When Irina Metzler's book first came out in 2006, it was not immediately evident that it was one of those a rare pioneering works that opens a whole field of study in a discipline. It was horribly expensive, dauntingly dense, and, to those unfamiliar with Disability Studies, seemingly narrow in its focus. (The paperback edition, of which this is a review, has addressed the first point.) But Metzler performed important services for both medievalists and for scholars in Disability Studies. She wrote the first monographic treatment of disability in the Middle Ages, a condition that most likely directly affected at least 15% of the medieval population (the rate of disability in the world today according to a recent World Health Association report) and indirectly a much greater percentage, making this a topic of sweeping importance for medievalists. In addition, she informed those in Disability Studies, who have been modernists, that their theories might be more culture-specific than they thought. TMR did not review Metzler's book when it came out, so to remedy that omission and to provide a context for a new collection of essays that has since come out, I will begin with a review of Metzler's book.
Metzler's big question is whether in the Middle Ages people with impairments were disabled and whether, if so, they had a "disabled identity," that is, an identity primarily derived from their impairment. In asking this question she is drawing on an anthropological view of disability which distinguishes between impairment (a physical or mental condition of less than optimal function) and disability (the way that impairment limits a person's full participation in society). In some societies, to have very low vision is to be unable to carry out the functions expected of adults and so to be marginalized and disabled, whereas in other societies, technological aids may mean that such a person can carry out all functions necessary to his or her status independently. In the former society, the person may be disabled and in the latter not, but in either case the impairment is the same. Thus an impairment can be treated as a medical issue. The problem with simply doing so, as Metzler argues in her first chapter, is that medical study universalizes what is not a universal experience, and situates impairment as a disease, while not addressing how society disables people with impairments. Metzler's tentative answer is that the impaired for most of the Middle Ages were not necessarily regarded as a burden or held responsible for their own impairments, but that toward the end of the period, with the rise of individualism and changes in spirituality, they were more marginalized and deprecated and seem to have been coming to be more disabled. But she also suggests that medieval people were not defined as closely by a single feature of their lives as we, and furthermore, since they believed that their bodies would be resurrected in a perfected form, they did not develop an "disabled identity."
Metzler's second chapter lays out the social science view of disability; she finds the work of Neubert and Cloerkes, who did a metastudy of the ethnography of disability, particularly useful. [1] She also relates the history of the other theories through which disability has been understood. Early work on disability stressed the stigma of disability (following the sociologist Erving Goffman). [2] There was a tendency to assume that disability had always been stigmatized, but Vic Finkelstein argued that the isolation of the impaired is a distinctly modern phenomenon. [3] Following from this theory, other scholars have posited that the impaired could often find a productive place in society, as one's whole identity was unlikely to hang on a single characteristic. From anthopology, Metzler also raises questions about whether the impaired occupied a liminal space in the Middle Ages.
Thus far, Metzler's book provides a theoretical background in Disability Studies for medievalists. In the next chapters, Metzler lays out the medieval intellectual contexts into which impairment might be placed, for the benefit of modernist scholars of disability, who have tended to view the Middle Ages as a particularly benighted time when those with impairments were killed, mocked, stashed away and/or treated like animals. The third chapter deals with medieval thinking about the body from a theological perspective. While impairment was sometimes seen as the result of an individual's sin or that of his or her parents, the Bible and theologians did not always take this position. Furthermore, since all bodies would be resurrected unblemished at the Last Judgment (except for the martyrs who would bear their wounds as badges of honor), impairments were accidents (in an Aristotelian sense) rather than part of the essence of the impaired individual. The fourth chapter then turns to the thinking of philosophers and medical writers about the origins of impairment. As little might be done medically for impaired individuals, the best hope physicians had was to prevent impairment through more effective treatment for trauma, awareness of occupational disease, or through determining the etiology of congenital impairments, so these might be avoided. Ideas from learned circles trickled down to the less educated, so that even though medical and philosophical texts were generated by elites, popular notions probably partook of some of the same ideas about impairment.
