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Disability in the Middle Ages

– Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension, Corporate Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance. Thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to welcome back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab Leah Pope Parker of the Department of English. She’s going to be talking with us about her research on “Disability in the Middle Ages: Five Brief Histories.” Leah was born in Seattle, Washington and went to Mount Lake Terrace High School near Seattle. And she went to the east coast of the United States to go to American University in Washington DC where she studied literature and theater. And she came to UW-Madison to get her Master’s in English, which she got in 2014, and she has already defended her PhD thesis and she’s in this wonderful process called depositing. (audience chuckling)
And she will get her PhD in the spring here in the Department of English at UW-Madison. Please join me in welcoming Leah Pope Parker back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
(applause)

– So thank you all for coming. I was a bit worried when I realized I’d be speaking on the last Wednesday night, official Wednesday night of the year. I’m so glad to see you all here. Thank you for coming out and thank you, Tom, for that lovely introduction. So, I studied the history of disability in literature and culture, and so for those of you coming from more of a science or medical background, this may be a different perspective on disability from what you’re used to. So rather than studying things like how disability works, how the body actually biologically works, my job is instead to think about how we think the body works. And so, I hope that brings you some exciting surprises this evening because my goal is to share with you a couple of different stories about how we used to think how the body works. And specifically, how we thought the body works in the European Middle Ages. Specifically between the years– Well, for me, the Middle Ages are about 500 to 1500 CE, but in terms of what I’ll actually be discussing, really more like the late ninth century through the 15th and a little bit of the 16th century. So, I’ll be checking for how you’re following me on my stories all along ’cause I’m excited to share these with you. One thing I do want to point out is that my research is on the early Middle Ages, like the seventh through the 12th centuries, and specifically, it’s on England. And so, that means that my examples here are going to be sort of biased in that direction. It also means that the language is a lot easier to share. But I will branch out into Continental Europe and I’m happy to answer your questions or respond to questions as well as I can about Continental Europe if you have them. So, my goal here is to share with you five different kinds of stories about how disability was understood by people living in Europe in the Middle Ages. And so, there will be a political story, a medical story, a religious story, an artistic story, and a poetic story. Each of these, however, contains within it components of some of the others. So expect some bleed across these divides.

These five case studies won’t tell the whole story and I want to emphasize that because medieval disability studies is actually a very new field, just in the last couple of decades it started thriving. And we’re still figuring out what the story was, the big picture, overarching story. But these case studies do model some of the ways that we go about approaching disability. And the larger story of the history of disability in the Middle Ages. All these blend humanistic inquiry with discourses of science and ideas from sociology and medicine in order to think through that history. It’s an inherently interdisciplinary and intersectional field.

So, before I dive straight into the Middle Ages, I want to give some modern orientation to the field of disability studies. There are some things I want you to know. First of all that when we think about disability as a category, there’s been a lot of ink spilled over what that even means. Many of the models for thinking about disability in terms of disability studies and disability activism have come in response to what is referred to as the medical model. And that’s not to say that medicine is bad. We all agree that we should have access to medicine, and, I don’t know, health care and insurance. But we do agree that there is more to the experience of disability than just medicine. And so, that’s what the social and cultural models, as they’re called, react to, in terms of medicine. So the medical model is framed as thinking, “Okay, there needs to be a fix. There needs to be a cure.” And yes, absolutely, medical treatment is valuable and important, but there’s also other ways of understanding disability. For example, there is a difference between impairment and the actual social or cultural construct of what we call disability. So let me break that down for you a little bit. The physiological reality of our bodies can constitute an impairment. For example, a person may have a mobility impairment that impacts their ability to walk, and so they use a wheelchair. That is not necessarily a disability, even though it doesn’t have to be experienced neutrally or positively, it can be experienced negatively, even. But it becomes a disability when the society in which that person lives makes it difficult to access certain resources, or institutions, or does not provide adequate and fair accommodations. For example, needing to use a wheelchair becomes a disability when you can’t get somewhere without going upstairs.

Within this context of the difference between impairment and disability, there’s been a lot of modeling in terms of what isn’t disability? And if you think about that, you could say able-bodiedness, perhaps is a bit wordy, and it’s actually a fairly new term. Ability, we don’t usually use in that context. A lot of times we think about what is normal and refer to quote unquote normal bodies, but that too has some baggage. And so, a scholar, Leonard Davis has argued that we didn’t really have this concept of normalcy until the 19th century when the development of statistics, of demographics, started making observations about larger populations and noticing some really tidy bell curves and saying, “Okay, well, if you’re within a few standard deviations of average, that is ‘normal’ and I think beyond that is aberrant.” So that’s an idea that Davis argues was developed in the 19th century. He says that before that, instead of constructing ourselves in fitting, in keeping with, or in opposition to, the quote unquote normal, instead, we thought about, and by we, I mean western civilization, thought about the ideal. And his example of this is something like, Greek mythology where Venus, or Aphrodite in Greek, actually, is the ideal form of a feminine woman. And that’s not a form that any woman, any real woman is expected to attain. It’s not normative in that way, and by normative, I mean it enforces this idea that you should want to be like this. The way magazine covers, or movies, or doctored images of celebrities, encourage us to want to be a certain way.

So, Davis argues that the ideal was not normative. This is a bit challenging when we want to look at a period between classical antiquity in the 19th century, and this is where we start thinking about what could be different about the Middle Ages? Because in the Middle Ages, there wasn’t this pantheon of figures whose bodies were ideals, but not necessarily normative. But there also wasn’t yet this concept of statistical normalcy. And so, part of my larger project is with a group of my colleagues to figure out, okay, what’s substituted then? How did people understand their own embodiment? How did they understand whether they fit, whether they were part of an in group, or whether they were part of an out group? And were there even such tidied divides?

