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From: H-Net Staff <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:17:03 -0400
Subject: H-Net Review Publication: Black on Irina Metzler, 'A Social
History of Disability in the Middle Ages'
To: [email protected]
Irina Metzler. A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages.
New York Routledge, 2013. 346 pp. $125.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-415-82259-6.
Reviewed by Winston Black (University of Tennessee)
Published on H-Disability (June, 2014)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison
What sources are available for understanding the experience of
physical impairment and disability in the Middle Ages? How do we
contextualize those sources and interpret changes in them over time?
These are the questions guiding Irina Metzler's second book, _A
Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages_, which serves in
many ways as a companion to her first monograph, _Disability in
Medieval Europe: __Thinking about Physical Impairment in the High
Middle Ages, c. 1100-c. 1400_ (2006). In her first book Metzler
established a clear vocabulary and a flexible theoretical model for
the historical investigation of impairment and disability in the
Middle Ages (defined, respectively, as a biological reality and a
cultural construct), and in this second book she brings that model to
bear on a set of historical themes in four chapters, titled with bold
simplicity as "Law," "Work," "Ageing," and "Charity."
Metzler employed scientific, theological, and hagiographic sources in
her first book to trace the construction of disability in the Middle
Ages. In her second she follows primarily economic, literary, and
legal texts to sketch the "lived experience" of disability (p. 1).
Metzler admits that this "lived experience" is nearly invisible, for
the history of medieval disability suffers from the same lack of
sources--or a belief in the lack of sources--that has hindered the
study of similarly marginalized historical groups such as women,
children, and peasants. Because of the almost total absence of
autobiographical sources for medieval disability, Metzler calls her
approach a study of mentalities (with frequent reference to Jacques
Le Goff [1924-2014], that most famous practitioner of such a method),
by applying both synchronic and diachronic approaches to a vast array
of sources.
In her brief introduction, Metzler highlights the importance of the
structuralist-anthropological theories of liminality and marginality
for the study of medieval disability. Permanently physically impaired
people in the Middle Ages were "liminal" insofar as they were neither
healthy nor sick, and "marginal" insofar as they are found upon, or
forced to, the edges of society. She recognizes the shortcomings of
liminality theory for disability studies in that the medieval
disabled were permanently "liminal" whereas in its classic
formulation by Victor Turner (1920-83), liminality was a temporary
status in religious and social rites of passage. Nonetheless, she
alludes frequently in her four chapters to this modified "liminality"
of medieval disability.
Chapter 1 on law is concerned primarily with judicial maiming, which
Metzler defines broadly (perhaps too much so) as including not only
the corporal punishments of established courts, but also the maiming
of noncombatants after battle, the revenge of petty lords upon
another's peasants, and the unintended loss of limbs in unsanitary
prisons. Most of the chapter is a gruesome catalogue of severed feet,
noses, ears, and testicles, drawn from law codes and actual cases. A
great deal of this material is drawn from Sean McGlynn's _By Sword
and Fire _(2009), which has already provided a thorough study of
cruelty and maiming in the context of medieval warfare. Metzler's
interpretation of this chapter's material is thin, and we get little
sense of how those who were intentionally rendered disabled or
impaired spent their lives afterwards, apart from a few examples of
maimed individuals turning to a life of crime, or of people impaired
by accidents who hoped they would not be mistaken for mutilated
criminals.
In chapter 2, on work, Metzler explores the relationship between
impairment and one's ability to contribute to society in the later
Middle Ages. After a brief review of the impairments and disabled
status of military veterans (her examination of osteological evidence
of healed war injuries is convincing, and a similar approach would
have helped chapter 1), Metzler divides her chapter into three
sections: a review of the industrial accidents of workers such as
carpenters, miners, and weavers; the social and financial aid
provided by craft guilds and religious confraternities to those
disabled by such accidents; and a nuanced modification of Jacque Le
Goff's and Brendan Gleeson's theories on the changing values of time
and work in the later Middle Ages, in light of the evidence of work
performed by and provided to the medieval disabled. Metzler ends
chapter 2 with an excursus on the well-known, but poorly understood,
case of court dwarves, jesters, and fools. Metzler admits that few
dwarves appear in court settings before the sixteenth century, but
they are too valuable for her study to ignore as the only example of
a career that was considered specifically suited to the disabled
(here, dwarfism was due probably to hypopituitarism or
achondroplasia). Metzler's brief examination of medieval dwarves
provides a useful platform to decry, once again, the gross errors
about the Middle Ages perpetuated by historians of disability as well
as the misleading and excessive influence of the Bakhtinian grotesque
body.
