A Historical Sociology of Disability: Human Validity and Invalidity From Antiquity to Early Modernity 9780367174187, 9780367174200, 9780429056673

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Violating disability
Chapter outlines #24,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #27,0,-32768 References #30,0,-32768Part I Method and theory #34,0,-32768 Chapter 1 Thinking through disability history: An act of recovery #36,0,-32768 Introduction
Methodological self-consciousness: The author in the confessional #40,0,-32768 New historicism #44,0,-32768 The place of ‘Proprium’ and ‘moral economy’ in an historical sociology of disability #50,0,-32768 A history of disability or a history of impairment #54,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #59,0,-32768 References #60,0,-32768 Chapter 2 Modelling disability theory: A contemporary history of the disability idea #65,0,-32768 Introduction
First wave radicalism: The social model of disability #67,0,-32768 The second wave: Conceptual proliferation, Critical Disability Studies and the growth of the cultural model of disability #74,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #88,0,-32768 References #89,0,-32768 Chapter 3 Conceptualising property and propriety, validity and invalidation #97,0,-32768 Introduction
Recognition: Moral economy of propriety #100,0,-32768 Ableism: The cloak of validity #104,0,-32768 Invalidation #110,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #121,0,-32768 Part I: Concluding remarks #122,0,-32768 References #123,0,-32768Part II Disability in history: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modernity #130,0,-32768 Chapter 4 Disability in ancient Greece and Rome #132,0,-32768 Introduction
Arete: The contours of classical propriety #135,0,-32768 ‘And those of the worst’: Disposable bodies #150,0,-32768 Pharmakos: The disabled scapegoat #170,0,-32768 An ocular-centric culture of appearance and light: Being blind in Graeco-Roman society #178,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #187,0,-32768 References #190,0,-32768 Chapter 5 Disability in the Christian Middle Ages #197,0,-32768 Introduction
Eristic Christianity #200,0,-32768 God, church and state: Normate power triangulated #204,0,-32768 Theological invalidations: The others of the unscathed #213,0,-32768 Ambiguous God, ambiguous scripture and ambiguous testaments of sin and disability #225,0,-32768 God’s tease: Saints and sinners #233,0,-32768 No ears to hear, no eyes to see … the wonders of God #239,0,-32768 The era of ridicule #244,0,-32768 From monsters to demons #249,0,-32768 Merciful conduct: A stairway to heaven #257,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #269,0,-32768 References #273,0,-32768 Chapter 6 Renaissance and Reformation: Disability invalidation in Early Modernity #281,0,-32768 Introduction
Interregnum #283,0,-32768 Aesthetics and classic revivalism #286,0,-32768 Demons and witches #301,0,-32768 Monsters #312,0,-32768 Dark subjects: Savages and heathens #319,0,-32768 Social dislocation: Vagabonds and beggars #330,0,-32768 Fools and folly #336,0,-32768 The closed Protestant body: Each to his own #343,0,-32768 Concluding remarks #348,0,-32768 References #350,0,-32768 Conclusion: A banquet of indignities
References #367,0,-32768Index

Citation preview

‘Written beautifully, scrutinized thoroughly, and analysed with depth. This book is a much-needed addition to disability studies literature as it helps us to understand better the historical and cultural mechanisms underlying the (de)valuation of disabled people’. Professor Simo Vehmas, Department of Special Education, Stockholm University ‘In this expansive, meticulously researched and generously written book, Bill Hughes displays yet again why he is one of the principle go-to theorists for disability studies researchers. This incredibly ambitious social and historical text realises its potential not least because of Hughes’s sense of duty to the reader: to make the complex accessible and applicable. A triumph’. Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies and Education, University of Sheffield ‘This is a really stimulating read for academics and non-academics, alike. I commend the author’s suggestion to non-academics to read part two, the historical account, before part one, the study’s theoretical basis; for this facilitates understanding of the book’s novel approach to the study of disabled people’s place in relation to society, both then and now’. Dr Jim Elder-Woodward, OBE, retired: Former Convenor of the Scottish Independent Living Coalition and co-Convenor of the National Independent Living Programme Board ‘This book opens up an entirely new perspective on the history of disability, and in particular the changing meaning of validity and invalidity from antiquity to early modernity. It is a brilliant, fine-grained and civically engaged analysis of the changing relationship between impairment, disablement and moral economy. It is a landmark book that deserves the widest possible reading and discussion’. Professor Nick Watson, Chair of Disability Studies, University of Glasgow ‘Bill Hughes’ latest book brings home the need to face the social meaning of disability today by confronting the past. Poetically political, this is a captivating exploration of how the collective imagination confines disability to multiple forms of in-validation throughout Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. Exploring representations of impairment in the Western moral economy over time, Hughes shows how disabled people are situated as “both good to

mistreat and good to be good to.” For anyone who knows that being disabled, like thinking about it, is not easy, Hughes work [or title] will enable us to find new ways to expose how disability has been made a problem of invalidation while awakening our need to question this inheritance. This book is a must read’. Tanya Titchkosky is Professor of Disability Studies in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE of the University of Toronto, Canada and author of Disability, Self and Society; as well as Reading and Writing Disability Differently; and The Question of Access. ‘An exhilarating journey through the theoretical and historical landscape that shapes our understanding of disability. In this ‘historical sociology’ of disability, Hughes presents a richly detailed and scholarly account of disabled people’s place in the moral economy throughout the ages. At times challenging in its profundity, but always witty and often frankly poetic, this is a must read for any serious student of disability’. Etienne d’Aboville, Chief Executive, Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Living

A HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF DISABILITY

Covering the period from Antiquity to Early Modernity, A Historical Sociology of Disability argues that disabled people have been treated in Western society as good to mistreat and – with the rise of Christianity – good to be good to. It examines the place and role of disabled people in the moral economy of the successive cultures that have constituted ‘Western civilisation’. This book is the story of disability as it is imagined and re-imagined through the cultural lens of ableism. It is a story of invalidation; of the material habituations of culture and moral sentiment that paint pictures of disability as ‘what not to be’. The author examines the forces of moral regulation that fall violently in behind the dehumanising, ontological fait accompli of disability invalidation, and explores the ways in which the normate community conceived of, narrated and acted in relation to disability. A Historical Sociology of Disability will be of interest to all scholars, students and activists working in the field of Disability Studies, as well as sociology, education, philosophy, theology and history. It will appeal to anyone who is interested in the past, present and future of the ‘last civil rights movement’. Bill Hughes is Professor of Sociology at Glasgow Caledonian University. He was co-editor of Disability and Social Theory (2012), a regular contributor to and member of the Editorial Board of Disability & Society and, formerly, Editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research.

Routledge Advances in Disability Studies

Intellectual Disability and the Right to a Sexual Life A Continuation of the Autonomy/Paternalism Debate Simon Foley The Changing Disability Policy System Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe, Volume 2 Edited by Rune Halvorsen, Bjørn Hvinden, Jerome Bickenbach, Delia Ferri and Ana Marta Guillén Rodriguez Cultural Disability Studies in Education Interdisciplinary Navigations of the Normative Divide David Bolt Institutional Violence and Disability Punishing Conditions Kate Rossiter and Jen Rinaldi A Sensory Sociology of Autism Habitual Favourites Robert Rourke Understanding Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities in Adults Dreenagh Lyle Students with Disabilities and the Transition to Work A Capabilities Approach Oliver Mutanga Institutional Ethnography and Cognitive and Communicative Disabilities Kjeld Høgsbro A Historical Sociology of Disability Human Validity and Invalidity from Antiquity to Early Modernity Bill Hughes For more information about this series, please visit: https​://ww​w.rou​t ledg​e.com​/ Rout​ledge​-Adva​nces-​in-Di​sabil​ity-S​t udie​s/boo​k-ser​ies/R​A DS

A HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF DISABILITY Human Validity and Invalidity from Antiquity to Early Modernity

Bill Hughes

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Bill Hughes The right of Bill Hughes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-17418-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17420-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05667-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Tracey, Liam and Roisa

CONTENTS

List of figures xii List of tables xiii Acknowledgements xiv Introduction

1

Violating disability  1 Chapter outlines  9 Concluding remarks  12 References 15 PART I

Method and theory 1 Thinking through disability history: An act of recovery Introduction 21 Methodological self-consciousness: The author in the confessional  25 New historicism  29 The place of ‘Proprium’ and ‘moral economy’ in an historical sociology of disability  35 A history of disability or a history of impairment  39 Concluding remarks  44 References 45

19 21

x Contents

2 Modelling disability theory: A contemporary history of the disability idea

50

Introduction 50 First wave radicalism: The social model of disability  52 The second wave: Conceptual proliferation, Critical Disability Studies and the growth of the cultural model of disability  59 Concluding remarks  73 References 74 3 Conceptualising property and propriety, validity and invalidation

82

Introduction 82 Recognition: Moral economy of propriety  85 Ableism: The cloak of validity  89 Invalidation 95 Concluding remarks  106 Part I: Concluding remarks  107 References 108 PART II

Disability in history: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 4 Disability in ancient Greece and Rome

115 117

Introduction 117 Arete: The contours of classical propriety  120 ‘And those of the worst’: Disposable bodies  135 Pharmakos: The disabled scapegoat  155 An ocular-centric culture of appearance and light: Being blind in Graeco-Roman society  163 Concluding remarks  172 References 175 5 Disability in the Christian Middle Ages Introduction 182 Eristic Christianity  185 God, church and state: Normate power triangulated  189 Theological invalidations: The others of the unscathed  198 Ambiguous God, ambiguous scripture and ambiguous testaments of sin and disability  210

182

Contents 

xi

God’s tease: Saints and sinners  218 No ears to hear, no eyes to see … the wonders of God  224 The era of ridicule  229 From monsters to demons  234 Merciful conduct: A stairway to heaven  242 Concluding remarks  254 References 258 6 Renaissance and Reformation: Disability invalidation in Early Modernity

266

Introduction 266 Interregnum 268 Aesthetics and classic revivalism  271 Demons and witches  286 Monsters 297 Dark subjects: Savages and heathens  304 Social dislocation: Vagabonds and beggars  315 Fools and folly  321 The closed Protestant body: Each to his own  328 Concluding remarks  333 References 335 Conclusion: A banquet of indignities References 352

343

Index 355

FIGURES

5.1 The Master of Alkmaar: The Seven Works of Mercy: Feeding the Hungry 5.2 The Master of Alkmaar: The Seven Works of Mercy: Giving Drinks to the Thirsty 6.1 Leonardo da Vinci: Vitruvian Man 6.2 Hieronymus Bosch: Cripples 6.3 Hieronymus Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delight 6.4 Pieter Bruegel: The Blind Leading the Blind

247 248 274 279 280 282

TABLES

0.1 The invalidation of disabled people in the Western Proprium: Moral economy as analytical framework 0.2 The Proprium: Situating disability in the spheres of political and moral economy 2.1 Bifurcation of the barrier metaphor in Disability Studies 3.1 The two pillars of disability invalidation

9 9 57 85

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Colleagues at Glasgow Caledonian University, particularly in the Department of Social Sciences Scholars and comrades in Disability Studies Comrades in Glasgow Disability Alliance Family and friends

INTRODUCTION

Violating disability While the subject desires recognition as human, capable of activity, full of hope and possibility, she receives from the dominant culture only the judgement that she is different, marked or inferior. (Young 1990: 60) It must have been profoundly difficult for disabled people, throughout history, to have found ways to define themselves other than through the violence that has visited and violated their lives and marked them as different and inferior. Be it the pharmakoi of ancient Greece or the mendicants who, as I write, scratch out their lives in the grinding poverty of the great cities of the global south, one can imagine an experience of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), a life outside the polis, devoid of rights, in which one exists biologically but not politically, not so much as an autonomous individual, but as little more than mere living matter. In this rootless zone of strangerhood, or ‘exception’, one must make daily acquaintance with the barely disguised brutality that goes hand-in-hand with existence on the sharp, dangerous edge of society where one is ‘beyond the realm of personhood’ at the very ‘threshold of humanity’ (Overboe 2007: 24). In the experience of disabled people, this kind of ‘living’ is not exceptional (Reeve 2008a; 2008b). Hate crime – though under-reported, often trivialised and surrounded by legislative confusion – is a daily fact of life for disabled people in the UK and the US (Emerson and Roulstone 2014; Quarmby 2011; Sherry 2010) and there is plenty of evidence of other forms of violence and violation against disabled people which is well above the norm for their non-disabled counterparts (Hughes, Goodley and Davis 2012; Jones et al. 2012), including sexual abuse (Brown and Craft 1989; Mueller-Johnson, Eisner and Obsuth 2014;

2 

Introduction

Olsvik 2006; Sobsey and Doe 1991; Sullivan and Knutson 2000), bullying and harassment (Carter and Spencer 2006; Christensen et al. 2012; Conners and Stalker 2007), victimisation of, for example, intellectually disabled people (Fisher, Moskovitz and Hoddap 2012) and elders with dementia (Strasser et al. 2012) and psycho-emotional hurt and insult (Reeve 2002; Thomas 1999) including the ‘profound neglect’ of disabled children ‘to the point where it is life threatening’ (United Nations Children’s Fund 2005: 11). Mikton and Shakespeare (2014: 3055) conclude that: ‘Violence against persons with disability is … a significant public health and human rights issue’. Violence against disabled people takes place in most social spaces: in the home, at work, in school, in institutions, in the community, in public (Saxton 2009). Women with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than their non-disabled counterparts (Brownridge 2006) and, even today, ‘forced sterilisation’ has been acknowledged as a critical human rights issue facing disabled women and girls in a variety of international contexts’ (Frohmader and Meekosha 2012: 486). The United Nations Children’s Fund (2005: 6) noted that infanticide and ‘mercy killings’ of children with impairments are still commonplace in some contemporary cultures: Disabled children may be killed either immediately at birth or at some point after birth; and sometimes years after birth. The rationale for such killings is either 1) the belief that the child is evil or will bring misfortune to the family or the community or 2) the belief that the child is suffering or will suffer and is better off dead. ‘Better off dead’ is a common refrain that rings down the ages as a justification for those who have sought or carried out the extermination of disabled people. Goodley and Runswick Cole (2011: 1–7) argue that the violence of disability discrimination takes multiple overlapping forms, including the real, the psychoemotional, the systematic and the cultural. Lives lived in the lap of oppression become easy targets for violence, interpersonal, institutionalised and systematic (Young 1990). Violence in institutional settings against disabled children and young people is, on a global level, ‘particularly widespread’ (United Nations Children’s Fund 2005: 11). A life lived in bodily difference, in palpable transgression of physical and mental norms, is an existence that experiences ubiquitously the mundane invalidating violence of the non-disabled gaze (Hughes 1999). As Tobin Siebers put it (2001: 739), ‘people easily perceive when someone is different from them but rarely acknowledge the violence of their perception’. The growing evidence of pervasive victimisation and violation of disabled people in the present makes one imagine a past replete with gross acts of injustice. And, to a certain extent, one has to imagine or at least conjecture from the evidence available. I make this, however, a partial claim. I have no doubt that Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 65) have it right when they argue that, ‘the history of disabled people inevitably involves a contemplation of a variety of mechanisms

Introduction 

3

for enforcing their social segregation and even their extermination’. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that an assertion of this order is as durable as the stonework on the Acropolis. Yet the historical record is punctuated by silences and gaps; the voices of disabled people are often barely audible, amidst the clamour and noise of the past. The experience of the disabled subject – the disability perspective – has been ignored, hidden, suppressed, unspoken and unexamined. It shows itself, however, sometimes in its clearest light (ironically), in the shadows of history, in the ‘spectral presence’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2007: 1) of the narratives of ‘the great and the good’, and it is visible, in the background, behind the broad shoulders of property and propriety; of all that is deemed worthy, virtuous, beautiful and good. Campbell (2005: 109) argues that we need to think of the history of disability as “always present” (despite its seeming absence) in the ableist talk of normalcy, normalisation and humanness’; in the violence of the silences that make the absent presences concrete. Campbell goes on to suggest that ‘the truth claims that surround disability, are dependent upon discourses of ableism for their very legitimation’ (ibid.). The moral high ground of history provides the unwitting vantage point for an overview of disability and the violence of invalidation that goes with the territory of being disabled in an ableist world. Repression and violence are buried deep in the hot core of the normal and the normative. The former can be revealed by interrogation of the latter. As Goodley (2014: 129) suggests, disabled people are systematically exposed to the ‘violent maintenance of the normative order’. The plight – often desperate – of disabled people throughout the ages is sustained by the insecurities of non-disabled people. They are chained to a moral grammar that makes them think of themselves as superior to those whose bodies and minds cannot be easily squared with the cultural norms that valorise ability. Disability is the graveyard of the fears and anxieties of non-disabled culture, the burial plot for normate pity and disgust (Hughes 2012). The habituated overwrought sensibilities and ontological insecurities of non-disability help to explain why the cultural and social locations of disability have been characterised ‘as largely at odds with the collective and individual well-being of disabled people’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 2). These unseemly locations on the margins of community are profoundly invalidating. The persons in these locations have offended in some shape or form, often simply on account of their shape or form. Disabled people have been unable to escape the claws of moral judgement. Rod Michalko (1998: 37) in telling his story about going blind is very clear that he is narrating a moral tale, a tale that is about not ‘being right’: This is a story of something gone wrong and a story of how wrongness is given life through the recognition that a life must be lived within the paradoxical awareness of the necessity and desire for life itself. It is the story of the necessity of diagnosis (what is wrong) and the desire for discovery (being wrong).

4 

Introduction

In losing his sight, Rod ends up on the ‘wrong’ side of virtue, pitched violently across the moral border where he is expected to submit to being wrong. He has breached the canons of normality, ordinariness, acceptability, similitude, propriety. Rod is cast adrift in the confounding Lebenswelt of quotidian ‘lay morality’, where bodies and minds are judged and found wanting (Sayer 2011). In the visio of ‘wrongness’, one becomes, if not a target of, then, at least, eligible for normative violence. The unfamiliar is a fertile breeding ground of contempt, all the more visceral if it is ‘righteous’. Difference lights moral fires of intolerance in which human validity and invalidity are at stake. Such is ‘our love of the same’ that we tend to seek a ‘remedy’ for difference (Stiker 1999: 10). As Stiker’s History of Disability suggests, the milk of human kindness rarely figures in efforts to make difference submit to similitude. The step from the negative evaluation of ‘character’ to the stinging lash of bigotry is a short one. Symbolic violence prefigures blood-letting. The norm is the father of a bellicose brotherhood. For disabled people, the violence at the core of similitude produces correctional practices. The will to adjust ‘dissident’ corporeality and ‘wrong-headedness’ to the moral requirements of the social body asserts itself. ‘Crookedness’ should be straightened out, aligned with the doxic cultural meaning system. Correction in the name of similitude involves the harsh transformation of wrong-being into right-being, of what not to be into what to be. Disabled people – consigned to the ‘wrong’ side of the moral-ontological ­border – experience the wilful ethic of transformation. ‘Correction’ is impairment’s axiological stalker. The persuasion that this moral boundary must exist and should be kept in place is matched only by the persuasion that violence is justified in moving ‘being wrong’ into the better location of ‘being right’. Moral economy demands it. The history of disability invalidation is itself a kind of war, an uncivil civil war in which the non-disabled ‘clean and proper’ body goes into battle with itself – with the body that it does not wish to become, which is, of course, the body that it is and will become. Ability, aglow in the myth of its own purity and invulnerability, becomes unrecognisable to itself. In the fruitless war of humanity against itself, the ableist moral economy is delusional, writing wrongs by correction and torture, when the case for the need to do so has never been made. Disability is the collateral damage caused by the able body’s crusade against its own frailty. Validity, self-espoused by the non-disabled subject, represents disability as an invalid form of being-in-the-world. Tanya Titchkosky (2011: 17) puts this idea in a compelling way. Disability is, as non-disability sees it, a ‘space of unwanted calamity’. The same thrust of the sword that cuts the disabled subject off from the land of the valid confers validity and freedom from calamity on the bearer of the weapon. The disabled figure – as other, stranger, outlier and outlaw – enters the ideological service of a disingenuous and deluded non-disabled imaginary; a fantasy world of ontological integrity and validity. The space dedicated to calamity creates a moral cleaving of community: A blessed space of belonging and propriety and a liminal space of marginality and indignity!

Introduction 

5

Despite a history in which disabled people have been subjected to inordinate levels of maltreatment, violation and violence, they have been amongst the last to be included in the modern ‘roster of … disenfranchised’ minorities (Davis 2001: 536). Disability is the ‘Johnny come lately’ in the annals of identity politics. Described as ‘the last civil rights movement’ (Dreidger 1989) (though Trans people may beg to differ), disability politics took shape in the aftermath of the new social movements that crashed onto the pages of history in the 1960s and 1970s. Nature’s ‘calamity’ found it difficult to secure a position in the league of social underdogs. Extricating disability identity from the asocial mire of ‘the natural’, where easy explanations prosper, has proved a more difficult enterprise for disabled people than for women, black and gay people. But the time for disability history is now and in the making. Disabled people, ever more conscious of themselves as such, are curious about the lives and times of their predecessors. Examining the past for strands that tell the story of disability leads to the contention that disability history is a history of dis/ability. It cannot escape its umbilical connection to the history of the relations between disability and non-disability. The troubled struggle with self, forces itself to the centre of the story, and it poses enduring questions about the nature of autonomy, well-being, mortality and morality. It embraces the biopolitical lifecycle from cradle to grave, from natality to Thanatos. Congenital impairment unsettled conceptions of the human condition in classical Western society and continues to do so, today, in the Global North and South. The assumption that something has gone wrong at the very moment life announces itself is a master narrative of impairment from classical infanticide to pre-natal screening. ‘Ability’, haunted by finitude, ponders and disavows its fragile, mortal self. It is easy to answer the complex ontological question ‘who am I?’ by a gesture rather than ref lexive self-scrutiny. One points a finger at embodied difference, the ‘less fortunate’, the other, saying, betraying, as the finger is raised; ‘I am not one of them!’ Violent indifference to difference is a moral excuse, a recipe for an unexamined life and a bully’s charter. One expurgates one’s vulnerability and abjection and transfers these all-too-human qualities onto a disparaged alter. Able identity positions itself as the invulnerable ‘clean and proper body’ (Shildrick 2002). Hubris and self-delusion rob disabled people of dignity and agency and non-disabled people claim the (moral) high ground. By side-stepping the Aristotelian injunction to know thyself, a diversion is created in which the other is a scapegoat (pharmakos) consigned to a moral underclass of improper persons. Cleansing moral panics arise at timely sociological moments to reinforce the hegemony of corporeal wholesomeness. Invalidating the alter is a trick played by the self to assuage fear of a life that will embody pain, impairment and suffering and will end up as dust in the cold, cold ground. The relationship between disability and non-disability is fraught with socially and culturally shaped ontological considerations. Disability should help us to understand, as C. Wright Mills put it, ‘that the limits of human nature are frighteningly broad’ (1959: 45): We have learned the fear, but not the lesson.

6 

Introduction

Attraction to a self-concept in which the human animal has been sanitised by culture and civilisation remains obdurate. Neither vulnerability nor abjection – the empirical reality of ourselves – has much appeal. Neither appear on the list of modern virtues and neither, though for different reasons, has stood as credible credentials at any time in the past. The purifying Western ego has shown no interest. Identity built on the frank admission of one’s most compelling anxieties would merely compound the sense of fragility and human frailty that one was trying desperately to avoid. However, it seems that one does need to know what one is not. The historian Hayden White (1972: 4) called this psycho-emotional trick ‘ostensive self-definition by negation’. One identifies difference and puts it out there in vacuous moral space as an ‘anti-type’, an antithesis, a repulsive counter-example to the valued state of being that one allocates, by default, to oneself. The negated figure is the counterfeit passport to cultural self-authentication. Non-disability creates a safe space into which identity anxieties, associated with vulnerability and abjection, can be tipped. Tom Shakespeare (1994) called this space a ‘dustbin of disavowal’. The non-disabled imaginary is a landfill site strewn with bad faith. The litany of violence mapped out above occupies a normative space in which perceptions of calamity are nurtured. Intolerance and prejudice preclude the interpretation of disability in Western culture, as a ‘desired state’ (Titchkosky 2007: 6). The weight of disability as a social problem is depicted by negative ‘scripts’; a hermeneutic that shores up its impropriety and denounces it as an authentic experience. Impairment is a target for insidious symbolic bellicosity. It simmers in language and representation. It is the velvet fist beneath the iron glove of governance and power. Disability is a cultural artefact, axiologically interpreted as ‘undesirable difference’. It has become ‘immanent in everyone’s habitus’ (Bourdieu 2001: 33). Disabled people attract violence immanent in the norm, a ‘type of violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 168). It is similar to the poison of sexism and misogyny that normalises sexual violence (Taylor 2013). For Judith Butler (2004), ‘normative violence’ is practised against bodies that are ‘unintelligible’ in any given social order. Impairment is the ‘infinite enemy’ of the desire for normal embodiment that short-circuits answers to ethical questions. Who should we grieve over, and who is collateral damage? Who should we celebrate, and who should we ridicule? Impairment is made ‘unintelligible’ by the non-disabled community that disavows and dehumanises it, making itself intelligible in the process. Scripts of otherness give a green light to violent language and conduct, normalising and valorising it; they encode violence as legitimate, just, proper. Some people, disabled people, can be good to mistreat. I argue, in what follows, that disability is pressed into service in the Western moral economy of validity and invalidity, not only negatively, as handmaiden to normatively validated violence, but also positively as an instrument for doing good. In Antiquity, there is no virtue in being magnanimous to ‘the weak’. Vulnerability is an enemy of heroic culture. Its suppression and elimination

Introduction 

7

benefit community and polity. Christendom, however, evaluates disability as both good to mistreat and good to be good to. The ideology of charity transforms impairment into an object of non-disabled munificence. The ‘crooked’ subject is a vessel of sin and a passport to heaven for people who have the means to act mercifully to ‘cripples’ and ‘idiots’. Charity makes disabled people good to be good to; reinforcing ableist dominance and a hierarchy of embodiment. Violence against disabled people, actual, symbolic, normative, does not abate amidst gestures of magnanimity. Charity is good trade for non-disabled people. Salvation for a few pennies! It makes disability central to the social distribution of propriety and impropriety, to moral economy. Charity enhances the moral use-value of impairment for non-disabled people. It is a hedge-fund for the accumulation of cultural, moral and spiritual capital that non-disabled people use to demonstrate their social validity. Non-disability is not an identity to which the vast majority, who might be so classified, are likely to subscribe. Few would wish to pay the dues of membership or learn the secret handshakes associated with this mysterious club. Able or normate identity does not depend on self-identification. One does not need the cul-de-sac of false consciousness to explain the disinclination of the normate community to embrace the vulnerability and abjection that it quietly, unknowingly, ascribes – not to itself – but to the other that it instantiates. Ability occupies a privileged subject position by virtue of it being the embodied representation of Western cultural norms. The ‘normate’ can be defined, therefore, as ‘the constructed identity of those who by way of bodily configurations and cultural capital assume they can step into a position of authority and wield the power that it grants them’ (Garland-Thomson 2017: 8). It is a position at the heart of the community to which reference is rarely made. Its enunciation is barely audible. It is a power that whispers. White people – other than supremacists – seldom dwell on their whiteness, though the demand to do so from a variety of constituencies has been on the increase. The call to non-disabled consciousness is, to date, stillborn. Its absent-presence is obdurate. Normal is a ubiquitous aspiration rarely represented, communicated or conceived as a basis for identity, let alone a problematic or ‘pathological’ one that is a source of social inequality and intolerance. Yet, where there is hate crime, there is supremacism. Normal is a problem of power that is only beginning to be confronted. In partnership with its unsettling opposite, it is a binary in the early throes of deconstruction (Davis 1995). Too often, it is taken for granted or spirited away and located in the ‘natural attitude’ that closes down social critique. It may be appeased by pity, gratified by bigotry or enacted in violent hate. Normal is rarely benign to the pathological! The central aim of this book is to analyse the role and place of disabled people in the moral economy of ‘Western’ cultures from Antiquity to Early Modernity (though I hope to bring the story up-to-date in the not-too-distant future). This is a story of validity and invalidity. Validity, I argue, is largely determined by one’s place or position in the Proprium (Esposito 2010). Proprium, or community,

8 

Introduction

is founded on the distribution of property and propriety, economic and cultural capital. The book is concerned primarily with the social distribution of propriety in what I call the moral economy. The social response to disabled people in the moral economy of the West is profoundly negative. In Western communities, it leads to two poles of moral judgement. Firstly, that disabled people are good to mistreat, and secondly, that they are good to be good to. The former preceded the latter by many millennia. The latter dates from the emergence of Christianity out of the ruins of the Roman Empire. In Christianity, both poles of moral judgement operate simultaneously. Both poles invalidate because they are measured against the ideal, able pillars or anchors of Western propriety; beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. Through the narratives that constitute these ideals and the aspirations they embody, positives of moral economy are bespoken and the moral excellence of ‘higher humanity’ is enacted. Property and propriety are culturally constituted and enabled to f lourish while human impairment is narrated through impropriety and consequently invalidated. In the first pole of judgement, where disabled people are represented as good to mistreat, they are framed affectively as disgusting, regarded as abject and monstrous and subjected to violent forms of anthropoemic exclusion and disposal. In the second pole of judgement, where disabled people are represented as good to be good to, they are framed affectively as pitiable, regarded as wounded and vulnerable and subjected to charitable and paternalistic forms of anthropophagic rehabilitation or correction. This conceptual framework, summarised in Table 0.1 below, is used in the substantive chapters in Part II of the book to organise and analyse the historical material into what I call repertoires – or narratives – of invalidation. The ableist pillars of propriety form the basis for the construction of nondisability as the prototype of moral agency; a background against which the validity or worth and value of disabled people, at a cultural level, as well as a human, ontological level, is regularly in question. Moral economy is the sphere of cultural relations in which ideas and beliefs are materialised, struggles for recognition enacted and in which disabled people, marked by impropriety, face barriers to being. Political economy, by contrast, is the domain of resource allocation and class relations in which struggles over the distribution of power and property are enacted and in which disabled people, marked by poverty, face barriers to doing. The barriers distinction is debated in Chapter 2. The two spheres of property and propriety taken together constitute the Proprium, a term that I unhinge from Esposito’s project and use to unite, theoretically, the economic and moral relations of a given community by dividing its sustaining motifs into the way it handles goods and goodness, property and propriety. The place of disability with respect to the two spheres is mapped out in Table 0.2 below and is used in Part I of the book to develop a conceptual framework to examine the ways in which relationships between disabled and non-disabled people can be encapsulated as a struggle for validity.