One other, speaking of tidied divides, one other concept from modern disability studies that I want to share with you is the idea of normate and that comes from that word, normative. Rosemarie Garland Thomson coined this in opposition to what she calls extraordinary bodies, bodies that exhibit some kind of marker as different and that can be intersectional. That’s not just having a disability, it can also be being marked as different due to one’s race, ethnicity, skin color, due to one’s gender, due to one’s sexuality, in terms of that expression of that sexuality. And so, the normate is defined as the absence of markers of difference. It’s very much akin into the phenomenon of having medical trials where the population is entirely homogenous. I suspect you can imagine that that medical trial might be with a group of white middle-class, middle-aged men and that’s how we end up with medicines where we’re not sure how they react, for example, in women’s bodies or in intersex bodies. So that idea that there’s an unmarked body that is supposed to stand in for everyone, that’s the normate. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have that body, you can’t help it. But it does mean that it’s a cultural force, right? That has real impacts in terms of real people’s lives and experiences of their own bodies, whether they’re normate or not.

So, these concepts are really valuable as foundational ideas for thinking through experiences of the body. But they’re also essentially modern. And a large part of my research is to argue that in the Middle Ages, disability wasn’t modern. It seems like such an obvious thing, the Middle Ages were not modern. And disability wasn’t monolithic either. In the advertising for this event, we pointed out that the Middle Ages spans roughly 1,000 years, and that means that there’s a lot of difference in that time. And so, even though I’m going to skip around within the Middle Ages, I don’t want to give the impression that there’s any kind of homogeneity. Individuals had distinct experiences and also different communities had distinct experiences. So keep that in mind even as we move across this larger period. And so in order to figure out how the Middle Ages might be different, we need specifically medieval models for understanding disability and impairment as it was understood in the Middle Ages. So a couple of models to start and then I promise I’m going to start storytelling.
(laughs)

Some models for the Middle Ages have come out, 2012 was a huge year for medieval disability studies. There were like five more publications that really changed the field at that time. But two of them are really crucial for today. First is Edward Wheatley, who’s actually just down at Loyola University Chicago. His religious model is very similar to that medical model I mentioned a few minutes ago in that it argues that in medieval Christianity, specifically, the dominant religion in Europe at the time, in medieval Christianity, impairment was something to be healed. It was expected to be fixed and I could put fixed in scare quotes. And that’s the sense of impairment being something that’s not desired. But it’s also a bit more complicated than that because in medieval Christianity, impairment, even as it’s something to be fixed, is also something that’s very necessary for conveying and demonstrating divine power. So anyone familiar with the Christian Bible may be recalling that in the New Testament, and the gospels describing the life of Christ, there are several healing miracles in which Christ will heal someone and in most of them, He’ll say something like, go forth and sin no more. Well, that suggests that the disability or the impairment, blindness, or mobility impairment, had something to do with having sinned. It suggests that disability is a punishment for sin and we see, and we will see, in my stories that that’s an idea that was common. Not pervasive, but common in the Middle Ages.

But, when, in a particular instance, when Christ heals a man born blind, His disciples ask, “Who sinned, that man or his parents?” And Christ responds, “Neither. He is born blind so that I can demonstrate God’s power by healing him.” And that’s the core of Wheatley’s religious model, that there’s this contradiction between disability being something to be eliminated, to be eradicated, and yet also something really necessary to this core religious belief and faith in divine power. That in the Age of Faith, as the Middle Ages is sometimes called, was really crucial to understanding what it meant to be Christian. Another way of thinking about disability as a very complicated, a distinctly not modern, phenomenon in the Middle Ages, is Tory Pearman’s gendered model. And the argument there is that it’s actually really rooted in medieval medical understandings of the female body. So, in the Middle Ages, one of the dominant ways of understanding sexual dimorphism in humans was that the female body or anything other than a masculine body was a flawed or deformed, or weakened version of the male body. This should echo that idea of the normate, that there is one standard and then there is the other. And so, this medical idea that in gestation, in the womb, a shortage of temperature being not quite right, or the woman, the mother looking at something wrong, that that could create instead a daughter, rather than a son. That idea creates a concept of gender, a concept of gender difference in a way that is disabling. So, if the idea that your body makes you other, physically lesser, that’s the correspondence there in this model between gender and disability. This is what I’m getting at when I say that disability studies is an inherently intersectional model. We can’t look at it in the Middle Ages and think of any kind of holistic model without thinking about the really crucial role of medieval concepts of gender, and religion, and as I’ll argue, concepts of class, concepts of race, concepts even of age and nationality.

So, when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages, it’s tricky because there’s no unifying term. There’s no language, either Latin, or Greek, or a vernacular language that was spoken in Medieval Europe that has a single unifying term. But we do have some alternatives. We could just speak about impairment, lacking that social construct, but that’s not quite there because there is a social construct. There is stigma, there is lack of access. Some folks have used infirmity off of the Latin word, infirmitas, and then what probably looks like the odd one out up there, unhaelu. That looks weird because it’s Old English. Unhaelu is an early version of what has become unwhole, or unhealthy, in modern English. And it essentially refers to an idea of being not quite right. In fact, to use the term normate again, it kind of refers to anything that’s not normate. But, of course because it’s 1,000 years, well, came into use about 1,500 years before Rosemarie Garland Thomson was writing, it’s also just not quite a perfect fit with that. I and some of my colleagues prefer to use the term, disability. And this is for a very activist but also a very historical reason. Because disability studies is an inherently activist field. It inherently proclaims and advocates for the rights of individuals with disabilities for whatever reason that they might have a disability, whether it’s congenital, or acquired, or temporary, or invisible.