Thornier problems of interpretation occur in chapter 3, on ageing.
Should the inevitable wearing down of old age be treated as a
disability? Are the elderly blind or maimed more or less "disabled"
than young people with the same impairments? Because old age shares
many biological and cultural aspects with disability, in particular
its liminal place between health and disease or life and death,
Metzler includes in this chapter all "pathological, because
disabling, aspects of old age" (p. 94). This comprehensive scope
makes it, by far, the longest and least organized of the chapters.
She examines, in turn, the various debilities associated with old
age. How many people were "old" in the Middle Ages and how was "old"
defined? These questions are followed by an extensive survey of
literary, theological, and medical descriptions of old age from
Hippocrates to Petrarch, and then an exhausting catalogue of
"misogerontism" in the classical and medieval periods. She concludes
that old age itself was not a disabling condition in the Middle Ages
(as some treat it now), but was obviously attended by disabling
conditions. Metzler necessarily engages with the research of
Shulamith Shahar (b. 1928), the expert on medieval old age for the
last two decades, moving beyond Shahar's work by providing numerous
examples of the care (or lack thereof) provided for elderly workers,
her evidence coming mostly from later medieval, English sources.
While Metzler's first three chapters are dedicated to causes of
impairment or disability in the Middle Ages, in her fourth chapter,
on charity, she examines the social attitudes and organizations that
most often identified and provided assistance to the impaired. In
both this chapter and her conclusion, Metzler builds on and
challenges the work of Sharon Farmer on medieval charity and poverty.
Despite the title, there is very little in this chapter on charity
per se, and rather more on poverty and the experience of the disabled
poor. Sources related to charitable foundations and guilds, however,
provide much of her evidence on the intersections of poverty and
disability, on the formal definition in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries of the deserving and undeserving poor, and on the growing
distinction of impairment from sickness.
This last chapter has the strongest and clearest argument of the four
chapters, namely, that the roles and depictions of the impaired
changed in the later Middle Ages, for both better and worse.
Urbanization, population growth, and an increasingly mercantile
society that valued working ability all influenced a widespread shift
from the indiscriminate charity of the early and central Middle Ages
to a charity reserved primarily for the deserving and clearly marked
poor. Physical impairment, manifested as culturally marked
disability, was one of the best legitimations for begging, and thus
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the orthopedically impaired
beggar (usually blind or lame) became the standardized artistic and
literary symbol of the deserving pauper. The physically impaired, and
thus deserving, beggar was compared favorably to the able-bodied,
undeserving, beggar. Yet the more that disability became recognized
as a valuable physical and social marker for legitimate begging, the
more that impairment was faked or forced (or was believed to be,
according to later medieval legislation and preaching). This led in
some cases to a distrust of the disabled poor and a greater focus on
the body of the beggar. Both poverty and impairment were tested,
marginalized, moved from the streets and churches into hospitals or
beyond city gates. Metzler also provides in this chapter some rare
and valuable evidence for the actual experience of medieval
disability in her discussion of mobility aids for the blind (people,
dogs, or staffs), of the meaning of names for crutches in Latin and
Romance languages (such as _potens_), and of the meaning of labor
legislation in the post-plague era for the physically impaired and
localized charity.
Metzler continues her criticism of Sharon Farmer in her conclusion,
taking to task Farmer's interpretation of a healing miracle from the
canonization proceedings of King Louis IX of France. The proceedings
detailed the life and apparent healing of a deaf and mute boy, also
named Louis, from which Metzler gathers valuable evidence of the
acceptance of a disabled individual as a productive worker (here, a
blacksmith) and the accommodations made to facilitate communication.