Introduction 

9

TABLE 0.1 The invalidation of disabled people in the Western Proprium: Moral economy

as analytical framework Ability

Disability

Disability

Pillars of propriety Anthropomorphic (to deify)

Pole of judgement 1: Good to mistreat Anthropoemic (to exclude)

Pure/proper Godlike Praise Respect Valid

Abject Monstrous Disgust Violence Invalid

Pole of Judgement 2: Good to be good to Anthropophagic (to assimilate) Vulnerable Wounded Pity Charity Invalid

TABLE 0.2 The Proprium: Situating disability in the spheres of

political and moral economy Moral Economy

Political economy

Cultural relations Recognition Propriety Disability; Barriers to being

Resource relations Distribution Property Disability: Barriers to doing

I do not argue that one of the two spheres that constitutes the Proprium is more important than the other in producing or sustaining disability oppression and invalidation, though I venture in Chapter 3 that property has the upper hand. The focus is, however, on the lefthand column, on axiological questions of value, on moral economy and the cultural struggles for recognitive justice that would restore propriety to disabled people by dismantling barriers to being. For a reader less theoretically inclined, it may make sense to read the Part II of the book first. Start with Chapter 4, read the three substantive historical chapters and return to Part I once these have been completed.

Chapter outlines In Chapter 1, ‘Thinking through disability history: An act of recovery’, I examine the most appropriate methods and analytical categories for this study, including how to make a historical sociology of disability work for disabled people. A standpoint of methodological self-consciousness, I argue, provides a basis for situating the author in the analysis. To clarify the relationship between past, present and future, I discuss the utility of historicism and new historicism. The interplay of time, text and culture in reading the past through the present is proposed as a subjective necessity and a desirable way to proceed. To surmount the problem of anachronism, I suggest that there are non-anachronistic tropes

10 

Introduction

and metonyms – like monstrosity, deformity and defectiveness – that embody a ­pre-modern lexicon of impairment that can be used to emplot narratives of disability. The place of Proprium and moral economy in the analysis of normate power is discussed, and the debate about whether a history of disability or a history of (all the) impairments is the better way to proceed is examined. The former is prioritised and the importance of narrative intersections between gender, race and disability is emphasised. In Chapter 2, ‘Modelling disability theory: A contemporary history of the disability idea’, I explore the changing face of Disability Studies and its relationship to the disability movement. This contemporary history of the development of ideas about disability and the praxis that has brought together, in mutual tension, academy and activist, begins in the 1970s with the rejection of the medical model of disability in favour of politicised alternatives. Derived from grassroots resistance to the disabling conditions of modernity and capitalism and elaborated, principally in the first instance, by sociological critique, the social model of disability emerged in the UK as the theoretical expression of the disability movement. Together with developments in Scandinavia and the minority group model in the US, disability was transformed from medical discourse into a debate about discrimination, exclusion and oppression. Successful claims to rights – manifested in anti-discrimination legislation – by disabled people in many countries – ran alongside theoretical and political debates in which there was an increasing complexity and variety of perspective, out of which emerged ‘second wave’ Critical Disability Studies (CDS) in which the co-existence – not always peaceful – of diverse paradigms has f lourished. Culture and a cultural model of disability came to the fore and I suggest that the idea of ‘barriers to being’ is a useful bridge between first and second wave Disability Studies. I position the idea of a history of invalidation in the contemporary theoretical context, emphasising the ways in which CDS articulates three core issues; embodiment, self and other and the non-disabled imaginary. I argue for the importance of impairment as the base cultural category on which disability qua social oppression is constructed. In Chapter 3, ‘Conceptualising property and propriety, validity and invalidation’, I outline a theory of impairment invalidation as the conceptual framework for the substantive history that follows. Invalidation is best understood as a category that evolves from its synergies and differences with two related concepts, namely, recognition and ableism. Both categories articulate disability and difference in terms of the relational dynamics between impairment and nondisability. The ways in which the latter demeans the former creates disability qua social oppression. Invalidation is the process, mediated by the dialectic of ability/­d isability, that transforms impairment into disability, bodily or intellectual difference into problematic being. I propose a critique of recognition by suggesting that invalidation is the specific form of misrecognition or moral harm experienced by disabled people and I contend that ableism, as a category that maps out embodied propriety in any given social and historical context, instantiates the broad parameters of invalidation by positioning bodies of difference

Introduction 

11

as the repulsive antithesis of propriety and validity. In distinguishing between strategies, repertoires and processes of invalidation, I delineate the ways in which the credibility and worth of disabled people is undermined. In Chapter 4, ‘Disability in ancient Greece and Rome’, I examine the idea of arete – or virtue – and argue that it stands at the core of the normative sensibilities of Antiquity. Arete describes a particular kind of character and way of being that effectively locks disabled people out of the aristocratic curriculum of propriety. The good life or eudemonia was a normate narrative of human perfectibility manifest in the classical Western ideals of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice to which the Ancient Greeks and Romans were wed. These ideals – or pillars of propriety – sustained narratives about disabled people that suggested that they did not have the ontological credentials to live an ethical life. In the ‘natural attitude’ of Greek and Roman propriety, disability was disposable and the problem of disability was solved by anthropoemic means. Disposal of disability derived validity from its sacrifice on the normate altar of arete. Disability was placed outside the universe of moral obligation. Disabled people were good to mistreat. I further demonstrate the culture of disability invalidation in Antiquity by examining the ‘treatment’ of disabled people in the fields of politics, medicine and leisure and in military and religious life. Furthermore, in the abandonment of the figure of the pharmakos, the disabled scapegoat is sacrificed for the wellbeing of community and polity. Impairment blossoms morally in antiquity, only in the ritualised moment of its negation, ‘its’ dying breath, ‘its’ death throes. If disabled people escaped infanticide in classical Antiquity, they faced judgement by physiognomy. Character was evaluated by the appearance of the body. Defect, deformity and monstrosity were moral abominations. This was evident, I argue, in the ocularcentric culture of appearance and light that was profoundly invalidating for blind and visually impaired people. In Chapter 5, ‘Disability in the Christian Middle Ages’, I argue that disability was at the moral centre of Medieval Christian life. It had an umbilical link to both the ‘chimerical hell of the netherworld’ (Bauman 2006: 156) and to the redemption of the great and the good, who, through charitable acts directed at the wretched and the tarnished, built redemptive favours that smoothed their way to an afterlife of infinite grace. Disability mediated good and evil, saint and sinner in a moral economy dominated by the crucial importance of ultimate, otherworldly destinations and the temporal instrumentality of wretched life on Earth. On the one hand, disabled people mediated grace. On the other hand, they were the embodiment of sinfulness. On these opposing grounds, disabled people were both good to be good to and good to mistreat. There was moral justification aplenty, in the eristic tradition of Christianity, for the contemptuous and callous treatment of those with bodies and minds that sported the marks of the devil and carried the burden of sin in a hyper-visible, corrupting form. To do violence against manifestations of the diabolic was a godly act based on pious motives. To give alms to the wretched victims of God’s just punishment was – in the annals of the irenic tradition of Christian love – also a virtuous act;

12  Introduction

one, however, that embodied significant benefits to the giver. Disability, in the Middle Ages was an instrument for the salvation of non-disabled people; a ticket to heavenly bliss, a passport to absolute propriety. Disability became a gilt-edged insurance policy that permitted worldly privilege to buy its way into heaven. Disabled people were treated as a stairway to heaven but also as sinners, monsters and demons and as objects of ridicule. In Chapter 6, ‘Renaissance and Reformation: Disability invalidation in Early Modernity’, I examine impairment invalidation in the interregnum between the Middle Ages and Modernity focusing on the new portraits of disability that surfaced in a period when science and superstition were either mutually supportive or wrestling for cultural hegemony. Renaissance art and culture re-discovered the values of Antiquity, evolving new portraits of disability based on the valorisation of human beauty that inaugurated a revival of the aesthetic invalidation of difference. I argue that negative representations of impropriety associated with disabled people were used as scripts, by the propertied classes of Western Europe, to legitimise the subjugation of the ‘heathens and savages’ encountered by the expanding mercantile empires of the nations of the Atlantic Rim. In the demonisation of disability in the witch-hunts of the Reformation and counter-­ Reformation and in the demeaning portraits of monstrosity mapped out in Christian and proto-scientific representations of impairment, I argue that violence against disabled people was both legitimated and enacted in the great clashes of faith that attributed sin and corruption to opposing religious parties. The social crisis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the great displacement of people from established ways of life and traditional economic activity unsettled the status of disabled people, positioning them alongside rogues and ‘sturdy beggars’ and other disreputable people who were represented as moral degenerates involved in ‘crooked’ and nefarious activities. In this historical juncture, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor began to re-orient the moral economy around state, rather than religious, priorities, prefiguring the emergence of the modern welfare systems that came to dominate the government of disability. The (philosophy of the) fool emerged from the playful critique of ecclesiastical life in the work of Erasmus into the ‘idiot’ who represented a threat to the ingenuity and hard work of enterprising Protestantism. Finally, the chapter engages with the Protestant displacement of charity by faith as the central principle of Christianity and with the suppression of grotesque embodiment that underpins the civilising propriety of the closed Protestant body. These developments are associated with new systems of invalidation and social control that process disabled lives into marginalised and segregated social spaces.

Concluding remarks According to Susan Wendell (1996: 105) the ‘first commandment’ of disability is to ‘Get well or die’. Disability is for life. The choice is therefore eradicated; reduced to the second option. Tales of the extermination of disabled people are

Introduction 

13

not uncommon in historical and anthropological literature. They are a testimony to the way in which the ‘commandment’ has been enacted by the forces of ableism. This book deals only with ‘Western’ approaches to disability, but an example from outside this cultural domain is useful, ironically, in helping to outline the way in which anthropologies of dehumanisation are used to invalidate disability. Take, for example, the following approach to congenital disability. For the Papel people of Guinea-Bissau in Western Africa, the birth of a child with a physical impairment mobilises a religious and ontological binary that determines the fate of the child. The binary enables the community to manage the uncertainty of physical difference. The Papel distinguish – after birth – between human and non-human children. If the child passes muster as the former, then he, or she, is allowed to live and is accepted into the community. If on the other hand, tribal authority designates the child as iran, or non-human, an invalid person, a being possessed by an evil spirit and therefore lacking a human soul, then infanticide follows (Einarsdottir 2005). Iran is the dehumanising designation that makes infanticide an acceptable moral option; in fact, a moral obligation. It is a cultural concept that distinguishes the human from the inhuman and recommends violation and violent disposal for those who cannot make the grade. The application of the concept invalidates the humanity of its referent. As we traverse Western culture, we will find similarly grained responses to the validity of impairment. Natal testing for natural validity and, ergo, social propriety in human beings is also the way of Western Proprium. Power is invested in propertied classes who have access to the means of control over the beliefs of their constituent populations. Where property and propriety are closely aligned – as they have been in the ‘West’ – human validity has been constructed as a question of who should live and who should die, who should prosper and who should not. The concordat between property and propriety in Western Antiquity was the ableist foundation upon which physical, mental and sensory impairments were transformed from variants in human nature into invalidated cultural artefacts. The binary of ability and disability, validity and invalidity in Western culture rests on the emergence of impairment as a narrative of profound socio-ontological significance. It promotes anthropological settlements about proper and improper being. This book is the story of disability as it is imagined and re-imagined through the cultural lens of ableism. It is a story of invalidation; of the material habituations of culture and moral sentiment that paint pictures of disability as ‘what not to be’. It examines the forces of moral regulation that fall violently in behind the dehumanising, ontological fait accompli, of disability invalidation. This book is an historically informed critical social ontology for disability (Hughes 2007). It is an emancipatory historical sociology that seeks to expose the fixtures, fitments and fissures in the non-disabled imaginary – the way in which the normate community conceives of, narrates and acts in relation to disability. I outline the hegemonic system of meaning that demeans difference and gives comfort to the intolerance that denies impairment a proper place in the human community.

14 

Introduction

This book is geographically bounded by a focus on disability in ‘Western civilisation’. The term, from a disability perspective, is an aporia. From the perspective of the pillars of Western propriety – beauty, truth, reason, order and justice – disabled people are the others within. They are regularly the targets of the barbarities of ‘civilisation’. The transformation of impairment into disability – embodied difference into oppression – is a process accomplished, and which continues to be accomplished, by ‘Western’ ableism. Property and propriety (Proprium) have gathered able-mindedness into its repressive project. I think Mitchell and Snyder (2003: 859) get it right when they reframe the ‘West’ as the ‘eugenic Atlantic’ and argue that disability is the ‘master trope of human disqualification’. The eugenic Atlantic in turn, however, has its roots in the eugenic Mediterranean. The classical empires of Greece and Rome mobilised the ‘master trope’ in the fugitive forms of monstrosity, deformity and defectiveness. The tropos of disability articulated deficiencies of body, mind and senses to women and foreigners and it used them to legitimate slave economics and uninhibited masculine moral authority in public and domestic spheres. Aristotle deformed femininity and the ‘script’ (Molina 2006) of deformity was applied to barbarous foreigners. The infant West was suckled morally on the ‘master trope’ of ‘­d isqualification’ for its tropos was deeply habituated in the firmament of othering. Moral evil comes in shapes that are monstrous, defective, deformed, crooked, crippled and idiotic. It may be too strong a claim to subsume gender and sexism and race and racism under the master categories of disability and ableism but we need to be aware of their knotted intersections in legitimations of Western expansionism and misogyny, anywhere along the route of the long march, be it in classical imperialism, Medieval crusades, or Early Modern or modern colonialism. Disability is still a narrative tool of Western expansionism and gender oppression, ironically revised (or is it reversed?) in the postcolonial context as a ‘human rights’ export, a moral gift from the proselytising ‘male-white-West’ Global North, to the rest of the world (Meekosha and Soldatic 2011; Soldatic and Meekosha 2014). The fickle bureaucracies of modernity have a fast and loose approach to defining disability. It changes with the wind. Alan Roulstone (2015: 675) noted recently that: ‘Disability is exactly what a state deems it to be’. Administrative categories – usually to cut the disability bill – follow economic logic to the extent that one can be a disabled person one day and not the next. I offer, therefore, a very loose definition of disability – a time-traveller’s companion to help us through the ages. It is borrowed from a starting point of ontological egalitarianism rather than the economic opportunism of the neoliberal state. I include in the club of humanity everyone for whom the faintest claim to such a status can be made. With this premise in mind, I define disability in terms of culturally specific practices that exclude people from the club or raise questions about their qualifications for membership. Disability applies, therefore, to those who have been refused entry or whose membership has been invalidated on the grounds of

Introduction 

15

physical, intellectual or sensory difference, or who, by the application of normative practices of exclusion, have been positioned or represented as corporeally or cognitively or sensibly improper and, who in consequence, are balanced precariously at the edge of human validity.

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PART I

Method and theory

1 THINKING THROUGH DISABILITY HISTORY An act of recovery

Introduction This is a study of changing forms of corporeal and intellectual validity and the cultural validations and invalidations that accompany them; of how impairment, the cultural raw material of disability, is communicated, represented and evaluated across time. Schillmeier (2010) argues that: ‘Disability turns our attention to the different ways’ in which ‘the bifurcation of nature is practiced’. Distinctions between natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal follow dominant and subordinate groups across time (Ernst 2007). The former benefit from positive social representations, the latter from negative equivalents derived from the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ embedded in binaries that are simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive. In different historical periods and cultural contexts, people with impaired bodies and minds have been segregated from their hegemonic, non-disabled counterparts and subjected to patterns of social and moral regulation that invalidate their social value and human worth what I call their propriety. The twins – disability and non-disability – are separated at birth and go on to live lives vastly different in experience; the former in impropriety, the latter in dignity. There has been no pot-boiler reconciliation in which the two encounter one another in the full f lush of knowledge about who is who and how they are related. Such a poignant moment of reconciliation is yet to be delivered. We can live in hope! Disability history is an infant project on the margins of historical inquiry compared to the ‘older’ sibling social divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality. A great deal more ink has been spilt over these fellows in historiographical acts of recovery. ‘Present by absence’, like the body in Sociology (Shilling 2003; Turner 1996), disability history has emerged recently as ‘a vibrant field

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of intellectual enquiry’ (Borsay 2012: 324). Those who search for disability in ­h istory and cultural artefact have been surprised by its ubiquity: Disability is everywhere in History, once you begin to look for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write. When historians do take note of disability, they usually treat it as a personal tragedy or an insult to be deplored or a label to be denied, rather than a cultural construct to be questioned and explored. (Baynton 2001: 52) In the burgeoning field of literary and cultural Disability Studies, the discovery of the omnipresence of disability in text, across time (Baker and Murray 2018) has produced a rich seam of analysis that is growing exponentially year on year, be it in relation to disability as a generic category (Hall 2016) or to sensory impairments, including blindness (Bolt 2013) or deafness (Sanchez 2015) or in relation to specific impairments like epilepsy (Stirling 2010) or literary movements like, for example, modernism (Hall 2012; Johnston 2016) and romanticism (Bradshaw 2016). Byron’s deformed right foot is no longer unspoken. Disability has reclaimed the meaning of manliness in mid-Victorian Britain (Bourrier 2015). The ‘absent presence’ of impairment is losing its liminality. A place in ‘cultural poetics’ (Greenblatt 2007) has been secured. Narratives and representations of disability f low like the rivulets of a delta through Western time, and yet appear as parched soil. It is as if non-disability has walked forever purblind across its sovereign terrain. Disability consciousness is beginning to undo this arid depiction of the historical landscape. The emergence of disability as a vibrant, dynamic and morally negative construct in the history of cultural narrative makes it the latest recruit to historical revisionism. There is no sense, no justice, in treating impairment as an ahistorical, pre-social, natural category or as some curiosity to be mulled over by natural historians or philosophers, and no merit in reducing it to pathology to be prodded and poked by medical professionals. These conceptions of disability have drained the history from it (Anderson and Cardin Coyne 2007). Reclaiming the parched soil of disability history requires an approach to impairment and disability that is social and cultural. Mitchell and Snyder are impressed by the extraordinary frequency in the literary canon with which disability is used as a ‘narrative prosthesis’. It excels as a metaphor for something that has ‘gone wrong’: Nearly every culture views disability as a problem in need of a solution, and this belief establishes one of the major modes of historical address directed toward people with disabilities. The necessity for developing various kinds of cultural accommodations to handle the “problem” of corporeal difference (through charitable organisations, modifications of physical architecture, welfare doles, quarantine, genocide, euthanasia

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programs, etc.) situates people with disabilities in a profoundly ambivalent ­relationship to the cultures and stories they inhabit. (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 205) The enabled, in dominating the telling of Western history, have promulgated evaluations of f lesh and mind that reveal the vital moral forces behind the shape of human validity and propriety. Negative, problematic ‘nature’ forms in the egregious shadow cast by virtue, raising questions about the extent to which outsiders possess social, cultural or even ontological capital. When respect, esteem and dignity are concentrated in palaces of privileged credentials, the boundaries of tolerance are tested. Punitive moral ‘taxes’ on difference abound. Disrespect, cruelty, barbarity are practiced by the offices of ‘civility’. Injustices – the narratives that tell of it – are available in the ‘historical embeddedness’ (Greenblatt 2007: 7) of literary texts and practices. Invalidations of disabled people are evident in the language of abomination that impairment attracts. For the enabled, impairment has been representationally plastic. It has been used, for example, to portray the ‘barbarian’; the socio-geographical other of Western civilisation. The ‘barbarian’ hails from an expansionist, militaristic ‘homeland’ where empire is aspiration and supremacism has taken root. The category mobilises outsider–insider binary evaluations of human worth and virtue. It implies a distinction between the repugnant and the righteous. It constructs a wall of aversive affects that identifies those who are eligible to be mistreated. On the ‘right’ side of the wall, we find ‘all those who belong to the locus of enunciation’ (Mignolo 2005: 8). Property and propriety command the circuit of the civilised and look to widen its dominion. Barbarity is gross, offensive, evil and violent. Civilisation licenses itself to restrain, to subdue the barbarity that has attracted its animus. As Walter Benjamin (1969: 253) noted in his Ten Theses on the Philosophy of History, ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’. The relationship between positive and negative that folds one into the other in Benjamin’s notion of history is an important starting point for a historical sociology of disability. The human subject is divided against itself in disavowing its corporeal vulnerability and abjection. These traits belong to the other, projected onto the mythical figure as blemish and stigma. Disability and non-disability are constituted in the non-disabled imaginary in ways that idealise the latter and contort the former. Imaginary idealisation sculpts the doxic form of the insider. Imaginary contortion chisels the toxic figure of the barbarous stranger. Behind both idealisation – civilised citizen – and contortion – barbarous outsider – sits the brooding figure of power and the consorts of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice that attend to the moralising business of normative evaluation and moral regulation. The citizen insider is a full and proud member of the polity who, in marked contrast to the barbarian, is strange and suspect, and may only belong by coming under the spell of Western propriety. The stranger is, however, crucial to the citizen whose self-worth is based on the worthlessness of the outsider.

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The axiological dialectic of outsider–insider is reproduced by other binaries that have impacted negatively on disabled people’s lives. For example, in modernity, normal and abnormal exist in mutual contradiction. The power of the first is intertwined with the invalidity of the second. As Rosemary Garland-Thomson (1997: 20) put it: ‘without the pathological to give form to the normal, the taxonomies of bodily value that underlie political, social and economic arrangements would collapse’. The anomalous figure, troublesome, detestable and transgressive, clarifies acceptability, civility, propriety. The other helps to evidence the right stuff of being, the contours of virtue, the character of ‘nobility’, the ‘nature’ of cultural propriety. ‘The unruly, uncivil, disabled body’ writes Fiona Kumari Campbell (2008: 7) ‘is necessary for the reiteration of the “truth” of the “real/ essential” human self ’. The eugenic logic of Western civilisation demeans, degrades. In extremis, it exterminates those who defile the essential human self. Disability history is made in this wrestling match between self and other. It is a dialectic of the same subject synchronically reversed by its own journey from insider to outsider, non-disability to disability. The ‘master-partner’ fails to recognise ‘his’ destiny in the despised other. The history of disability is a struggle between the aspirational and the empirical self; a pointless civil war, born in able, mortal fear, in which the idealised self violently oppresses and deforms the alterity it has estranged. In the history of relations between disabled and non-disabled people, or the history of invalidation of the latter by the former, it takes two to tango in time. In claiming that invalidation, despite the varied forms that it takes in time, is a concept that can offer some supra-historical traction, I run some risks. The accusation of operating with an essentialist conception of historical process is a critique waiting in the wings, but it is important to contest this by indicating what I want to avoid. Edward Wheatley (2010) argues, for example, for a singular conceptual point of access to the complexities of the Medieval period, suggesting that it requires, for its understanding, a religious model of disability. Stiker (1999: 91) argues that, with the transition to what he calls the ‘Classical Centuries’; ‘the priest, monk or friar is no longer our means of access to the new cultural era’. Stiker is right, but how do we leap the gulf between the old and the new, if the old is accessed by a code that makes no sense with the dawning of the new. Wheatley, as a historian of a particular time, may be less interested in the leap. It is important to recognise the profundity of the claim that disability is ‘always already a problem’ (Titchkosky and Michalko 2012: 113). I hope to demonstrate by the end of the book that this is not an essentialist position. I propose the concept of invalidation as the idea that helps to smooth the passage between one epoch and the next. It allows time travel that is buttressed by some meaningful continuity. This may displease some disability historians inf luenced strongly by Foucault, like Pieter Verstraete (2012), for whom chronological historiography is dated. However, I think that both linear and ‘fitful’ methods recognise the importance of ‘improvisational borrowing in the face of new and pressing demands’ (Youdell 2006: 35). Disability history is full of

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‘improvisational borrowing’. Phoenix-like properties of pejorative ­representation (of disability) wing their way across time, and touch down, now and then, in ‘the face of new and pressing demands’ (Youdell 2006: 35). The methodology that I am proposing for this historical sociology of disability pulls one towards a consideration of the ethical relations that will best suit the next steps in the human journey. To be engaged with how we want to live in the future, we must think of our current relationship to the past as an act of recovery, a conscious political excavation of an archive open to interpretation from a specific standpoint. It is important, therefore, to put a trace of the author in the story. The discussion of ‘methodological self-consciousness’ in the first section following serves this end. To the extent that the past is envisioned through the present, I discuss the value of new historicism to the project and suggest that the problem of anachronism is best avoided by utilising a tropos of impairment from the historically f lexible lexicon of monstrosity, deformity and defectiveness. These categories cut through the time periods under consideration and can be used, therefore, to emplot disability prior to modernity. I emphasise the importance of Proprium (property and propriety) and moral economy (the structural domain of propriety) as analytical frameworks. Finally, I tackle (a) the conceptually thorny distinction between disability and impairment and how I conceive of its impact on method and (b) the ways in which representations and evaluations of impairment, as they intersect with gender and race, have produced a significant measure of narrative interchangeability.

Methodological self-consciousness: The author in the confessional The ‘methodological self-consciousness’ embraced by ‘new historicists’ (Greenblatt 2007: 212) is a confessional desire. So, here goes! I am a white, ablebodied, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon male, who lives comfortably in the Global North. This list of privileged identities constitutes, some might suggest, a litany of deadly sins that require harsh penance. Some may be more forgiving. More importantly, where I write from, may be questioned and legitimately so. Given the content of the book, my greatest sin of position is that I am able-bodied, though, inevitably, temporarily so. I am an ally of the disability movement, but, nonetheless, an outsider. I have no personal experience of impairment and disability; no auto-ethnographic material to invest in this study; no wisdom nor pain of felt oppression to enhance the force or legitimacy of the narrative. If I had great faith in objectivism, I could raise that grand standard in my defence. I could make the comforting claim of disinterestedness and retreat into the safe arms of scientific curiosity. My faith, however, is weak. I am not inclined to excuse my non-disabled identity by a weak appeal to scholarly detachment. This book may be about disability but, even though I may speak from a position of inexplicable naivety, this book is also for disability. It engages with the epistemological space between scholasticism and activism. Objectivism – as

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I understand it – is not an option. I do, however, have some experience to draw upon that might mitigate my naivety. Disability is the singular, principal object of study only in relation to the opposite that is always silently invested in its meaning. The text is as much about non-disability as it is about disability. I have some experience of one element of the dynamic dialectic that bends and stretches these imagined poles of difference. I could also appeal to common humanity, not on normate terms, but on the grounds that we are all f lawed, fragile and vulnerable. In Western culture, these pejorative meanings have been attributed far more regularly to disabled people than to the universal ‘we’. There is far more source material about non-disability than disability in the historical archives. Understanding of disability is heavily refracted by power; by the victors in the beauty contest of history who have articulated their embodied ‘truth’ of the past. Wherever social validity appears, disability appears too, but on the horizon in the form of a blurred alter ego, or a disgraced uncle who turned up at the party without invitation. Non-disability stands astride the history of value, virtue and propriety like a colossus. Impairment is the guilty secret of non-disabled people, fear of which pushes them towards the comfort blankets of exclusion and charity. Growing up in the 1960s, I very rarely encountered a disabled person and on the rare occasions that I did, I could feel tension, generated, I realised much later, by my normate enculturation. It took me a long time, the acquisition of some disabled friends and colleagues and some of the rudiments of social science to begin to understand that the awkwardness of these encounters was projected by me onto my disabled interlocutor who had been interpreted by my august, habituated ableism as an interloper, an unwanted guest, a spoiler. Impairment was constructed in the encounter, as a problem, by me, by my distorted acquaintance with difference. The mist of chaos and social death that shrouded my experience was a ‘gift’ of history and biography. I was introduced to ‘the simple truth’ as Brian Watermeyer (2013: 5) put it that ‘all disabled and non-disabled people alike, struggle with the cultural phenomenon of disability’. The point, however, is to change it. Ableism is the absurd product of a shallow imagination; a dystopia devoid of the excellence of human variation; an intolerant, egocentric perspective in which ‘normal’ human beings become spineless in the face of their own insecurities about their own humanity. In these respects, I have credentials. I am infinitely better qualified to ‘speak’ about non-disability than disability. This may not excuse my other sins of position, but it does allow me to claim some limited, subjectively impaired legitimacy as an interpretive voice. My second sin is that I am not a historian. I venture into territory in which my scholarly credentials are limited. Historical sociologists might be advised to do penance for coming to history from an inf lected position in which analysis carries a greater burden than primary research. There is some guilt to be expurgated. The substantive chapters, scoured out from the long marches they interrogate, are little more than the pith of the complexity of the human stories at

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their core. Yet no matter how much humility and ignorance we feel as we stand before the great traverse of human endeavour, there is an obligation, principally to the present and the future, to wrestle some lesson, some comfort, some hope from its archive. Not every historian will share this soft pedagogy. Many will not wish to stray as far from the evidence or embrace the wider and wilder hermeneutic to which the sociologist is attracted. Many will see too much subjectivity, naivety and teleology in this interpretive impetuousness. Even if I dared to claim that every historical tract is merely a footnote to the events it describes, I would still have to announce my debts. Leaning on the shoulders of the Herculean labours of those many scholars who, over the ages, have struggled through reams of documentary evidence to bring the past to life, the historical sociologist is indebted to the historian – to those who have already historicised the archive. It can only be repaid by an analysis worthy of the work of bygone Sisypheans who have compensated ‘for the absence of the past’ (Ankersmith 2006: 328). This is what I attempt below, but it is inf lected by its status as an act of political recovery. My third sin is that I am not ‘really’ a historical sociologist. I am a sociologist by trade who has, since the early 1990s specialised in Disability Studies. Much of what I have done to date in this field has been driven by theory rather than history, but as I have worked on disability theory and with and without disabled scholars and activists, history has pushed its way to the forefront as the best possible mechanism for applying the insights that have emerged from the sociological approaches to disability that are driven by a commitment to support the Disabled People’s Movement. The millennial obsession with bio-politics continues apace. ‘Life’ is the rage of the age, but death, as always shapes this agenda. Nihilism has closed in on the contemporary world, its thick, oppressive cloud constantly overhead. All the redemptive myths of Western thought seem unable to rekindle the sun. Where did we go wrong? What happened to progress? Why do we feel so anxious? This is a good time to consider death, but we seem ill-disposed to do so. Life – a f lourishing life – and how to get one on this precarious planet, seems to be the bee in the bonnet of contemporary social philosophy. The rekindling of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, his scientific biology and his politics have been summoned to the debate. Sovereignty and nomos are regarded as so all-encompassing that resistance to them is futile. Postmodernism has deconstructed the world into a rabbit warren. Obscene wealth and obscene poverty live side-by-side but never rub shoulders, each immunised from one another by spatial, emotional and social separation. Sordid greed runs the global financial and business systems. Politics is sliding into populism, fakery, corruption and terrorism. Knowledge is whatever we want to say. Truth has become a distant relative of communication. There are signs of death everywhere. World War III – the Cold War mantra of extinction – has become fashionable once again in a geo-political and ecological context of feral international relations. Life has its back against the wall. It is the right time to think and talk about human frailty and death. All the better if we can do it well and embrace it. It is

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a good time to consider our temporality and history. The muse of the human journey is the place to start. But biographical temporality should not be ignored either. These two temporalities are always related, bio-politically ingrained into one another as life’s beginning is to its end. The end – we have to recognise – is not defeat or preamble, though seduction by the idea of death as preamble is, in itself, a defeat. Death is destiny, inevitability, and if it is a preamble, we needn’t concern ourselves with it, since we cannot know to what it is a preamble. The conception of death as either defeat or preamble distracts us from its inevitability. The Western ego is strongly attracted to redemption, to the idea of death as preamble, to eschatology as hope, to an afterlife, a place for the weary soul to rest beyond the wretched sovereignty of prison earth. It is also attracted, relatedly, to a model of death as defeat, a failure of life, a surrender, a succumbing, a yielding, a weakness, a passing … rather than just an end. Everyone knows that Thanatos eclipses Eros. Everyone knows that they will die. It is how we deal with it that sustains the disability issue. How we deal with life’s blunt end in history and biography, the two mutually entwined temporalities into which we are all folded, is a question that provokes us to consider the moves we make to keep the dread of death at bay. However, disability disavowal renders us emotionally inept in our engagement with the destinies of temporality and finitude. The normate economy of affects is a place of deep moral significance. If fear is its foundation, pity and disgust are its two outriders (Hughes 2012b). Pity makes disabled people good to be good to and disgust makes them good to mistreat. Both emotions are past masters in the creation of social distance between people. They are hierarchical emotions that split the structured dyad of disability and nondisability into an exchange between agent and object. The two are prised apart. Pity and disgust – to evoke Georg Simmel – are not bridges that can be crossed. They are doors slammed in the face. The politics of pity may lead to systems of care, but they are, all too often, imbued with hubris, contempt and resentment. Inhospitability, prejudice and violence animate the politics of disgust. Both other. Both corrode community. I suspect that these were the two feelings to which I was reduced when I botched encounters with disabled people in my youth in the 1960s and 70s. In the 1980s, for me as a sociologist, disability was a matter of medicine and charity. Medicine commanded its understanding and charity was the default morality of my personal contribution to an ethic of rehabilitation that made me feel like a responsible caring citizen. It would be an appropriate ethical task for a socially sensitive science of rehabilitation – mature enough to ref lect critically on its philosophy of correction – to address the corrosive and simplistic views about disabled people that I grew up with. However, no matter where medicine takes impairment, it is clear that the medical model cannot carry us towards a meaningful narrative consideration of the problem of non-disability. Writing a history of disability from the perspective of the medical model has become impossible. From a technical point of view, there are few filters to help historians see beyond the distortions of modern, institutional, professional

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perspectives (Bredberg 1999). Disability history should also help us to get beyond the ‘social/medical antagonism’ (Anderson and Cardin Coyne 2007: 448). Historical knowledge has been uncoupled from the search for ‘truth’ that it once embraced. It has put a distance between itself and scientific scholasticism that has become unbridgeable. It depends more on the analysis of narrative and rhetoric for epistemological validity (Ankersmith 2006; Davis 2006; White 1972) and on selfconsciousness as the methodological anchor of historiographical practice. This historical sociology is pitched in the space between scholarship and activism. Scholars need not be dragged down by the molasses of scholasticism.

