The Variable Body in History

THE VARIABLE BODY IN HISTORY

Chris Mounsey and Stan Booth (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942152

© Peter Lang AG 2016

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About the author

CHRIS MOUNSEY worked for several years in theatre before an accident and four months’ immobility, in which reading was the only possible occupation, led to an academic career. Degrees in philosophy, comparative literature and English from the University of Warwick followed, and a doctorate on Blake founded an interest in the literature of the eighteenth century. Professor Mounsey, who now teaches at the University of Winchester, is author of Christopher Smart: Clown of God and Being the Body of Christ and editor of Presenting Gender, Queer People, Developments in the Histories of Sexualities and The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century.

STAN BOOTH is a PhD student at the University of Winchester. He worked for many years as a local government manager advising members of the community of a disadvantaged area of London. Seeing the credit crunch coming and the obvious impact it would have, he returned to learning, undertaking an MSc in Health and Disease and from there re-entered academia. His doctoral project explores the discourse of physical paralysis in the eighteenth century with a cultural studies emphasis that allows scope to explore individuals and to go beyond the notion of the typical and the predicted models.

About the book

The essays in this book explore the different ways the body has been experienced and interpreted in history, from the medieval to the modern period. Challenging the negative perceptions that the term ‘disability’ suggests, the essays together present a mosaic of literary representations of bodies and accounts of real lives lived in their particularity and peculiarity. The book does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather it celebrates the fact that it is not. By presenting a group of individual cases from different periods in history, the collection demonstrates that any overarching way of describing bodies, or unifying description of the experience of the myriad ways of being in a body, is reductive and unhelpful. The variability of each body in its context is our subject.

← 12 | 13 →

IRINA METZLER

In/Dis-Ability: A Medievalist’s Perspective

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses medieval and modern concepts of disability and how they might differ. One may note the medieval variability of labelling for ‘disability’ and the disabled. The conversation may highlight key concerns of today, by concentrating on two main themes: mobility and work (also working ability). The changing notions of poverty from the early to the later Middle Ages, from involuntary to voluntary poverty, demonstrate that inability to work becomes a key indicator of both poverty and disability. Personal mobility is a further key indicator, with differing types of mobility experienced by medieval disabled people. While mobility today is individualized and technologized, in contrast mobility in the past relied more on people than animals.

A beautifully executed fresco of St Lawrence distributing alms to the needy, made around 1449 by Fra Angelico for the Cappella Niccolina in the Vatican, depicts the classic stereotypical images of ‘the disabled’ as a group. However, this includes people who according to modern definitions are not physically impaired: widows and orphans; as well as those who are: the blind and crippled. Interpreting the representation of these figures from left to right, we find

• a widow with an infant
• an elderly crippled man
• an older widow with a small child
• an elderly man sitting on the ground supported with hand-trestles
• St Lawrence in the centre
• two small children (orphans?)
• a middle-aged blind man ← 13 | 14 →
• an old man with a long beard, who has no obvious impairment other than age
• a female pilgrim identifiable as such by her hat
• a middle-aged blind man with his cane.

All are shown with dignity and respect, they are certainly not caricatures. In fact, if any group label may be attached, ‘the needy’ may be more appropriate. To be classed as poor, or rather as ‘needy’, gave one the right to receive alms. In encompassing the sick, the disabled, the economically poor, the widowed and pilgrims, the pauperes who had a need for assistance were a multiform group,¹ a medieval total greater than the sum of its modernist categorical parts.

This essay will discuss medieval and modern concepts of disability, how they might differ and how the conversation may highlight key concerns of today, by concentrating on two main themes: mobility and work(ing ability). These two are some of the main themes of today for disability studies/activists, but the interesting question is whether this was also true in the Middle Ages. It then raises the question of how the two periods differ. Following the theme of the recent ‘VariAbilities’ conference² which was ‘history and representation of the body in its diversity’, it is apt to draw attention to diversity of periods as well as of bodies within periods.