Metzler rightly recognizes this story as valuable evidence for
medieval perceptions of the relative ability, inability, and
disability of a physically impaired young man. Metzler closes the
volume with brief responses to two common criticisms of her first
volume that still apply to this one: first, her neglect of gender in
the discussion of medieval disability and, second, her failure to
include illness in her treatment of disability. In the first case,
Metzler once again rejects an argument by Sharon Farmer (that support
for the medieval disabled was gendered), stating that her own, more
thorough, study of the sources on disability reveals no clear or
consistent gendering of disability. In the second case, concerning
the apparent failure to include illness in her study of impairment,
Metzler makes a stronger case, aptly reminding us of a fraternal
organization for the blind that distinguished between those who were
healthy and blind from those who were sick and blind. Clearly illness
and impairment were considered separate categories by one later
medieval group of disabled people.
The book's greatest strength is the sheer quantity of data provided,
mostly from England and Germany in the twelfth through fifteenth
centuries, but ranging across all of western Europe from the
classical era to the early modern period. The extensive scope of
Metzler's research is obvious from her endnotes, totaling over one
hundred pages, a full third of the volume. (I agree with other
reviewers that the preference of endnotes over footnotes--probably
made by Routledge and not Metzler--is unwieldy and hinders a critical
and informed reading of the text.) But that strength is also a
weakness, for Metzler's arguments are frequently hindered by her
passion for lists, lost under a tidal wave of names, dates, and
anecdotes. Each chapter, "Ageing" in particular, would benefit by
division into marked sections with clear signposting. Dividing the
book into four long chapters occasionally leads to material not
fitting: the excursus on suicide and acedia makes little sense in
"Ageing," while "Law" reads like a lengthy footnote to the following
chapter on work. Furthermore, spelling and grammatical errors are
frequent, a trend for which I am apt to blame both Metzler and the
press: for example, Metzler frequently confuses "less" and "fewer"
(e.g., p. 45, 75, 96, 153), a variety of names are misspelled
("Gerald of Cremona" for Gerard; "Troy Vandeventer Pearman"; and
"Albrecth Classen"; and Bishop Marbod of Rennes lives astonishingly
into his "seventieth decade" [p. 104]).
Metzler's dominance in the field of medieval disability studies does
create an echo chamber at points: she cites her own work as evidence
of the applicability of Turnerian theories of liminality to studying
medieval medical notions of impairment, as she does concerning the
evaluation of impairments in legal discourse. But Metzler cannot be
blamed too much for this circular reasoning since she is frequently
the only scholar to have examined such issues. There are
significantly more works on disability in the early modern and
industrial eras of Europe, and she engages fruitfully with the works
of Anne Borsay, Vic Finkelstein, and other historians of misabilities
in those later periods. Given the frequency of Metzler's criticism of
Sharon Farmer's work, I would have liked to have seen her indicate
the importance and difficulties of Farmer's work in the introduction.
I have chosen to be particularly critical in this review exactly
because I consider this book an invaluable resource for historians of
disability, medieval economics and culture, and premodern medicine,
who I hope will continue to investigate the many and varied sources
described by Metzler on an individual basis and in their specific
historical contexts. In her desire to examine sources produced
throughout western Europe during a period of four centuries or more,
Metzler could necessarily provide only the barest outlines of the
"lived experience" of disability. But those outlines are convincing
and her theoretical approaches toward filling them are worthy of
emulation. I am looking forward to a third volume from Metzler on
disability in the Middle Ages in which she perfects the methods
developed in the first two books, perhaps through a close reading of
one episode or one source, or through a careful comparison of the
construction of disability in two regions or two eras.
Citation: Winston Black. Review of Irina Metzler, _A Social History
of Disability in the Middle Ages_. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. June,
2014.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41980
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
--
--
Dr. M S Vaswani
Assistant Professor,
Department of English
Shivaji University, Kolhapur
Cell: 09404825544
Office: 0231-2609189
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