New historicism I want to settle my relationship with new historicism at the outset of this section. New historicism is based on detailed analysis of text in time and place. I adumbrate the bolder conclusions that might be derived from its working practices. I am not methodologically faithful to the intricate skills of narrative mining that it conscientiously deploys. It is, therefore, primarily its general frame of engaged historical recovery to which I appeal for guidance in this journey. New historicism is not afraid to narrow the distance between past and present and, like Raymond Williams, I want to confess to the inf luence of subjective and prejudicial passengers that accompany cultural materialism in its bumpy journey across time. In writing about the shifting sands of the past, we wade, inevitably, through the mud of the present. In this respect, the great Italian historiographer and ‘historicist’ Benedetto Croce (1921) was not far off the mark when he argued that ‘all history is contemporary history’. If we try too hard to struggle for ‘objectivity’, the mud becomes quicksand and we sink to a slimy doom. In her book on the history of disability in Ancient Greece, Martha Rose argues for the kind of scholarship that folds past and present into one another. She writes (2003: 2–3) One of the intents of this study is to show that able-bodiness has unref lectively been assumed to define the essential nature of the human body and that this assumption falsely colours our interpretation of the past. The falsely coloured interpretation of the past perpetuates the unref lective modern assumption that the nondisabled body is the standard against which the disabled body should be evaluated. In other words, my study reveals the distortion inherent in contemporary beliefs. This seems to me to be an accurate and acute reading of the present in its comparison to the past. The past is different from the present and requires a different mode of ref lection or standpoint to investigate it. The past is always different, sometimes radically so, another country, some aver, but I am not sure where else one can get one’s standpoint or ‘sitpoint’ (Garland-Thomson 2005) from, other than the present. There is always a point of view to ‘colour’ history.

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One must get it from somewhere and the present provides a palate from which we cannot escape. This is evident, for example, in the volume edited by James Porter (1999) on Constructions of the Classical Body. According to Anne Carson (1999: 87), there is a phenomenology of female pollution in Antiquity that places women, in a brutal patriarchal world, in a position between dirt and desire where they are conceived as ‘penetrable, porous, mutable and subject to defilement at all time’. The long march of male control over women which we have recently recovered for our history of the present is evident in the distant past in ways which we can understand from our contemporary perspective. However, Carson’s analysis would have been impossible 100 years ago. The present, then, could not have delivered it. We live with the danger of subjectivity and circularity because we have no other way to see the past, but through the lens of the present. The terminology of the present is, as Rose (2003) also suggests, awkward in the past. The battle against anachronism is important if we are compelled to use the present to find our way through the labyrinth of the past. Krotzl, Mustakallio and Kuuliala (2016) use ‘infirmitas’ (infirmity) to tell a strong story of health, weakness and care in Antiquity and Medieval society. The authors use a classical concept to short-circuit anachronism. I use tropes for disability – particularly monstrosity, defect and deformity – alive in the period under consideration to embrace a language of the past that is recognisable in the present as a cultural code for the representation of impairment. Rose (2003) encourages the historian of disability to ignore the anachronisms deposited in the minds of moderns by old lore. Yet who can avoid invoking the present when thinking about the past? The past is the child of the present. The donkey, as Rose (2003: 98) herself argues, is the antiquarian equivalent of the high-performance wheelchair. The ‘colouring’ of the canvas of history by a chronology that runs from distorted past to distorted present has not been unusual in the craft of History. The only alternative to the standpoint of the present is the standpoint of Absolute Truth. This idealist standpoint is beyond rescue. We are on safer ground if we embrace as our starting point the view that the ‘colours’ of the present and the colours of the future will undoubtedly paint the past anew. History has been ‘redeemed’ again and again by historians and will continue to be recovered for so long as human beings mine their past; especially so, if their goal is to enhance the future! The contribution that the past makes to the present is clearly articulated by Tim Stainton (2008: 407) in his remarks on the legacy of Augustinian theology for intellectually disabled people. Ideas propagated in the fourth century ce still have resonance today: Most importantly … was the reinforcing of the Greek notion associating reason with human value and personhood; an idea which would be central to social and political thought into the present day … While these ideas would assume many forms, the basic nature of these ideas would not

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change, and they would profoundly affect how intellectual disability was constructed in the centuries which followed. The legacy of Benedetto Croce (1921) in which the bowels of the past and present are umbilically connected is evident in Gadamer’s idea of ‘pre-judgement’ in ‘Truth and Method’ (1989). We cannot grasp the past in and of itself. Its truths multiply and always escape us. We can only represent it; make it into a worded world, a story amongst stories, a ref lection on a process that has gone. Yet we cannot help but remain attached to it and to the narrative recovery of who we once were. The exegete of the past cannot escape the present and is best served in the hermeneutic adventure to embrace the ‘prejudices’ of contemporary existence. Proponents of the ‘new historicism’ argue that only the present – through a glass darkly – can see the horizon of history. Greenblatt (2007: 224) promotes ‘new historicism’ with these words: ‘Writing that was not engaged, that withheld judgements, that failed to connect the present to the past seemed worthless … a neutral or indifferent relation to the past seemed impossible’. In this paradigm of historiography, not only is cultural artefact from the past considered in its wider historical context, but it is also recognised in the present as a powerful force in the portrayal of the past. Time and text under examination are mutually revealing. So too is the relationship between present time and text in production. The questions we ask in doing history/historical sociology and in reading the texts that constitute its discursive contours, ref lect our contemporary values. They will taint/inform the histories that we write. There will, therefore, always be more histories to write. As history marches om, the questions that confront it change: New ones that ref lect the cultural and social priorities of the day emerge. Just as power plays a significant role in the selection and refreshment of historically specific questions, so too do the material forces that shape the perspective of text and author, for they constitute the events and visions from the past to which the hermeneutic endeavour is perennially attracted. These ‘poetics’ assume ‘that texts not only document the social forces that inform and constitute history, culture and society but also feature prominently in the social processes themselves which fashion both individual identity and the socio-historical situation’ (Veenstra 1995: 174). To understand Shakespeare, we need to understand the culture of Elizabethan England, and to understand The Tempest, we need to understand Elizabethan imperialism. Text and time are enduring partners. One without the other cannot be conceived. From the perspective of historical sociology, disability history as an act of recovery has a lot to learn from historicism and ‘new historicism’. New historicism has found a welcoming home in Disability Studies (Bredberg, Davidson and Woodill 1994; Davis 1995; Eberly 1988; Herndl 1994; Schweik 2009; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 25) argue that ‘new historicism in Disability Studies in the humanities sought to perform an anthropological unearthing of images that could help to reconstruct a period’s point of view on human variation’. The ‘new historicism’ – developed by Stephen Greenblatt under the inf luence

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of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams and others – offers the o ­ pportunity for oppressed groups, such as disabled people, to subversively re-appropriate meaning that has been embodied in representations and understandings of their lives in ways that challenge historically significant representations of who they were and are. Disability is not simply a product of cultural discourse, as a f lat reading of new historicism might suggest. It is a struggle for the levers of knowledge and power. In new historicism, disability is a dynamic product. The interplay between material and social changes in culture and developing meanings and representations around it, evolve and develop diachronically. Chronology can be important as the bedrock for understanding these developments, but is not necessarily a determining feature in the changing meanings of disability. There are ruptures. The debt that the ‘new historicist’ paradigm owes to Foucault is not acquired uncritically by the methods employed in this book. ‘Foucault’s idea of archaeology suggests the project of theorizing appropriations of artefacts that have survived their times to live anew in the collective memories and imaginations of our times’ (Hall 2003: 152). One of the interesting things about disability seems to be the ubiquity with which some of the ‘artefacts’ associated with its history have survived. The march of civilisation cannot do without them. The idea that disabled bodies are disposable bodies, ripe for elimination – though historically variable in the form that such disposals take – crops up time and time again like an anthropological beacon of normate culture’s suspicions about the validity of ‘other’ people’s humanity. The sheer durability of disability prejudice – the lack of rupture of appearance/disappearance/reappearance of it as a phenomenon, even though it shifts shape in time – suggests the need for a civilisational-analytic that can capture such apparent ‘process continuities’. Interestingly Stiker’s (1999) history of disability draws heavily on Foucault, but adopts a traditional chronology rather than the preference for rupture that is characteristic of archaeology. Jay Dolmage (2014: 12) employs the ‘cunning intelligence of the Greek Goddess Metis to offer the possibility of a history that is not marked by able-bodied normativity’. He abjures linearity, preferring to ‘compress, juxtapose and juggle eras and location … to put narrative together in strange or jarring ways’. This book also owes more to chronology than rupture. At any one time, there are always numerous ways to think about disability and human variation, manifest in the complex relationships between culture, author, text and power. It is to the last of these that the new historicism is most indebted in its quest to unearth the anthropological and contingent meanings that are the hallmark of a given historical period. Specifically, it is the form of power known as ableism that has the most significance for a new historicist approach to disability. Ableism is spliced with racism and sexism. ‘Reactionary intersections’ of oppressed people are regularly amalgamated in history by hegemonic narrative. Moral economy herds disparaged groups into clusters of negative meaning in which tropes of monstrosity, defect and deformity are deployed as the tools of representation. They provide a clear picture of doxa and debris: On the one

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hand, the key characteristics of value, virtue and propriety and on the other, the contours of degeneracy and disreputability. Negative disability representation in history is a by-product of the desire of dominant groups to establish and maintain their moral superiority: their purity, worth, value and dignity. The able world is clearly identifiable as a clean and proper space, when depictions of propriety are at the expense of disreputable others who are monstrous, defective and deformed. ‘New historicism’ is a meeting point for history, the humanities and the social sciences. Cultural history, in the last three decades of the twentieth century was indebted to theoretical developments in postmodernism, post-colonialism, the cultural turn in sociology, the practices of ‘new social movements’ and epistemological developments at the conf luence of historiography and the humanities (Hall 2003). New historicism is cultural history; a history of collective, contextualised meaning. Text is its primary source and basis for interpretation. ‘What happened to disabled people?’ is the question fused into this method by disability scholars. How has ableism as a ‘structure of consciousness’ inf luenced custom and habit about conceptions and practices of valid and invalid lives in the Occident? This is not just an exercise in literary criticism, but an engaged recovery of history. ‘New historicism … does not posit historical process as unalterable and inexorable’ (Greenblatt 2007: 221), and it recognises the impact of forces of constraint and oppression. Disability history is weighed down by the terrible burden of constraint. It is not a tale, however, of defeated agency, but of the representational appropriation of the dignity and agency of disabled people by normate power. Disabled people survive on the margins and in liminal social spaces. They are more accustomed than most to the challenge of living lives poised on the knife edge of existence. New historicism ‘insists on agency’ for ‘extreme marginality is understood to possess meaning and therefore imply intention’ (Greenblatt, 2007: 221). Calhoun (2003: 386) argues that if one wishes to occupy an epistemologically balanced position between ‘the ideographic and nomothetic in both history and sociology’, then historical sociology is a valuable tool. The dependency on secondary sources associated with historical sociology attunes practitioners to the need for balance. The complication in this study is exacerbated by the many empirical silences that characterise the history of disability. Compensation for these absences lies in the stories that constitute the ableist hegemony of ‘ability’. Narratives of ableism sustain the continuity of the argument that impairment invokes invalidating social responses. Ableism in Disability Studies is methodologically useful. Description and depictions of clean and proper bodies simultaneously embody representations of impropriety. If I have glossed the interplay between text, time and culture in the narrative that follows, it is because I stick with binaries that are not sufficiently porous or nuanced to give colour, detail, contingency and resonance to the complex human relationships that are the strained, unfolding, unbalanced, ‘­partnership’ between disability and non-disability. In the ‘long march’ that I describe, I pick out the grand features of the landscape that is traversed. The fine detail

34  Method and theory

of scenery is absent. This is a story of big geology; the grinding of continental plates; the freezing and melting of permafrost; the folding of the great mountain ranges beneath the oceans. The central protagonists have fortunes that contrast sharply and starkly. Non-disability prospers. Disability does not. Non-disability is accustomed to praise and celebration. Disability is accustomed to ridicule and diminishment. Non-disability expects to be welcomed and to belong. Disability experiences hostility and rejection. Non-disability is represented as autonomous, nourished in propriety. Disability is represented as dependency and construed as contaminating. The narrative that follows is a monument to the big picture, rather than the granularity of these contrasting moral fortunes. Furthermore, the remove from detail is manifest in the fact that many of the texts mobilised as sources in the course of the argument are scholarly interpretations of original manuscripts and events. The landscape is, therefore, under the scrutiny of binoculars rather than a microscope. The approach is dictated by the scope of the task. I would suggest, however, that the framework and conceptual apparatus of a ‘critical historical social ontology for disability’ is amenable to an analysis and interpretation of primary sources and to the ideas of the communicants who committed their timely thoughts to posterity. History is available to us through an anguished struggle for meaning in which we begin from our beginning, form our place and time and, as Hayden White (1973/2016) put it, try to emplot the past. Emplotment is a poetic configuration. Historians tell stories; offer meanings that are plausible. They can tell stories about and stories for. This story falls into the latter category. It challenges the negative rhetorical assemblages about human variation that have accumulated in history (Dolmage 2014). We emplot the past recursively because change makes the past lose the plot. It is always disappearing into the sunset. It comes back in traces, through the always already historicised chronicles and other texts that have been left behind by our predecessors as their signature emplotments, their ‘take’ on the past and on their time as it ref lects their disposition towards the world in which they lived. An emploted canvas is a narrated world dense with tropes, for ‘troping is the soul of discourse’ (White 1978: 2). The data of history is established by literary devices that begin life as meaning already deviated and def lected. Further ref lection on these data produce new inferences, imaginatively re-oriented as they are re-authored in another time and place. History is always uprooted by new rhetoric and representation. From Croce’s work during the fin de siècle period when the nineteenth and twentieth centuries met to new historicism to postmodernism is a tale of the crumbling pillars of historical scholasticism. We can follow impairment and the tropes that have constituted its meaning(s) across the stepping stones of time, from a perspective that is rooted in the present. Indeed, we have little choice in this matter if we accept the claims of ‘the poetics of culture’. New historicism emerged from literary theory and criticism, particularly from scholarship on the Renaissance and later in the work of students of the Victorian period (see, for example, Gallagher and Greenblatt 2001). It argues for a hermeneutic in

Thinking through disability history  35

which the historical context of text and the history of the p­ resent, including the perspective of the author and interpreter (of the historical text under consideration) are considered to be in dialectical relation to one another. In the substantive chapters, I focus on the tropos of defect, deformity and monstrosity as categories that align past and present. They are semantic indicators of impairment and of ‘what not to be’ in past and present. They evoke, starkly, the opposite of the able world of validity in which people are enabled to f lourish.

The place of ‘Proprium’ and ‘moral economy’ in an historical sociology of disability Disability as a subject is a magnet for moralising. It has been argued that, ‘there is no “moral field”, no place where “the moral” rules alone’. This is because ‘morality is to be found everywhere’ (Hunt 1999: 8). However, ‘the moral’ and moral politics, predominate in certain fields of cultural activity and representation. These are ‘consumption, pictorial and other forms of artistic representation, dress, the treatment of children, the disabled and animals’ (Hunt 2003: 364). Moral regulation usually accompanies the moralisation of subjects: ‘Moral regulation projects’ are pertinent to many fields of social activity and ‘are an interesting and significant form of politics in which some people act to problematize the conduct, values or cultures of others and seek to impose regulation on them’ (Hunt 1999: 1). The world of power and moral regulation, the spaces in which propriety and validity are culturally formed and enacted are intimately entwined in the dialectic of relations between disabled and nondisabled people. I use the term Proprium to describe the two-sided nature of the foundations of normate power. Proprium is constituted by property and propriety or political economy and moral economy. The two are closely intertwined in the social and cultural processes that produce human validity and invalidity. Property seeks propriety to morally legitimise or validate its actions. The moral management of populations is directed at ‘governing others in the name of moral distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong (Hunt 2003: 366). Populations targeted for this kind of regulation or moral policing are usually marginalised, conceived as deviant or represent some kind of threat, real or perceived, to the status quo, to order and propriety and the hegemony of ruling and privileged groups (Corrigan 1990). Whatever might be considered dangerous (Mort 2000) or contaminating (Douglas 1966; Pivar 1973), from the perspective of power may be subjected to moral regulation. The link between health/sickness and moral regulation is well-known (Brandt and Rozin 1997; Foucault 1967; Hughes 2000; 2009). Moral economies like political economies require management and regulation. Property and propriety are the mutually sustaining edifices of Proprium that inform cultural virtue. Beauty, truth, reason, order and justice are the key cultural narratives around which social virtue and moral validity, in Western societies, have been organised

36  Method and theory

and evaluated. All have axiological import. Goodness or virtue is assessed in relation to these narrative ideals insofar as they are indexes of propriety in their own right, or have become so in their role as the f lagships of moral meaning and judgement. They are the Occidental organising narratives of the Western nomos. People are expected to embrace and be guided by them and by the proper conduct that they inspire. Events, things and people are assessed in relation to these tribunals of validity. They are the central criteria on which norms are founded and through which attributions of virtue or impropriety can be mobilised. They harbour ancient sentiments of principle and belief. They have generated the key values that underpin Western modernity including, inter alia, human rights, liberal democracy, the rule of law and equality before it, freedom of conscience and speech, the search for knowledge and truth, the cultivation of beauty and justice and the use of reason to deliver these ends. Beauty, truth, reason, order and justice are the touchstones of moral order and ethical aspiration. They are the imperatives that reveal what we want to be and what we don’t want to be. They are assessment tools used to make socio-ontological judgements. They structure how we feel about, and make sense of, people, events and things. Beauty, truth, reason, order and justice are stress-tests of social inclusion; the categorical imperatives of human propriety. However, in their historical and cultural enactment, they produce patterns of disqualification that deny disabled people entry into the community of virtue. Through their enunciation, disabled people become subjects of ‘radical impropriety’, symbols of ‘the lack of the proper’ (Esposito 2010: 7). Each imperative contains its other, and each is a signpost of what not to be. Disability is, or has been, associated with impurity, contamination, pollution, ugliness, error, irrationality, disorder, monstrosity, deformity, defectiveness, idiocy, feeble-mindedness, stupidity, deceitfulness, crookedness and criminality. The ‘f laws’ of nature – or the suppression of them – are included, in classical life, as intrinsic to its orderliness. Western culture vilifies impairment as the opposite of the virtues that it subscribes to. Culture articulates propriety as impairment’s alterity. Judgements about impairment are made against the backcloth of the cultural desire to embody beauty, truth, reason, order and justice, and each is connected to goodness and to the Western conception of a good life. They are disabling tribunals, formed by communities and corporations that stand these ideals up as signifiers of what to be and how to live. Property commands the ideals of propriety. Proprium includes two key elements, namely, ‘being and ethics’, and ‘having and economics’ (Bird 2013), propriety and property, moral economy and political economy. ‘Moral economy’ forms readily around the binary of ability and disability. Disability is a key site of moral regulation; for judgements about right and wrong, worth and value. This idea has deep roots in Western consciousness. Morality is performed by bodies (Carr 2010). The production, exchange and distribution of worth and value are mediated by the moralisation of cultural objects and persons in ways that serve powerful interests. Lay morality, in Western culture,

Thinking through disability history  37

is organised around the meaning of physical appearance. It is a guide to the ­substance and character, good or bad, that lie behind it (Evans 1969; Hartsock 2008). Property through its inf luence on propriety organises human variation into an ableist hierarchy that ref lects normate beliefs and interests. I argue in the following that impairment and its inf lections in deformity, defect, monstrosity, (as well as many other representations embodied in, for example, concepts like vulnerability, impurity, madness, idiocy, etc.) form the dark tropos of human variation. Impairment has been subject to various forms of negative representation, evaluation, moral regulation and government in the course of history. This tropos embodies negative valuations or moralisations about nonnormative types of embodiment. Moralisation materialises judgements about the worth and value of human beings. It is a process that arises from the encounter between f lesh and the world, body and able context. Evaluations of validity and invalidity are consequent upon the relational nature of this engagement. This ensures its temporality, its historicity, its propensity to change. Human validity requires that f lesh and the social world are commensurate with one another. Given that f lesh and world, body and society are always in the process of becoming, the relational dynamic of dis/ability, ensures that the processes of moralisation and the validations and invalidations that are inscribed in it will vary across time. The temporal nature of disability regulation is best conceived within an ableist ‘moral economy’ that brings benefit to non-disabled people. The concept of moral economy is associated, in the first instance with the work of E.P. Thomson. He wrote that: My own usage [of “moral economy”] has in general been confined to confrontations in the marketplace over access (or entitlement) to “necessities” – essential food. It is not only that there is an identifiable bundle of beliefs, usages and forms associated with the marketing of food in times of dearth which it is convenient to bind together in a common term, but the deep emotions stirred by dearth, the claims which the crowd made upon the authorities in such crises and the outrage provoked by profiteering in life-threatening emergencies, imparted a particular “moral” charge to protest. All of this, taken together, is what I understand by moral economy. (Thompson 1993: 337–338) Thompson (1966; 1971; 1993) argued that the riot ‘was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It was legitimized by tradition; an older moral economy, that taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people’ (1966: 62–3). The word ‘riot’ drains protest of its moral content. Thompson restored it by relating the ‘riot’ to a subsistence ethic and its breach by power and privilege. The food riot was not a form of spontaneous irrationality, but derived ‘from a consensus as to the moral economy of the commonweal in times of dearth’ (1993: 246). ‘Tradition’ fixed a fair price that

38  Method and theory

was determined not by profit, but by what people could afford and not just by the peasants, but the millers and bakers and the paternalists who had a stake in the price. As the moral relations that sustained a fair price begin to collapse, the ‘riot’ or protest erupted. The ‘riot’ became the mechanism adopted by the poor to restore balance to the moral economy and the system of determining a fair price that has been undercut by class exploitation. Thompson’s research suggests that ‘behind every form of popular direct action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found’ (Thompson 1966: 68) and that it challenges a dominant notion of right, particularly when fairness is corrupted. Moral economy, on this reading, refers to collective action from below that enacts its own moral validity. The poor do not, however, as a rule, have control over, or access to, the means to legitimate their actions. Moral economy is dominated by the propertied classes, transformed under its hegemony into consensus, into the common sense of ‘right thinking’ subjects (Gramsci 1971). Thomson uses moral economy analytically to describe how moral belief shapes resistance to ruling class power. I use moral economy analytically to describe how moral belief is dominated by ruling class interests to shed light on the history of social relations between disabled and non-disabled people. Moral economy in my usage refers to the ableist-doxic understanding of propriety and how it is distributed and contested. Cultural representation and evaluation are the water carriers of the ableist moral economy. Economy and moral economy are two sides of the same social ensemble; separate but interrelated spheres of activity and feeling in which goods and good, property and propriety are at stake. Moral economy regulates relations of value by way of ‘projects’ that ‘are directed at governing others in the name of moral distinctions between good and bad, right and wrong’ (Hunt 2003: 365). It is the perspective from which privilege and power gauges propriety and judges the conduct of actors. Projects derived from the social ideals of beauty, reason, truth, justice and order have been central to the Western telos and the development of its moral economy. Representation derived from ‘the high ideals’ of Western society has had a pejorative impact on disabled people’s place in the community. The concept of moral economy, applied to disability, uncovers a history of compassion and violence, caritas and maltreatment. Disability is both good to be good to and good to mistreat. Since the time of Constantine, these two ableist conceptions can be co-located, and both embody distinctive feelings about disability in the non-disabled imaginary. The first invokes pity and the second, fear, hatred and disgust (Hughes 2012b). Moral economy is also an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed 2004a; 2004b). It embraces the emotional relationships that straddle the ontological separation of disability and non-disability, including, particularly, the negative feelings of the latter about the former. If the moral economy sets out the doxic curriculum of how to behave towards one another, the affective economy sets out how we should feel about one another. Ableist morality mobilises emotion in the disavowal of impairment. The invalidating feelings and perceptions, often highly contradictory, make the moral economy treacherous for disabled people. Where human societies

Thinking through disability history  39

struggle, emotionally, morally and practically, to i­ncorporate human variation and ­d ifference, disability and its invalidation take shape.

A history of disability or a history of impairment What follows is a ‘historical sociology’ of disability. In combination, history and sociology offer the best method for studying ‘social change’ (Calhoun 2003: 383). This is important for Disability Studies, particularly if it is to circumvent the tendency of the UK social model to treat impairment as an ahistorical and asocial biological ‘inheritance’ and thus concede it to the jurisdiction of medicine (Hughes and Paterson 1997; Wendell 1996: 35). A strength of the cultural model of disability, embraced (particularly) by the humanities tradition in the US, that has gained ground in Europe in the last 20 years ( Joshua, Schillmeier and Schillmeier 2010; Waldschmidt, Berresem and Ingwerson 2017), is that it is not wed to a strict distinction between impairment and disability, the body and society (Goodley 2011: 14). To take the view that disability is a manifestation of, and can be defined in terms of, social oppression, in concrete ways that vary historically, and is therefore a social construct and a product of the ensemble of social relations (Oliver 1990) need not be accompanied by a conception of physical and mental impairment that reduces it to a biological universal that is simultaneously historically empty. Disability is unthinkable without impairment. Impairment too occupies the field of history in multiple forms of human variation as ‘a site of phenomenological value that is not purely synonymous with the process of social disablement’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 6). Impairment is drawn into historical sociology and social change and it is evident with ubiquity in culture and text. Meanings of impairment shift in time as activity and context re-invent them. The broad, ‘loaded’, categories that constitute impairment – defect, deformity, monstrosity as well as the specific concrete ontologies such as deafness, blindness, ‘idiocy’ etc. – are connected meaningfully to the cultural and social contexts and processes that construct and reconstruct them anew. The difficulty with the Cartesian trick of separating impairment and disability, nature and culture rests in the loss of analytical efficacy. To make sense out of either on their own is an impossibility. A historical sociology of disability is best understood in terms of the processes of invalidation that transform impairment into disability, forms of human variation into experiences of oppression and discrimination. The minute one tries to pull impairment and disability apart in history, they snap back together, connected by a strongly coiled spring of representation. As Simi Linton (1998) has argued convincingly, disablement is best understood as the ensemble of social and cultural processes through which impairment is devalued. It is historically specific judgements (or moralisations of embodiment) about human variations that underpin both the oppression and discrimination that disabled people experience and the forms of resistance that they enact.