That there is, they’re deserving to be noticed, there’s deserving to be recognized, and there’s deserving to live one’s life. That is an inherent argument of studying disability in this way. And people with disabilities today, I found, often want to see themselves reflected in history. We all do, don’t we? We want to see ourselves reflected in the history of where we come from, or where we’re told we come from. That’s why we study it, when it comes down to it. So in my definition, disability is the experience of a physiological difference that, usually but not always negatively, impacts an individual’s educational or professional prospects, their need for medical treatment, access to institutions, services and public spaces, and/or the perception of the society in which they live. This is actually really easy to apply to both the modern, our current world, and the Middle Ages because they had bodies. They had education, they had professions, medical treatments, institutions, public services and spaces. And they definitely had a lot of thoughts about how folks who looked different from them fit or did not fit into their communities. And that’s where we get the stories that I’m going to share with you tonight. We get these stories out of different approaches to bodily difference. And sometimes it fit a lot better than we might imagine. So, I want to start with this political story. How many of you have heard of King Alfred the Great? Yeah, and if you don’t mind a little bit of audience participation, what do you know about him? Anything at all?

– [Audience] Other than the fact that he was an English king.
– He was an English king, yeah.
– [Audience] He burnt the oatcakes.

– He burnt the cakes, that’s what I was looking for. Those are the two things people usually know about Alfred the Great, is that, they say he’s the first King of England, and he burnt the cakes. I’ll get to the cakes in a minute. First to dispel that myth, he actually wasn’t the King of England.
– [Audience] That’s right.

– He was the King of Wessex, which was a kingdom of Anglo-Saxons, well, Saxons, prior to the unification of what we now call England today. So, prior to, well, in the early Middle Ages, there were a bunch of different kingdoms of different levels of power, and at the time that Alfred was king, Wessex was one of the few that wasn’t currently being ruled by Vikings. So, it’s the forebear of what became a unified England. And Alfred is one of the first to label himself King of All the English. Although he does say, King of All The English, except those under the rule of the Danes. So, acknowledging that there. Okay so, Alfred the Great. Wessex is down on the south edge of England there, so you can get a little bit of a visualization going. He came to the throne in 871, in the midst of quite a lot of conflict. It’s actually dramatized by the arrows swishing all over this map. England, what would become England, was under attack by Danish Vikings and this would eventually result in the creation of what is known as the Danelaw, a region in the east and north of England where Danish law was prioritized over English law. And actually, studies have shown that even to this day, the prevalence of blue eyes is dramatically higher on the Danish side of that line.

Simply because of the genetic makeup of the people who lived there for so long. So, Alfred inherited this but he was never supposed to be king. He was the last of five sons and all of his older brothers were kings before him. He was actually trained, it seems, for more of a religious career. He was allegedly brought to see the Pope and blessed by the Pope and he was given this fantastic education, he was raised at court. He was actually a very bookish and scholarly individual. He also, after he ran out of older brothers and became king, that might have had something to do with the Vikings, after he became king, he actually lost Wessex.

He was kicked out from his throne and he was in hiding. And this is when he allegedly burnt the cakes. This is an uncorroborated folk story, I love this folk story. That he was in hiding from the Vikings, and he’s staying, he’s in hiding with this woman in this sort of rural cottage, and she thinks he’s, she doesn’t know he’s the king. She leaves him alone while she’s cooking some small cakes, like oatcakes. And when she comes back, they’re burning. ‘Cause he’s so lost in his troubles, he’s trying to figure out how to regain his kingdom. And she comes back and she says, “Why have you let the cakes burn?” Because he’s the king and he knows nothing about how to cook. That’s not the important part of his story for tonight but figured I’d at least let you know that that’s, what some people will ask you for in the future. So, Alfred did get Wessex back. And he did consolidate his power. And after that point, he did that through a successful guerrilla warfare campaign. But also, a successful propaganda campaign, which may have produced the story about the oatcakes.

He consolidated his power and he produced an extensive literacy program, which included drawing scholars to his court, much like Charlemagne had done about 100 years before. And these scholars, these religious men, these well-read men were involved in translating texts from Latin into English. And I give you this list just to demonstrate that these are major texts in early Christianity. Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is often still read and taught today, Dialogues of Gregory, Augustine’s Soliloquies. Alfred allegedly himself translated this top list, including the first 50 Psalms before he died. There’s additional text that we are attributed to others in his program, that should actually read Gregory’s Pastoral Care, which is a text on how to essentially be a good pastor to your flock.

Also, some global history, and the Histories Against the Pagans and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was a native English text but written in Latin. It’s the Ecclesiastical history of what we now translate as the English people. I’ll also note that this image I’ve given you here is of what’s called the Alfred Jewel. We call this the Alfred Jewel because it says around it, “Alfred orders me made.” And it was found very near to the island, it used to be an island, they drained the marshes that surrounded it, where Alfred allegedly burned the cakes. But it’s also what we think is, it’s what we think is an astel. And an astel is a very rare word in the texts we have. It describes, we think, the bulb or the handle of a pointer, essentially. Something you would hold in your hand to point to the lines of a text. And in the preface to that Pastoral Care text that Alfred had sent to every bishop in his realm. Alfred said he was sending as well an astel, worth 50, money denominations that we actually don’t know how to translate quite, but a very valuable object. And this, which we found it is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, may be one of those. It may be something that Alfred, this Alfred actually ordered made.

