A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages

201 Pages·2022·4.172 MB·English

by  Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, Joshua R. Eyler

A CULTURAL HISTORY
OF DISABILITY
VOLUME 2
A Cultural History of Disability
General Editors: David Bolt and Robert McRuer
Volume 1
A Cultural History of Disability in Antiquity
Edited by Christian Laes
Volume 2
A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages
Edited by Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, and Joshua R. Eyler
Volume 3
A Cultural History of Disability in the Renaissance
Edited by Susan Anderson and Liam Haydon
Volume 4
A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century
Edited by D. Christopher Gabbard and Susannah B. Mintz
Volume 5
A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century
Edited by Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes
Volume 6
A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age
Edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF
DISABILITY
IN THE
MIDDLE AGES
VOLUME 2
Edited by Jonathan Hsy,
Tory V. Pearman, and Joshua R. Eyler
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, Joshua R. Eyler and contributors, 2020
Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, Joshua R. Eyler and contributors have asserted their right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work.
Series design: Raven Design
Cover image: A sick man and a crippled man presented
to a doctor, from a treatise by Abul Qasim Kalaf ibn al-Abbas al Zahrawi
© Musee Atger, Faculte de Medecine / Bridgeman Images
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2871-5
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Series: A Cultural History of Disability
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CONTENTS
List of figures vi
Notes oN CoNtributors viii
series PrefaCe xi
Introduction: Disabilities in Motion
Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, and Joshua R. Eyler 1
1 Atypical Bodies: Seeking after Meaning in Physical Difference
John P. Sexton 19
2 Mobility Impairment: The Social Horizons of Disability in the Middle Ages
Richard H. Godden 35
3 Chronic Pain and Illness: Reinstating Chronic-Crip Histories to Forge
Affirmative Disability Futures
Alicia Spencer-Hall 51
4 Blindness: Evolving Religious and Secular Constructions and Responses
Edward Wheatley 67
5 Deafness: Reading Invisible Signs
Julie Singer 83
6 Speech: Medieval Representations of Speech Impairments
Kisha G. Tracy 99
7 Learning Difficulties: Ideas about Intellectual Diversity in Medieval
Thought and Culture
Eliza Buhrer 115
8 Mental Health Issues: Folly, Frenzy, and the Family
Aleksandra Pfau 133
Notes 148
refereNCes 159
iNdex 180
LIST OF FIGURES
0.1 Christ heals a blind man (Maastricht Hours in French, 1400–25), fol. 135r.
Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
Viewer.aspx?ref=stowe_ms_17_f135r 2
0.2 Healing of the blind man and raising of Lazarus (Spain, 1129–34).
Metropolitan Art Museum, via Creative Commons. https://www.
metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471846 2
0.3 Miracle at Mont St. Michel: pilgrims in motion (Luttrell Psalter, England,
1325–40), fol. 104v. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.
bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_42130_f104v 3
0.4 Vieillesse or Old Age (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la
Rose, Lyon, France, c. 1487), fol. 10v. Public domain; British Library Online.
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_4425_f010v 5
0.5 Agnès de Pontoise, a blind spinner, led by her sister to the shrine of Louis
IX. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5716, fol. 633v. Public
domain; Gallica Online. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8447303m/
f640.item 6
0.6 Saints Cosmas and Damian perform a miraculous transplantation of a leg.
Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, Spain, c. 1495. Public domain; Wikipedia.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_verger%27s_dream-_Saints_
Cosmas_and_Damian_performing_a_miraculous_cure_by_transplantation_
of_a_leg._Oil_painting_attributed_to_the_Master_of_Los_Balbases,_
ca._1495._WDL3251.png 15
2.1 “Beggars and Cripples,” drawing by Hieronymus Bosch. Courtesy
of Albertina Vienna, 2019. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/2/2e/Beggars_and_Cripples.jpg 40
2.2 A crippled man in the margins of The History and Topography of Ireland
by Gerald of Wales, c. 1250, London, British Library, Royal 13 B VIII, fol.
30v. © The British Library Board, reproduced under Creative Commons 41
2.3 A double-amputee in the margins of the Romans Arthurien, 1250–70,
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 95, fol. 297r. Courtesy of
Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2019 42
3.1 Colored print with Christ as Man of Sorrows adored by a Carthusian.
London, British Library, Egerton MS 1821, fol. 9v. Public domain; British
Library Online. https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/
ILLUMINBig.ASP?size=big&IllID=1073 65
LIST OF FIGURES vii
4.1 Four blind men being led by a sighted boy in a copy of The Romance of
Alexander. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS 264, fol. 74v. Image available
online: http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=bodleian&manuscript
=msbodl264 81
5.1 Fifteenth-century German Expositiones evangeliorum representing Christ
healing a deaf man and sticking his finger in the man’s ear. Klosterneuburg,
Stiftsbibliothek, Codex Claustroneoburgensis 4, fol. 114v. By permission of
the Augustinian Canonry Klosterneuburg, Library. http://cdm.csbsju.edu/
digital/collection/HMMLClrMicr/id/16400/rec/1 91
5.2 An unheeded marginal instruction to the illustrator in a copy of Jean
Corbechon’s French translation of De proprietatibus rerum. Paris, BnF MS
fr. 22532, fol. 102v. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France 92
7.1 Drawing: head, showing cells of brain ventricles, c. 1347. Wellcome
Collection, via Creative Commons. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/
xmg3rejh 120
7.2 Detail of a miniature of the fool holding a stick and using a small animal
to play as if it were bagpipes, and two men, one of whom is David, at the
beginning of Psalm 52. From Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale, France,
first quarter of the fifteenth century. London, British Library, Royal MS 15
D III, fol. 262. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/
catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=37773 122
7.3 Gluttony, from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, c. 1630–c. 1375, part 1.
British Library, Royal MS 6 E VII, fol. 195. Public domain; British Library
Online. https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.
ASP?Size=mid&IllID=40344 126
7.4 Detail of a historiated initial: a fool and a demon. Psalter and Hours, Use of