40  Method and theory

This book is emphatically not a history of specific ‘impairment groups’. The focus is on impairment and disability as generic categories. It pays particular attention to the tropes and metonyms (‘monstrosity’, ‘defect’, ‘deformity’, etc.) that cut across the particularism of lived impairment and layer them with negative cultural meaning. Specific impairments are, however, invoked to illustrate and develop arguments. D/deaf history and the history of ‘madness’ and being blind are, for example, simultaneously part of the history of disability and separate from it, not only epistemologically where there is both overlap and autonomy but also politically. The D/deaf community is – as a rule – far more comfortable with its ref lexive identity as a linguistic minority (Corker 1998; Scully 2012:) than the idiom of disability, and the mental health service users’ or psychiatric survivors’ movement that emerged in the 1970s has a complex relationship with the disability movement, ranging from the fraternal through the ambivalent to the hostile (Beresford 2000; 2012; Plumb 1994:). However, one cannot ignore the argument that the history of D/deaf people or ‘madness’ or being blind, rubs shoulders with the history of monstrosity, defect, deformity, as well as intellectual, physical and (other) sensory impairments. These tropes are knotted around specific complexities of identity and meaning that change over time. Impairment and disability are the categories that I use to keep kith and kin together under the same conceptual roof. Including impairment groups in a more or less homogeneous package of meaning is not an attempt to subdue difference, but to keep differences that matter together, in a cluster, not just for analytical purposes, but also on the grounds of similitude of treatment, overlapping representations and narratives, not to mention the common experience of injustice. The idiom of disability serves these purposes. Some ‘impairment collectives’, might feel out of place, or offended, by being subsumed into or effaced by a categorical abstraction. The objective, however, is not to impose an identity. It is to make sense of the long march of the history of the dialectic of human validity and invalidity and how this process has constructed corporeal and intellectual difference. If abstraction is the charge, then I will have to plead guilty, but in the light of the caveat (or excuse) that I do so in order to make this history into the socio-political project that I think it should be. The ethico-political unity of academy and activism is best served by it. Neither do I mean to suggest that D/deaf history, for example, should or must be subsumed into disability history. The quality of histories of D/deaf culture in the US (see, for example, Baynton 1996; Burch 2002; Padden and Humphries 2005) would, in themselves, make nonsense of such a suggestion. Neither do I mean to suggest that the history of impairment is politically moribund. In the introduction to their collection of articles on disability history, from Early Modernity to the present, Turner and Stagg (2006: 4) argue that by ‘exploring the stigmatisation of different physical, intellectual and psychological impairments in their historical context’, the contributors will ‘provide a more complex understanding of processes of devaluation associated with human anomaly in

Thinking through disability history  41

the past’. I couldn’t agree more! We need histories that drill down into the lives of people with impairment. The more the better! This, however, is not what this project is about. Its focus is ‘big history’, the ‘long march’; the processes of representation that invalidate human variation by transforming impairment into disability. The relationship between disability and impairment has had a troubled journey in the contemporary history of the Disabled People’s Movement (Hughes and Paterson 1997; Morris 1991; Oliver 1990; Shakespeare 2006: 34–43). The social model of disability arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of individual and medical conceptions of disability, promising a discourse that would leave impairment and all its biological tropes to the vultures (Oliver 1990). The objective was to rescue disability from the epistemological ‘blind alley’ to which it had been consigned by medicine and the rehabilitation sciences. Disability Studies, as it developed out of the social model, refused to deal with the carrion. Fresh conceptual meat was embodied in the category of disability, which would carry all the epistemological, political and sociological weight in the struggle for disability emancipation. More detail on this recent history of the struggle for ideas about disability is offered in the next chapter; suffice to say at this juncture that a politicised conception of impairment is a necessity. The social response to impairment triggers invalidation for disabled people and validity for the normate community. Impairment is the palpable socio-ontological source of negative reaction and pejorative representation that is evident in cultural narratives of disability. It – impairment – is what the non-disabled gaze ‘sees’ and constructs ideologically (Garland-Thomson 1996). It is to the elucidation of the social and cultural processes of invalidation of people kindred by virtue of impairment that this book is dedicated. The non-disabled imaginary constructs and reacts to ‘deafness’ and ‘madness’ in ways that have invalidating consequences, broadly similar to ‘other’ disabled people with different impairments. Similar, but not the same! Accounts of the experience of invalidation will produce variegated narratives. There will be similarity enough, however, to use a range of sociological concepts to make sense of the narratives without, I hope, doing violence to those differences. Marginalisation, stigmatisation, exclusion, discrimination and oppression, the key categories in the discourse of inequality and the experience of injustice, describe the lives of difference with surprising equity and consistency. In the dialectic between disability and non-disability that produces invalidation, impairment, in its many and varied forms, is the principle mediator. Cultural and social responses to impairment make disability by transforming bodily difference into disvalued being. A strict affiliation to the social model and its view of the genesis of disability as a form of oppression that bubbles to life out of the cauldron of capitalism (Gleeson 1997; 1999; Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1990), leads inevitably to an historical account of disability that is synchronically silent. There is no disability, no oppression of bodily difference before the clash of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Irina Meltzer (2006) is drawn into this cul-de-sac.

42  Method and theory

She concluded in her ground-breaking account of Disability in Medieval Europe (2006: 190) that ‘although in reality there were probably as many physically impaired people, proportionately, as there were in other societies, including our own modern society, there were very few Medieval disabled people’. If one rips apart impairment and disability (body and society) in this way, one is bound to produce a curiously apolitical, disembodied history in which the invalidating representations associated with impairment are not connected to social oppression. The cultural model, embraced by Critical Disability Studies, is not bound by this lens. Representations of impairment are narratives, pre-modern or not, of propriety and impropriety, validity and invalidity. Capitalism did condemn the vast majority of disabled people to economic inactivity and loss of independence, including, in many cases, institutional confinement, but this does not mean that life for people with congenital and acquired impairments in pre-capitalist societies was free from processes of social and cultural invalidation or from narratives and practices that demeaned and, at times, destroyed their lives. Neither does this mean that there have not been some very good materialist historiographies of disability in the context of capitalism. The late Ann Borsay’s (2005) materialist account of the relationship between Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750 springs immediately to mind. She too prefers a generic concept of disability to the particularisms of impairment. Colin Barnes (1996), though strongly committed to a strong social model position and to a materialist approach to disability history, recognised that economic reductionism and crude materialism, as an explanatory framework for disability history, did not consider the impact of belief systems and cultural values on impairment. By arguing for the causal efficacy of the ‘superstructure’, Barnes breathed some life into disability history as a synchronic story of oppression that stretches deep into the mists of time. Borsay (2005: 12: 2012) also critiqued the assumption ‘that impairment in pre-industrial Britain was for the most part unproblematic’. These views loosen themselves from a reductive focus on economics. Combined with recognition of the importance of the cultural locations of impairment and the ‘barriers to being as well as to doing’ that disabled people face, the social aspects of impairment in any time can come to the fore. Injustice and invalidating social relations position disability as a subject of, and for, history that can travel back behind capitalism without losing its critical and political edge. A synchronic approach – be it ruptured, or more linear – is more easily absorbed by a cultural materialist approach to disability history that is not tied to the binary view of impairment and disability that dominated Disability Studies in the period before the new millennium. There will be more on this theoretical shift in Chapter 2. This book is not about the many ‘historical gaps’ (Longmore and Umansky 2001: 3) and silences that mark out the history of disability. It is a chronically chronological historical sociology with an eye to an overview. The overview is sustained by the concepts of validity and invalidity, how this axiological divide

Thinking through disability history  43

is maintained in the Proprium by imbrications of property and propriety, and by a focus on role of disability in moral economy and its relation to the potential for ethical politics. Historians are coming into the disability field, seeking to fill the many ‘historical gaps’. They offer an epistemological depth and richness to the periods and particularities that they study. Recent examples – to name but a few – include Laes (2013), Disability and the Disabled in the Roman World, the 32 chapters of Laes’ edited volume (2017), Disability in Antiquity: Rewriting Disability, and Turner’s Disability in Eighteenth Century England (2012). Some analyse the experience of specific impairments; for example, Wright’s Downs: A History (2012), McDonagh’s Idiocy: A Cultural History (2008) and Wheatley’s Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability (2010). In developing an historical sociology of disability, questions of ontological validity and their relationship to social and cultural life come to the surface. Some of the questions I have been asking myself have been raised in the field of ‘disability bioethics’ by Jackie Leach Scully: [T]o speak of disability ontologically, as a way of being, rather than pathologically … is to replace a well charted set of questions with less familiar ones. If disability is a way of being, what sort of being is it? How exactly does it develop? Which (that is whose) representations of disability have authority? What relationship does disability have to other social or ontological categories like gender, ethnicity or class? Is disability in fact a genuine ontological category – is it really an authentic way of being, or is it just a useful organising category for a motley collection of odd bodies? (Scully 2008: 3–4) The past helps in the formulation of answers to these important questions. Disability is, or has been constructed as, an ontological position (Hughes 2007; Thomas 2004) or a sketch of a specific kind-of human identity. To date, it has been a negative construct. Disability has been represented as ‘what not to be’. Disability, conceived as a politics of emancipation, is the struggle to abrogate the negative historical and cultural accretions that have reproduced this damaged ontology. The task is to invalidate the history of invalidation. C. Wright Mills (1959: 11) noted that in order to ask appropriate sociological questions and examine their rise to historical prominence, one ‘must ask what values are cherished yet threatened and what values are cherished and supported by the characteristic trends’ of the period in question. Impairment is experienced by non-disabled people as a subterranean threat to their constitutional integrity. This pathology of non-disability – its fantasy of invulnerability (Shildrick 2002) – suggests an insecure affective and ontological imaginary that translates impairment into a threat to cherished values and a splinter in the eye of moral order. Scully (2008) raises the issue of the relationship between disability and other (socio-) ‘ontological categories’ like gender, ethnicity and class. In this investigation into the disabling cultural evaluations of impairment, gender and ethnicity

44  Method and theory

reveal themselves as bedfellows. The history of the invalidation of d­ isabled p­ eople, and the negative ontological evaluations that follow them across the march of time, is marked by many narrative conf luences with gender and ethnicity. Concepts of monstrosity, defect and deformity prove in a significant variety of cultural contexts to be interchangeable ‘scripts’, deployed by hegemonic rhetoric to forge a common narrative of disvalue amongst the socially least privileged. As Jay Dolmage (2014: 4) put it: ‘Disability is often used rhetorically as a f lexible form of stigma to be freely applied to any unknown, threatening or devalued group’. In the historical portraits of classical Antiquity, Medieval Christendom and the Early Modern period that are drawn in Part II of the book, narrative intersections with gender and ethnicity are analytically and thematically important.

Concluding remarks Disability is subject and object of this study. I have argued that a critical social ontology for disability has to be embedded in historical sociology and conceived epistemologically as a combination of activism and scholarship. This project cannot be detached from a politically motivated act of historical recovery or from the ‘deformed’ cultural constructions that inform contemporary conceptualisations of disability. These constructions have roots in the past that can only be interpreted from a standpoint in the present. New historicism provides the best method to develop an analytical framework that will do the self-conscious work of recovery, and I have proposed a tropos of disability that attempts to mitigate anachronism. Proprium and moral economy provide a post-Marxist, cultural materialist scaffolding to support the hermeneutic endeavour. I have also argued that disability is best understood in history though ableist representations of bodies in which impairment is portrayed as the antithesis of propriety and that the tropos of impairment provides scripts that are used to ontologically invalidate the identities of other marginalised groups Scully (2008: 3) argues convincingly that cultural perceptions of disability are shifting from the pathological to the ontological, from a medical deficit to a ‘way of being’. However, the evaluation of disabled embodiment immanent in its scientific representation was, as Georges Canguilhem (1989) proposed, never ontologically neutral. From a non-disabled or ableist perspective, disability is, and has been, as I suggested in the introduction, a problem, a catastrophe. It was thus in the modern imaginary and in the social forms that predated it. Disability has been represented as an ontological failure and an indication of problematic moral personhood. It is a magnet for negative moral evaluation (Parens and Ash 2000) and a sibling – in representation and evaluation – of other people of difference that have shared disvalued identities. Disability as an ontological category guides us back into the past, to develop what Licia Carlson (2005: 149) called an ‘historical ontology of ourselves’. Disability ontology is shaped by disingenuous normate conceptions of it as, for example, a state of disrepair, an abomination, a useless-eater and so on. It also

Thinking through disability history  45

propels us into the future! Consideration of the ethical ontological project of ­disability ­emancipation is developing quickly. Schillmeier (2010: 11) has argued that Disability Studies is ‘an ontological project that is not only interested in how we live but also engages in ontological politics; in how we want to live’ (emphasis in the original). The non-disabled world is puzzled by disability pride. It simply doesn’t have the vision to see the world that way. One is tempted to diagnose myopia. In Western culture, disability has been epitomised as ‘what not to be’. It will take the normate community a while to get over a prejudice that it has carried for millennia. Through the disavowal of impairment – our rejection of it in ourselves – we have lost contact with the celebration of ‘all of our lives’, including impairment, pain, sickness, suffering and the fear that draws us towards consideration of the inevitable outcome of our mortal condition. If an historical ontology refers to the power by which we constitute ourselves as subjects, then we do so, as Ian Hacking (2002: 3) argues, ‘at a place and time using materials that have a distinctive and historically formed organisation’ and we do it to constitute ‘ourselves as moral agents in quite specific, local, historical ways in ‘civilisations with histories’. Disability history is deeply embedded in these ‘­civilisations with histories’, in the formation of moral agency within them and in the able-centric cultures that they produced.

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Borsay, A. (2005) Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Borsay, A. (2012) History and disability studies: Evolving perspectives, pp. 324–335 in N. Watson, A. Roulstone and C. Thomas (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, London, UK: Routledge. Bourrier, K. (2015) The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bradshaw, M. (Ed.) (2016) Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind and Text, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Brandt, A. and Rozin, P. (1997) Morality and Health, London, UK: Routledge. Bredberg, E. (1999) Writing Disability History: Problems, perspectives, sources, Disability and Society, 14(2): 189–210. Bredberg, E., Davidson, I. and Woodill, G. (1994) Images of disability in nineteenth century children’s literature, Disability & Society, 9: 33–46. Burch, S. (2002) Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War 11, New York: New York University Press. Calhoun, C. (2003) Afterword: Why historical sociology, pp. 383–394 in G. Delanty and E. Isin (Eds.) Handbook of Historical Sociology, London, UK: Sage. Campbell, F.K. (2008) Refusing able(ness): A preliminary conversation about ableism, M/C Journal, 11(3): 1–13. Online at: http:​//jou​r nal.​media​- cult​u re.o​rg.au​/inde​x.php​/ mcjo​u rnal​/arti​cle/v​iewAr​t icle​/46 accessed 7/8/11 (Accessed 7/9/11). Canguilhem, G. (1989) The Normal and the Pathological (Translated, C. Fawcatt), New York: Zone. Carlson, L. (2005) Docile bodies, docile minds: Foucauldian ref lections on mental retardation, pp. 133–152 in S. Tremain (Ed.) Foucault and the Government of Disability, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. Carr, D. (2010) On the moral value of physical activity: On body and soul in Plato’s account of virtue, Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 4(1): 3–15. Carson, A. (1999) Dirt and desire: The phenomenology of female pollution in antiquity, pp. 86–99 in J. Porter (Ed.) Constructions of the Classical Body, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Corker, M. (1998) Deaf and Disabled or Deafness Disabled, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Corrigan, P. (1990) On Moral Regulation in Social Forms/Human Capacities: Essays in Authority and Difference, London, UK: Routledge. Croce, B. (1921) History: Its Theory and Practice (Translated, D. Ainslie), New York: Harcourt Brace. Online at: https​://ar​chive​.org/​strea​m/his​toryi​tsthe​ory00​croc (Accessed 25/10/2013). Davis, L. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body, New York: Verso. Davis, M. (2006) Historics, London, UK: Routledge. Dolmage, J. (2014) Disability Rhetoric, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Douglas, M. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eberly, S. (1988) Fairies and folklore of disability: Changelings, hybrids and the solitary fairy, Folklore, 99: 58–77. Ernst, W. (Ed.) (2007) Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal: Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity, London, UK: Routledge. Esposito, R. (2010) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Evans, E. (1969) Physiognomics in the Ancient World, Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society.

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Finkelstein, V. (1980) Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion, New York: World Rehabilitation Fund. Foucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilisation, London, UK: Tavistock. Gadamer, H.G. (1989) Truth and Method (2nd Edition) (Translated, J. Weinheimer and D. Marshall), New York: Crossroad. Gallagher, C. and Greenblatt, S. (2001) Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (Ed.) (1996) Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Garland-Thomson, R. (2005) Feminist disability studies, Signs, 30(2): 1551–1587. Gleeson, B. (1997) Disability studies: A historical materialist view, Disability & Society, 12(2): 179–202. Gleeson, B. (1999) Geographies of Disability, London, UK: Routledge. Goodley, D. (2011) Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, London, UK: Sage. Gramsci, A. (1971) Prison Notebooks, London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. Greenblatt, S. (2007) Learning to Curse: Essays on Early Modern Culture, London, UK: Routledge. Hacking, I. (2002) Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, A. (2012) Disability and Modern Fiction: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, A. (2016) Literature and Disability, London, UK: Routledge. Hall, J. (2003) Cultural history is dead (long live the Hydra), pp. 151–168 in G. Delanty and E. Isin (Eds.) Handbook of Historical Sociology, London, UK: Sage. Hartsock, C. (2008) Sight and Blindness in Luke-Acts: The Use of Physical Features in Characterisation, Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Herndl, D. (1994) Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture 1840–1940, Chapel Hill, CA: University of North Carolina Press. Hughes, B. (2000) Medical bodies, pp. 12–28 in P. Hancock et al. (Eds.) The Body, Culture and Society: An Introduction. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Hughes, B. (2007) Being disabled: Towards a critical social ontology for disability studies, Disability & Society, 22(7): 673–684. Hughes, B. (2009) Managing health in everyday life, pp. 56–73 in P. Hancock and M. Tyler (Eds.) The Management of Everyday Life, London, UK: Palgrave. Hughes, B. (2012) Fear, pity and disgust: Emotions and the non-disabled imaginary, pp. 68–78 in N. Watson, A. Roulstone and C. Thomas (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, London, UK: Routledge. Hughes, B. and Paterson, K. (1997) The social model of disability and the dis­appearing body: Towards a sociology of impairment, Disability & Society, 12(3): 325–340. Hunt, A. (1999) Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, A. (2003) From moral science to moral regulation: Social theory’s encounter with the moral domain, pp. 364–383 in G. Delanty and F. Isin (Eds.) Handbook of Historical Sociology, London, UK: Sage. Johnston, K. (2016) Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism, London, UK: Bloomsbury Press. Joshua, E., Schillmeier, M. and Schillmeier, M.W. (2010) Disability in German Literature, Film and Theatre (Volume 4 Edinburgh German Yearbook), Edinburgh, Scotland: Camden House.

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Krotzl, C., Mustakallio, K. and Kulliala, J. (2016) Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health Weakness and Care, London, UK: Routledge. Laes, C. (2013) Disability and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History, Antwerp, Belgium: University of Cambridge Press. Laes, C. (Ed.) (2017) Disability in Antiquity: Rewriting Antiquity, London, UK: Routledge. Linton, S. (1998) Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York: New York University Press. Longmore, P. and Umanski, L. (Eds.) (2001) The New Disability History: American Perspectives, New York: New York University Press. McDonagh, P. (2008) Idiocy: A Cultural History, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Metzler, I. (2006) Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages, c.1100–1400, London, UK: Routledge. Mignolo, W. (2005) The Idea of Latin America, London, UK: Blackwell. Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, D. and Snyder, S. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Morris, J. (1991) Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability, London, UK: Women’s Press. Mort, F. (2000) Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England Since 1830, London, UK: Routledge. Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement, London, UK: Macmillan. Padden, C. and Humphries, T. (2005) Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parens, E. and Ash, A. (2000) Disability rights critique of prenatal testing, pp. 3–34 in E. Parens and A. Ash (Eds.) Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Pivar, D. (1973) Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Porter, J. (1999) Constructions of the Classical Body, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Plumb, A. (1994) Distress or Disability? A Discussion Document, Manchester, UK: Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People. Rose, M. (2003) The Staff of Oedipus: Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Sanchez, R. (2015) Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature, New York: New York University Press. Schillmeier, M. (2010) Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses and Things, London, UK: Routledge. Schweik, S. (2009) The Ugly Laws, New York: New York University Press. Scully, J.L. (2008) Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference, Lanham, ML: Rowan and Littlefield. Scully, J.L. (2012) Deaf identities in disability studies: With or without us, pp. 109–121 in N. Watson, A. Roulstone and C. Thomas (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, London, UK: Routledge. Shakespeare, T. (2006) Disability Rights and Wrongs, London, UK: Routledge. Shildrick, M. (2002) Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self, London, UK: Sage. Shilling, C. (2003) The Body and Social Theory (2nd Edition), London, UK: Sage. Snyder, S. and Mitchell, D. (2006) Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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2 MODELLING DISABILITY THEORY A contemporary history of the disability idea

Introduction ‘Disability Studies’ in academia evolved alongside the Disabled People’s Movement (DPM). It became its intellectual expression. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, Disability Studies prioritised a social model of disability, designed to represent the case for disability oppression and act as guide to its elimination. The social model was the ‘big idea’ of the movement; the paradigm-shifting battering ram that brought the medical model to its knees and transformed the meaning of disability from a ‘bodily deficit’ into the lifeblood of radical identity politics. A powerful force, it helped to transform a generation of disabled people into political activists and move a generation of disability scholars into political engagement. The continental priority of theoretical depth was absent from the early formulations of the social model. That came later. The social model was the lodestone of the movement, magnetic in its simplicity, effective tool and concrete guide. There was no need for deep theory, for nuance, complexity and abstraction. The job of emancipation could be done without it. The ‘big idea’ worked without refinement or embellishment; without tinkering in the name of epistemological decoration or academic egoism? The priority was practice, not some ‘Young Hegelian’ notion of praxis. Direct action, rolling out legislative reform, making the built environment, bit by bit, into a place where disabled people could come out and ‘be’ was the preferred modus operandi of the UK disability movement. It was heavily indebted to the empiricism and tradition of its wider culture (Goodley, Hughes and Davis 2012) and, far less consciously, to the pragmatism and Fabianism that marked the politics of the British left from the beginning of the twentieth century. The social model was a product of the cultural ‘sensibilities’ that E.P. Thompson (1965) called ‘the peculiarities of the English’, a ‘blanketing fog’ of ‘traditionalism’ and ‘empiricism’ (Anderson 1964: 40)

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51

Ironically, the materialist critique of Anglophone anti-intellectualism, expounded by a well-known English historical materialist, applied appropriately to a model that had its roots in Marxism. However, theory, of various continental f lavours, has, since the 1960s, crept through the ‘blanketing fog’, establishing residency in the ivory towers of the UK. The silent migration of continental ideas has changed British thinking. The European invasion, from Gramsci to Derrida, Bourdieu to Baudrillard, Althusser to Lyotard, Foucault to Zizek, has been relentless. The ‘coagulated conservatism’ of tradition in the academy has been supplanted by polychrome theoretical eclecticism, a menu upon which the UK intelligentsia has gorged. Postmodernism, love it or hate it, eroded the peculiarities of islander insulation and parochialism that was consolidated by a premature bourgeois revolution (Anderson 1964). European thinkers who came to Britain for real, like Bauman and Elias, have also had a hand in undermining British empiricism. Disability Studies rose on the crest of a wave that has been characterised by a series of ‘turns’ that have buffeted the empiricism of its imperial past. For Disability Studies, the somatic turn (Hughes and Paterson 1997) has been the most important. It pitched the concepts of impairment and disability, prised apart by the UK Social Model, into intense negotiation. The new millennium released new sensibilities. The deep scars and profound shocks of the global economic crisis of 2008 were preceded by a long, festering crisis of embodiment that played out in the great somatic anxieties of late twentieth century consumer capitalism (Featherstone, Hepworth and Tuner 1991). The crisis of embodiment re-embodied social thought in the social sciences and the humanities (Turner 1996). The social body is deeply scarred by contemporary panics over the precarious state of human ontology in a variety of domains (Fuller 2011), including, inter alia; weight (Riley et al. 2007), fitness (Sassatelli 2010), performance (Magdalinski 2008), genetics and identity (Atkinson, Glasner and Greenslade 2006), age and ageing populations (Faircloth 2003) and last, but not least, ability/disability. We have witnessed ableist manifestos for an enhanced humanity (Fuller 2011: 155–160; Campbell 2009); including the rise of ‘soft’ eugenics and ultra-up-todate Malthusianism based on the ‘universal’ desire for perfect babies (Landsman 2008). Contemporary culture is preoccupied by a search for the good body; a good body for the digital age; a real corporeal doppelg ä nger for the endless vitality, power, cool, beauty and moral opaqueness of the virtual bodies and avatars that never get knackered, old, sick, wrinkled, crocked or ‘crooked’. Fantasy ‘clean and proper bodies’, our moralised, purified ontologies of self, just don’t break down or die. We live in envy of high-definition creations, the better bodies of our imaginations, to which we, ironically, aspire. This is the handiwork of ableism. Alongside these preoccupations and the polarising anxieties that accompany them, a progressive disposition has arisen. It supports the celebration of difference. An agenda for equality in the value of diverse bodies is acknowledged (Metzl and Poirier 2005; Moore 1994). In the context of ableist somatic fantasies of consumer culture, on the one hand, and the more fertile

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soil of recognition for corporeal variation, the DPM and Disability Studies had to think its way into the twenty-first century. The backlash of reaction and right-wing populism that has rooted in democracies post-2008, has, however, revivified intolerance of difference and the body fascism of hyper-­consumerism. Theory struggles against cultural crisis, against the nihilism of the age. It wilts in the face of austerity, populism and the politics of resentment, in which the ‘deserving’ populations of social democracy shrink until they include only the ‘hardworking’ moral majority. Disabled people are rarely made welcome in this club. In this chapter, I argue that Critical Disability Studies (CDS) forms a ‘second wave’ of disability thinking that supersedes the first wave radicalism of the social model of disability. The former is embedded in the politics of embodiment, the relationship between self and other, disability and non-disability. As internal debate in Disability Studies has become more theoretically diverse and politics far less homogeneous, emphasis on the cultural significance of impairment, the hegemony of ableism and the nature of the non-disabled imaginary has come to the fore. I claim that the distinction in first wave Disability Studies between barriers to doing and barriers to being, is useful in demonstrating the transition from a social to a cultural model of disability that places disability discrimination in a wider context of Proprium, by which I mean the unity of property and propriety; the very unity that enables ability to f lourish.

First wave radicalism: The social model of disability [D]isability according to the social model, is all the things that impose restrictions on disabled people; ranging from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination, from inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport systems, from segregated education to excluding work arrangements and so on. Further, the consequences of this failure do not simply randomly fall on individuals but systematically upon disabled people as a group who experience this failure as discrimination institutionalised throughout society. (Oliver 1996: 33) In response to the experience of exclusion and discrimination in the modern period, the Disabled People’s Movement (DPM), in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and many other regions and countries across the globe, struggled to improve the lives of disabled people. This process gathered force in the last three decades of the twentieth century and it was inspired by the social model of disability, described by Mike Oliver (above) as a paradigm shift from an individual to a sociological conception of disability. Legislative pathways were forged. Movements worked to get far-reaching AntiDiscrimination Legislation (ADL) onto the statute books. This approach had significant advantages: Led by disabled people, it shifted the discourse about

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disabled people from individual invalidity or sickness and personal ‘need’ to ‘rights’ and ‘citizenship’. ‘Need’ in relation to disability was defined in the modern period, when disability was under the jurisdiction of medicine, not by disabled people themselves, but by medical experts authorised by their credentials to speak in the name of disability (Kristiansen, Vehmas and Shakespeare 2009: 3). Just as the Occident shaped the Orient by narrating it from an imperial vantage point (Said 2003), so too disability relied for its biological, social and moral meaning on foreign deliberations characterised by technical rather than experiential competence. Objectifying ideas of pathology, dependency and deficit dressed disability in the ableist attire of normate desire. Discursive handiwork in clinics, hospitals, medicalised spaces of segregation and learned papers emanating from the biomedical sciences crafted the meaning of disability during the long haul of modernity. As ‘objects’ lacking autonomy, disabled people were best neither seen nor heard (Humphries and Gordon 1992); consigned, confined to the social and ontological periphery where they could be repaired or live out secluded lives in ‘protected’ impoverishment and burdensome dependency. In the moral pantheon of medicine and the non-disabled imaginary, disabled people were reduced to infantile submission and grateful acquiescence, incarcerated in special spaces, designed to manage their vulnerability and abjection. Disability was a blighted ‘destiny’ of perpetual suffering marked by physical or intellectual limitation, amputated ambition, incapacity, incapability and loss; a life ruined by a cruel visitor who refused to leave. Disability was a tragic way of being (Oliver 1990), a catastrophe best met with dignified silence and psychological adaption to suffering and abnormality. Non-disabled people, disavowing impairment in their own lives, were expected to respond to disability with magnanimity and paternalism. Medicine clothed pity in the white coat of science. Disability was understood as a pathological condition, a tricky case for the science of the abnormal, a conundrum of rehabilitation. The DPM, in the later part of the twentieth century tried, with some considerable success to shift the disability paradigm (Barnes and Mercer 2003). The social model moved debate about disability ‘from pathology to politics’ (Goodley 2011: 5) The social model of disability transformed disability from an objective medical fact derived from the universal body of knowledge known as clinical pathology into an outcome of relations of power. How these relations of power are expressed in social patterns that exclude disabled people was the question posed by the social model. (Hughes 1999: 65) The meaning of disability was epistemologically recast by first wave radicals. ‘Solutions’ to it, were displaced from bodies to environment, from the personal to the collective, from matters of physical and/or mental ‘correction’ to issues of access, participation and inclusion in social life. The social model conceived

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disability as oppression. Its elimination was a social process and a project of political emancipation. The social interpretation of disability privileged social transformation, reform of social structures and relationships. It repudiated medical pathways to normalisation. To engage with disability, from a social model perspective, was to engage not with invalidity or pathology nor even with the bodies that signify these ‘deficits’, but with social inequality, with the multiple ways in which disabled people were denied citizenship (Fleischer and Zames 2001; Hughes 2001) or maltreated by discrimination, exclusion and segregation. The DPM argued for: A comprehensive legislative programme which establishes a suitable framework for the enforcement of policies which ensure the integration of disabled people into the mainstream economic and social life of the community and provides public confirmation that discrimination against disabled people, for whatever reason, is no longer acceptable. (Barnes and Oliver 1995: 114) The transformation of disability from embodied deficit to social inequality required a clear distinction between disability and impairment that cut the causal link between the corporeal and the social. The rejection of medical aetiology that followed was the first principle of the social model. It was articulated in 1976 by the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and later carefully delineated, in sociological detail, by the late – much missed – Mike Oliver (1990) in his ground-breaking manifesto, The Politics of Disablement. The social model defined impairment as a somatic, intellectual or sensory difference from scientifically derived functional norms and disability as an oppressive infrastructure socially imposed on top of it. Relocated from the biological to the social domain, disability was defined as a ‘disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people with impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities’ (UPIAS 1976: 14). Disabled Peoples International argued that (1982: 7) the ‘functional limitation within the individual caused by physical, mental or sensory impairment’ was not the fundamental issue. The social model effected a paradigm shift in thinking about disability, by situating medical discourse on the periphery of epistemological efficacy. Discrimination was the root of the problem. Disability was re-defined as ‘the loss or limitation of opportunity to take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical or social barriers’. The social model mobilised the distinction between impairment and disability to critique the ‘scientific neutrality’ and ‘impaired’ aetiology of medical discourse. It launched a politics of identity and difference driven by the objective of disability emancipation. The social model focused on the socio-material production of disability in the context of the historical rise of capitalism, an economic environment profoundly unforgiving of bodily difference, given its emphasis on individual productivity