What does that story have to do with disability? It’s important to remember that Alfred had a chronic illness. It’s been suggested that we could diagnose him as having Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory condition of the digestive tract. And we know this, not from physical evidence from his body. We’ve actually lost his remains, but we do have textural evidence that describes it. Asser, you’re welcome, Tom, (laughs) (audience laughing) wrote a biography of Alfred. Which we should be aware was propaganda, it was trying to argue for Alfred perhaps being a saint, and was also trying to argue for his political power as well. It was written during his lifetime, so Alfred would have read it. But Asser puts a lot of emphasis on Alfred’s experience of his chronic illness. So, Asser describes it as, “a sudden and immense pain which was unknown to all physicians,” it’s beyond medical knowledge. And it’s quote, “the worst thing that for such a long time, from his 20th year up to his 40th, and even longer,” Asser was writing when Alfred was about 45, “It, his illness, could be prolonged incessantly through so many cycles of years.”

This comes from a passage of the biography describing Alfred’s wedding night. This is when it came on. And I highlight this, that this is the Alfred who kept Wessex out of Viking hands. That this man had a chronic, very serious pain affecting him throughout his life. I highlight this not to make him an inspiration, but to share how integral the identification with a physical impairment or illness, the identification with what we call disability, even without a term, could be for constructing a medieval person and really, a medieval culture’s identity. And there’s more because Asser actually gives some backstory on this. So, back in his lustful youth, Alfred was very troubled. He was very pious by his lustful urges. And so, he allegedly, “besought the mercy of the Lord to the extent that the Almighty God and His immense clemency might change the torments of this present and troublesome infirmity for some lighter illness, on this condition nevertheless that the new illness should not appear on the outside of his body lest he might become useless and despised. He feared leprosy and blindness, or some other such disease, which soon make men, upon whom they fall, both useless and despised.”

There’s a lot in here so let’s unpack it a bit. So Alfred, from his youth, had piles, or hemorrhoids. And Asser actually says that when the more intense illness came on, people thought it was related. If it was Crohn’s disease, it was. And Alfred wanted to resist his lust so he asked for some lighter illness. Not to have no illness, but to have a lighter illness, one which is not visible to the outside, one which is not stigmatized in the way leprosy or blindness would be for him. And an important thing to note here is that we have some evidence that in roughly Alfred’s time, blindness could be disqualifying from kingship. His grandson, who we could more comfortably call the first king of England, was not the obvious choice to become king because he may have been illegitimate. But he was the oldest son, of Alfred’s oldest son, and when we went to go claim the throne, he was attacked and his attackers attempted to blind him.

That attack, it appears, was meant to prevent him from becoming king. They didn’t try to kill him. They tried to blind him. And that cultural understanding, that understanding of vision impairment, as something that inhibits one’s ability to be a good judge, to be a good ruler, to be a good king, that is the kind of stigma that takes an impairment into becoming a disability. And Alfred doesn’t want this. He wants something that impairs his lust but does not disable his kingship. And of course, God doesn’t give him a lesser illness. “After a short interval of time,” as Asser says, “he contracted the previously mentioned bodily affliction, ‘the piles,’ that was the first illness, through the gift of God in which illness, laboring long and painfully for many years, he despaired even of life, until after he made his prayer and God took it away from him entirely.” So to clarify the timeline a bit, he has piles from his childhood, well, from his adolescence, where he wants to not be so lustful, he has the hemorrhoids.

And then he prays, sort of a spur of the moment while he’s out hunting, he goes into a chapel and prays, could I have a lesser illness? And God took the hemorrhoids away from him. “But alas, when it was taken away, another more troublesome disorder seized him, as we have said, at his wedding feast, and this wore him out incessantly by night and day from the 20th year of his age up to his 45th year. But if at any time through the mercy of God that illness were banished for one day, or a night, or even for the interval of only one hour, nevertheless, the fear and dread of that terrible bodily pain never left him, as it seemed to him– but rendered him almost useless, as it seemed to him in divine as well as in human affairs.”

So, what we have here is a disability. Because Alfred is so hampered. He’s so unable to do what he believes he should be able to do. It’s rather than a social or culturally enforced stigma, it’s something that Alfred seems to be imposing on himself, at least as Asser’s presenting it. Remember, this is propaganda. But Asser is very careful to say it “rendered him almost useless, as it seemed to him, in divine as well as in human affairs.” The fear and the dread of that terrible bodily pain never left him.

This is the king who shaped the English language as it is today. Because this is the king who had such a vast translation program, that literacy in English became prized much more highly than it ever had been before. English literature would probably not be what it is today without Alfred’s chronic illness, which as an adolescent, kept him reading, kept him in book learning, and also motivated some of his translations, or the translations he ordered, of medical texts. The words I’m speaking to you right now would not be the same. And recognizing the cultural, political, and social power that disability has in that way, in terms of how the Middle Ages still impact us today, reveals just how much the way we conceive of disability in the present day. How we understand it as something that makes us useless, or useful, by calculating our worth in terms of use. It has impacts that could affect us for centuries.

So, Alfred the Great was a major historical and political figure for whom we have a name, and a history, and documents, and I can show you maps of where he ruled. But that’s not most of the people who lived in the Middle Ages. And so, even though I spent quite a lot of time on Alfred, I want to give some time to these remaining stories, for, well, the next three will be dedicated to those more anonymous medieval people who lived with disabilities. So thinking about medicine. Want to jump ahead a couple of centuries, (laughs) to a monastery in the northwest of England. I don’t have another map for you, northwest of England. I want to introduce you to the Tremulous Hand of Worcester. And if you were here in April when I spoke about multispectral imaging and stains, I mentioned the Tremulous Hand of Worcester. So, that’s a callback for you.

