Joshua R. Eyler (ed.), Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. xii + 235, £55.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6822-0.

Abstract

This study of disability, concerning the mentalities surrounding disability from social, economic, religious and literary, but few medical aspects of mediaeval culture, will be welcomed for the scope and multidisciplinary breadth of its collection, although the bias does tend to weigh in favour of literary criticism. The premise of the collection, as the editor states in his cogent and reflective introduction, is ‘that Medieval Studies and Disability Studies have much to say to each other.’ Hence, all the contributions, in one way or another, commence with a critique, analysis or exposition of these two disciplines in relation to the specific topic of each essay. In the first part, ‘Reconsiderations’, the authors engage with mediaeval sources, where a significant proportion of the essays concern blindness. The essay on rediscovering the working lives of blind inmates of a Parisian hospital demonstrates that there is a person with an individual identity, shaped amongst other by social and professional status, behind the simple label of ‘blind’. There thus emerges the intriguing observation that persons working in textile production would potentially be prone to industrial accidents causing loss of vision. Blindness is also the theme of essays on St Francis, whose ‘weakening of the eyes’ appears to have been ‘discreetly marginalized’ by subsequent reception of his hagiography, and on blind poet–composers in the fourteenth century, who were believed to possess an enhanced sense of hearing in compensation for their loss of sight, leading not so much to disability but different ability, as one author argues. A similar tension exists in the miracles of Louis IX where disability, on the one hand, figures as testimony for Louis’ saintliness, while on the other hand, valorises the suffering body. Deafness is explored through a literary lens in the character of the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the same writer’s Merchant’s Tale is enlisted for a portrayal of the pregnant body, reflecting stereotypes of considerable antiquity that treat the female body per se as disabled, in that female is deemed an inversion of the male norm. Social aspects of disability are addressed by both literary and historical approaches, namely through the connection between poverty and disability in their portrayal in Langland’s Piers Plowman, and through the ‘legal controversies’ of madness in French jurisprudence. Two essays look at specific figures marked by disabilities, one treating royal impairments in Anglo-Saxon literature, while another investigates the disabled Fisher King of Arthurian legend. ‘Markers of difference’, that is, names suggesting disability in Icelandic sagas, are employed to explore the opposition between individual experience and social context. In the second part, ‘Reverberations’, contributors explore the legacy of mediaeval texts and how they shaped post-mediaeval representations of disability. We encounter Chaucer again in a re-working by the Scottish poet Robert Henryson; Shakespeare's Richard III as a construct of early modern narrative; and the afterlife of mediaeval ideas concerning the relationship between the aged female body and disability. Despite the caveat that the lack of medical topics may disappoint readers of this journal, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the rapidly emerging topic of disability in the Middle Ages. The different approaches employed by literary and historical scholars emerge as one of the stronger points of this collection, in that the tendency of literary criticism to treat disability as a narrative prosthesis is counterbalanced by rigorous historical analysis of sources that uncover the physical bodies of mediaeval persons, making for an interesting, challenging and thought-provoking amalgam of discourse analysis and philological reconstruction. One is, however, left wondering how far the many variant definitions of ‘disabled’ proposed by the individual contributors reflect more of the specific authors' concepts of disability than attempt an emic understanding of mediaeval notions concerning the consequences of physical or mental difference.