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and its relation to the rate of profit. The overhaul of the concept of disability ref lected its temporal origin in the ensemble of new social relations forged in the furnace of capitalism. Disability was disentangled from the semiotic pillars that had reduced its meaning to medically legitimated, personal, individual deficit. Oliver (1996: 32) chipped away at the medical paradigm. The modernist view of disability located it erroneously ‘in the individual’; identifying its causes in ‘functional limitations or psychological losses’; presenting it as a ’personal tragedy’ and a ‘terrible chance event’. Repositioning disability aetiology in social relations, rather than in the f lawed f leshy constitution or corrupted cognitive or sensory faculties of the individual, gave the social model epistemological force and political impetus. Disability ‘rebranded’ invoked a new discourse of discrimination, exclusion and oppression that privileged the experience of people who were physically and intellectually different from the norm (Scambler and Kelleher 2006). Redefined as a ‘social issue’, disability was rescued from incarceration in the clinical foster home of modernity to which it had been consigned by the exploitive logic of a mode of production hungry for muscle to turn the wheels of industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century, disability was tainted by economic superf luity and a burdensome reputation. Medicine secured the right of surveillance over disabled people and became the custodian of their social redundancy. By de-skilling corporeal, intellectual and sensory difference, capitalism turned impairment into defective labour. Disabled people were simultaneously created and spoilt by an economic system that consigned them to the margins (Finkelstein 1980). Impaired labour power lost its use-value. Disabled people became the f lotsam and jetsam of the throw-away logic of capital accumulation; scientifically invalidated by the demoralising monikers of pathology, malformation and abnormality. In a socio-economic context where use-value was used to create surplus value, the ‘useless’ distinguished themselves as dis-value: Economic cost; social burden; cultural threat to the well-born. In industrial capitalism, care of the ‘useless’ made paragons out of caring professionals and wealthy benefactors and ‘poor souls’ or ‘moral degenerates’ out of impaired bodies and minds. In the post-industrial world of f lexible labour, impairment was re-assessed. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the possibility that disabled people might contribute to post-Fordist service economies reframed the debate about disability. Labour power and the labour process were re-drawn in ways that diminished the value of physical capital (Finkelstein 1980). The cost of institutional confinement tallied against the cost of community care made the latter look like a bargain basement buy for the fiscal policies of states inclined towards welfare capitalism and (in the latter part of the century) neoliberalism. Many disabled people felt the loosening of medical jurisdiction and experienced release from institutional confinement and the (underfunded) system of social care that introduced new patterns of surveillance. These conditions provided fertile soil for the propagation and growth of a social approach to disability. The agenda shifted from rehabilitation to politics, as disabled people, blocked in their

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communities by ubiquitous obstacles to their participation therein, organised and raised their voices. New questions were posed: In what ways does social organisation produce disability? How can barriers to participation and forms of dependency experienced by people with impairments be eliminated? The ‘problem’ of disability was redefined as ‘a series of social restrictions that prevent disabled people from taking part in mainstream activities, leading to profound social disadvantage’ (Hyde 2006: 252). During the era of reactionary medical hegemony, disabled people had been segregated, dispersed into specialist spaces of confinement by the inaccessible environments of the economic system (Gleeson 1999) and left to rot. Consignment to burdensome dependency on family, kin or community by a concordat between state, medicine and capital (Barton 2001) in the late twentieth century was a settlement that highlighted the inaccessibility of a world made in the image and likeness of ability that was ill-prepared for the diaspora of ‘invalids’. Wage slavery for disabled people, in the brave new world of community, would be an unusual privilege; poverty a constant companion (Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare 1999: 131–134). Identifying and eliminating barriers to the participation of disabled people in economic, social and political life became the central concern for the DPM, as it looked through the lens of the social model and saw a landscape strewn with barriers to the social participation of disabled people (see, for example, Barnes 1991; Barnes and Mercer 2003). If, for example, work, transport and education are accessible to disabled people by right and in practice, then it becomes possible to eliminate a host of disabling barriers. If, on the other hand, we assume, as the medical model does, that disability is a product of faulty bodies, then the path to citizenship for disabled people rests entirely on the outcome and efficacy of progress in the sciences of rehabilitation. Disability rights can only be won if, and when, individual problems of mental or physical ‘incapacity’ are solved. Social model activists set out to demonstrate that this was not the case. They argued that inclusion/exclusion of disabled people was a structural problem that rested on stubborn, but removable, barriers (Oliver 1990). Disability was rooted ‘principally in the socio-­ structural barriers that serve to disadvantage and exclude people with impairments’ (Thomas 2004: 21). Disabled people were excluded from participation in social life by ‘disablist’ practises and assumptions that were built into institutions and key services (Oliver and Barnes 1998; Barnes and Mercer 2004). The barrier metaphor described an inaccessible world and became a synonym for the social model and its spirited, passionate determination to challenge and remove the structures of restriction. Barriers were multiple and pervasive, abrogating possibilities for active citizenship. They were structural/material and attitudinal, and they stood in the way of disabled people’s practical involvement in the quotidian spaces of everyday interaction (Swain et al. 1993). A bifurcation in the understanding of barriers in Disability Studies emerged at the dawn of the new millennium. It is sketched in Table 2.1 and is used to structure the discussion that follows:

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TABLE 2.1 Bifurcation of the barrier metaphor in Disability Studies

Attitudinal barriers

Material/structural barriers

Barriers to being Recognition Property Cultural Model Ableism

Barriers to doing Redistribution Propriety Social Model Disableism

Carol Thomas (1999) distinguished between barriers ‘to doing’ and barriers ‘to being’. The former drew attention to ‘physical, economic and material barriers’; the latter to ‘hurtful, hostile or inappropriate behaviour’ (Conners and Stalker 2007: 21; Watermeyer 2013) embedded in attitudes and beliefs about disabled people. A superstructure of disrespect sat atop a material base of obdurate exclusion. Barriers to doing were palpable and spatial; ‘stop signs’ that disabled people encountered, at every turn, as they tried to navigate the built environment and the social geography of everyday life. They were the stone walls of a structure of social apartheid based on a system of bi-partisan access (Goggin and Newall 2005). In life, being and doing are inseparable, but much can be gained, theoretically, from their analytical mitosis. I dwell on this distinction in order to argue – contrary to the social model – that barriers to being are phenomenally efficacious cultural artefacts. ‘Barriers to being’ tell of frosty receptions in the quotidian spaces of interaction where f lags of incivility f lutter. They demonstrate the credibility of cultural arguments about recognition to the politics of disability. In social model discourse, they play second fiddle to ‘barriers to doing’. The latter has material presence and is the focus for DPM’s demolitionist ambitions. Its wrecking balls were aimed at the palpable dimensions of disability oppression. Attitudinal barriers were epiphenomenal. They would collapse when the structural and material barriers are eliminated (Oliver 1990). The cultural, psycho-social aspects of stigma and exclusion would wither away as material barriers collapsed. ‘Barriers to being’ resonate with axiological questions of otherness, the attributes of humanness and moral agency that inform cultural, ethical and philosophical understandings of disability (Kittay and Carlson 2010; Scully 2008). They expose how non-disabled people think about disabled people and how they are pejoratively represented in the able-bodied world. Barriers to being draw upon the phenomenological and subjective aspects of disabled people’s lived experience of being shut out and immobilised by barriers to doing. They highlight the feelings of not belonging encountered in no-go areas and the anger and despair of wheels trapped in the muddy mire of discrimination. They expose the shame and terror of blatant abuse and criminal forms of hatred, the welter of accusations, negative assumptions, representations and evaluations, and they are communicated by crass lexicons that undervalue and demean disabled people’s social and human credibility. Multiple problems of recognition and

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their psycho-emotional consequences will not disappear as the world becomes ­structurally more ­accessible for disabled people. Increased opportunities for contact between people who are different may mitigate prejudice, but may have the opposite effect. Barriers to being invoke the ways in which non-disabled people make disabled people emotionally and socially ‘other’, and they expose the dis-human ‘comforts’ of disavowal that make non-disabled people competent at conceptualising disability in ways that puff up their own moral credibility and embodied integrity. Finally, and crucially for Thomas (1999), ‘barriers to being’ open up the conceptual territory of affect to the analysis of disabled people’s lived experience as they endure moral harm. Material barriers do not critically interrogate ableism or the ideals of living, conduct and embodiment that moralise ability and demoralise difference (Campbell 2010). The destructive and demeaning evaluative ‘standards’ of ableism that invalidate disabled people, often without intention, are accompanied by pity, fear and disgust (Hughes 2012b). Aversive emotions sustain the hegemony of normate ways of being. Barriers discourse, for first wave radicals, was oriented to the reform of facilities to improve access rather than the r­ e-orientation of human relations or a revaluing of the values around recognition and belonging or the reworking of the relational dynamic of self and other that mediates the experience of the objectively barriered-world. One can, however, identify in first wave radicalism one important idea that points towards the importance of understanding cultural barriers. This is the idea of personal tragedy (Oliver 1990), for it offers an explanation of the able mind-set. A personal tragedy account of disability outlines the paternalistic temper and affective content of the non-disabled imaginary. Personal tragedy is a culturally habituated perspective that non-disabled people have about disability. It is a supremacist standpoint of evaluation in which disability is conceived as a pitiable way of being. It positions disabled people as victims, sufferers, charitable cases, philanthropic objects. It reduces disabled people to persons who require help and are good to be good to. It distinguishes wholesome self from diminished other. It puts moral and social distance between normate physical and intellectual integrity and the other whose unfortunate deficits and tragic life are character defining. The other for whom one feels sorry is as broken as ‘I’ am whole; as vulnerable as ‘I’ am without wound; as spoilt as ‘I’ am spotless; as dirty as ‘I’ am clean; as improper as ‘I’ am the embodiment of propriety! For the social model, however, personal tragedy is a materially determined ideology, rather than a belief that has material consequences The unilateral emphasis on material structure in the social model of first wave radicalism renders the self/other relationship short of cultural content. It also presents a vision of disability history that stops short at the crepuscule of capitalism. The social model embraced a materialist ideal of redistribution as the template for the realisation of justice. On this view, ‘recognition’ was second strand politics; a matter of epiphenomenal, super-structural change. The ideology of personal tragedy was, to the social model, a cultural issue – a line

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in the sand that would be washed away with the tides of structural change. This view u ­ nderestimates the materiality of culture. Yes, personal tragedy is a particular conception of disability in which disabled people have ‘walk-on parts’ in heart-warming tales about the charitable accomplishments of non-disabled people! But it does not explain why disability is the epitome of impropriety. The concept of ableism has far more analytical efficacy in the analyses of issues of cultural hegemony than the one-stop-shop of personal tragedy ‘theory’. The latter offers a brief glimpse into the non-disabled imaginary, but tells us little about the habituations embedded in the cultural meaning system that hands out the laurels of propriety. Ableism examines the impact of society’s most cherished ideals on disabled people. These ideals – beauty, truth, reason, order and justice – are not benign in consequence for disabled people. They embody judgements about them, for they establish the criteria for the evaluation of value. They address the question of who is of value and who is not. Barriers to being for disabled people are counter-posed to the ‘opportunities to f lourish’ that mark the lives of propertied, proper normates. The social model barely lifts the axiological lid on the cultural issue of the ‘catastrophe’ of undesirable difference, never mind the invalidating outcomes that exist symbiotically with the opportunities to f lourish available to privileged ability. The role and place of disability in moral economy and the economy of affects is pivotal and cannot be reduced to the personal tragedy mind-set. Personal tragedy theory should be subsumed into the theory of ableism where it can play a part in exposing how (a) non-disabled people imagine the world, and (b) the material consequences of this cultural imaginary for the validity of the lives of disabled people. Personal tragedy is an archetype of impairment, amongst many others in the narcissist imaginary of ableism that depicts disability as disvalue and impropriety. It is one indicator, among many, of the venerable status of ability and, by inference, the disreputability of impairment. The relative indifference of the social model to barriers to being and questions of cultural propriety and human validity exposes it to cultural critique. One of the outcomes of the limitations of the ‘big idea’, in a context where postmodern thinking and the cultural turn were coming to life, was a ref lexive millennium in which Disability Studies, breaking out of its national parochialisms, succumbed to a proliferation of concepts, theories and models, in which, it must be admitted, scholarship was better served than activism.

The second wave: Conceptual proliferation, Critical Disability Studies and the growth of the cultural model of disability Some of the problems associated with first wave Disability Studies and the ‘big idea’ at its heart led to the harsh conclusion that it had become an ‘outdated ideology’ (Shakespeare and Watson 2001), rather than a limited form of critique. Paterson (2012) argued that the social model was strong on spatial, but weak on temporal forms of discrimination. Others described it as an ‘oppositional

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device’ that operates hetero-topically to open up an alternative vision of the world in which disability discrimination and exclusion must be arrested and defeated (Beckett and Campbell 2015). In many respects, the social model is a ‘utopian’ form of political optimism, the starting point of a philosophy and practice of hope, rather than its theoretical culmination. As Garland-Thomson (2011: 592) put it, the big idea shifted disability from ‘an attributed problem in the body to a problem of social justice’ and in this respect, it ‘was theoretically ground-breaking’. Once the ground is broken, the foundations of the new edifice have to be laid. The ease with which dogmatic self-assurance clings to big ideas is the beginning of their development. Development is always an undoing of sorts. The social model did not sit easily with difference within the ranks of disabled people, not just relative to identity variations like class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, but also in relation to varieties of impairment (French 1993). The emphasis on the unity and solidarity of disabled people suffocated marginal voices and glossed over, as the feminist movement had discovered, the wealth of difference within the multiple and complex life experiences associated with being-impaired-inthe-world. Feminist thinkers were the first to voice their concerns about ‘undifferentiated unitary groupings’ and the dangers of treating disability experience as if it was homogeneous (Begum 1992; Fawcett 2000: 5–6) or somehow separate from the experiences associated with impairment (Crow 1996; Morris 1991). A second critique challenged the social model distinction between disability and impairment on grounds that it produced (another) misleading Cartesian dualism. It effectively displaced the body from disability thinking. The medical model may have reduced disability to the body, but a social model of disability could not afford to treat the body as if it had no social or cultural significance (Hughes and Paterson 1997; Shakespeare and Watson, 1997). The ‘big idea’ was troubled by those who saw in it a naturalistic, rather than a sociological, account of impairment. The form of disability theory that developed in the last decades of the old millennium was ‘somatophobic’. Oliver (1996: 35) insisted that ‘disablement is nothing to do with the body’. The first house rule of the social model was ‘don’t talk about impairment’! This plea for silence made epistemological concessions to medicine. It conceived of impairment as a pre-social, ahistorical, biological phenomenon that was outside the orbit of culture. The f light from the body by the social model took place at precisely the moment when cultures of corporeality were becoming central to the sociological imagination that had driven the ‘big idea’ (Hughes and Paterson 1997). The psychology of disability, reactionary in its historical subservience to medicine, had been frozen out by the ‘big idea’: ‘The social model was unable to make provision for disabled subjects who were diverse and embodied with personal and psychological histories upon which social suffering had left its impression … the social model’s need for this sterile disabled figure was clear but it left much of the real life experience of the disabled population un-theorised and un-­interrogated’ (Watermeyer 2013: 15). The social model had succumbed to

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wheelchair hegemony. It had, for example, marginalised people with intellectual disability (Goodley 2001). Critical Disability Studies (CDS) emerged in the new millennium as a somatically sensitive, post-Cartesian social theory driven by a ‘cultural model’ and a constructionist conceptualisation of impairment. The second wave was in the making. As critique expanded, new models – of varying levels of compatibility with the ‘big idea’ – were proposed. An ‘affirmative model’ was proposed (Swain and French 2000). It focused on impairment not as deficit, but as a source of pride, rooted empirically in the growth of the disability culture and arts movement. Dejeuner (2017) responding to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD 2006) proclaimed the efficacy of a ‘new human rights model of disability’. The Nordic ‘relational model’ of disability that had been around since the 1960s re-examined itself in the context of the success of the British social model (Gustavson, 2004; Kristiansen and Traustadottir 2004; Tossebro 2004). It had developed out of a practical research tradition that evaluated the efficacy of welfare provision and protection for disabled people. It was popular and productive in the social democratic heartlands of northern Europe: in Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The Nordic model focuses on the interplay and interaction between individual and contextual/environmental factors. It is open to ideas from the social and the human sciences and based on a rights framework. Research addresses the disadvantages experienced by disabled people in terms of their (lack of ) fit with environments designed for able-bodied people (Kristiansen and Traustadottir 2004; Tossebro 2004). Nordic scholarship in learning disability established a framework for research in the 1960s and developed it through the impactful categories of ‘normalisation’ and ‘social role valorisation’ (Nirje 1969; Wolfensberger et al. 1972); predating significantly the emancipatory research and advocacy traditions associated with the social model (Walmsley 2001). Susan Gabel (2004) proposed that the social model should be replaced by ‘resistance theories’ of disability and the cultural and minority models of the fastdeveloping North American humanities tradition mixed with their European counterparts to create an environment in which theoretical and conceptual hybridity was common. While the identity model owes much to the social model, it is less interested in the ways in which environments, policies and institutions disable people and more interested in forging a positive identity based on experiences and circumstances that have created a recognised minority group. (Brewer et al. 2012: 5) The proliferation of critiques of the UK social model was, by the end of the millennium, a consequence of the internationalisation of Disability Studies; an effect of the meeting of different national traditions in an intellectual space that traversed

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the global north and was beginning to feel the inf luence of the ­post-colonial traditions of the global south (Barker and Murray 2010; Goodley 2016). Schillmeier (2010) argued that there has been a post-millennial cultural turn in Disability Studies. The cultural model embraced ‘the analysis of representation of disabled people in the cultural spaces of art, media and literature’ and it was designed to ‘retrieve the silenced voices of disabled figures from their cultural locations’ ( Joshua, Schillmeier and Schillmeier 2010: 5). Unsurprisingly, it has been welcomed by some D/deaf culture theorists (Holcomb 2013). The cultural model recommends treating impairment, analytically, as a ‘cultural artefact’, with a focus on the cultural intersections that construct it (Devlieger et al. 2016). Disability was envisioned as a ‘cultural trope’ (Garland-Thomson 2005: 2). Disability is evidenced by the social and historical contexts in which the meaning of impairment is communicated, represented and evaluated by able-centric discourse. The cultural model also claims historical potency. It analyses the multiple representations and cultural locations of disability including ‘sites of violence, restriction, confinement and absence of liberty for people with disabilities’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: x). Neither did a cultural approach to disability rule out – as social model historical materialism had done – the application of these methods to pre-capitalist societies. Cultural representations embody widely held beliefs that underpin social practices about bodily and intellectual difference. They create invalidating barriers to being for disabled people and have done so in ‘Western society’ since its dawn in Ancient Greece. This issue had a preliminary airing in Chapter 1, but it is worth returning to it. First wave radicals recognised the core material conditions that produced disability in its modern form, creating a narrative of its historical trajectory from the industrial revolution to the present (Borsay 2005), including the processing of disabled people in medically dominated institutions in which disability was conceived as the antithesis of individual autonomy. The qualities deemed essential to the citizen/subject of modernity were found wanting in disabled people (Hughes 2001; Rioux 2001). On the social model view, however, disability is a recent phenomenon, arising out of the tendency for capitalism to maximise the rate of profit by excluding impaired labour from the production process. In the dash for profit, the worker with impairment is left on the wrong side of the factory gate. However, the rise to ascendancy of the capitalist is not year zero for disability. Capitalism invalidates impairment, but it is not the first economic system to do so. Disability predates capitalism, if not semantically, then practically. This is evident in the debates and struggles that surrounded impairment’s army of predecessor metonyms; names, meanings, identities that were attached to impairment with semiotic stickiness; monstrosity, defect, deformity, insanity; the idiot, fool, cripple and so on: The lexicon of disparagement is premodern. ‘Normality’ is a modern term, part of the nomenclature historically co-located with the success of the bourgeoisie and the rise of modern scientific medicine. However, disability, as a social phenomenon, did not spring to life as if by autogenesis in that noisy moment when modern machines burst into life.

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The social model attenuates the history of disability. Impairment has always been a cultural artefact just as disabled people, branded by impropriety, have always had to make a living in hostile conditions. CDS was rooted in the postmodern celebration of difference. It took the view that disability and ability embraced a vast range of human physical and intellectual attributes and experiences that could not be reduced to metanarrative (Corker and Shakespeare 2002: 15). The second wave expressed doubt about the efficacy of identity politics in the wake of the postmodern critique of essentialism and the unitary subject. It tried to theorise its way out of the jam; to develop conceptual co-ordinates that do justice to ‘dis-modernised’ social relationships (Davis 2002: 9-32). The propensity to ‘model’ around a politics of unified identity, was central to the first wave of radicalism. The propensity to theorise and draw on a wide range of theoretical perspectives is more common amongst postmillennium Disability Studies scholars (Goodley 2012b; Goodley, Hughes and Davis 2012; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009; Meekosha, Shuttleworth and Soldatic 2013; Waldschmidt, 2017), though its attraction for DPM activists is less obvious. First wave scholars were indebted to Marx and embraced critical, emancipatory theory (Mercer 2002; Oliver 1992 1997) derived from a ‘distinction between knowledge constituent interests (rational, interpretive and critical) and an emphasis on historical materialism’ (Meekosha, Shuttleworth and Soldatic 2013: 319). The relationship to critical theory in Disability Studies has widened substantially. Currents of theoretical critique drawn from postmodern, poststructuralist and post-conventional thinkers have f lourished since the new millennium (Davis 2002; Goodley 2011; Shildrick, 2002; 2009). CDS is a diaspora of ideas. It is as much about shifting material and political conditions as about new recipes for thinking. Intersections with queer theory (McCruer 2006) and critical race theory (Campbell, 2009) proposed collusions that were (partial) solutions to the internal differences within New Social Movements. Intersectional considerations brought new social movements, now and then, though not often enough, into one other’s spiralling orbits. Queer destabilises binaries, particularly those that distinguish sharply between the natural and the unnatural. It exposes social categories that have become naturalised. DisCrit, to use the preferred moniker that describes the fruitful miscegenation of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory, is an adventure in method that represents the odyssey of two abiding forms of oppression that have accompanied one another faithfully through the great horrors of Western civilisation. They have experienced its bellicosity with similar ferocity and have lived to tell the tale in a way that it has never been told before (Conner, Ferri, and Annamma 2015). The verb ‘to queer’ indicates a number of related radical positions, symbolic of generic non-normative communities. It is an alternative, critical ontology and a method for deconstructing the categories that make the pieces of the jig-saw of difference (look as if they) fit together. To ‘crip’ is the Disability Studies equivalent of the LGBT disposition ‘to queer’ (McCruer 2006; 2018). ‘Cripping’ has been used as a critical intersectional tool (Kafer 2013; Kafer and

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Kim 2018) and the term ‘cripistemologies’ has been used playfully by Johnston and McCruer (2014) to indicate new terrains of knowledge and action for disability scholars and activists. The shadow of the Frankfurt School and the young Marx, and postmodernist deconstructionism are evident in the coined verbs ‘to queer’ and ‘to crip’. They are currently recognised in disability politics among the new specificities of critique that Disability Studies needs to embrace if it is to be fit for the intersectional praxis that movements for justice will require to embrace in the twenty-first century. CDS scholars have searched in many other places for theoretical inspiration. They have, for example, re-engaged with C. Wright Mills ‘sociological imagination’ (Shuttleworth and Meekosha 2013); have drawn on Hardt and Negri’s theory of empire (Goodley and Lawthom 2013); have pillaged the work of Donna Haraway (Reeve 2012b), Deleuze and Guattari (Berresem 2017: Overboe 2012); and Jacques Lacan (Goodley 2012b). Schlegel (2017) recommends Habermas, Foucault, Butler and Derrida as basic sources for disability critique. Muller (2017) recommends Bourdieu. Nirmala Erevelles (2011) has argued for a materialist approach to Disability Studies in which disability is the ‘ideological linchpin used to (re)constitute difference’ in the ‘context of transnational capitalism’ (2011: 6). In the search for ideas that can be put to the service of disabled people, theoretical piracy is common. These varied contributions present revivifying ideas for Disability Studies as it copes with the developing sociological problems of globalisation, migration, neoliberalism, imperialism and populist retrenchment. Shifting the locus of praxis in ways that problematise the hegemonic dyad of the self-other relationship is one the most compelling aspects, in terms of both style and substance, of the new epistemologies that have f looded into the second wave disability thinking. Even the old geographies of thought are changing. Disability studies in the UK, most at home where materialism meets sociology, has been drawn into the cultural agenda around disability. This agenda has deeper roots in North America where a ‘minority’ model of disability activism has combined with cultural critique, and literary criticism, now f lourishing in the contemporary academy. It has been driven by the impact of critical theory on the liberal arts and humanities and the ‘discovery’ of a treasure trove of disabled characters in the literary cannon. The book series, published by the University of Michigan Press, launched in 2000, entitled Corporealities has provided a most important outlet for this vibrant, theoretically pluralistic agenda in which the somatic, understood as a cultural artefact, has been placed at the heart of Disability Studies (Bolt, 2013; Bourrier 2015; Davidson 2008; Couser 2009; Deutsch and Nussbaum, 2000; Mitchell and Snyder 2000; Price 2011; Siebers 2008; 2011; Stiker 1999; Stoddard Holmes 2004; Tremain 2005; Wheatley 2010). Other publishers, in the US and Europe, have also contributed to the burgeoning literature on the politics and poetics of disability embodiment. (Bolt, Rodas, and Donaldson, 2016; Bradshaw 2016; Esmail 2013; Frawley 2004; Garland-Thomson 2009; Johnston 2016; Mintz 2013; Mossman 2009; Quayson 2007; Sanchez 2015; Schweik 2009; Snyder and

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Mitchell 2006; Stirling 2010) The growth and success of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and the launch of Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Disability Studies Book Series in 2014 were further fillips to a burgeoning literature in a dynamic field. A lot of this scholarly production is not just about disability. It is also for it. Phenomenological approaches to disability have f lourished, especially in Canada (Michalko, 1999; 2002; Titchkosky 2003; 2007; Titchkosky and Michalko 2012) where the tradition descending from Maurice Merleau-Ponty has been particularly persuasive in developing novel lines of enquiry for Disability Studies. A younger generation of disability scholars are taking phenomenological accounts of disability in new directions, inf luenced by, for example, Martin Heidegger (Mladenov 2012; 2015; Abrams 2013; 2014a; 2014b; 2015). Australian scholars have pitched ideas into this eclectic theoretical broth. Fiona Kumari Campbell’s Contours of Ableism (2009) is an important example. Debates around disability and the postcolonial global south, drawing on, for example, concepts like hybridity, are growing in importance (Chataika 2012; Ghai 2012; Grech 2009). CDS is beginning to produce its own offspring; recent examples would be the emergence of Critical Autism Studies (see, for example, Milton 2014; Runswick-Cole, Mallett, and Timimi, 2016; Runswick-Cole 2014) in which autism is treated as a ‘cultural artefact’ embodying diverse meanings. ‘Disabled children’s childhood studies’ (Curran and Runswick-Cole 2013; 2014) is similarly inspired. Disability Studies and Mad Studies have, in the past few years, particularly in North America and the UK, welcomed one another like long, lost but profoundly argumentative siblings (McWade, Milton, and Beresford 2015). More ‘conventional’ perspectives are also present in the fermenting mix of CDS, even though they are in the vanguard of its critique. Contemporary Disability Studies is not short of proponents of critical realism, many of whom are located in the UK and Europe (Bhaskar and Danemark 2006; Kristiansen, Vehmas and Shakespeare 2009; Shakespeare 2006; Shakespeare and Watson 2010; Watson 2012; Williams 1999). The late Tobin Siebers (2008: 53–69) in the United States argued that disability theory and politics must make more of the brute realities of bodily pain and discomfort as well as the base, visceral limitations and inconveniences of impairment while European scholars, following Carol Thomas (1999), cite ‘impairment effects’ as a concept that grounds disability in biological realities of restriction rather than discourse. This claim opens disability to a ‘bio-psycho-social’ or ‘social realist’ approach (Shakespeare 2006/2014) in which a rapprochement with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICIDH-2) becomes theoretically possible. The capabilities approach associated with Indian economist Amartya Sen and American philosopher Martha Nussbaum has been, in recent years, inf luential in Disability Studies and has attracted a number of disability scholars (for example, Mitra 2006; Stark 2010; Vehmas 2012). These traditions, in contrast to the social model of disability, interpret the body and impairment as proper objects of empirical and theoretical social

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scientific inquiry in which impairment is redeemed as a cause of disability. Whilst one might include the critical realists and proponents of capabilities in the camp of second wave disabilities studies with some ease, to assert that these ‘schools of thought’ belong to Critical Disability Studies is not so simple. The sub-stratum of reality that critical realists and many proponents of the capabilities approach cherish is a core epistemological position that does not sit well with a world reduced to the language that describes it. Most proponents of CDS claim that one cannot separate impairment from its representation. They situate their materialist credentials not in the ‘hard reality’ that one might find in the ‘state of nature’ but, sociologically and historically, through the ways in which ideas become material forces. Critical realists are not prepared to submit to a conception of the body that is singularly cultural. Most proponents of CDS, by contrast, envision the body and impairment as cultural artefacts. Tensions, such as these, are evident with significant clarity in the recent essay by Vehmas and Watson (2014) in which they set out the dividing lines between critical realism and CDS from the perspective of the former. The globalisation of disability issues and activism and the impact of the recent ‘downturn’ and ‘austerity’ on disabled people across the globe, are the most important social developments in the genesis of new ways of thinking about disability (Goodley 2011; Shakespeare 2015). This material context suggests, as the young Marx argued pace the proletariat, that with respect to the historical agenda of disabled people, thought follows action as theory follows practice. Critical Disability Studies is not a radical break with social model thinking. It is, however, eclectic in the way it draws on traditions, disciplines and theories that are open to their own de-construction. Theoretical efficacy is measured by its response to economic, social and cultural change. Dogma, by contrast, is an idea that has become frozen in the moment of its enunciation. It is too self-satisfied to respond to change. It is a metanarrative that cannot be breached by the new times that undermine it. However, whatever the differences between the social model and CDS and its critical interlocutors, Disability Studies remains, like the social model, committed to the struggle to improve the lives of disabled people. Contemporary forms of post-millennial Disability Studies struggle to resolve the epistemological and practical tensions between scholarship and activism. CDS is profoundly intersectional in its orientation. It mimics post-feminism in its attention to difference within broad categories of identity. This is true of developing global, transnational frameworks of disability (Gorman 2016; Erevelles 2011) in which intersections, particularly with race, have become much more important (Bell 2011; Chen 2012) and where parallels between ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-disability’ have developed out of, or alongside, Critical Race Studies (Bell 2006; Mitchell and Snyder 2003; Pickens 2014). To understand the construction of disability, one needs to understand ability. Disability Studies has become much more concerned with dis/ability (Goodley 2014). The slash, or virgule, is indicative of a dialectical relationship between disability and nondisability and of the relations of power that structure beliefs about what it means