Thus I chose the play on words used for the title: in/dis-ability, because it arouses the question of when a simple inability becomes a disability, and what is the terminological differences. Who are ‘the disabled’? As an all-embracing umbrella term, this is rather vague semantically, since it means all and sundry – physical, sensory and intellectual disability. Added to the conceptual mix is the growth of disabilities in the modern day where more and more conditions are being identified and pathologized, e.g. autism ← 14 | 15 → which was unknown prior to the 1960s, and arguably ‘learning disabilities’ is a misnomer for any historical period prior to the advent of universal schooling. This arouses further the question of the validity of umbrella terms more generally. Do they include too much? And what do we mean by disability? In our society it usually means two things: possessing a physical/mental impairment and benefitting from certain legal and/or social rights but also suffering from social and economic restrictions.

So what does ‘disability’ mean for other cultures? The starting point for discussing disability is to be clear about the very valuable distinction between the different models of disability. In the medical model, anatomical difference automatically and invariably equates to social and cultural difference as well. So the physically impaired are always also the disabled, at all times past and present. In the social model, by contrast, impairment is taken purely as an anatomical phenomenon and is distinguished from disability (this need not exclude ‘intellectual’ impairment either, especially considering the genetic basis discovered so far for a number of conditions, Down’s syndrome being the most well known). Disability then relates to the social, cultural or economic perception of people. Ultimately, disability is a social construct that is laid on top of the somatic condition of impairment.

Back in 1970s Britain the following definition was suggested:

Impairment: Lacking part or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ, or mechanism of the body. Disability: The disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities.³

In other words, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement on women, one may be born impaired but one is made disabled. The notion of the social construction of disability therefore permits historical investigation and analysis. If disability is a social construct, as times and societies change so too should notions of what is and what is not disability. ← 15 | 16 →

Yet impairment is ubiquitous in human society, and as far as we can tell from the archaeological record, has been so in past human societies.⁴ It has even been demonstrated to exist in other vertebrate animals, as a number of archaeological finds of osteological pathologies in animal bones testify.⁵ The World Health Organisation suggested that approximately 10 per cent of the world’s population is either physically or mentally impaired at any given time,⁶ which means that we may assume a similar proportion for past societies as well with the Middle Ages being no exception. Impairment therefore is and has been a factor in a large number of people’s lives, so one can study the implications and effects of impairment, in past as well as present societies.

Armed with the distinction between impairment and disability, the historian can then set off on the discovery of disability in past times, and can discover how, why, and in what way impaired people may or may not have been regarded as disabled by their cultures. This distinction allows us to observe and research change over time and between cultures – change in attitudes to and therefore treatment of impaired people. All too often historians have assumed unquestioningly that all physically or cognitively impaired people were also always disabled, no matter which culture they lived in. It is therefore important to note that not all impairments were consistently disabling in all cultures.

A new addition to the variegated growth in disability models has been Edward Wheatley’s ‘religious model’ of disability.⁷ At first glance this constitutes an attractive proposition for the medievalist looking at medieval ← 16 | 17 → disability, since religion obviously played an important role in medieval culture, to the extent that the period was popularly called the ‘Age of Faith’. But herein lies the problem: Wheatley does not resolve the contradiction between his interpretation of blindness as defined by human negotiation, presumably meaning culture, and religion as something ‘outside’ of culture, which is evidently nonsense. Religion is a sub-set of culture, as any ethnologist, archaeologist or historian could have pointed out. I take the ‘social’ in the social model of disability to relate to religious factors as much as to legal, political, literary, and economic in – other words ‘culture’. The distinction between religion and economics that we make nowadays was far less apparent in medieval times. There was a far more complex relation between health and wealth, religiosity, disability, economics and social structures than a reduction to a purely religious model of disability would allow.

The postmodern critique of history has focused the historians’ gaze on the world of language and texts, and allowed historians to develop more complex analyses, as well as to take a heightened interest in previously disregarded topics (of which disability is one example). There is a danger, though, that the ‘linguistic turn’⁸ in the discipline of history may make us ignore the very real facts of illness, poverty, death, and so on, which are not simply reducible to textuality alone. One postmodern author, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth,⁹ has reduced everything to pure text and discourse, thereby eliminating notions of time or society as anything other than linguistic constructs. Criticism of the ‘linguistic turn’ has come from historians such as Richard J. Evans, who argues against the ‘postmodernist concentration on words [which] diverts attention away from real suffering and oppression and towards the kinds of secondary intellectual issues that matter in the physically comfortable world of academia.’¹⁰