Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations ed. by Joshua R. Eyler (review)

The edited volume Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations is a welcome addition to the recent literature in medieval disability studies. Joshua Eyler draws from the larger disability studies community for his introduction to the subject. He elucidates the current debate as to which of the many disability studies models best fits medieval disabilities: the medical model, the social model, or the cultural model (p. 6). As Eyler points out, medieval scholars find none of these completely satisfying and have put forth new models. Edward Wheatley proposes a "religious model" of disability for the Middle Ages.¹ "In establishing this model, he uses the framework of the medical model to propose that religion played the same role in medieval society that science and medicine have played in the modern world" (p. 6). Irina Metzler recommends that medieval scholars use the modern definition of "disability" as it is tied to economic and social disadvantage while using "impairment" as an overarching etic idea. In her framework, an individual could be impaired without being disabled in his or her culture.² Eyler suggests that medieval scholars use the cultural model and the term "disability" with the understanding that some people are more disabled than others.

Three of the fourteen brief essays deal with the subject of blindness. Mark P. O'Tool offers a study of the patients at Quinze-Vingts hospital. He finds the majority of patients were businesspersons, who because of their occupations either used chemicals that led to blindness or worked in poorly lit or otherwise fatiguing conditions that led to eyestrain. O'Tool utilizes charts, outlining the occupations of these professionals, who were in no way "poor blind beggars" (p. 12). Julie Singer investigates composers and musicians who became blind and truly "play[ed] by ear" (p. 39). Their disability of sight seems to have amplified other senses. Francesco Landini "represents for us the meeting-point of theoretical reflections on the link between blindness and intellectual activating, and the actual production that is its end result" (p. 47). For the cross-eyed Guillaume de Machaut (p. 48), visual impairment was "a hurdle to be overcome" (p. 51) and may well have imbued his poetry with richer and, Singer suggests, prosthetic narratives. Scott Wells writes on the blindness of Francis of Assisi. Francis "began to experience a 'weakening of the eyes' in the early 1220 in conjunction with his journey to Egypt to preach Christianity to Sultan al-Malik" (p. 67). Wells's work is insightful. "[B]lindness had to be kept bounded within clearly demarcated limits; beyond those constraints, it would become 'disabling' to Francis's potential embodiment of sanctity" (p. 80).

Three of the articles consider disability in the works of Chaucer. Edna Edith Sayers analyzes the deafness in Wife of Bath. With her usual adroit and lovely prose, Sayers writes, "Deafness, as a real-life condition rather than a symbol of refusal to listen, is the quintessential individualizer, plucking deafened people from the levelling effects of social intercourse and isolating them as though behind a glass wall in all their idiosyncrasies" (p. 91). Tory Vandeventer Pearman considers pregnancy as a disabled form of the female body in the Merchant's Tale. Pearman links the figure of Sheela-na-Gig with its oversized vagina, the lecher, and ideas about monstrous births to the grotesqueness of the swollen, pregnant body. The pregnancy of the character May "with an illegitimate child, functions as a corporeal reminder that the female body remains inextricable linked to the disabled body" (p. 37). Andrew Higl scrutinizes Cresseid's leprosy as disability in Troilus and Criseyde and the Testament of Cresseid. Higl observes how a few early modern printers published these two works together in an effort to give Cresseid a more fitting "end" through "[t]extual prosthesis and narrative prosthesis [that] reveal new concerns and meanings when they are coupled as a sort of 'double prosthesis...