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to be disabled. The slash is post-Cartesian punctuation, a declaration that the binaries of scholarly work are the two broken pieces of a figure that should, like Humpty-Dumpty, be put back together again. The slash depicts the barriers to the reunification of human variation in a community of equals. This is an economic and a cultural task. In this book, I focus on the latter, and I have argued that in the analytical separation of barriers to doing and barriers to being, we find, in the latter, the subject matter of this book. Barriers to being for disabled people are shaped by cultural questions about the ontological integrity of impairment. They arise historically in communities of Proprium conf licted over the distribution of property and propriety, social validity and invalidity. What I take forward from this discussion of the contemporary history of the disability idea is threefold: 1. The proposition that impairment is a cultural artefact; 2. The proposition that disability/non-disability constitutes a dialectic of self and other that is structured by the ableist enmeshment of ability in the pillars of propriety; 3. The proposition that Western culture is shaped profoundly by a non-­ disabled imaginary. Impairment: The social model considers ‘the impaired body untouched, unchallenged: a taken-for-granted fixed corporeality’ (Meekosha 1998: 175). The social model politicises disability, but does not do the same to impairment (Cole 2007; Hughes and Paterson 1997). Carol Thomas (1999: 40) returned impairment and the body to politics by arguing that the ‘concept of disability refers to the relationship of ascendency of the non-impaired over the impaired’. The omission of impairment from politics and culture has been a force for CDS in its critique of the social model (Goodley 2011; 2012; Goodley, Hughes and Davis 2012; Shildrick 2012). Impairment is not socially neutral. It sketches the negatives on a map of normative bodies, representing deficits of moral worth and ontological credibility. Impairment is profoundly political. It is, in the normate judgements that depict it, a bellwether of intolerance towards human variation. Impairment is the socio-ontological condition for understanding disability as oppression. Prior to the critical/cultural turn in Disability Studies, impairment was, as Shildrick (2009: 1) put it, conceived as extraordinarily insensitive to ‘the extraordinary significance of human corporeality’. Schillmeier (2010: 4) has remarked that: ‘As an impaired body the body is outside society and as a disabled body it is inside society’. He suggests that we need a rethinking of the social in the social model: The social … neither appears as a line of demarcation that separates it off from the medical, the biological or the mental and physiological. Nor does it function as the divisional border that carves up society and nature,

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human and non-humans, humans and technologies or splits collective from the natural. (Schillmeier 2010: 6) Impairment too, needs to be inside society. In disturbing the meaning of both ‘the social’ and ‘the body’, disability and impairment, the certainties of the social model about the social as the only cause of disability and impairment as socially neutral is unsustainable. Meanings attributed to impairment are deeply embedded in the social and cultural landscape. The non-disabled gaze does not just see impairment. It sees it as something, through its able point of view that is, in turn, inf lected by its self-sustaining interest in human perfection and redemption. Impairment, in the non-disabled imaginary is problem, catastrophe, tragedy. It is, as Robert Murphy (1990: 140) suggested, visualised as a ‘tissue of myths, fears and misunderstanding’. Critical realists are right to say that impairment is ‘real’ and that medicine can make a positive difference to impairment effects. The case has been made eloquently and rigorously by Tom Shakespeare in 2006 and in Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited (2014). However, impairment, in the able imaginary, is also a mythos produced and sustained by ideals of clean and proper embodiment. The aggressively negative conceptualisations of the impaired body by the dominant self are self-serving. The hyperbolic mythos of ability embodies a tropos of impairment that inf licts terrible damage on its reputation. The mythos of ability is the means by which the normate community comes to terms with its failure to admit to the awful burgeoning ‘truth’ of its own abjection and vulnerability. Impairment – like nature – refuses to stay out of politics, for it is pressed into it by the illusions of propriety. Non-disability refuses to imagine the body as a limit; as abject, vulnerable and subject to failures of agency. To do so would be to shut itself down and to confound the other with itself. Narratives of disability do not normally tell the story of how carnal myths of invulnerability and ‘the body perfect’ are formulated in the non-disabled imaginary by a delusional, dominant self. Nor do they begin to untangle the knotty contradiction that to recoil in disgust from impairment is to recoil in disgust from oneself. The unbearable nature of being is writ large in immutable, temporal, f lesh. Tobin Siebers (2011) contends that the social body hypostatises an archetypal body that becomes the normative vista of embodiment. The able-body of ableism is also the ideal, aspirational, hegemonic body that reduces impairment to a condition of social, moral, emotional and aesthetic ‘calamity’. The able-body is a general proxy for, and representative of, humanity and the impaired body is a symbol of problematic human constitution. The universal and moral status of the able body is contrasted with the ‘hyper individualisation’ of disability (Siebers 2010: 10). For the latter, the link with a venerable, universal notion of humanity, is tenuous and despoiled. Impairment is an object of categorical violence, for it is taken as a common sense way of thinking about undesirable embodiment. The door is open for all sorts of atrocities to be committed, some, ironically, in

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the name of ‘common decency’. Impairment marks out the moral economy of validity, top-down and bottom-up, because it is the moral lens through which social propriety is envisioned. Impairment signals impropriety, incivility, ‘outsider’ status. ‘Belonging’ is mediated by the negative tropos of impairment as it is interpreted in the mythic dispositions of the non-disabled imaginary. What forms of embodiment are proper and valid? Rosemary Garland-Thomson (1997: 8) argues that the normate figure is ‘the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries’. Disability, is, therefore, ‘not so much a property of bodies as a product of the cultural rules about what bodies should be or do’ (1997: 5). Unimpaired embodiment is the touchstone of virtue and the cultural standard of rhetorical propriety. Impairment cannot be conceded epistemologically to disciplines that treat it as a natural, presocial, ahistorical, supra-cultural, organism. Impairment requires the good offices of critical theory, social history and historical sociology to unveil its cultural import. It is not a corporeal object mired in stasis or a mere natural foundation on which the politics of disability identity can roam undisturbed by the unrecognised differences within its own ranks. The cultural model of disability offers new ways to think about the relationship between impairment and disability. Baker and Murray (2018: 1–2) argue that ‘much disability representation … connects the fact of disability to an extension of how that fact might be read’. In this context, judgement proliferates. Judgement – mediated by the representation of calamity and catastrophe – transforms impairment into disability. Cultural meanings that arise from considerations of impairment are ubiquitously negative, judgements regularly pejorative. The story of disability is the story of people who have been found wanting, the story of people who have not been enabled to f lourish. ‘In a world of fervent somatic symbolising disability is centre stage. Bodily differences … lend themselves to analogies with deeper moral or civil shortcomings’ (Watermeyer 2013: 17) In this book, I treat impairment as a cultural artefact and examine it through the ways in which it has been culturally deployed and morally inf lected. The emphasis is on the axiological dimensions of impairment, on the impropriety associated with it in three historical periods: Classical Antiquity, the Christian Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The focus is on negative cultural representations of impairment and on their derivations in the positive virtues that anchor human validity in Western society. Impairment is central, economically, emotionally, politically and sociologically, to the story of disability. It is the source of invalidation, the ‘objective’ ground upon which embodied difference is culturally transformed into disability. Impairment is not a lazy concept that sleeps through the history of injustice. It is the tangible bedrock of disability invalidation. Impairment is plucked, dragged, pushed, pulled, out of its place in the lap of nature and transformed, ‘othered’, into a culturally meaningful, socially significant, negatively distorted, subject position. In practice, the distinction between impairment and disability trips

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over itself, because the binary is a heuristic distraction from the compelling ‘real life’ unity of the categories. To imagine impairment in a ‘state of nature’, that Early Modern mainspring of political analytics, is to imagine it as a prerepresentational, asocial property of being; to place it in a timeless time before it was ‘already a problem’. To frame disability analytically as the social and cultural transformation of impairment into negative value is useful in thinking through the two concepts (disability and impairment), but impairment is never isolated from representation and evaluation. Culture moralises corporeality. Defectiveness, monstrosity, deformity, disability; the language that impairment comes out into the world as, and is undermined by, is the negative rhetoric of embodied propriety; the clean and proper self that requires an abject, disposable side-kick. Self and other: CDS is intrigued by the relationship between disability and non-disability or, by the ‘question of self and other’ (Shildrick 2012: 3) and the making of damaging normative narratives that place othering at the heart of contemporary debates about equality and justice (Shildrick 2009). This question suggests a hegemonic non-disabled imaginary (Hughes et al 2005), a ‘normate world’ (Garland-Thomson 1997), of ‘normalcy’ (Davis 1995; 2002) in which the social ensemble is involved in the construction of disability as an undignified identity, a disvalued form of being that signifies an undesirable alterity. In this context, we need to be aware, as Titchkosky (2007: 17) argues, of what ‘we are doing’ or what we have done, to ‘make disability’. The ‘we’ in the preceding sentence refers to the dominant ‘clean and proper’ self that makes the other morally unpalatable in the name of its own comfort, superiority, privilege and power. For the social model, the question of self and other is a matter of the structural dispositions that socially locate disability ‘here’ and non-disability ‘there’. For CDS, it is a question of the collapse of non-disability into self-denial and the invalidating consequences that f low from the creation of a fantasy, abject, alter-ego. CDS is drawn to the problematic of the privileged-self in the name of the other and to a theoretical tradition in which this relationship is discursively central. The master-slave relation in Hegel, the radical existentialism of Sartre and Fanon (Hughes 1999), post-conventional theories (Shildrick 2002; 2009), including Lacanian psychoanalysis (Goodley 2011) and phenomenology (Mladenov 2015; Titchkosky 2007) play, in different ways, to the critical interrogation of the core binaries of Western consciousness. The cultural production of self-identity is conducted in the company of a silent companion. There is an elephant in the room. Disability is the moral f lip-side of the ‘great and the good’, the barely visible foundation on which the redemptive, fantasy of the perfect imago is constructed. Impairment is a critical player in the moral and existential becoming of the non-disabled self. Ability sweeps aside its own humanity, its own vulnerability, its own abjection by founding itself constitutionally on vanity, hubris and bad faith. In the next chapter, I argue that the non-disabled/disabled distinction rests on strategies and repertoires of invalidation that represent the other as catastrophically

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f lawed. The inf lation of the valid self and def lation of the invalid other is rooted, existentially, in fear of loss of bodily control (Wendell 1996). The stigma of invalidity spoils identity, rendering its bearer ‘not quite human’ (Goffman 1963: 3). Disability invalidation is constructed emotionally (Brown and Coleman 2010) by normate fear. Stigma is not a facet of the bearer; not an attribute of the discredited other. It is, in the face of the trembling tide of mortality, a desperate strategy of self-validation. Peering normalcy – frozen by fear of the loss of bodily control – envisions abominations of the body (Wendell 1996; Goffman 1963). The non-disabled response to disability – existential anxiety, moral panic – seeks succour in the articulation of its own emotional physical, social and moral integrity. Objectification and dehumanisation of impairment is simultaneously an affirmation of the validity and humanity of normative embodiment. The disabled subject is annihilated; ontologically invalidated. Fear of death is the ‘archetype of all fears’ (Bauman 2006: 53). Disability is the imminent, cultural proxy for the terrifying prospect of not-being. Non-disabled persons resolve fear of loss of bodily control by projecting it onto the disabled body. The reputation of the other is struck down and imprisoned in the mythos of the non-disabled imaginary. The non-disabled imaginary: For the social model, disability is epistemologically located, primarily, as a ‘problem’ of the structural and spatial location of disabled people. They are immobilised behind ‘barriers to doing’, frozen in social spaces inimical to active citizenship. For CDS, disability is produced and reproduced as a ‘problem’ in the non-disabled imaginary by entrenched, cultural barriers to being that arise from fear of impairment. The non-disabled imaginary refers to the cognitive and emotional dispositions that shape and structure the relationship between self and other, including the relations of domination that contribute to the negative interpretation, representation and evaluation of impairment. The non-disabled imaginary is the battery of ideas and unconscious dispositions about human constitution that carry the authority to either dignify or demean. The non-disabled imaginary is a critical tool for Disability Studies. Its absence leaves space to frame impairment as natural corruption and moral crookedness, rather than as a figure of culturally contrived alterity. Disability, as it has been constructed in the Western imaginary, is a grotesque caricature of able normativity. The idea of an imaginary is widely used in post-conventional theory (Shildrick 2012). Sibling concepts illuminate it. One can see the kernel of the idea of the non-disabled imaginary in Tobin Siebers (2010: 8–9) description of ‘the ideology of ability’: The ideology of ability is at its simplest the preference for able-­bodiedness … it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual persons. It affects … our judgements, definitions and values about human beings … it creates social locations outside of and critical of its purview, most notably … the perspective of disability. Disability defines

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the invisible centre around which our contradictory ideology about human ability revolves. For the ideology of ability makes us fear disability, requiring that we imagine our bodies are of no consequence while dreaming, at the same time, that we might perfect them. It describes disability as what we f lee in the past and hope to defeat in the future. Preference for ability is proxy and synecdoche for idealised bodies. Repugnance for subordinate bodies is created in its divisive wake. In the imaginary, preference is naturalised, taken for granted. Intoxicating validity invalidates as a matter of course. In becoming cultural ‘common sense’, the desire for ability establishes a moral binary around which the foundations of the social imaginary are constructed. An imaginary of good bodies bettering themselves and bad bodies spoilt by vulnerability and abjection is founded on a Manichaean carnal fantasy. The moral benchmark of the non-disabled imaginary is the ‘clean and proper’ body, an incarnation of virtue driven, in Western culture, by the pursuit of redemptive perfection and purity. The imaginary also posits a figure that is the negation of the clean and proper body; cause for disquiet, disgust and pity; a disturbing stranger an uncivilised presence, a contaminant. The stranger – the presence and proximity of corruption – must be made clean or banished, put outside the boundaries of the imaginary, sacrificed on the altar of propriety. The emotional and cognitive architecture of the non-disabled imaginary – constructed from the core beliefs of Western culture and ‘ennobled’ by fear and loathing – is a monument to ‘magical realism’. Delusion prospers in this imagined mindscape. The non-disabled imaginary is a psychic storehouse in the collective conscience; a discursive repository in which the stock of symbols and axiological icons about human validity, capacity, virtue, value and aspiration is stored. There is space aplenty too for folk devils that harass the axiological icons. Its contents are not fixed. They vary as the sands of value shift. They are renewed by the cultural praxis of human endeavour and reinterpreted in the light of the developing dialectic between human diversity and the norms of embodiment. The nondisabled imaginary is a special space in the collective conscience that houses and habituates the sentiments of ableism. For Durkheim (2013), collective conscience is a socially unifying force. The non-disabled imaginary is fertilised by consensus and based on a deferential relationship to the social ideals of embodiment and civility. From a disability perspective, the imaginary is divisive and hierarchical. It valorises normative order at the expense of difference and human variation. As a source of collective value and common understanding, it is a force for solidarity only amongst those who derive a sense of worth from it. Its consensus conceals a binary conf lict of interest. The psychic data stored in the non-disabled imaginary are complex. They are made up by a habitus that draws on a jumble of conscious and unconscious symbols. One might argue that the imaginary overlaps with the second psychic system that Jung (1916/2003) called the collective unconscious: A depository of phantasies, primordial images and myths about humanity, its virtuous projects and its relationship to the cosmos and how

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these delusions are best appreciated through the binary nature of archetypes such as order and chaos, light and dark, sacred and profane. The split of Jung’s imaginary into ego and shadow is, at least metaphorically, a useful description of the relationship between non-disability and disability. The privileged habitus of non-disabled embodiment is the source of the moral shadow to which disability is consigned.

Concluding remarks Disability Studies is an evolving discipline. The disabled people’s movement, the ‘last civil rights movement’, as one commentator from the United States called it (Dreidger 1989), is making its weight felt historically after a long march of oppression in which conditions for struggle had not been favourable. Movements need theory, thought that rubs shoulders with action. Intellectuals, activists and allies are ‘finding their feet’ in trying to untangle the cobwebs of centuries of oppression, exclusion and discrimination that have been the ‘normal’ fare of disability experience. I have ref lected on some debates in Disability Studies, and how its intellectuals – organic and traditional – in trying to understand disability, have become engaged with its gilded alterity. Disability is difference, but the differences within disability also constitute politically palpable differences. Impairment is a source of difference around which internecine disputes have f lourished: Is it neutral or should it be treated as a politically potent factor in the conceptualisation of disability? Impairment has been a source of actual and potential difference of interest and perspective within the movement. Disability scholars have disputed its status as neutral, real or culturally constructed. One is reminded of the feminist debate about the epistemological status of sex and gender. Given the history of New Social Movements, none of this is particularly surprising and may be, in the long run, an indication of health; though, of course, internal disputes seldom feel salutary. Disability Studies struggles with the obligation to be the theoretical expression of the disability movement. In plotting this role, I have structured the debate in terms of two waves of development, characterised firstly by the social model of disability and more recently by Critical Disability Studies. I began with the ‘big idea’ and how it has been critically developed and accentuated by a proliferation of models and theories, and I drew out from this contested space of ideas how the barriers to being that disabled people endure can be best articulated by treating impairment as a cultural artefact, constructed from an othering imaginary in which the non-disabled self has been enabled to f lourish. In the next chapter, I develop a concept for Disability Studies that captures the misrecognition, misrepresentation and maltreatment that disabled people have faced across time. I argue that disabled lives have been subjected to processes of invalidation in which impairment is misrecognised in the non-­d isabled imaginary and moral economy as an improper property. In contrast to the whole or validated subject, impairment is recognised, invalidly as ‘what not to be’.

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The enduring negativity of impairment rests on the cultural repertoires and ­representations embodied in stirring narratives of human validity that are the offspring of the marriage of property and propriety.

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3 CONCEPTUALISING PROPERTY AND PROPRIETY, VALIDITY AND INVALIDATION

Introduction In this chapter, I set out my terms of engagement with the concepts of validity and invalidation. The invalidation of disabled people and the validity of nondisability as ‘ways of being’ in Western culture pivot on patterns of moral regulation that undermine the ontological credibility of impairment. In the moral economy of propriety, where property and ability dominate and the politics of recognition is played out, belief and value are constructed, cherished, threatened. Disabled persons are dehumanised and disavowed. They are good to mistreat and/ or good to be good to. Impaired people, used as instruments in the aggrandisement of normate value, are disabled. Moral economy, the sphere of communication, representation and evaluation, structures the boundaries of conduct in the unequal relationship between disability and non-disability. These boundaries are located in ‘the public Duchies of language and culture’ (Robinson 2013: 6), where disabled people are constituted as ‘always already a problem’ (Titchkosky and Michalko 2012: 113). In a world of barriers, not of their own making, disabled people, tainted by worthlessness, struggle for validity. From the perspective of propriety, impairment breaches moral order which is socially constructed (Gergen 2013) around representations and evaluations of disability and non-disability. Virtue and moral excellence are not, as classical virtue ethics suggest, reducible to their possession by the heroic actions of individual moral units, but to the dynamic of ‘Proprium’ that is situated at the cultural conf luence of property and propriety. The moral domain is structured around ‘the actual practices engaged in by real persons functioning within a larger social and political context’ (Robinson 2013: 2). One can trace the lineage of virtue ethics from Aristotle to Macintyre by the receding efficacy of individualistic and universal accounts

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in which transcendent ideals are embodied as abstract possessions of persons to a sociological conception of the moral as a product of relations between people, to ‘participatory action that gains its meaning only within the arena of cultural intelligibility’ (Gergen 2013: 17). The moral validity of actors is shaped by historical processes, by the struggle for power to control the meaning of value and the right to decide who is worthy or unworthy, valid or invalid. For people living a ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998) on the economic and legal margins, the journey to validity is a painful pilgrimage with no guarantee of safe arrival. Disability history is a history of precarity (Stiker 1999) and of deprivation of the usual normative and legal considerations conventionally attributed to persons in the community (Reeve 2010). Moral precarity is experienced in the sphere of evaluation where identity is validated or demeaned, recognition given or withheld. Sayer (2011: 23–24) argues that people are, necessarily, evaluative, continually monitoring and making judgements about how we and others and the things we care about, are faring. This is how we help ourselves to decide what to do. Disposition towards cultural subjects and objects is evaluative, based, for better or worse, on representations of worth that circulate in the moral economy. Drawing on cultural representations, everyday evaluations inform whether we esteem or demean, grant or withhold recognition, avow or disavow others value to the community. Validity draws heavily on judgements about ability. The tribunal of validity is evident in the master categories of Western consciousness, its pillars or anchors of propriety; reason, beauty, truth, order and justice, the themes through which property mediates the meaning of propriety. The ‘clean and proper body’ has invested heavily in a brand that associates it with the badge of ‘goodness’, in what constitutes worth, value, virtue, propriety and validity. Impairment, in the non-disabled imaginary is perceived as the antithesis of these master categories. The mundane moral work of evaluation is done ‘on automatic’ through our ‘feel for the game’. It arises from our embeddedness in habitus (Bourdieu 1984), from taken for granted norms that are the social equivalent of impulse and from problems already established in the naturalised domain of cultural ‘common sense’. Some involve ref lection or ‘internal conversations’ and a struggle to judgement. Steeped in the cherished representations by which community makes sense of others, judgment may be a cruel ‘science’ or a popularity contest. ‘Worth’, propriety, validity is at stake. Undermining the validity of human beings and justifying the practices of cruelty that may follow from it, is intensely emotive. It is impossible to be uncontentious in a context where judgements about what one, more vexingly others, ought or ought not to be, are up-for-grabs. The full range of emotions may be stirred into life: ‘All sorts of relationships to do with disability are mediated by unconscious emotional currents’ (Watermeyer 2013: 5). The normative, in its breach, is easily inf lamed and profoundly vengeful. Impairment – ‘dustbin off disavowal’ (Shakespeare 1994) – ‘provokes’ the normate community

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into uncomfortable self-ref lection in which aversive emotions like hatred, fear and disgust are mobilised (Hughes 2012b; Soldatic and Pini 2009; Soldatic and Meekosha 2012). For a group to be justifiably good to mistreat, affective bile is required. For a group to be good to be good to, it has to be conceived as vulnerable, in need of the support of others. A mood of paternalistic sympathy for tragic lives (Oliver 1990) is necessary. Rescuing the ‘aff licted’ from dependency moralises community. Accumulation by able bodied people of feel-good, moral capital is derived parasitically from the invalidation of disabled people. Disability is not only structured by moral economy, but also by an ‘economy of affects’ (Ahmed 2004a; 2004b). It springs from a combination of aversion and sympathy. Impairment, from its conception in the ‘Western’ non-disabled imaginary, is a moral problem. ‘So prized and praiseworthy are characteristics of vitality, health and energy in commonsense accounts’ of ability ‘that questioning their association with virtue may, at first glance, seem incongruous’ (Watermeyer 2013: 18) Impairment is a problem of recognition, that begins with a failure of selfrecognition in normate communities. The discussion of invalidation that follows is preceded by a discussion of recognition and ableism. Recognition is concerned with the distribution of respect and disrespect, an idea of Hegelian origin, courted, of late, by many suitors. Scholars wrestling with the complexities of the shifting problems of identity, rights, citizenship and justice in fin-de-millennium neoliberal societies have been attracted to the debate about recognition. As the declining empire of the West ref lects on the excesses of bellicose modernity, recognition has become an Occidental obsession. Early modern Western expansionism differentiated itself from the ‘inferior’ cultures it invaded and from the monsters, savages and heathens that it sought to transform with its civilising mission. The peoples of the world were allocated to a hierarchy that boasted a morally superior white, masculine, ‘Western’ summit (Said 1993; 2003; McGrane 1989). Respect for difference was sparingly dispensed. Early modern othering blunted the moral force of recognition. It conceived of moral agency as a singular attribute of the ‘in-group’ of the competing powers of the Atlantic Rim. Classical ableism revivified in the Early Modern period, clarified the moral ideal of embodiment. To fall out of its embrace, as the indigenous peoples encountered by the Western expansionists did, was to fall into a moral void of misrecognition and invalidity. This was already a familiar place for disabled people. Their tropos was used to form the scripts that described colonised peoples. In the final section of this chapter, I outline the concept of invalidation as a social and cultural process of moral regulation that is based on two key dimensions: deficit of credibility and confinement through incapacity. I also by indicate how strategies and repertoires of invalidation are deployed in the ableist ‘project’ of dispossession and privation that draws the line between human validity and invalidity.

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Recognition: Moral economy of propriety There is no worse dispossession, no worse privation … than that of the losers in a symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognised social being, in a word, to humanity. (Bourdieu 2000: 241) Pierre Bourdieu marks out what is at stake in the struggle for recognition – the sociologically porous boundaries of human inclusion. Contemporary claims about justice embrace two broad categories, namely, economic distribution and cultural recognition, the two pillars of Proprium that I have called property and propriety; a double-vision of just ‘social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers’ (Fraser 2000: 108). This laudable aim is contrasted with the historical and empirical context of invalidation in which disabled people have experienced injustice as a consequence of mal-distribution and misrecognition. Table 3.1 summarises the position taken in this section in relation to the debate in contemporary critical political theory about the relative weight of recognition and redistribution and its application to the study of disability. New social movements of the twentieth century engaged in struggles for recognition (Honneth 2000; 2001; 2007; Fraser 1998a; 2000; Fraser and Honneth 2003). These movements thrust, inter alia, issues of, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability to the forefront of the political landscape. The conf lict between classes that dominated social relations during the sturm und drang of industrial capitalism appeared, in the latter half of the twentieth century to take a back seat. Recognition is a struggle for identity and dignity by people on the social periphery who have some common, embodied perspectives, interests and experiences based on economic and recognitive deficits. Taylor (1992: 26) insisted that: ‘Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need’; particularly for individuals and communities who have suffered from want of dignity and respect; who have known violations of bondage and slavery, economic and cultural harms; people whose lives have been squandered by the machinations of privilege and power. This (now) familiar reading of modern history sought the service of a model of mutual recognition indebted to Hegel. His idea continues to provoke debate in contemporary critical theory (Honneth 2000; 2007: Taylor 1992; 1994). Hegel’s metaphysical and teleological dialectic of recognition examines the inter-subjective nature of TABLE 3.1 The two pillars of disability invalidation

Mal-distribution

Misrecognition

Political economy Property Validity

Moral economy Propriety Invalidity

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the human journey towards self-fulfilment by sketching struggles for justice and demands for tolerance, dignity and rights. In the long march of history, disabled people have been denied even the basic conditions of combination and solidarity associated with the development of collective consciousness. The conditions for collective self-realisation are a contemporary phenomenon. Theories of recognition have limped (sic) towards engagement with disability. Its major theorists – Iris Marion Young (1990) aside – make little or no mention of it. Recognition highlights the wrongs done to minority groups. It underscores the axiological dimensions of the politics of identity; generic themes taken up by Disability Studies to delineate the ways in which the debate about recognition can be applied to disabled people (Scully 2008: 133–151: Abberley 2002: 128–130: Danermark and Gellerstedt 2004; Shakespeare and Watson 2001; Frohmader and Meekosha 2012). In general, these scholars take a positive view as to the value of recognition for the politics of disability. The historical origins of the idea of recognition betray its weaknesses. It belongs to the dialectic of imperialism and culture that emerged along with modernity as Western empires traversed the globe (Said 1993). The ‘natives’ of lands colonised by European powers were explained by their cultural peculiarities as anthropological ‘others’ (McGrane 1989). The liberal notion of recognition, based on respect for different cultures (Kymlicka 1995; 1997), failed to recognise that the imperative to respect was derived from the very processes that violently created global hierarchies of culture and forms of discrimination and oppression that we now acknowledge as core criteria for the application of the principle of recognition (Anghie 2004). There is a stench of hypocrisy and there is no getting away from it. The Hegelian dialectic is tainted by its own locus in the cultures of imperialism. However, the weakest element of the politics of recognition remains its relative indifference to the material; to the importance of property. For minority groups in general, or disabled people in particular, few would be bold enough to take the view that the politics of recognition is more important than the politics of redistribution. For example, Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias Project (Wright 1995 and Ackerman, Alstott and Van Parijs 2006) suggested that in the context of the crushing hegemony of neoliberalism and the intention to reduce the welfare state to a vestigial presence, it was incumbent on the left to develop radical schemes – real utopias – that put the vision of re-distribution at the heart of contemporary politics. The ‘basic incomes’ and ‘stakeholder grants’ promoted by materialists, were designed to offer people living in poverty, including the vast majority of disabled people, the opportunity to avoid economic disadvantage rather than be compensated for it. However, the general shift of attention in discussions of justice from redistribution to recognition during the fin-du-millennium period did not mean that the importance of economic inequality was diminished. Indeed, in the wake of the credit crunch, it reasserted itself as a matter of urgency for minority groups in general, and disabled people, in particular. As the guardians of the global economy apply their neoliberal policies of

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fiscal restraint and austerity, cuts in services and benefits have d­ isproportionately undercut the f low of resources to disabled people (Butler 2012; O’Hara 2014: 173–208;), reigniting political activities in the struggle against the latest injustices of material mal-distribution (Tyler 2013). In the disability movement, the accent remains on redistribution. Activists and organic intellectuals have focused on material forms of remediation for injustices done to disabled people (Oliver 1990). The neglect of material injustice in this book is not a rejection of its import. In the maintenance of injustice, economic mal-distribution is decisive. This book is, however, concerned primarily with propriety and moral economy; less so with property and political economy. It is focused on the claim ‘that the recognition of the dignity of individuals and groups forms a vital part of our concept of justice’ (Honneth 2001: 44) and on processes of ‘social exclusion, where human beings suffer in their dignity through not being granted the moral rights and responsibilities of a full legal person within their community’ (Honneth 2001: 49). The relative weight of the efficacy of propriety and property, moral economy and political economy, to the debate over equality and justice should not blur the more general bivalent claim that ‘culture and economy are thoroughly imbricated with one another’ (Fraser 1998b: 40) and that ‘struggles over redistribution … are themselves locked into a struggle for recognition’ (Honneth 2001: 54). The protagonists in this debate are not so far apart. A key difference stems from a theoretical dispute which has, in the canons of historical materialism, traditionally separated materialists from idealists. The orthodox Marxist tenet that the economy is determining in ‘the last instance’, is tempered from its original formulation by Engels in Nancy Fraser’s ‘perspectival dualism’ (1998b: 19). Left Hegelians, like Honneth, do not privilege the economic above the symbolic, preferring to avoid the ultimate, causal choice in favour of the promulgation of a dialectic of more or less equal weight. The specifics of the historical moment have become burdened with the casting vote in deciding the relative importance of ‘structure’ and ‘superstructure’. It is, however, important to stress, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) did, the processes that transform ideas into material forces. Discourses are always (discursive) practices or representations that are real in meaning and wrought in action. The pejorative beliefs and prejudices that have accumulated about disabled people in the non-disabled imaginary and the moral economy owe some of their durability to the material advantages and privileges of those who benefit from economic injustice. Prejudice and structural inequalities are reciprocal social relations. Both propriety and property matter. Historically, they rub along very nicely together, as do their opposites. Moral life is mired in political economy. It is difficult as Nancy Fraser (2001: 23–25) argues, to conceive of invalidating mis-recognition as an issue of social status rather than identity (Fraser 2000). While invalidation is a matter of the impact of ‘institutionalised patterns of cultural value … on the relative standing of social actors’ (Fraser 2001: 24), it is also about quotidian processes of inter-subjective disrespect that undermine

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self and social identity; about everyday moral insults that annihilate worth and self-respect. Fraser takes the debate about recognition and redistribution in a deontological direction towards a theory of universal rights and justice, towards a Kantian conception of morality. Left behind is the Hegelian Sittlichkeit (ethics), inter-subjectivity, the bonds of community broken (and sometimes repaired) and how the meaning of the good life in its various cultural forms is denied to some people, while others revel in it as if it is a mirror of their self-identity. As Lash and Featherstone note (2001: 3) ‘in some ways recognition is irreducibly cultural … at the same time irreducibly private and immediate’. It is more than a matter of ‘recognition by public institutions; it has to do with everyday inter-subjectivity as well’. Disability injustice is a combination of structural exclusion and cultural prejudice that works itself out in the quotidian spaces of everyday life. Cultural and subjective life is the zone of recognition where comfort or cruelty, validity or invalidity are experienced. Disability is a way of beingin-the-world mediated by crumbling existential credibility. Impairment is always better, if it is ‘ameliorated, cured or indeed, eliminated’ (Campbell 2010: 5). It is the unwelcome stranger; the disavowed abject, best exterminated or rendered invisible through assimilation (Hughes 2002). Impairment is opposed to ‘wholesome individuality’, capability, sound constitution or healthy social formation. It is, in the culture of the West, normally conceived in terms of dis-value; distance from propriety. At stake in the politics of misrecognition is the smear of impropriety; in the inter-subjective interplay between non-disability and disability, the disabled body is ubiquitously ‘stunned into its own recognition by its presence as alien being in the world’ (Paterson and Hughes 1999: 603). Social rejection (and belonging) is produced by different patterns and forms of misrecognition and disrespect, transforming the ideals of ableism invested in the non-disabled imaginary and moral economy into material forces that undermine the worth of disabled people’s lives. The forces of ableism are lively and dangerous currents that carry the imprimatur of the most valued cultural ideals and illusions. Honneth (2000; 2001; 2007) offers a concept of recognition drawn around the healthy formation of self as its outcome. By implication, the constant round of stigmatisation, discrimination, exclusion and oppression that disrespected individuals and groups encounter will lead to diminished capacity for moral agency. It is not clear how a social movement can rise on the back of such intense moral ruin, or how disabled people, crushed by perpetual undervaluing, could ever get their collective act together. They have; though it has taken millennia for the conditions for collective action to form. The custodial conditions of the ‘great confinement’ may have been the space in which collective disability identity fomented or: It may be the case that the experience of disempowering care and the threat of the institution being offered as a ‘promise’ in the golden age of welfare, allows disabled people as a group for the first time to identify ‘respect’ rather than physical survival as a collective objective. (Abberley 2002: 128–129)

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The point about survival is important. Mendicancy courts disability. Recognition may collapse in the face of necessity. As an offspring of invention, disrespect has been a way of life for disabled people. If Cooley’s metaphor of ‘the looking glass self ’ is a reasonable ref lection of how self-concept is constituted, then disabled people, throughout the ages, are likely to have seen themselves in unf lattering terms. Self-loathing is the emotion associated with ‘internalised oppression’. No doubt, in many different historical and cultural contexts, ‘internalised ableism’, what Campbell (2009: 16–29) calls the ‘tyranny within’, has caused moral harm and submissiveness and has kept the collective disabled subject off the map of history. The conditions for collective agency and the struggle for recognition accompany the base struggle to survive. Esteem pales into insignificance when one does not know where one’s next meal is coming from. Propriety loses its halo. Moral economy crumbles. Recognition is starved of the cultural oxygen it requires for those who have been left to their own devices to make a life from economic scratchings or the emotional refuse of beneficent property. On the other hand, survivors in cultures of survival demonstrate agency beyond the ken of the comfort to which the usually designated agent has become accustomed. The empirical juxtaposition of political economy and moral economy may be at its sharpest when necessity dominates social relations, but its theoretical juxtaposition is important in understanding how community requires the cohabitation of property and propriety, political economy and moral economy, distribution and recognition. To juxtapose political economy and moral economy as, respectively, the social spaces of distribution and recognition, property and propriety is to make the latter a general category of value distribution in a given social context, rather than to tie it down, as E.P. Thomson does, to a particular historical formation that refers to popular subsistence ethics and the ‘riotous’ behaviour that follows the enforcement of an unfair price by local privileged paternalists. Moral economy can be extended beyond a base in money and markets to embrace the cultural and civic struggle to identify and distribute worth that is always embedded in particular economic circumstances. Moral economy is the domain in which propriety is contested and in which the drama of recognition and misrecognition is played out. Moral economy is the domain in which ability is recognised and impairment subjected to the misrecognitions of ableism.