In the final full chapter, Metzler finally introduces the evidence she has used to talk about impairment, healing miracles in the miracula of an assortment of saints. Although the miracle stories are hardly disinterested and cannot be used either to determine the causes of an individual's impairments or why they were healed, she argues that they can be used for their description of the lives of the impaired, and thus to answer the questions that most interest her. Most of the stories in the miracula collections, in fact, involve the restoration of people with impairments to full function or autonomy. However, the focus on impairments in the miracles was because medicine then, as now, could do little to treat impairments, even though many of the petitioners in the narratives had actually sought medical treatment. Therefore, therapeutic miracles were the last hope of many disabled people. The ways the texts talk about the impaired reveal contemporary attitudes toward them, and also details of their daily lives, how people with mobility impairments got around, for instance. Most of the impaired who appear in these texts could be said to have been disabled within the context of their society, as they were unable to support themselves or move around without assistance. However, there is little evidence that they were mocked or shunned or that they were necessarily beggars; charity was expected of all Christians and the disabled presented an opportunity to show it through assistance as well as money. The book ends with a short chapter summarizing the material that has gone before, and a lengthy appendix listing the miracles Metzler studied.
Metzler's book has opened an important conversation and provides, for those interested in the issue of disability in the Middle Ages, a welcome place to begin. It does have some weaknesses, but my discussion of these should not be taken as disapprobation. No one book can perfectly open a new area of research. There were so many issues raised within Disability Studies worth considering, that Metzler must have found it hard to organize the material. The two very different audiences for the book made this particularly difficult. This factor may account for the rather dissertationy and episodic feel of chapters 2-5. Metzler is anxious not to leave out any scholar (medieval or modern) whose work might be pertinent, but reading some chapters felt rather like reading catalogues (catalogues I was very happy to have, but still). Because she treats some matters topically within the chapters, she sometimes circles back to figures she has already discussed (this is particularly true in the "medieval" chapters) or leaps backward in time. Although the temporal framework of the book is stated to be 1100-1400, many of her material comes from earlier or later than this; this is probably necessary, given the relative vacuum into which she projected her work. Although Metzler explicitly declines to discuss images of the impaired in detail, she does refer to them. The book, however, has no illustrations, just references to manuscripts and painting. However, all of these observations are basically quibbles.
More important, I see the evidence provided by the miracula in far more problematic terms than Metzler does. She does not in any way suggest that the miracula were intended to describe events historically, and she is aware that such stories were rhetorically shaped and normative. But one of the implications of such shaping is that one cannot take it for granted that the impaired, for instance, were not treated abusively. In the few examples she gives where the impaired are mocked, the purpose clearly seems to contrast the faith of the impaired person with the impiety of the mockers, who can be construed as being shamed by the miracle. The details serve the miracle and cannot be fully separated from it. This doesn't mean that families didn't (or did) speak abusively to members with impairments. While the miracula can certainly show a variety of attitudes toward impairment and the technology of impairment, they may not be as good a guide to people's more typical responses to actually impaired people, when there was no question of a miracle.
And that is a problem with the book, albeit not a problem of Metzler's creation. What was the experience (to the degree that we can consider this given the sources we have) of people with impairments? While it is valuable to consider how disability may have been conceptualized, conceptualization would be more meaningful if we also knew how they were treated. That seems to me to be the next port of call in this research, and brings me to the second of the two volumes under review here.
What is new in this more recent volume? How have the authors followed the trail blazed by Metzler? I wish I could say that there is a lot that is deeply revelatory here. Some of the essays are of great interest, all of them are highly competent, and they fill in our understanding primarily of the literary conception of disability, but they don't break that much new ground. On a theoretical level, Eyler in the introductory essay outlines the approaches to disability (more clearly than Metzler, although he also has the advantage of her account), adding a third cultural approach that does not distinguish as strongly as Metzler does between disability and people's reactions to it. This approach leaves some wiggle room (sometimes quite a lot) for individuals with impairments to negotiate their status and thus does not elide the experiences of individuals, while recognizing that there were commonalities. Most of the contributors to the volume, however, follow Metzler in distinguishing impairment from disability at least tacitly, and all of the medievalists agree with Metzler that models created in and for the modern period do not fit medieval disabilities very well.
This collection of essays takes a broader approach to disability than Metzler's. Metzler does not include leprosy, for instance, among the disabilities she considers, whereas it is the focus of Andrew Higl's essay on Henryson's completion of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. There is, however, some reason to distinguish leprosy from other chronic conditions. For one, unlike most other impairments, it was believed to be both contagious and sexually transmitted, even though recent scholarship has suggested that medieval lepers were not as marginalized has been commonly believed. [4] Tory Vandeventer Pearman treats pregnancy as a disability in the context of The Merchant's Tale, but does not offer much of a rationale for putting this temporary form of bodily difference alongside more permanent and limiting conditions. This is particularly surprising in light of the modern discussion about whether pregnant women should have access to disability payments or have special parking spaces, but even if one were to take only an emic approach (understanding the culture within the context of the culture), some discussion of the construction of pregnancy in the Middle Ages (Was it a disability? An illness?) seems necessary. Encarnación Juárez-Alemendros discusses old age, showing how it marginalized women, although women were not necessarily impaired by aging (depending on how one thinks about facial hair). Here too some more explanation seems necessary, as well as some reference to the actual status of old women in Spanish society of the sixteenth century. Theory may not be sufficient to explain why they were loathed (if they were, beyond the literature). Aleksandra Pfau's treatment of the legal situation of madness in late medieval France seems to fit more consistantly with thinking about disability (although Metzler did not deal with it). This essay draws primarily on normative texts--legal treatises and custumals--creating a framework for understanding a legal case involving a murder committed by a madman.
