 satire 8, 22–4, 38, 46 Satire 4 (Donne) 109–10 savants 157 Scarron, Paul 65, 79 Schneider, Paul 98–9 Scudéry, Georges 79–80 seeing, theories of 95, 96, 97 Segrais, Jean 79 sexual ability 35–6, 38 Shakespeare, William dangers of hearing 110–11 Hamlet 9, 66, 151, 160 Henry IV Part 1 43, 45–6 Julius Caesar 107, 108 monstrous births 167n5 Richard II 108 Richard III 38–9 Romeo and Juliet 108 Sonnet 112 107 The Taming of the Shrew 143–6 The Tempest 147–9 The Tragedy of King Lear 129 Titus Andronicus 108 Troilus and Cressida 108 Sibenhar, Balthasar 90 sign language 102, 103–4 silence 101, 103, 104, 105, 111, 112, 113–15, 119 skin grafts 7–8 Skolastica 85 slaves 75 Smyth, Thomas 54–5 social construction 85–92, 137–8 social model 10–11, 33, 50 Souldiers Demand, The 46, 47 “spectacle of suffering” 64 speech 117–32 Spenser, Edmund 31, 111–12 spirituality 45, 111–15 stereotypes 14, 32, 86, 129, 141, 151, 152–6, 157 Stoicism 70 Stubbe, Henry 59–60 stuttering 123, 124–5, 126, 128, 130–1 suicide 160 supercrip narrative 34 surgery 7–8, 56–7, 59, 64, 96 Survey of Cornwall, The (Carew) 104

197

Swinburne, Henry 126 syphilis 8 Tagliacozzi, Gaspare 7 Taming of the Shrew, The (Shakespeare) 143–6 Tartaglia, Niccolo 128 taxes 51 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 147–9 Teresa of Ávila 68 Teresa of Cartagena 67 Tilh, Arnaud du 74 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 108 tongue 121–3 tongue-tie 121, 123 Topsell, Edward 120 torture 70–5 Tower of Babel 119–20 Tragedy of King Lear, The (Shakespeare) 129 Traherne, Thomas 113–15 Treatise of Spousals, A (Swinburne) 126 Trinity College 51 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 108 Tyro 49–50 undeserving poor 49, 50, 53, 65 Vagabond Act 1572 51 Vesalius, Andreas 7 virtue 6, 48–50 visual perception theories 95, 96, 97 Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci) 1–3 Vives, Juan Luis 73, 141 Voerden, Nicasius van 90–1 Volpone (Jonson) 29–31, 107 Walkington, Thomas 117 Wallis, John 59 war injuries 46–7, 55–6 Webster, John 101, 129, 162 weeping eyes 98 Weinsberg, Hermann 97–8 werewolf trials 159–60 What You Will (Marston) 130–1 Wheatley, Edward 85, 93, 159 Willis, Thomas 142 Wilson, John 49 Wilson, Thomas 105–6, 125–6 Wiseman, Richard 56 witchcraft trials 159–60 women 67–8, 70, 111, 129, 136, 141–2, 144–6, 157 Woodall, John 56–7 work injuries 53–60

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