Ableism: The cloak of validity In this section, I argue that ableism is at the core of the cultural beliefs that mark out the contours of propriety. It constitutes a vision of the good life in which impairment is misrecognised as a deficit of body, soul and cultural competence. Disableism evokes injustices done to disabled people; the ways in which d iscrimination and oppression spoil disabled people’s lives (Goodley 2014). ­ Ableism is a by-product of the valorisation of human vigour and vitality, of the ideals of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice that are invested in Western myths of human redemption and perfection. Ableism may also be used as a

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critical category to explore the inadvertent ‘pathologies of non-disablement’ (Hughes 2007: 683) revealing them through examination of cultural beliefs that are held in the highest esteem; through shifting the enduring ‘problem of disability’ (Titchkosky 2007) onto the shoulders of normate privilege, a hitherto largely invisible protagonist in the history of injustice. The project of bringing disability out of the shadows and into the light is helped by foregrounding the figure that cast the shadow in the first place. Ableism is integral to the established nomos; the meaningful ‘world view’ and the laws, norms and mores that sustain social order including its ethos. It is a taken for granted part of the historically fashioned world central to the moral meaning system which it protects like a ‘shield against terror’ (Berger 1967: 22). Nomos is shelter from the storm of dread that human beings externalise, objectify and finally internalise in the face of the cosmic questions of pain, suffering and death. Ableism is the normate fantasy of complete self hood or invulnerability (Shildrick 2002) in which the impaired other is interpreted as bearer of burdens of finitude and temporality; symbol of the sustaining nomos in decay. The normate community, in awe of nomos, lives, for the most part, in a world of disavowal sheltering beneath a f limsy canopy of order. Disability is fashioned in the Western able world view as a figure opposed to order, predictability and stability, as an agent of primordial chaos. The moral economy – shaped by the normate fantasy of ableism – is bifurcated by disability misrecognition which functions as a means of protecting non-disability from the fragility of nomos. The literature on ableism has grown, from a trickle before the end of the millennium (Chouinard 1997) to a steady f low over the last decade or so (Campbell 2008; 2009; 2010; Dolmage 2017; Goodley 2014: Wolbring 2008; 2012). Chouinard (1997: 380) defines ableism as ‘ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume’ ability ‘and by so doing construct persons with disabilities as marginalised’. Goodley (2014: 22) focuses on neoliberal forms of ableism; on the range of ‘contemporary ideals’ that privilege ability, promote healthy personhood, create space for a community of belonging and encourage institutional bias towards autonomous, independent bodies. Ableism constructs the moral rhetoric of cultural context in which multiple, everyday social processes misrecognise impairment as a symbol of disorder and aggrandise ability in a taken for granted imaginary of embodied perfection. Ableism is a manifesto for everyday judgment, a tribunal of lay morality, an ethos of evaluation (Sayer 2011) in which cognitive physical and sensory difference symbolise nomos under threat. CDS is concerned with the cultural re-valuation of these processes of negative evaluation. ‘In order to deconstruct the exclusionary and demeaning aspects of ableism’ and find ways to ‘respect the value of disabled identity’ in ‘an embodied politics of recognition’ (Loja et al. 2013). Ableism encapsulates both embodied normativity and the other that falls short of the norm and sustains them in umbilical relation. The central binding/unbinding binaries in the ableist imaginary invoke Manichean attributions of good and bad to forms of embodiment. Ableism seals the moral

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hegemony of non-disability and the apparatus of normative, social solidarity that diminishes and invalidates disabled people’s lives. Disabled people experience moral injury as they encounter, in the shadow of able hegemony, stigma and rejection. Ableism suggests that disability is ‘inherently negative and, if the opportunity presents itself, should be ameliorated, cured or … eliminated’ (Campbell 2010: 5). As Titchkosky (2007: 9) put it, the dominant modality of disability is ‘a clear-cut problem in need of a solution’, a trouble begging for remediation. Positive evaluations of ability misrecognise impairment as corporeal and social corruption. Ableism disqualifies ‘groups of people based upon … biologically coded insufficiency’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 126–127). In the face of crooked nature, the able nomos is unforgiving. Cultural insult sets the pattern for recognitive injustice. Celebration of moral worth inf lames moral injury which is felt, ‘not only’ as ‘bodily pain’, but also in ‘the accompanying consciousness of not being recognised in one’s own self-understanding’ (Honneth 2007: 134). In the lives of disabled people insult runs deep. Disability ‘is not merely the other to normalcy but … an irreducible productive force, a kind of alterity to any interest we have developed in identity and difference’ (Titchkosky 2007: 8). Ableism is the lodestone of negativity that permeates subordinate identities, just as belonging embodies able counterparts. When normative order is objectified in moral economy, it becomes a ‘shared facticity’ (Berger 1967: 19), ‘taken for granted’, ‘naturalised’ in the moral architecture, habits and practices of community. It is the touchstone of collective value in the palaces of propriety. Ableism – as if by autosuggestion – strips impairment of dignity. It acquires its ‘shared facticity’ not only from the ‘projects’ of ‘world making’ that ref lect the life affirming nature of normative embodiment but also, simultaneously and silently, from disability’s ‘deadly status’ (Titchkosky 2007: 108). Ableism is not confined to a celebration of normality. It craves perfection (Campbell 2010). It is nurtured by the desire for redemption or the realisation of the imaginative designs of sublime artistic representation, or in opiate states of cosmological f light where human beings – as Ludwig Feuerbach argued – ­conjure up a divinity, a transcendental power, that substitutes for the inadequacies of the terrestrial nomos. Campbell (2008: 153 and 2009: 5) registers this facet of ableism in her definition of it as ‘a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produce a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’. Ableism is intoxicated by fantasies of perfection. There is enhancement and perfection and prosthetic utopias on the other side of the rainbow of ableist normality. Ableism desires a world of utopian embodiment just as much as it needs a world of ‘lesser’ beings to plump it up. Perfection is a Western cultural ambition. Telos in classical Greece, redemption in European Christendom are imagined states of sublimity; symbolic worlds that outshine their empirical counterparts because they are free from imperfection. Ableism draws on perfect worlds to configure the map of its imaginary.

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‘Ideal normate’ configurations against which disability is unfavourably ­ easured are many. Take for example, the promise of a purified being embodied m in the contemporary project of genetic engineering (Sandal 2009). Perfection invalidates. Its moral register traps people in a vicious tyranny (Glassner 1992). ‘Coming to terms with perfection’ means embracing ‘whatever it is that we understand and hold to be “right”, “good” and “true”; whatever is especially worthy of consideration and respect and inspires us to better our lives and the lives of others to achieve our full potential’ (Hyde 2010: 15). Perfection is a preacher skilled in the rhetoric of hubris; an artist practised in the sculpting of moral order. Ableism refers to the ways in which cultural priorities dignify the illusion of normative wholeness, promote a corporeal standard, encourage aspirations towards it and, in so doing, make disability its illegitimate offspring, its denigrated other, a form of undignified, invalid being. Ableism is a set of ‘­ideological formulas that equate devalued bodily conditions with decreased social value’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2006: 18). Ableism embodies the story of a dynamic dyad – disability and non-disability – engaged in an abusive and dysfunctional relationship in which the latter, the dominant partner, has acquired the rhetorically substantiated reputation for validity and worthiness, whilst the former has lived, undignified, in a liminal state in which worth and validity have been undermined. Ableism tosses disabled people into a permanent war against the differences by which they have been defined and understood. It pitches them into a struggle in which their dignity is contested; into a war of words in which impairment and its army of proxies – deformity, defect, monstrosity, anomaly, feeblemindedness, idiocy and insanity etc. – have come to represent ontological and ethical dubiety. It engages them in a war of deeds that ends in a terrible social geography of brutalising spaces set aside for moral degenerates and pariahs or in attempts to assimilate, or destroy by absorption, the unwelcome difference that disability represents. Carnal difference is constructed in the non-disabled imaginary as a psycho-emotional threat to the life-affirming, normative condition of wholeness. The ‘normal/pathological’ system of evaluation in modernity is based on the putative carnal differences that are incorporated in the binary distinction: Despite the instability and relational nature of the designations normal and abnormal, they are used as absolute categories. They have achieved their certainty by association with empiricism and they suffer from empiricism’s reductive and simplifying tendencies. Their power and reach are enormous. They affect individuals’ most private deliberations about their worth and acceptability, and they determine social position and societal response to behaviour. The relationship between abnormality and disability accords to the non-disabled the legitimacy and potency denied to disabled people. (Linton 1998: 24)

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Normality is ‘natural, undisputed and unremarked’ (Garland-Thomson 1997: 20). It is the bastion of common sense and taken-for-granted notions of what it is and should be. Disability is nature gone awry. It attracts dispute and remark. It is the abnormal, abject counterpart to value and propriety. Ableist normality is a kind of ‘sacred canopy’ (Berger 1967) under which desirable forms of being and doing prosper, and undesirable forms are exposed and expelled. In the ableist imaginary, normality is a basis for a good life whilst in narratives of physical and mental difference ‘disability and unhappiness’ tend to ‘constitute a likely combination’ (Bolt 2015: 1103) In much the same way that racism embodies the binary of white and other (Hill 1997; Garner 2007) and acts as a system of moral regulation, ableism bifurcates disability and non-disability, insinuating privileged propriety to the former and biological, social and cultural calamity of the latter. Just as white is defined primarily by its negation (Lopez 1996), so too non-disability is an affirmation of privilege and esteem. Lennard Davis (1995: 23) argues that just as race scholarship had ‘turned its attention to whiteness’, so Disability Studies could benefit, ‘not so much from a study of disability’ but from a focus on the ‘study of normalcy’ and the tyranny at its core. In the context of anti-colonial struggles, Sartre (cited in Jay 1994: 294) described the power of white masculinity as the embodiment of virtue: ‘The white man, white because he was a man, white like the day, white like truth is white, lighted like a torch of all creation; he unfolded the essence, secret and white, of existence’. Non-disability claims a like lineage; clean, pure, unbroken, wholesome, but simultaneously absent, invisible, desultory. The nondisabled body, surface armour forged from truth, beauty and order, is a phantom existence, an ontological fantasy, a delusion: The non-disabled body cannot be nor cannot become vulnerable or frail because it is not an empirical body. It is a normative construction, a “body schema”, a myth that is used to constitute the f lawed other and provide a place of emotional safety from the fear felt by those “clean and proper bodies” … that have deluded themselves into thinking that existence is secure, stable and autonomous. (Hughes 2007: 680) The non-disabled nomos embodies a ghost ontology, a fiction of wholeness and purity. Impairment maintains the delusion by helping ability to clarify and cleanse itself, to organise its relation to itself and to work out the way it thinks about what it is and will become. Without impairment, ability is a loose foundation, inchoate and amorphous, barely able to keep upright. Ableism endures through its denigration of impairment as negative-being, a life of lesser value. Negativity is the latent, trans-temporal cohabitee of impairment. The apparent permanence of this arrangement in the non-disabled imaginary is the basis of validity and invalidity. A representation of nature as pristine and unspoilt holds sway against the empirical, brute reality of the practical instantiations of

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corrupted corporeality. Nature conceived as an aesthetic ideal type is the basic currency of ableism. Impairment is prodigal by comparison. Nature’s ‘freaks’ – to invoke Aristotle’s description of disabled people – are crocked, crooked, twisted, unsightly, unseemly, interminably tarnished. This is what the tropos of disability suggests. The ableist system of reference reduces impairment, to its latent, ineradicable ‘truth’ as dis-value. It requires easy ontological verities for its simplified and simplifying system of moral order in which there are good bodies and bad bodies. It perpetuates the moral binary in a series of spin-offs; sanity and derangement, intelligence and idiocy, literacy and illiteracy, sight and blindness, hearing and deafness and so on. Ableism is ‘a network of notions about health, productivity, beauty, and the value of human life itself ’ (Bolt 2015: 1106). Non-disability names and shapes what it thinks it is not, what it creates as subaltern. It disinherits its bastard offspring. The non-disabled gaze disfigures. In modernity, it enlists the help of medical science to legitimate its carnal perspective. The non-disabled gaze posits impairment as a pathological ‘condition’. It submits to moralising medical terminology. The ‘“condition” is visualised as an abnormality, a dysfunction, a f law, a deficit … “a crying shame”’ (Hughes 1999: 165). The non-disabled gaze embraces the language of disorder and the judgement of tragedy. Ableism humiliates what is not in its inner circle: The ‘clean and proper body’ (Shildrick 2002) shames the ‘crooked’ body. In the case of modernity, for example, ableism describes all that will not, or cannot, submit to the ‘might’ and to the right of the norm and to the practises of shaming that ridicule, cast out, assimilate or eliminate the ‘badly’ embodied. Any practice that will cleanse it and make it proper may be applied. Ableism is the normate mind-set that sets out the schema of carnal, intellectual and sensory validity and what it should look like. It dominates the distribution of value and worth by marking out what is civilised and where the good lies. Ableist invalidation is what happens when these benchmarks – historically and culturally variable in their content – are used for purposes of evaluation in the judgement of others (Wolbring 2008). It constructs the moral hierarchies out of which the practicalities for the ‘treatment’ and ‘disposal’ of ‘crookedness’ are derived. Much ableist work around disability is done through imaginative representation, in, as Kant suggested, that place ‘of art concealed in the depth of the human soul whose real modes of activity nature is hardly ever likely to allow us to discover and to have open to our gaze’ (Quoted in Warnock 1976: 32). Somewhere between the senses and the world made reasonable by thought is a place fired by passion; a dreamy, intoxicated space in which fact and fiction mingle. The imaginary has been an important theme in contemporary social and political thought (Anderson 1991; Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1987; Taylor 2004; Warner 2003). The subjects’ relation to the collective or the way in which people envision their relationships to others is made and unmade in the habituated dispositions of the ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004). For Anderson (1991), the notions of nation and nationality come into being in the imaginary, in the wake of print ‘capitalism’,

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in the symbols of the new patterns of communication that bind individuals into a territorial collective. The ableist imaginary involves the symbolic excesses of ‘othering’; the making of irreconcilable collectives out of the embodied phantasies and fears of human culture. It is drawn to phantasy and excess to monsters, to myths of extraordinary achievements and compelling catastrophes. In this space of excess, anthropomorphic and theomorphic notions of being and embodiment distinguish between bodies that are invulnerable, f lourishing, heroic, independent and complete and impaired bodies that are vulnerable, suffering, tragic, burdensome and broken. From a network of hubristic images of humankind, disability emerges as ‘what not to be’, a tragic ontology, suppressed by the weight of its fearsome latent presence in the lives of non-disabled people who refuse to come to terms with the personal, negative, existential possibilities that it raises. Disability opposes itself to non-disability in this latent trans-temporal form as the existential other that arises in the suppressed and partial recognition of the embodied nomos. Ableism imagines disability as the existential stranger par excellence, the unwelcome visitor that may come knocking at any time. When the knock comes, hospitality freezes. Disability is, for ability, a threatening and unseemly prospect that haunts familiar boundaries of moral self hood and cultural propriety. If we wish to say to someone, repeatedly and with conviction, that he or she does not belong, then we can – as we have done in the case of disabled people – design the message into the very fabric of the social environment – the place where the nomos is most palpably manifest. The brute materiality of exclusion makes it plain that a corrupt body or mind must accept, as the inevitable consequence of its disordering existence, a world of restriction or exile. Disabled people’s carnal information has not been loaded into the blueprints of the world we have made (Paterson and Hughes 1999). A more telling moral insult or form of subjective annihilation is hard to conceive. Wherever the world has been touched by human hands, one can detect the mirror of ability and the vanity of normality. Ableism removes impairment from the imagined spaces of propriety. It is constituted by visions of good (and bad) bodies; iconographies of carnal and intellectual normativity and a distorted, crooked other that represents a tarnished existence. Ableism is the cloak of validity.

Invalidation The highly respected medical sociologist Irving Zola (1982: 7) wrote, in what he called his ‘socio-autobiography’, that his disability was ‘a personal and social odyssey that chronicles not only my … acknowledgement of the impact of my physical differences on my life but also my growing awareness of the ways in which society invalidates people with chronic disability’ (my emphasis). This, to my knowledge, is one of the first references to the idea of invalidation as a way of describing the experience of disability. It provides a legitimate starting point

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to develop its career as a sociological concept. More recently, the concept of ‘social invalidation’ was used by the late Paul Longmore (2016) in his ­excellent book on American telethon spectaculars. He describes the positive, validating impact of these festivals of charity on non-disabled people. The benefits are ‘spiritual redemption, moral restoration and social elevation’ (2016: 59). Disabled people, by contrast, are fixed in the invalidating spotlight of munificence as the eternal victims of misfortune and suffering. The word invalidation appears in autobiographical literature, in, for example, Kuusisto’s (1998: 13) Planet of the Blind to describe a social reaction to blindness commensurate with the author’s experience. In the academic literature, it has been used as a term of ontological import (Mladenov 2015: 7). I have used the concept frequently in my own work (Hughes 2000; 2002). It has not, however, undergone sustained conceptual development. I intend to use it, here, in terms of the following broad brushstrokes: The failure to recognise, esteem or respect persons who embody unfamiliarity, strangerhood or difference to the detriment of their social validity; by inattention/ over-attention; by marginalisation, discrimination and exclusion, or by forms of assimilation in the name of similitude. Invalidation refers to the social processes that undermine the moral and ontological validity of people who have impairments that distinguish them from the ableist benchmark. Invalidation is primarily an axiological concept that can be applied to lives that do not matter. One cannot underestimate the dangers for people who are placed on the precarious edge of the human community: ‘If the people in a certain group are defined as inferior the requirement to act morally towards them is, some would say, annulled’ (Goodwin 2014: 435). I use the term invalidation to describe the specific form of status inequality and misrecognition experienced by disabled people in the various historical contexts that I examine in this book. I do so not simply because it is polemically striking or because it is a play on words, a pun that that puts together bodily deficit and lack of socio-legal acceptability, though these reasons are not entirely peripheral. I do so because it is adequate to the epistemological task of describing the social processes of ‘othering’ that strip disabled people of social, cultural, political, economic and emotional credibility and make most visible the ‘regimes of ontological separation’ (Campbell 2010: 6) that keep apart disability and nondisability, constituting the former as a sub-standard existence and an unworthy way of being-in-the-world. I stand by the answer to a question I asked myself in 2009: What specific form of abjection or othering is experienced by disabled people and do we need specific categories to ref lect the particulars of this experience? I suspect the answer to both of these questions is yes and that disability studies needs a narrative of “invalidation” to describe the historical, social, cultural and biographical processes that transform impairment into disability and that simultaneously, erect a “valid” form of

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embodiment that will not admit to (although lives in fear of ) the “tragedy” that it might become. (Hughes 2009: 407) Established concepts in the field do not quite fit the bill for the task I have set myself. Othering is too generic. ‘Dislocation’, be it comprehended in structural (e.g. Gleeson 1999) or cultural terms (e.g. Snyder and Mitchell 2006), has a favourable pedigree., Though it captures the various forms of spatial exclusion, marginalisation, segregation and social distancing that have been common responses to disabled people in a variety of historical, social and cultural contexts, it has had little explicit use by disability commentators. Dislocation has two inherent weaknesses. It does not encompass temporal forms of discrimination and oppression (Paterson 2012) and it is not adequate to the task of describing the social processes of assimilation used to try to make disability difference disappear into the absorbing f lesh of normalcy. The term disvalue is attractive from an axiological perspective. It is useful in the analysis of the credibility and social worth of disabled people, but it does not account so well for the spatial issues raised by the concept of dislocation. The term disablement was the front runner. It refers to the processes involved in becoming disabled. It is the process associated with disableism which can be defined as ‘a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well-being’ (Thomas 2007: 73). The validating, able source of oppression contained in the definition of disableism, is, however, absent from its net of concerns. The distinction between validity and invalidity has a moral, evaluative resonance that the category of disablement cannot attract. In developing an argument about disability as the product of the moral politics of impairment, in which hegemonic mores are validated, invalidation offers a cutting-edge nomenclature. It brings into sharp relief the issue of legitimacy against which disabled people’s agency is in perpetual struggle. Invalidation is commensurate with the deeply personal, subjective element of disablement that makes it a lived experience for the disabled people subjected to it. Invalidation captures the powerful, everyday, mundane dynamic of disabled people going about their business in the context of pervasive negativity. The non-disabled gaze is a heavy weight of suffocating moral interrogation, a gauntlet of disapproval that awaits disabled people’s public appearances (Loja et al. 2013). The gaze is the invalidating gawp that strips impairment of its humanity (Garland-Thomson 2009). It is evidence of the invalidating power of the non-disabled imaginary. The gaze identifies the bearer of the stamp of validity. The oppressor comes into view. Furthermore, invalidation, more transparently than the concept of disablement, embodies a ‘dual meaning’ which includes both ‘confinement through incapacity’ and ‘deficit of credibility’ (Hughes, 2000: 558). These meanings are useful in mapping the concept of invalidation and in drawing out its historical loci. I will highlight the former with an example from the Victorian period, noting that dictionary definitions

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tend to invert the appropriate causal connection in the phrase ‘confinement through incapacity’. A social model inversion would make the phrase read ‘incapacity through confinement’. I will concentrate analysis, however, on discussing the implications of the second meaning of invalidation. Invalidation as ‘incapacity through confinement’ resonates with Victorian notions of invalidity in the lives of middle-class women who came to be associated with the exhaustion of agency. These daughters of the wealthy bourgeoisie were dependent, burdensome, demanding, an emotional drain on privileged families who had lost their daughters to a wilting disease. The invalid role for these women was not a sick role (Parsons 1951), but a ‘career’ in which expensive doctors played a well-paid supporting role (Ehrenreich and English 1973; Herndl 1994). The contrast between the lives of inaction of these women and the work ethic of their fathers is striking. Industrial capitalism was an invalid-producing machine, manufacturing impairment on a scale unmatched in the history of human economy. Engels’ portrait of Manchester in 1844 was an account of the effects of capitalism on bodies labouring in conditions of pestilence, squalor and want; a world far removed from the invalid daughters of the industrialists. Poor invalids were ‘hollow-eyed ghosts’ brutalised by the harsh conditions of employment. Confinement they could ill afford. The middle-class invalids wasted away in luxury. Feminist historians have noted that these young ladies spent days prostrate on the chaises longues of Victorian drawing rooms (Brumberg 1988). ‘Invalidism’ was a passive state accompanied by a consumptive body and a fashionable, pale complexion (Ehrenreich and English 1973). Emotionally priceless, yet economically powerless, the daughters of the well-off, stif led in ambition, cultivated fragility through self-starvation (Brumberg 1988). They had little or no opportunity to develop themselves through work or formal education. Confinement produced their incapacity. Bordo (1993) argued that the Victorian ideal of femininity was helplessness. A romanticised cult of the feminine was built around the metaphor of the ‘wilting f lower’. Herndl (1994) noted that mid-nineteenth century medical theories depicted ‘cultivated’ unmarried young women as invalids who were suited to a life of domestic confinement in the private sphere. Confinement was a matter of spatial restriction, rather than the process associated with ‘birthing’, which was not an option for many of these emaciated young women. The contrast with the ideal of bourgeois masculinity was striking. Masculinity acted enterprisingly, freely and with vigour in the public sphere of production. Confinement was the destiny of middle-class ‘wilting f lowers’ and – though the conditions were far worse – confinement was also experienced by many thousands of disabled people incarcerated in eugenic warehouses on both sides of the Atlantic (Kuhl 2002; Reaume 2014). In the nineteenth century, invalidity was associated with a sterile life for privileged young women and sterilisation for disabled people (Stubblefield 2007). Femininity and disability are imbricated in discourses of invalidity and ­confinement in different time periods. Vandeventer Pearman (2010) offers this

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view in relation to the Middle Ages and Nussbaum (2003) verifies it in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Confinement through incapacity is, however, a misnomer. The ‘wilting f lowers’ and the inmates of colonies, asylums and poor-houses that sheltered disabled people were incapacitated because they were confined. The idea of invalidation as ‘confinement’ and ‘incapacity’ in a profoundly utilitarian age of individual endeavour combined with the ethical importance of work, shaped negative representations of disabled people as idle and dependent. They were considered bereft of agency, or, at worst, as ‘useless eaters’; a prejudice that can be traced back to Antiquity and forward to the Nazi death camps. Idleness was particularly stigmatising. The dominant perception that invalids were incapable of contributing to social life rippled out into a multitude of overlapping, invalidating meanings that included, inter alia, a fiscal drag on the state, the tax payers’ burden, the carers’ imprisonment (Hughes et al. 2005; Watson et al. 2004), The invalid – defined by incapacity – was the antithesis of the ideal citizen in the industrialising economies of the nineteenth century. Invalidation as incapacity through confinement is a spatialising, material force. It territorialises social relations, institutionalising social responses to out-groups through social distancing (Wacquant 2008). Exclusion, segregation or marginalisation are the socio-spatial consequences of the ‘social distancing’ of incapacitated people. The contrived geographies of distance keep disability and non-disability apart. There is an ableist psycho-emotional underpinning to the processes of ‘social distancing’ that is based on the disavowal of disability by non-disabled actors who consider themselves immune to incapacity (Shakespeare 1994). The zoo, the cage, the stage, the cellar, the attic, the asylum, the leprosarium, the poor house, the camp; places betwixt and between the custodial and the therapeutic; ‘special’ places; places remote from the heartbeat of social life and community, from sight, from mind, from propriety; incarcerated or confined in these segregated spaces; wheeled out now and then, as entertainments or specimens, to be inspected, gawked at or prodded by the normate agents of property and propriety. These are the liminal locations that shape the stories of disabled people and their invalidating confinements. The construction of places of exile demands a strong emotional and moral foundation firmly established before the first bricks are laid. What Norbert Elias (2000: 258) calls, an ‘invisible wall’ of affects, a combination of hate, pity, fear and disgust (Hughes 2012b) forms the emotional background to the spaces of confinement, exclusion and exile in which disabled people have been placed to eke out lives with limited resources, negligible autonomy and high levels of surveillance. Social distancing nourishes prejudice, stigmatisation, stereotyping, discrimination and oppression. Gordon Allport (1954) ref lecting on the mind-set of Nazism, argued that its macabre, choreographed geography of prejudice began with anti-locution, avoidance and segregation, passed through phases of discrimination and violence and ended-up in extermination. Geographies of invalidation legitimate the maltreatment of out-groups who are good to mistreat.