Several of the articles explore the use of chronic illness or impairment as presented in a positive ways, a very useful exploration of the variety of conceptions of disability. Julie Singer's article argues in her study of two visually impaired composers, Francesco Landini, who could not see at all, and Guillaume de Machaut, the nature of whose visual impairment is not clear, that contemporaries seem to have regarded them not as disabled, but as enhanced in their musical abilities by their blindness. Beth Tovey, in her discussion of disability in Anglo-Saxon literature, and particularly in Asser's life of Alfred, notes that the king's chronic illness was interpreted by his biographer as a form of divine favor, not punishment, presenting Alfred's stoical suffering as a symbol of his kingliness.
As far as the existence of a "disabled identity" in the Middle Ages, most of the scholars in the volume would agree overall with Metzler that there was no fixed identity as disabled for medieval people. Hannah Skoda argues based on the miracles of St. Louis that for medieval people, disability was not an identity but a state they might hope to leave, and that the experience of it was highly dependant on one's social surroundings. Scott Wells shows that St. Francis's eye problems, which culminated in blindness before his death, were approached in different ways by his biographers. Thomas of Celano assimilated it to the trope of the blindness of encroaching death, while Bonaventure saw it as the result of Francis's weeping (and so a sign of sanctity), and the authors of the Assisi Compilation, Francis's companions at the end of his life, as a means of showing the exemplary nature of Francis's life. Kisha G. Tracy makes a similar argument for the different treatments of the Fisher King in Chrétien's Perceval, Robert de Boron's Roman du Graal, and Wolfram von Exchenbach's Parzival; the cause of the disability of the monarch (and indeed the degree of disability) was freely manipulable by the author because of the absence of fixed expectations on the part of the audience. The absence of such an identity did not mean that there were no recognized disabilities in the Middle Ages. Mark P. O'Tool notes that when the Parisian hospital for the blind accepted residents, their previous identities as workers were erased by omission from the hospital records, while Jennifer M. Gianfalla's essay on Piers Plowman depicts Langland's struggles with the ease with which people might simulate disability to facilitate their begging and the genuine needs of the poverty-stricken disabled who might suffer through this impersonation. So some individuals had a socially accepted right to seek charity based on disability, but who might do so (or did so) was fluidly defined.
Several of the essays have revealing observations about the way identity might be negotiated in matters of bodily difference. Although Hannah Skoda uses miracula as her evidence, she uses the description of the conditions experienced by the impaired before their miraculous cures at the hands of St. Louis to show sensitively the variation in the ways the disabled might be treated by their "friends" and family, either with great kindness and compassion, with abandonment and rejection, or something in between. John P. Sexton's article on nick-naming shows how attempts to "peg" an individual might fail or succeed (using the cases of peg-legged "tree-foot" Onund Ofeigsson and Njal "beardless Njal" Thorgeirsson), but that even where nicknames referring to disability stuck, the nicknamed person might negotiate the implications of the soubriquet.
One area that Metzler didn't much explore was the question of how disability intersected with gender. Sexton's essay shows that masculinity might be at stake for the bodily different. Onund "tree- foot" may have lost a leg, but he was still very much a man in his society, while Njal's beardlessness called his manhood into question. Juárez-Alemendros similarly addresses this question, albeit for the sixteenth century, where age, gender, and impairment come together to construct old women as monstrous individuals. Edith P. Sayers refers to gender more obliquely, in the discussion of the deafness of the Wife of Bath, for she is both literally deaf, possibly because she has been clouted on the ear with a book by her antifeminist husband, and figuratively deaf to his arguments, although clearly gender is the major issue in the Wife's prologue and tale.