The Tremulous Hand was a monk and scribe at Worcester Cathedral Priory who experienced, based on the evidence of his handwriting, a congenital tremor that would have caused his hand to shake, producing varying degrees of impairment throughout his life. And that’s basically all we know about him. We know what texts he wrote in because we can identify his characteristic handwriting. And I’ve given you some samples here, you can see, the lighter brown ink is the Tremulous Hand and he’s writing in the margins of texts that are 100, 200 years old. Books lasted longer then than they do today.

And you can see especially in that top left-hand example how his handwriting shakes from side to side. There’s a bit of a waver in the ascenders, the vertical lines, in his handwriting. That’s how we know that this person existed and that this person had a disability. So, prior explanations tended to focus on Alzheimer’s disease or old age as explanations for the Tremulous Hand’s characteristic tremble, but actually, his career was so long. He was writing in versions of this handwriting for about half a century. It wasn’t half a century of old age. So we know that he lived and continued to live and continued to work in a way that was perhaps accommodated, that was perhaps made possible by the circumstances of living in the priory. On an embodied level, there’s a great deal of variation in the pigment of the ink we see here, and I’ll return again to that top example, you’ll see the H, it’s the fourth letter in. That H is far darker. And then you’ll see it gets darker again in the right-hand side of the E at the beginning of the second word. Those variations in the ink reveal part of the embodied experience of this tremble.

Because there’s a higher degree of fading in the ink between dipping of the quill, than in most medieval scribe’s handwriting. The high degree of fading suggests that the rhythm of the Tremulous Hand’s penmanship is out of sync with the timing required by the materiality of ink, pen, and parchment. There’s a temporal dimension of the Tremulous Hand’s scribal practice that both moves too fast, making for those wavy ascenders, and too slow, allowing the ink to fade before he refills it every couple of letters. And this is the emergence of disability out of impairment for someone who we don’t have a name for. It’s a physical reality of his tremor affecting the process of his scribal labor, impacting both the appearance of his work and what must have been his lived experience of the process of writing.

Now, the Tremulous Hand is identifiable today solely because of this disability. Because the evidence we find in manuscripts is because of the tremor that we’re able to identify it all as the same scribe. But surely, he must have known his identity to be much more than this tremor. It was not consistent. It varied considerably over the course of his lifetime, such that it’s actually very difficult to put all of the texts that he wrote in, in order. It was neither a stable nor consistent marker of his identity. But nonetheless, it’s through the physical activity of writing in which his tremor is so apparent that his intense research agenda, where he’s reading and writing in all of these texts, becomes apparent to us. It’s only because of this tremor that we know he existed at all. And because of his handwriting, we can also learn quite a lot about the experiences of being a monk in the 13th century. This text, which I don’t expect you to read– it’s, I know, very small– this is an herbarium, an herbal. It’s a book of remedies from herbs and plants. This is the table of contents. And you’ll notice, on that right-hand side, there are a couple of Es between the columns.

Those were written by the Tremulous Hand. And we’ve found, well, scholars before me have found, that there’s a pattern in what he marks. He tends to mark far more references to cures for dimness of the eyes or soreness of the eyes. And then a couple for like bladder stones, inability to urinate, a skin condition. There were other concerns as well, but by far, he’s clearly more invested in cures for problems of the eyes whether it’s vision impairment or pain. And now we don’t know if this means that it’s something he experienced, or perhaps if it’s something particularly common for monks who are writing and reading all the time with no artificial light for a 50-year career. I would have some dimness of my eyes, too.

But the selective grouping does suggest that, at the very least, these remedies are a particular interest to the Tremulous Hand or to his larger community. And to my knowledge, I don’t actually know if these remedies worked. More scientific scholars than I are testing them and some Anglo-Saxon remedies did work, so that’s great. But that’s not the important thing here. The important thing here is that an individual, we have an individual here with one kind of impairment involved in the treatment, involved in the understanding and the addressing of another kind of impairment. And it shows us, it reminds us that even if we can identify an individual, an anonymous individual, in this case, and say they had such and such, even if we can give that diagnosis, there’s always the possibility of more factors to their identity. And that to me makes them incredibly real and human.

So to think more about the relationship between faith and medicine, because the Tremulous Hand was a monk, I want to now share a rather revealing story of a Christian saint. And actually, those of you, perhaps some of you, grew up going to Catholic school or Sunday school. Anybody know about Saint Margaret? Excellent, this is a brand new story for you. (audience laughs) Saint Margaret’s fantastic, she burst out of a dragon. Yeah! So, (laughs) briefly, according to Christian hagiographic tradition, Margaret of Antioch was a young Christian woman living in late third or early fourth century Antioch, which is near modern day Antakya in Turkey. In accounts of her martyrdom, Margaret is determined to protect her chastity from the pagan prefect who wishes to marry her. She doesn’t want to marry him ’cause he’s not Christian. And she’s therefore tortured, imprisoned, and eventually killed. This is not an uncommon narrative in hagiography about virgin martyrs in Christian, in medieval Christianity. But Margaret’s legend is unusual in two very telling ways. First, while she’s imprisoned, Margaret defeats not just a devil, but also a dragon. In many versions, including the one I’ll talk about in just a moment, she’s swallowed by the dragon and bursts out of its belly by making the sign of the cross. And that’s illustrated here in a later mid-15th-century Parisian image.

Secondly, after ultimately being beheaded, or before being beheaded, although some saints talk after being beheaded, it’s a separate thing. (sighs) Margaret prays to ask for certain privileges and comforts for those who would venerate her as a saint. Including that wherever there is kept a copy of the book of her martyrdom. “Let there not be born a child that is blind, nor halt, nor dumb, nor deaf, nor vexed by an unclean spirit.”