Arras, France, c. 1300. London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 15,
fol. 96. Public domain; British Library Online. http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/
illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5804 129
7.5 Illustration from a 1497 Latin translation of Sebastian Brant’s Stultifera
Nauis (Ship of Fools), University of Edinburgh, Inc. 13, fol. 107r. University
of Edinburgh, via Creative Commons. https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/
detail/UoEgal~2~2~42037~102996 131
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Eliza Buhrer is a teaching associate professor at the Division of Humanities and Social
Sciences at Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches classes on scientific and
environmental ethics, medicine, and society, and a variety of other non-medieval topics
to engineering students. Her background, however, is in medieval history, and prior to
beginning her job at Mines, she taught medieval history at Seton Hall University and
Loyola University New Orleans. Her publications have explored intersections between
the histories of law, medicine, and disability in the Middle Ages, with a particular focus
on the history of intellectual disability, and she is currently working on a book on the
cultural history of attention and distraction from Antiquity to the present.
Richard H. Godden is an assistant professor in English specializing in Medieval Literature
and Culture. His research and teaching interests include representations of disability and
monstrosity in the Middle Ages, medieval romance, Chaucer, and digital humanities. His
current book project, Material Subjects: An Ecology of Prosthesis in Medieval Literature
and Culture, focuses on the material objects with which medieval bodies were so intimate,
including not only the recognizable prosthetics (both mundane and miraculous) that
served as replacement for missing appendages or as assistive devices such as eyeglasses
and crutches, but also more common literary and cultural objects such as armor, clothing,
and religious relics. He is also coeditor of the forthcoming essay collection, Monstrosity,
Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, and of The Open
Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales.
Aleksandra Pfau is an associate professor of History at Hendrix College in Conway,
Arkansas, where she teaches medieval and early modern European history, including
courses on law, medicine, and magic. Her book, Medieval Communities and the Mad:
Narratives of Crime and Mental Illness in Late Medieval France, is forthcoming from
Amsterdam University Press. She is currently working on a number of projects related to
her study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century French legal documents, especially pardon
letters.
John P. Sexton is Associate Professor of English at Bridgewater State University in
Massachusetts, with a focus on medieval English and Icelandic literature and culture. He
has written, presented, and published on topics including English saints’ cults, physical
injury and disability in the Middle Ages, Icelandic sagas, Chaucerian literature, the
medieval practice of sanctuary, and the professional challenges facing medievalists. He
is a cohost of the Saga Thing podcast and a founding member of The Lone Medievalist.
Julie Singer is Associate Professor of French at Washington University in St. Louis. She is
the author of Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Boydell
& Brewer 2011) and Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Madness, Metaphor (Boydell & Brewer, 2018). Other recent and forthcoming publications
include articles on Boccaccio, Philippe de Mézières, and Jean Froissart.
Alicia Spencer-Hall is an honorary research fellow at the School of Language, Linguistics
and Film at Queen Mary University of London. She specializes in comparative analyses
of medieval literature and modern critical theory. Alicia works in the field of medieval
disability studies, exploring representations of chronic pain in the Middle Ages in terms
of contemporary crip theory. She is a cofounder of the Medievalists with Disabilities
network and is regularly invited to speak about experiences of chronic pain in both
medieval and modern contexts. Alicia is also an expert in medieval hagiography, with her
work foregrounding interrogations inflected by contemporary visual, media, and cultural
studies. Her first book, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens, came out in 2018, published
by Amsterdam University Press. At present, she is finishing up work on her second book,
Medieval Twitter, to be published by ARC Humanities. A companion piece to the chapter
in the present volume, “Stopping the Clock(s): Precarious Times in the Academy,” which
reflects upon the embodied experience of crip time as an academic, is forthcoming in
Theorising Ableism in Academia, edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh (UCL Press).
Kisha G. Tracy is Associate Professor of English Studies and Co-Coordinator of the
Center for Teaching and Learning at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her
main research interests include medieval memory and confession, medieval disability,
and higher education pedagogy. Her book, Memory and Confession in Middle English
Literature, came out in 2017, published by Palgrave.
Edward Wheatley, Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, has written and
lectured extensively on disability in the Middle Ages. He received fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies
for research for his book, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions
of a Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2010), which was the first monograph
devoted to a single disability across medieval cultures. He has contributed chapters to The
Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018),
The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the
Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages (Edwin
Mellen Press, 2011), and The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd edn. (Routledge, 2010). His
articles on disability have appeared in such journals as Comparative Drama, Exemplaria:
A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, and Disability Studies Quarterly.
Editor biographies
Joshua R. Eyler is Director of Faculty Development and Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric
at the University of Mississippi, USA. His books include How Humans Learn: The Science
and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (2018) and Disability in the Middle Ages:
Reconsiderations and Reverberations (2010).
Jonathan Hsy is Associate Professor of English at George Washington University, and his
work explores the intersections of language, technology, and the body. Author of Trading
Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State University