Joshua Eyler (ed.), Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations

Abstract

This book represents a fresh new addition to studies of medieval disability by a group consisting largely of younger scholars. The focus of the volume is on documentary sources from the tenth century to the fifteenth century, and ranges in geographical coverage from Iceland to Spain and from England to Italy. The texts under study in this volume include hagiography, poetry, legal codes and hospital records. The volume sets out, as its title indicates, to offer new readings of familiar texts and institutions, to consider the impact of medieval texts on modern constructions of disability theory, and to propose new models or new ways of thinking about disability or impairment. The opening chapter begins with the blind lepers at the Hôpital des Quinze Vingts. Mark O'Tool argues that a focus on disability overshadows other social identities, and emphasises the professional activities of occupants before they were admitted to the hospital. He also draws an important connection between trades and the impact of work on shaping the body, in this case the connection between cloth and leather working and blindness. Tony Vanderveuter Pearman discusses the female body in the Merchant's tale, exploring the medieval construct of the woman as a ‘disabled’ man in medieval physiology. Julie Singer offers a very different reading of medieval disability in her consideration of the links between blindness and musical ability, arguing that, in medieval terms, blindness was not necessarily a disability but an improved state—blindness is a ‘direct contributor to artistic production, not a hindrance’ (p. 43). Hannah Skoda takes thirteenth-century hagiography as her source, and, like Julie Singer, describes a ‘compensatory’ model of disability: impaired bodies are presented, in her sources, in terms of heightened holiness. Scott Wells also pursues this theme in a consideration of Francis of Assisi's blindness. Edna Edith Sayers reconsiders entrenched views of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's deafness. By focusing on the Wife's deafness (and its cause), both Chaucer's comedy and the Wife as a feminist forerunner are revitalised.