And so here we have this bringing together of impairment, thus stigmatized as disability, and childbirth. It’s what I would consider a proto-eugenic logic. The idea of let us not bring such children into the world, which is deeply troubling to me. But it’s also an idea that led to the proliferation of her cult, her saint’s cult. Because she burst out of a dragon’s belly, and because she promises childbirth without disabled children. She became the patron saint of childbirth. She’s no longer recognized by the Roman Catholic Church because there’s no evidence she ever actually existed, but there are legends of Saint Margaret that survive from as early as the eighth century, and they probably existed before then. The Old English version of this life that’s translated here, is drawing upon Latin sources, and was most likely composed in Southern England at Canterbury. It was composed in the middle of the 11th century. There’s an association between sin and disability here.

Particularly in this last item, not vexed by an unclean spirit. By this, we might take– a different version of this might be that your child will not be possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit. That, from other texts, likely is a reference to certain symptoms of mental illness. There are other passages from early medieval England that describe individuals who scream, or wail, or thrash, who were later then exorcized. As in, there is an exorcism, and that that is what heals them. But if you look at further descriptions of the symptoms in those contacts, there’s a very good chance that certain mental illnesses could be at play here. So there’s a moralization of these features. Not just because Margaret says they won’t be there, but because she aligns them with the uncleanness of an unclean spirit.

And this categorization, I believe is really crucial here, because she’s pulling all of these things together. She’s saying that blindness, mobility impairment, deafness, being nonverbal, being, having some kind of mental illness, or cognitive impairment perhaps. Those in poor health are later mentioned. All of these are brought together. And I mentioned a little while ago that there’s no single word in Old English, or really any medieval vernacular that encompasses all of these different experiences of the body the way we use disability today as a category, an identity category. But their collection together here suggests that there was something they held in common. And so even though there’s this really horrific eugenic logic at work here, we can also recognize a nascent sense of community, a sense of solidarity, a sense of that unity that did eventually, several centuries later, produce movements like disability rights activism. It’s difficult to locate that kind of community elsewhere in the Middle Ages, and I see this as a suggestion, that even though here, it’s framed negatively, perhaps there were people with disabilities in the Middle Ages who experienced that community positively.

There’s another way that very troubling depictions of disability can also help us think about nuance in disability in the Middle Ages. Cosmas and Damien, this is another pair of saints. Has anyone heard of them? Really, I would have expected more people to know Margaret than Cosmas and Damien because they’re more Eastern saints, but that’s great, cool. So they were physician saints, who were eventually martyred. But depictions of them, because they were physicians often show them attending to a sick person’s bedside, often examining a bottle of urine, which my second image includes. There was a way of diagnosing, in case, (laughs) that was new information. But there’s also a persistent thread in their iconography that deals with a very specific miracle. And it’s called the Miracle of the Black Leg. As you may be able to guess from that moniker, this story deals specifically with medieval notions of race, and notions of intersectionality between race and disability. It also deals with depictions of violence, specifically violence against bodies of people of color, and so if that’s going to cause you any kind of distress, or anxiety, I encourage you to do whatever you need to do to maintain your wellbeing, whether you’re in the room with me now or watching the feed. As this miracle goes, a white man had an infection in his leg. A gangrenous festering wound, which the saints miraculously replaced with the leg of a dead black man. He’d recently been interred in a nearby cemetery, as we can see on the right side of this image. This is an Italian painting from the 14th century. I promised I would leave England at some point. (laughs) So there are a couple of reasons why this particular racialization of this miracle might have occurred. Probably there wasn’t actually a successful limb transplant.
(audience murmurs)

So I’m assuming it’s not based in reality. But remember what we’re looking at here is not historical medical practice, but stories, ideas about what it meant to have an impairment or what it meant to treat an impairment. What it meant to be an organ recipient. Even in the Middle Ages. And I suspect that part of the reason there’s such a vast visual tradition here, dozens of examples probably existed…is that it’s visually compelling. If you look at it, there is a visual distinction that highlights the fact that that leg is not the leg the white man was born with. And so there’s a spectacle here. There’s a sense of appropriation of a body of a person of color for the purposes of the spectacle. We should remember that as much as this does look like a modern transplant, we can’t necessarily hold the figures in the story, or the people who appreciated it and shared it in the Middle Ages, to modern expectations about things like medical informed consent, even in addition to the leg donor being deceased, there’s no organ donor card he could sign, or the back of his driver’s license. So that, we can’t really hold them accountable to, but we can see this as a way of holding cultural forebears in the European Middle Ages accountable for understanding some kind of relationship between disability and race.

And what I find interesting about this is the fact that this transplant is even considered possible. Because it means that there is something biologically substitutable here. And if you’re familiar with the very racist imperial justifications for slavery in the 18th, 19th, and 20th, and 21st centuries, this idea that there’s something inherently different about a body with different colored skin is quite pervasive in those really failed excuses. And so the fact that sometime in the Middle Ages, for a lot of the Middle Ages, there wasn’t anything that inherently different about white bodies and black bodies. I think it’s a really valuable idea to pull out of this. But we need to remember that this is still the– actually very little appropriation of a body part for the sake of spectacle, for the sake of a religious story, for the sake of demonstrating as we previously discussed in the medic, the religious model for medieval disability, the demonstration of divine power through this healing miracle.

Now I want to point out that in some versions of this legend, the miracle occurs before the saints have died, Cosmas and Damien, but in some version it occurs after they’ve died, and they just miraculously do this from beyond the grave. That’s not unusual for medieval saints’ legends. But notably, there are also some versions of the story that disagree on whether the black man was actually dead. And this is the image that is– I find particular disturbing. This image was made in Spain in the 16th century. So I could totally jettison it and say, “Well, it’s not really medieval, it’s not the medieval’s fault.” But it’s inheriting that tradition. We have to hold the ancestral line of images before it accountable.

