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Recent Work in Disability History
Greg Carrier, a budding medievalist and blogger in Canada, reports that there is enough “critical mass” to form a Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages.
Medieval Disability Studies: An Emerging Field
by Gregory Carrier (University of Alberta)
Medieval disability studies is a new and emerging field. Much focus has been placed on disability history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the result that disability before then, particularly in terms of the medieval period, has been relegated to an intellectual backwater of sorts, centered around the idea that medieval ideas of disability saw disability as a manifestation of sin.
With the recent publication of Irina Metzler’s Disability in Medieval Europe, scholars have begun considering medieval understandings of disability beyond the ‘disability as sin’ model. This field is so new that scholars who work on medieval disability generally work independently and because they have a personal or academic interest in the subject.
The annual International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, has benefited medieval disability scholars by bringing them together and allowing them to exchange ideas and discuss the current state of scholarship in the area. At the recent ICMS (8-11 May), there were four sessions on disability (or related to it) in medieval Europe.
(Ab)normal Societies: Disability as a Socio-cultural Concept in Medieval Society
This session had two papers, one which discussed definitions of mental illness in Plantagenet England, and the other discussed the socio-cultural framework in which a deaf converso nun, Teresa de Cartagena, wrote her memoirs. (Note: A converso was a Jew who had converted to the Catholic faith or a Catholic whose Jewish ancestors had converted to Catholicism.) Both papers argued that the act of defining the disabled in terms of their respective subjects relied upon a flexible and nuanced definition of disability: there was not necessarily a single, unified ‘model’ or ‘theory’ that was formulated by theorists (jurists, theologians, and physicians in particular) and ordinary people who cared for or encountered the disabled that translated into a ‘set’ definition of disability.
The Scientific Grounding of Medieval Medicine
There was no discussion of disability in this session, but one of the strands of thoughts in medieval disability studies is the idea that rational discussions helped frame and define medieval understandings of disability, and not necessarily just supernatural or divine explanations. The four papers in this session emphasised rational developments in medieval thought by examining specific examples of St John of Beverly’s practical medical training and knowledge as outlined in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People; the relationship between university-trained physicians and empirical medical knowledge; the study of poisons and toxins, and the use of astrological medicine as influenced by Aristotle and Galen in establishing the scientific foundations of medieval prognosis.
Embodied Identities: Disability and Gender in Medieval Literature
One of the most common misconceptions about medieval disability studies is that there are very few sources either by or about actual disabled people in the medieval period, thus any study of medieval disability must base itself upon literary representations of disability. The paper on aging in Beowulf argued that the frequent references to the aging of the characters was used as a cue to the readers of the poem to recall the positive and negative qualities of aging, such as increased wisdom and physical frailty, and to associate those qualities with the characters at specific points during their lives in the poem. In an analysis of the disabling gaze in medieval (French) lyric, it was argued that women projected out of their eyes when they gazed and men received into their eyes when they were gazing: as such, women could ‘harm’ men by projecting their love and desire, among other emotions, to men. This concept thus both affirmed and disabled women, while also allowing literary writers a safe way of disabling men and their masculinity in late medieval lyric. The final paper discussed the idea of the gaze in relation to the aging body of ‘Alisoun’ (Alison), the Wife of Bath, from a virile young woman to a stodgy old woman in both Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the 2003 BBC production of the ‘Wife of Bath’.
Disability in the Middle Ages: A Roundtable Discussion
This roundtable brought together six leading medieval disability scholars who discussed their projects and their reflections on the current state and future directions of the field. After brief discussions about wide-ranging topics such as the mentally ill in medieval England to blindness in medieval France to a discussion of the value of a feminist critique of medieval disability studies and a vigorous discussion of how precisely to understand medieval definitions of disability, both in terms of concepts and terminology, the floor was opened to the audience. There was a good discussion about moving disability studies away from the field of literary studies and increasing the scholarship on discussions of lived experience in terms of examining sources that discuss actual disabled people. A second, exploratory, discussion focused on the difficulty of defining the disabled, particularly in terms of looking at the term ‘disability’ as ‘dis-ability’ – did medieval people automatically perceive the disabled as being fully incapable of carrying out functions, or were they understood as being dis-abled in that they were able to carry out some functions and only ‘disabled’ in others? The roundtable left all participants with a sense that even though medieval disability studies is a new field, it is a field that is extremely full of promise.
A final note: One evening, approximately fifteen scholars interested in medieval disability studies got together for a meeting and decided to form the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages. The goal of the Society is to “promote an interdisciplinary, scholarly conversation about the history and representation of medieval disabilities.”
If anyone would like further information about the Society itself or on how to join, or would like to discuss medieval disability studies at Kalamazoo or in general, please feel free to contact me at greg.carrier@gmail.com. Please include [Medieval disability studies] in the subject line. You may also visit my blog, where I discuss medieval disability issues, at http://cripples-imbeciles.blogspot.com/.
Thank you.
© The Disability History Association, 2008