It is always difficult to make a collection of essays coherent, and this collection is no exception. The three final essays (Higl, Abigail Elizabeth Comber, and Juárez-Alemendros) appear in a separate section entitled "Reverberations" and treat texts from the early modern period. The problem is that although the antecedents of these texts were indubitably medieval (Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the historical king Richard III, and Galician cantigas d'escarnho), Henryson, Shakespeare and the authors of the Spanish Golden age take the stance toward disability is that Metzler describes as emerging at the end of the Middle Ages: disability is seen as disgusting, worthy of mockery, and as an outward sign of an inward corruption. This is probably clearest in the case of Richard III, who was assigned a disability (a hunched back) in the early modern period for which there is no evidence in the documents generated in his time. Similarly, Henryson, in finding closure (a narrative prosthesis) for Chaucer's story, is the one who brings in leprosy; it is not part of Chaucer's tale. Juárez-Alemendros's article poses the same problem: the fact that aging women are associated witchcraft, for instance, seems to point forward to the witch craze and perhaps toward the reining in of women in the early modern period, not backward to the Middle Ages.
The collection also does not make much headway against one of the central problems of medieval disability studies--noted already by Metzler--which is that normative evidence (literary and legal texts) far outnumber historical records of a kind that would allow us to see actual disabled people. (If it has not been perfectly obvious that these are the comments of an historian on a collection where literary studies predominate, it surely must be now!) Nonetheless, there are some exceptions to this and some novel uses of literary evidence. O'Tool in his essay on the inhabitants of the hospital for the blind in Paris links some of these individuals with their occupations, revealing the impact of occupational disease on medieval people. While only a minority of people could be linked to their occupations, many of those who could be were people exposed either to eyestrain or to dangerous foreign substances that might be lodged in the eye in the course of their work. Tovey's essay on disability in Anglo-Saxon England primarily compares two normative literary texts, Aelfric's homily on the Holy Innocents, which discusses Herod's final debility, and Asser's life of Alfred, in which he describes a painful and mysterious disease suffered by the king. She does, however, set Aelfric's and Asser's comments in the context of Anglo-Saxon medical knowledge, arguing that this knowledge allows us to understand how the audience would understand the difference between the illness of the evil king and of the good one. Gianfalla operates in the realm of Langland's rhetoric about poverty and who may justly beg, namely disabled beggars, but notes that this must be situated within the context of societal concerns about "sturdy beggars" (to use the Elizabethan legal term) and vagrancy law. Other essays, however, touch less on the physical world, residing largely at the level of figuration and language in a fairly familiar sort of literary discourse. One may argue whether texts ever show us the actual historical world as opposed to an imaginary, but as an historian I more or less have to take the position that some do so more than others. Literary conceptions reflect mentalities and imply materialities, but without more direct evidence about lived experience, we are forced to rely on our ability to intuit the nature of the reflection. When literary scholars often cannot agree on whether certain texts are in earnest or are parodies, this is a thin limb to crawl out on. And even if we can interpret such texts in a satisfying way, we are left with the question of how typical such framings of disability are. To give an entirely hypothetical example, if normative texts urged contemporaries to be charitable, if only a few were and most were indifferent, the normative texts only ameliorated the experience of a few people.
Oddly enough, in a collection in which most authors discuss the imaginary of the disabled, there is no essay on images, although on the cover of the book there is an interesting image of a child (or physically small person) with what seems to be ectrodactyly (or perhaps a leprous loss of fingers) being wheeled along in a one- wheeled litter. The image comes from the marginalia in the Luttrell Psalter, which is famous both for images of everyday life and for grotesques. A fuller accounting of all of the images of impairment-- illustrations in the miracula and the Bible, for instance-- would be of great use. Francesca Guerra has developed some metadata tags for digitized manuscripts to indicate disability, [5] and it is to be hoped that scholars will use her work to begin that necessary discussion of images.
In sum, Metzler's book is still well worth reading five years later. Eyler's collection of essays also has value, although it does not, as the blurb on the back claims, offer a "ground-breaking new approach"; the debt to Metzler's work is deeply apparent in every article. It does, however, represent a modest step forward in bringing medievalists to consider disability in the Middle Ages.
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Notes:
1. Dieter Neubert and Günther Cloerkes, Behinderung und Behinderte in verschiedenen Kulturen. Eine vergleichende Analyse ethnologischer Studies (2nd ed. Heidelberg: Edition Schindele, 1994).
2. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Reprint ed. London: Penguin, 1990).
3. Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1980).
4. Timothy S. Miller and Rachel Smith-Savage, "Medieval Leprosy Reconsidered," International Social Science Review 81:1/2 (2006) : 16-28.
5. Francesca Guerra, "Simplifying Access: Metadata for Medieval Disability Studies," Pacific Northwest Library Association Quarterly 74/2 (Winter 2010): 10-26, accessed July 16, 2011 at http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/PNLA%20Quarterly/guerra74-2.htm.