This image shows the black man on the lower right as a live donor, who has had his leg severed and it’s being reattached, well attached to the white man above him. You’ll see one of the saints is doing the attaching, the other is examining a bottle of urine. This states to beyond my period of expertise, so I don’t want to make huge claims about some kind of development between the 14th and 16th centuries, in which this kind of image became more acceptable to Europeans, that it became more acceptable to think about dismembering a living person, who, in this depiction is shown in extreme agony. I don’t want to suggest that that became more acceptable between the 14th and the 16th centuries, but I don’t think we can ignore the possibility that in an era of massive enslavement and colonization as the 16th century is getting us into, this image became more acceptable.

So this is perhaps the most fragmentary of the stories I have for you. I have just one more. But this is fragmentary because it’s outside of my primary expertise geographically. It’s not England. (laughs) It’s temporally out of my expertise, it moves more toward the early modern era, and it’s also disciplinarily outside of my expertise. I am not an art historian. But I found it important to share with you as a reminder that disability never exists in isolation. It didn’t in the Middle Ages just as it doesn’t today. Individuals with disabilities always have other identities, many of which also function as marginalizing in intersecting ways. And if we think about disability as a larger cultural concept that functions to please quote unquote, normal bodies, from those that are deemed aberrant, then we also have to acknowledge the intersecting systems that police the normate body, that that was just unmarked by race, or class, or gender, or sexuality, national origin, et cetera. In the Middle Ages, as today, studying disability through this lens helps us to access these intersections for understanding identity and the body.

So one final disability history for you. Now I want to return to the realm of the literary, because it’s always nice to end at a place where one is most comfortable. And I want to think not just about bodies, but also about minds, which would argue in the Middle Ages, constituted a part of the body. Very much as they do today when you think about body, mind, wholeness. So I want to introduce you to Thomas Hoccleve. We have another named individual to end as well. Thomas Hoccleve was a 15th century bureaucrat and poet in London. He fancied himself an inheritor of Chaucer, he was a big fan of Chaucer’s poetry and thought that he was sort of taking up the mantle of the next Father of English poetry. Literary historians generally don’t quite agree. Some do. In 1414, Hoccleve experienced an acute about of mental illness, and we know this because of two sources. First, archival research has demonstrated that there was an interruption in Hoccleve’s bureaucratic career at this point. Because the records say he wasn’t getting paid in quite the same way or he wasn’t working in quite the same way but the records don’t say why. But secondly, we have the poet’s own words describing an autobiographical, or at least semi-autobiographical form. An experience of what he calls, “A wild infirmity”, on a timeline that fits with that break in his bureaucratic career.

So the first part of a sequence of five poems, called Hoccleve’s Series, is a poem called “My Complainte.” And it describes the poets experience both when he was in the throes of his acute symptomatic phase, and also afterward. In this lingering stigma associated with that condition, and despite his assertions that he’s recovered from that primary mental illness, the speaker of the poem also describes a kind of melancholy, a version of depression, that he is impacted by in his present moment while writing the poem. So the complaint is constructing the poets experience of what we would now call neurodiversity. That is, any mental, psychological, or cognitive situation other than what might be called normal. The complaint constructs neurodiversity through poetry, and this is that final method for studying medieval disability that I want to share with you, because it draws on the affordances of poetry as a source for historical study of cognition. So that we can go beyond what third parties say when they’re describing a medieval person with a disability in order to look at a record that expresses the experience in the words of that person them self.

So Hoccleve describes his sickness as something that vexed him, a thoughtful malady. And his heart is so filled with grief that in the morning, he bursts out writing after he’s had a really troubled night’s sleep. It’s a kind of melancholy as I said, a kind of depression due to his recollection of his past sickness and his despair over ever being reintegrated into society. He’s continuing to be rejected by his peers, even though he claims he’s been completely cured for five years. And even though for five years, Thomas, who’s Thomas Hoccleve is the author. I call the narrator Thomas, because that’s how he refers to himself in the poem. Thomas and his wits have been in accord for five years as he puts it, but he says that all of his old friendships are entirely over shaken, no one wants to hang out with him.

And the world, as he says, makes him a strange countenance, they pretend they don’t know him when he passes through the busy streets of London. So I want to use him as an example to look at neurodivergence, any difference in one’s cognitive processes for poetry. And we can do this by starting with prior scholarship on the manifestation of normative cognition. That is, processes of thought or patterns of ideation in prosody. Prosody refers to patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry. For those of you coming at this from more sciency backgrounds and not so much poetry, if you’ve ever learned anything about prosody, there’s a very good chance it was iambic pentameter in Shakespeare’s sonnets. This one may be familiar to you. There’s that 10 syllable line, or with five units of two beats each. So for example, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” I could emphasize the beats in that a little bit more. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” That’s a filling normal iambic pentameter line, which is not to say Shakespeare always wrote normal iambic pentameter. He also wrote some weird stuff. But this is fairly regular.

Even in this very regular line, or pair of lines, we can see the way in which prosody that rhythm reflects a certain way of thinking about the content of these lines, about what the meaning of the words is. You can see that for example, in “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” I’ve emphasized it there. Lovely bridges between two feet of the meter. And as a result, if you slow it down, you have to linger over the word lovely. And that suggests quite a lot of things. It suggests a pattern of thought embedded in the poetry, dwelling upon the idea of the relationship between love and loveliness, the importance of physical appearance in this poem. Now when we think about prosody as a reflection of cognition, what it comes down to is as Eric Weiskott says, “At the level of metrical structuration”, it’s the structure of meter. “Where language becomes verse, meter and thinking are one and the same.”

In other words, the patterns of our language, specifically in poetry, both shape and reflect the ways we think. Patterns of language both shape and reflect the ways we think. My view, the idea that prosody reflects but also informs cognition, is fertile ground for thinking about forms of cognition that are often figured as marginal, both in the Middle Ages and today, just as the very presence of a body, typically a human body, opens a door for the utility of disability studies, the presence of cognition invites thinking specifically about differences in cognition. That is, neurodiversity. We can see this repeatedly in Hoccleve’s complaint when he is describing his own experience of some kind of mental illness. For example, part of Thomas’ account of his melancholy reads, and this is also in the iambic pentameter, familiar form, “The greef about myn herte the so sore swal and bolned euere to and to so sore.” That’s Middle English. I’m not going to translate for you because the rhythm is important, but in rough terms, “The grief around my heart swelled so sorely and enbolned or, bolstered, swelling, ever around, and around so again, sorelier injuriously.” It’s a rough translation. The meter of the original is important though because it’s what gives us the unit of myn herte.

It performs a perfect heartbeat of an iam, and the words that follow, seem to follow that in myn herte so sore, that occurs again in the next line as to and to so sore. So painfully, so sorely. And a new rhythm emerges, an insistent rhythm and those repeated O sounds. To and to so sore. It’s not exactly iambic. It’s an interrupted heartbeat in the meter that is supposed to be da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. It’s a somatic symptom of emotional and psychological distress, but it’s rendered poetically in the meter of the lines describing the distress of his heart.

Similarly, the lines in which the speaker is describing his prior mental illness… Again, in Middle English, “Witness uppon the wilde infirmite wiche that I hadde as many a man wel knewe, and wiche me oute of mysilfe caste and threwe.” It’s difficult to say within the rhythm. So in rough translation, “Witness look upon the wild infirmity which or that, I had as many a man well knew, and which through myself and cast myself out of myself.” The Middle English affords a much more concise representation of that.

But the meter is hard because the pronouns, especially in this last line are difficult to read aloud smoothly. Especially without multiple attempts. I’ve been doing this, like trying to figure out how to read this line for months and months, and it still troubles me. So it’s easy to follow the rhythm of the previous line and just say “And wiche me oute of mysilfe caste and threwe.” But that doesn’t account for things like the final E in mysilfe, which would be pronounced in Middle English sort of interrupting or playing a society. It’s too many beats. If we look at those slashes as representations of a stressed syllable, there are six. There are not supposed to be six. Another option which doesn’t fix the problem,

“And wiche me oute of mysilfe (laughs) caste and threwe.” That sort of fixes it in that there’s like five beats, but you have to squish in multiple unstressed beats in between. It’s very difficult to say. And what you’d get is, “And wiche me oute of mysilfe caste and threwe.” So when the poet is saying, “And which me out of myself cast and threw.” The rhythm casts you up and out of that very word, mysilfe. ‘Cause you can’t say it like that. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Except if you’re trying to make it sense in the rhythm of the meter.

All in all, when we highlight the correspondents between meaning and poetic form in ways like this, there’s this correlation between thought and meter. It reveals some of the very real experiences of neurodiversity that a person such as Hoccleve might well have had. And that to me, is powerful evidence for history of mental health that I am pursuing in my future work. And remember, we all want to find ourselves in history, and so my hope is that by teaching poets like Hoccleve to undergraduate students, sharing poets like Hoccleve with you, is to share that sense that even the poetry that we recognize as some of the more prominent, if not quite Chaucer-level poets, still more prominent poets from medieval England, that they were experience these kinds of things, and for many of us, that’s a very familiar experience.

How do I conclude this? (laughs) I’ve traced you this evening five different ways of looking at histories of disability in the Middle Ages. I can even list them for you. We can look at disability as a force and an experience with political significance and consequences, as an experience that bridged both religious and medical understandings of the human body, as a stigmatized collection of embodiments, that while perhaps not as marginalizing as we might expect, we’re in many communities not desired, and thus became the site for proto-eugenic impulses to prevent congenital disabilities.

We can think of disability as a category of identity that reveals intersectional systems for understanding identity, embodiment, and power, well before the modern era. And we can also think of disability as a very real lived experience that real people had that left traces in poetry and in other cultural objects that we have inherited from our medieval past. There’s of course quite a lot of other ways to look at disability in the Middle Ages, but I was told I only had one hour, and I’ve already gone well over that. I also don’t have any more slides.
(audience laughs) You might have seen an earlier version of the title of this talk, in which I was calling it “Disability in the” quote unquote, “Dark Ages.” And I put “Dark Ages” in quotations, and then eventually ditched it from the title because, well, we medievalists don’t like it when you call our period the Dark Ages. It wasn’t actually all that dark.

Sure, there were collapses and political structures after the fall of the Roman Empire. There may have been setbacks in science, but only in parts of Europe. During the so-called Dark Ages, the Islamic world was flourishing. The culture that developed with Christianity, but also Judaism and other cultural forces in Europe also flourished and we have quite a lot of art from that period. In fact, one of the ways we can push back on the idea of it as the Dark Ages is to think instead of this period as the Illuminated Ages. Because that’s what they did, they painted their texts, their books in gold, and it was called Illumination. And they thought deeply and hard about their worldview, about their cosmology, of theology, of religion, but also just of how the world works in a very material, earthly sense. And that extended to medical concepts of disability, and also social experiences of disability. And so if I leave you with anything tonight, I hope it will be that, that it wasn’t entirely doom and gloom. Wasn’t without its problems, but then again, neither are we. Thank you.
(audience applauds)