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Disability invalidation as ‘incapacity confined’ may be practiced from another moralising standpoint, in which disability is conceived as good to be good to. This approach too has special spaces of confinement that are religious, charitable or therapeutic. In this context, disability invalidation requires a non-disabled ‘donor’ state or wealthy class to promote and fund charity, philanthropy or altruism and a professional class – ecclesiastical or medical – to define the needs of ‘the suffering’. These forces of good play opposite the recipient role of the grateful, mendicant or parasite. In this dialectic of invalidation, the emotional stakes are high. The interlocution of tragedy and beneficence, vulnerability and expertise leave disabled people in moral debt to ability. The ‘gift’ of ‘help’ or ‘care’ may become a poisoned chalice (Watson et al. 2004; Hughes et al. 2005; Shakespeare 2000). Implicit in the structural moral geographies that isolate disabled people from mainstream activities is the axiological view that they embody a deficit of credibility or propriety. Invalidation as deficit of credibility refers to the withdrawal of recognition and esteem that has pursued disabled people through the tangled maze of history. Cultures of virtue damage reputations. Anti-Semitism in Western history since the time of Christ is a case in point (Poliakov 2003). Proprium configures validity – material and normative. It establishes the benchmark of the ‘clean and proper’ subject (Shildrick 2002), the symbolic, esteemed corporeal form that epitomises the virtue of an era or a regime. Validity maps social and moral order, as well as compromised ontological worth. It sets the ableist standard or benchmark against which human worth, credibility and propriety is measured. An invalidated life does not matter. ‘It’ may be humiliated, stripped of subjectivity, constituted as abject/object, stranger, danger, other, dirt, pariah, problem, outsider, threat. ‘It’ may be cast out from the social body or brought into alignment with the norm, made to disappear or re-made in the image and likeness of the historically pertinent ableist vision of embodied credibility. Ableism, networked with property and propriety, embodies the power to invalidate at the level of social ontology and to inscribe bodies with or without worth, credibility, validity. Invalidation describes the processes by which impairment is transformed into disability; of how carnal differences are represented and evaluated as signs of inferior humanity. Invalidation has its origins in the ‘normate’ community. The able world of judgement is the privileged idiom of power. Ability is the ‘constructed identity of those who by way of bodily configuration and cultural capital … can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them’ (Garland-Thomson 1997: 8). The able community is the seat of disrespect and source of moral harm for difference. Mariam Corker identifies the specific quality that helps disaggregate disability from other identity groups pushed to the social periphery by normate propriety. Disability is unique in its negative representational ‘f lexibility’. In the moral meaning making schemes of cultures: ‘disability’, Corker writes, (2001: 47) ‘is the transient yet ever-present embodiment of dis-value, a category of “other” designated as a dumping ground for anything that cannot be valued’.

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The ‘dumping ground’ in Corker’s dark vision is strewn with existential fear about the vulnerability and precariousness of human life. The dumping ground is f lexible enough to house the ‘errors’ of nature, the ruin of reason, the decay of beauty, the collapse of order and the ‘curse’ of mortality: all the disempowering fears and catastrophes that haunt the redemptive vison of Western culture. Under normate hegemony, the value of disability can slump for any number of reasons. Culturally specific notions of socio-ontological propriety attribute and distribute worth, respect, honour and esteem. Potential candidates for invalidation follow. The less worthy may become legitimate targets for violence, abuse and humiliation or, if they belong to the ranks of the deserving wounded, may be eligible for social support. Modern categorical binaries like normal and abnormal form a core ontological register (Canguilhem 1989) around which the nondisabled imaginary undermines the value of disabled people. The processes of rationalisation associated with modernity imply that impairment, or ancestral concepts like deformity and defect, common descriptors of disability from Early Modernity to the eighteenth century (Nussbaum 2003) justify the erasure of the subjects that they represent. To be defined as a categorical abstraction outside the norm is to be considered aberrant and tarnished. One may be placed in a moral no-man’s-land or have one’s (ethical and political) possibilities significantly restrained. If one’s ‘legitimacy and potency’ is compromised by one’s identity as a disabled person (Linton 1998: 24), then one may be invalidated by one’s transformation into a good cause. To be short of credibility or validity is not only a story about a deficit of ‘legitimacy and potency’ but also – as I argued in the preceding section – a story of place, of social and political geography. To be socially valid is to be, moreor-less, ontologically rooted in a space to which one belongs and feels at home. Disabled people are often socially located on the ontological and geographical margins, where they experience the isolation and violent precarity of life on the edge. One tarnished by impropriety would be wise to expect regular challenges to place and integrity. Challenges may arise in the non-disabled community, as it wrestles with its collective sense of stability or tightens its definition of who is credible and who is perceived as a threat. The challenge might take shape as a clear, legal withdrawal of recognition or a compelling moment of discrimination or prejudice in which the moral grammar of ableism (Campbell 2010) pronounces a punishing sentence for impropriety. Invalidation may express itself in measurable geographical distance between disabled and non-disabled people; in the play of institutions, politics and economics as power positions people in terms of their access to spaces and resources. Invalidation is the effect of institutionalised patterns of cultural value as they play out in relation to the standing of disabled people. The emotional architecture of social space is symbolised by centre and periphery, belonging and exclusion, value and disvalue, opportunities to f lourish and barriers to being. Hate, for example, not only annihilates the value of its object (Scheler 1973), but embodies the desire to push it out of one’s domain of inf luence. Other (mostly) aversive

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emotions are mobilised in the frosty reception of disability and the segregation and exile that follows the dis-valued subject. Pity, fear and disgust are central to the emotional arsenal of invalidation (Hughes 2012b). This trinity of affects constructs disability as an ontological threat to the ‘clean and proper body’. The power of aversive emotions to invalidate enhances the positive values associated with propriety validating its position on the moral high ground as symbol of the right way of being, the guardian of what ought to be. Emotional repulsion and the binary of right and wrong are twin dispositions in the acts of (dis)valuing that give rise to the transformation of impairment into disability. Invalidation, be it an experience or set of experiences related to cultural, political, social, economic, emotional or aesthetic life, is ontological. Its depersonalised object is stripped of value, objectified, made abject. Positioned outside the categorical imperative of personhood as ‘end-in-itself ’, disability becomes a target for the normate mob or an object of corrective practices. Impairment may be represented as not quite human. Disabled people may be reduced to objects of moral indifference or exploited as instrument in the ethical games of property and propriety. Not quite human may not be an injunction to mistreat, but it is sufficient to legitimate it. The epithet not quite constitutes a tableau of ontological inferiority. It addresses the f lawed agency of the vulnerable other, the wounds that are more-or-less visible; the abject, messy matter from which the ‘clean and proper’ body will, ‘understandably’, recoil. Deficit notions of humanity announce normate superiority. Not quite makes a shattered, impure opposite from a shade of difference: It transforms ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ into extraordinary, abnormal and unnatural. The sub-human is the embodied basis of validity and invalidation; its twisted logic makes impairment a standard bearer of the improper. Invalidation embodies a double process of moral evaluation that operates, in temporal and cultural terms, with simultaneity: On the one hand, there is the promotion of a valid, desired, hegemonic, able, natural, taken-for-granted subjectivity, and on the other, the demotion of an abject, inferior and unnatural embodied subject marked by distance from propriety and validity. The culturally significant moral binary evokes Foucault’s famous ‘dividing practices’; the organising power of the norm and its capacity to objectivise those that it creates outside of itself (Tremain 2005: 6). Invalidation works through an ontological binary of ‘natural’ bodies that sorts negative from positive, chaff from wheat. The process is always relational, an encounter between disability and non-­d isability or between parallel or similar binary tropes that ref lect the norm and its abasement. In developing the concept of invalidation to examine the history of disability, I have broken it down into two heuristic constituents designed to shape the concrete analysis that follows. I distinguish between strategies and repertoires of invalidation. Strategies of invalidation, broadly speaking, take two general forms. They are constituted by two distinctive social responses, or approaches, to impairment that are used by normate communities to respond to the presence of impairment.

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They are best framed by a nomenclature used originally by anthropologist Claude L évi-Strauss (1992) to investigate the nature of ‘host’ reactions to strangers, persons or events perceived by a social group as exogenous threats. Bauman (1997) argues that social groups develop anthropoemic or anthropophagic strategies to deal with outsiders who appear to challenge cherished values and norms. At the core of these strategies is the desire to cope with the unease felt by the arrival – in one’s hallowed space – of the friction and threat of unfamiliarity (Hughes 2002). The rub may be territorial and come in the shape of the migrant, or existential and come in the shape of impairment, or both, in the case of the figure of the disabled migrant (Hughes 2015). An anthropoemic strategy involves social practices that vomit ‘strangers, banishing them from the limits of the orderly world and barring them from all communication with those inside’ (Bauman 1997: 18). These practices are founded on intolerance and resentment, as opposed to what Kant called a politics of hospitality (Hughes 2015). As we shall see in the substantive chapters to follow, exile, exclusion, segregation and extermination of disabled people are not uncommon responses to disability. Root and branch disposal, banishment, abandonment or confinement behind high walls of able insularity are ubiquitous reactions to non-normative embodiment. This strategy, and the practices of expulsion and ejection that it embraces, requires moral justification to subdue the atrocities inherent in its accomplishment. Repertoires of invalidation (see the following section) provide the cultural representations and evaluations of impairment that make anthropoemic conduct into custom and habit to which Hume attributed ‘all belief and reasoning’ (1740/1975: 115) in history. The view that impairment is good to mistreat is the axiological template that accompanies the anthropoemic approach to invalidation. A second strategy or approach to disability involves anthropophagy. This is related to cannibalism or self-consumption, or to the re-affirmation of self in the transformation of the other into a bad copy of oneself. Invalidation works in this case by the absorption or assimilation of anomaly into the habitual, comfortable consensus of collective cultural experience. Anthropophagy attempts to restore the natural attitude and common-sense understanding of the normate community that has been disrupted by the introduction of difference. An anthropophagic response to impairment focuses on its erasure through measures that attempt to make it identical to non-disability. It is based on the transformation of the other into the same by blending or by correcting the corporeal excess associated with impairment. Rehabilitation, meaning to make at home, and other traditions of disability normalisation fall into this category. HenriJacques Stiker (1999: 128) argues that rehabilitation ‘marks the appearance of a culture that attempts to complete the act of identification, of making identical’. He goes on to argue that ‘this act will cause the disabled to disappear and with them all that is lacking, in-order-to drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single social whole’. Correctional logic seeks to right what is ‘wrong’ or has ‘gone wrong’ or to pass wrong off as right with a prosthetic trick. It covers up

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the problem by normalising it. Its modus operandi is to sanitise or to sweep the mess under the carpet. Difference is subdued or ameliorated by anthropophagy. Impairment is swallowed, consumed, covered-up, painted over. It is disguised so that it may ‘pass-as-normal’ (Goffman 1969). Institutions may be mobilised to do the work of correction. Systems of concern like charity, welfare and medicine are deployed to make impairment tolerable and render disability good to be good to. Paternalism, pity, piety and professional objectivity are invoked in these correctional contexts. Anthropoemic and anthropophagic approaches to disability are the strategic possibilities that the ableist imaginary calls upon to invalidate disabled people. The appetite to strategically invalidate is supported by repertoires that legitimate its implementation. Repertoires of invalidation are representations – and, simultaneously, evaluations – of impairment that are fashioned from the moral geography of the known and the unknown. The known is populated by experience and imagination; the unknown, only by the latter. Repertoires of invalidation colonise the imaginary with the ‘prejudicial wisdom’ that the habituated forces of validity carry from past to present and they forge the fictive character of the other. As Edward Said (2003: 54) argued: ‘All kinds of suppositions, associations and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own’. Fear and myth are parents to the unfamiliar. People and places beyond one’s ken, the dark vale of strangers, are brought, imaginatively to life. Fear resides in the unknown. it is a groomed space of emotional and cognitive fantasy. One need not seek out the stranger to clarify who he or she might be, for the stock of hostility and prejudice that custom has weaved is a proxy for knowledge in the social archive. The unknown is replaced by a spectre of familiarity. When we speak of the unfamiliar, fiction permeates fact. Said (1993: 58) describes this process: Something patently foreign and distant acquires … a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely novel or as completely well known; a new median category emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing. The stranger is wrapped in a cloak fabricated by the dominant self. It gives shape to what the valued-self does not wish to be. A phantasm or illusionary likeness is manufactured from buried fear and built up over time by layers and accretions of prejudice. An imaginary of crudely contrived, prejudicial repertoires of invalidation develops and it puts the stranger in the dock. Repertoires of invalidation are pulled from the magic hat of habit and custom and dusted down in revitalised distortions that announce their wisdom and currency for present purposes. The normate point of view articulates disability by drawing on an established repository of jaundiced fiction. One can appeal once more to Said. Though he describes the relationship between Occident and the Orient, his words apply

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equally well to the relationship between disability and non-disability: The ‘­articulation’, between dominant self and repressed other, he argues, ‘is the prerogative not of the puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries’ (Said 1993: 58). The non-disabled imaginary is the source of repertoires of invalidation and the negative representations and evaluations that have pursued disabled people across time. Ideas about disability are generated in the imaginary by ability. Knowing and speaking about disability with authority has been the prerogative of non-disabled people. In their accounts of disability, normative agents articulate embodied hegemony. The non-disabled imaginary is sustained by fear of the disabled arrivant. The putative visit of the existential stranger/sibling brings, it is imagined, a threat. The curse of physical, mental or sensory deterioration is embodied in the stranger and impairment is articulated as anomaly, deficit, decline and suffering. The harbingers of doom and death knock on the door, but they are not granted leave to enter. It is important to note that repertoires of invalidation not only represent, they also evaluate. The fear-fouled imaginary, with unbounded latitude for signification, representation and evaluation, is the psychic space of moral economy. It is populated with bile and bluster, with visceral, calumniating barbs of invalidity that have been mustered by the gods of fear, pity and disgust. Slave moralities and resentment of difference prosper. The improper is found in this swamp of familiar unfamiliarity. It is the place where monsters prowl, an inferno where the most detestable enemies burn. It is where those who love to slaughter what they refuse to understand gather and consort. Disability disavowal and dehumanisation are encamped at the borders of propriety. The moral economy of validity and invalidity, as it works itself out in the rough and smooth of social relations, embraces representational simplicity: Easily enunciated, bifurcated moral categories emerge from the murky imaginary and its calcified ‘principles’ of evaluation and judgement. In the encounter between disability and non-disability, the latter is elevated, the former demeaned. These judgements are immanent in the weighty presence of ableist reductionism (Bolt 2012: 290–292). Impairment, deficit of body, mind or sense, is a ‘metanarrative’ (Bolt 2012: 292) of over-determined moral significance. The heavy load of pejorative representation validates the normate self in the same moment that it annihilates the disabled subject. The ‘meta-narrative’ of impairment refers not to actual figures of f lesh and blood, but to archetypes, stereotypes and phantasms that have been transformed by custom and habit into petrified monuments to calamity and disrespect: The ‘meta-narrative’ of impairment splinters into invalidating repertoires: Mendicancy summarises blindness: Women with intellectual impairments are promiscuous: Empathy, that quintessential attribute of good human nature, is absent in autistic people (Baron-Cohen 2001). ‘Dwarfs’ are natural entertainers; clowns; stand-up, fall-down comics; stupidity is, or has been, liberally applied in

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the ableist imaginary, to disabled people with a range of impairments to speech, hearing and intelligence, including people with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. The ‘cripple’ – as we well ‘know’ from the annals of representation that have been rolled up into insuperable truth – is a vindictive and vengeful figure. In the able imaginary of moral evaluation, impairments are natural, taken for granted, trans-historical deficits. Their pejorative representations and evaluations are infinitely f lexible, transmutable into stereotypes, stigmas and prejudices that have been hewn through the ages and familiarised in custom. Disabled people may be de-humanised by repertoires of invalidation at different levels of social organisation; singular or multiple, varying with the extent to which impairment troubles the dominant, culturally concrete definition of valid humanity. Impairment, as cultural artefact, can be invalidated axiologically, at the economic, social, political, legal, religious or emotional level. In Sparta’s militarised polity, the primary processes of invalidation occur at the political and legal levels. In Athens, aesthetic and ethical impropriety dominate conceptions of impairment. Roman law legislates invalidity and buries its reputation in the vigorous politics of imperial spectacle. Christendom wraps impairment in sin and uses it to mediate its redemptive world view. Modernity chisels validity and invalidity from the fetish of the productive citizen and, in its neoliberal form, fabricates the figure of the welfare scrounger, a f lawed character up-graded from the Early Modern period, who is represented as a counterfeit citizen (Hughes 2015). Whatever the primary marker of disabled people’s impropriety, levels of invalidation overlap in generic axiological narratives that suggest deficits of being. Invalidation of impairment, at every level, is a dehumanising force in which propriety is found wanting.

Concluding remarks When ‘minor’ acts of invalidation erupt on the skin of the Lebenswelt, or in the lower epidermal layers where the interaction order is formed and sustained, as they do with extraordinary regularity in the lives of disabled people, they do so because their origins run deep in the veins of Western time and place. They f low out through a circulatory system controlled by chambers of ontological separation, in which blood, good and bad, is recognised, sorted and stored. Tom Shakespeare (1994) argued that, for non-disabled people, disability is a ‘dustbin of disavowal’ at the heart of cultural systems of moral regulation; systems that dispose of their rubbish by anthropoemic and anthropophagic strategies. Disability is always available as a potential scapegoat (pharmakos) for the normate community; a tonic collectively consumed by representatives of nomos. Invalidation – in its desertion of tolerance and disposal of human variation as waste – validates. It is a vindication, a celebration of moral worth and the pillars of propriety that hold up the edifice of ableism. It is the other to reason, to beauty, truth, order and justice, the bad blood in the system of circulation is pumped out as problematic, contaminating, emotional ‘excess’: ‘We know that when we enter a story

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about disability, we enter a world of … heart-warming tears, inner triumph, ­m irror-smashing rages, suicide attempts, angels and abjection, saintly compassion, bitterness, troubled relationships and courageous overcoming’ (Stoddard Holmes 2004: 3–4). At least this is the kind of story that the ableist imaginary makes up from the magic ingredients of its unfamiliar familiarity with diversity; its ‘not-­k nowing’ about disability and its use of fictive ontologies as the basis of its narratives of impairment. Melodramatic ingredients that blend the familiar and unfamiliar inform (sic) the non-disabled story of disability. The tale is dense with emotional narratives of ‘aff liction’, contrived sentimentalism and metaphorical excess. The plot annuls the diminished and exacerbates the extraordinary (Garland-Thompson 1997). In the tall tales that make up the story of disability, we encounter ‘ostensive self-definition by negation’ (White 1972: 4). Ability is the benchmark of validity, guide to its ethos and ethic to how people should feel, think, look and act if they want to be on the ‘right’ side of things. Impairment is suffocated by the Western conception of virtue, for it is the fiefdom of propriety. Invalidation makes its presence felt to disabled people objectively in social structure and cultural milieu; in the built environment; and in the segregated and marginalised spaces to which they have become accustomed. The presence of invalidation is also felt by disabled people in the ubiquity of the pejorative assessments and their deficits of cultural capital; in the misrecognitions and negative judgements embedded in and derived from the ableist doxa of belonging. In developing the dialectic of validity and invalidity, I have drawn on the concepts of recognition and ableism and have discussed invalidation in terms of incapacity through confinement and deficit of credibility. I have outlined strategies and repertoires of invalidation as a conceptual preamble to the substantive historical analysis to follow. For this book, the axis of validity and invalidity is in the foreground. ‘How is impairment constituted as invalid in history from Antiquity to the Early Modern period?’ is the central question. How is impairment transformed into disability qua oppression in Western culture as it develops and changes? My research suggests that the moralising processes of ableist propriety that cling to custom and habit, but vary across space and time, are to the fore in transforming impairment into a ‘what not to be’. If one reaches into the habitual common sense consensus of any given ableist social and cultural formation, then the pariah embodiment of disability emerges as a central player in the making of moral economy and the social distribution of propriety and impropriety upon which human validity rests. This is the analytical scaffolding for Part II of the book.

Part I: Concluding remarks The introduction invited consideration of the harm, danger and violations that disabled people encounter. Drawing on evidence from contemporary research, I claimed that disabled people were good to mistreat. The ambiguity that, with the Christianisation of Europe, disabled people also became good to be good to, set the

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scene for an axiological investigation of representations of validity and invalidity in the Occident. I also claimed that the ‘calamity’ of disability was incomprehensible without consideration of normate hegemony and its invalidating locus in the story of impairment. In Chapter 1, I outlined the methodological imperatives of historical sociology as applied to disability, which included a confession of standpoint, an outline of the interpretive utility of new historicism, and an analytical vindication of the ideas of Proprium and moral economy for a discussion of validity and invalidity. I also argued that a history of disability was an act of recovery of past from present that was indebted to a methodology that treated cultural representations and evaluations of impairment as its raw material. I also suggested that the negative tropos of disability was transferable to intersectional analysis. Chapter 2 explored the contemporary developments in the idea of disability which I divided into first wave radicalism dominated by the social model and its fin-de-siècle realignment into CDS. From debates in Disability Studies, I extracted concepts amenable to axiological analysis, including a cultural approach to disability in which barriers to being experienced by disabled people and propagated in the non-disabled imaginary, transformed their impairments into invalidating moral deficits. I used these concepts in Chapter 3 to develop a theory of disability invalidation out of a discussion of recognition and ableism in which I argued that strategies and repertoires of invalidation could provide the tools to develop an axiological analysis of disability history. As I suggested in the methodology, the historical sociology below is pitched in the space between scholarship and activism. If the reputation of impairment has been buried by Western normate hubris, then surely it is just to disinter the corpse and re-examine it.

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Vandeventer Pearman, T. (2010) Women and Disability in Medieval Literature, London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginalisation, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Warner, M. (2003) Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books. Warnock, M. (1976) Imagination, London, UK: Faber and Faber. Watermeyer, B. (2013) Towards a Contextual Psychology of Disablism, London, UK: Routledge. Watson, N., McKie, L., Hughes, B., Hopkins, D. and Gregory, S. (2004) (Inter) Dependence, needs and care: The potential for disability and feminist theorists to develop an emancipatory model, Sociology, 38(2): 331–350. White, H. (1972) Forms of wildness: Archaeology of an idea, pp. 3–38 in E. Dudley and M. Novak (Eds.) The Wild Man Within: An Image of Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Wolbring, G. (2008) The politics of ableism, Development, 51: 252–258. Wolbring, G. (2012) Expanding ableism: Talking down the ghettoization of the impact of disability studies, Societies, 2(3): 75–83. Wright, E.O. (1995) Envisioning Real Utopias, London, UK: Verso. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zola, I. (1982) Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

PART II

Disability in history: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Early Modernity Part II: Introductory remarks In what follows, I examine cultural narratives that represent and evaluate ­impairment in a moral light. Each section in the three chapters that follow outlines and analyses a repertoire of this order in the context of the established Proprium of the period. The repertoires focus on the ableist distribution of propriety and impropriety as they are manifest in the moral economy of the period under consideration and on the forms of disability disposal – anthropoemic and anthropophagic – that arise from the pejorative intonations of the repertoires. I demonstrate that while disability in ancient Greece and Rome is good to mistreat, in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, disabled people are both good to mistreat and good to be good to. The relationship between able Western culture and disability is fraught with tension. Invalidation of the latter in the former is largely a moral matter, insofar as impairment is portrayed as the other in the Occidental love affair with reason, beauty, truth, order and justice.

4 DISABILITY IN ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

Jupiter then instructed Hercules, who had travelled the whole world over and seemed familiar with every nationality, to go and find out his nationality. Hercules was badly shaken by the first sight of him – he hadn’t been scared by all possible monsters yet. Seeing the strange sort of appearance and the weird walk and hearing the hoarse and incomprehensible voice that belonged to no land creature, but seemed more appropriate to a seamonster, he thought his thirteenth labour had arrived. On a closer inspection, it appeared to be something like a man. (Seneca, quoted in Morton, Braund and James 1998: 286)

Introduction The quasi homo – something like a man – portrayed in the passage from Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii – written (probably) by Seneca (5bc–65ad) – is none other than the Emperor Claudius (10bc–54ad). His bid for deification is satirised. The text tells of a failed bid for glorification. Hercules, the epitome of physical strength, power and beauty, is puzzled. How could a contorted and crooked creature, like the one standing before him, try to make a case to reside among the gods in Elysium? In the classical world, the apotheosis of a man with physical impairments is beyond comprehension (for detailed accounts of Seneca’s reaction to Claudius’ claim for deification, see Braund 1996; Coffey 2013). Claudius gets a hearing, but in the end is dragged off to Hades. His sovereignty and autonomy as emperor on earth (41–54ad) counts for nothing. His ‘crooked’ stature excludes him from deified space. For an ordinary mortal with impairment, protections of citizenship are near impossible to secure. Ancient Greece invents citizenship, but confers it sparingly.

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It draws boundaries of belonging, invoking a ‘dialectical process between inclusion and exclusion, between those deemed eligible for citizenship and those who are denied the right to become members’ (Kivisto and Faist 2007: 1). To share in public life and ritual, one must be ‘fit’, in mind and body. In the Greek city states, citizenship is limited to a fraction of the population; a core community; a corporation of privileged men, who qualify because they are ‘able’, to fight, to vote, to own land and to hold office. Credentials such as these push Greek democracy toward aristocracy; towards rule by the best, governance by excellence, by a moral minority. In Athens, even under democratic rule, women, children, slaves and resident aliens did not qualify for citizenship. In Rome, full citizenship was the privileged status of property-owning males. Women and freedmen had partial citizenship, and few rights, and slaves were excluded. Garland (2010: 31) argues that, in classical culture, one cannot conclude from the available evidence whether or not disabled people were prevented from claiming ‘the same political rights as the rest of the citizen body and were entitled to stand for public office or whether their rights would have been curtailed de facto if not de jure’. Disability – per se – may not have been grounds for refusal of citizenship. Its association with lack of worth and diminished propriety, however, meant that the kind of treatment a citizen might expect did not match the experience of oppression and abuse to which disabled people were condemned. No-one, rich or poor, with a visible impairment escaped the moral excoriations of ableism. The palsied body of Claudius was maltreated by his predecessor Caligula (41– 12bc), who turned his uncle into a laughing stock. Pelted with olives by plebes! Thrown into the Tiber! The butt of jokes! He lived a life of humiliation until his humiliations ended with the death of his tormentor. Under the aegis of the Praetorian Guard, Claudius became Emperor of Rome. The mockery, at least to his face, ends. He is no longer weak. He is the most powerful man on the planet. After his death, the mockery resumes. On his way to Hades, Caligula turns up. He claims Claudius as a slave. In Hades, Claudius gets a clerical role in the judiciary. How the mighty are fallen. Hercules’ puzzlement at the appearance of Claudius at the gates of the gods is conditioned by a deeply negative reaction to the statesman’s impairments. Seneca deplored Claudius’ governance of Rome. His incompetence was evidenced by his ‘monstrosity’. His failure to control his twitching body and faltering speech were symbolic of political disorder. In Apocolocyntosis, Seneca welcomes the end of Claudius’ misshapen, crooked reign and the restoration of order and reason embodied in the youth and beauty of his successor, Nero. Seneca’s (ableist) argument from physiognomy is profoundly f lawed. As an emperor, the comely Nero was a disaster. Claudius was the better politician, by far. Another compelling clue to the social and political dislocation of disability from the core community in Greece and Rome is manifest in a claim made by Herodotus (484–425bc). ‘The father of history’ argues that the first and foremost qualification for human fulfilment, or eudemonia, lies in ‘freedom from deformity’ (quoted in Shapiro 1999: 153). For Herodotus, the good life and

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disability are incompatible. Propriety and impairment are curious, if not irreconcilable, bedfellows. Unruly physical constitution is not compatible with ontological or political integrity. Hercules reaction to Claudius follows this pattern of belief; one that sustains the ontological invalidation of ‘crooked’ and contorted embodiment. Deformity in Antiquity constitutes a prima facie case for unequal treatment and subordination. Exclusion from the juridical rights granted to those deemed worthy of citizenship may not have been a formal space in which disabled people found themselves, but their marginalisation in a culture dominated by an aesthetic curriculum of intellectual and physical excellence is beyond doubt. Herder refers to Greek civilisation as the zenith of human embodiment in which ‘mankind reached its most beautiful youthful f lowering’ (Sikka 2011: 16). Deformity upsets the harmony and balance of nature and society. As a blot on the landscape, one cannot concede equality to it; certainly not before the tribunal of lay morality. To do so would be to let unhealthy and unwholesome contaminants penetrate the polity, to embrace a potential contagion, to esteem a way of being that epitomised disorder, to open the gates to the barbarian. Disabled people – on the view proposed by Herodotus – cannot be accepted as morally competent actors. They have no route to a full and happy life. They cannot become eudemon. In classical culture, the journey towards excellence depends on a sound body in a sound mind, on physical and intellectual virtue, on what the Greeks called arete. The basic template of virtue is palpably absent from the lives of disabled people. To be without the means to moral agency is to be mired in a struggle to be included, not just in the political and social community but, ontologically, in the family of humanity. By conf lating non-normative difference in body or mind with a deficit of virtue and suffering, Antiquity removes from disabled people their entitlement to a f lourishing and fulfilling life (Carlson 2010: 163–187). Impairment is narrated as a corporeal marker that raises ethical doubt about the proper constitution of the human. Seneca’s portrayal of Claudius in Apocolocyntosis is much more than a satirist’s trivial ridicule of a ‘deformed’ emperor. It is an essay on the importance of propriety; a ref lection on the aesthetic of perfection. It outlines the centrality of embodied virtue or arete to the health and moral standing of individual and community. The deformed emperor brings the polity into disrepute. He represents constitutional chaos. A ‘crooked’, ‘contorted’ ruler is a sign of the moral degeneracy of the state (Morton, Braund and James 1998). A ruler must be straight and upright. In this chapter, I argue that arete establishes a moral grammar of ableism that underpins the invalidation of disability in the classical world. Arete organises the moral economy. In vitiating disability as life lived beyond the possibility of propriety, arete legitimates an anthropoemic approach to impairment. The community should be protected from its disturbing, polluting presence. Impairment is a biological predisposition to failure in the journey to realise a life of virtue. Disposing of impairment serves the cause of beauty, truth, order, reason and justice, the ideal raw material out of which the good life is formed and developed.

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Extermination and exile constitute standard ways of dealing with bodies that are articulated as incompatible with virtue and propriety. Claudius, citizen of Rome, formerly ruler of the known world, in knocking on the gates of the kingdom of the immortal, where men of far less wit and wisdom had been offered easy entry, is received as a joke: His body, his speech, his posture, his appearance – the material manifestations of his moral disposition – invalidate his case for admission.

Arete: The contours of classical propriety A definition of arete would include virtue, skill, prowess, pride, ­excellence, valour and nobility, but these words taken individually or collectively do not fulfil the meaning of arete (Miller 2004: V11) One might begin a discussion of arete with Miller’s criteria or with the four criteria of classical virtue – wisdom, courage, justice and temperance that are articulated, inter alia, in Stoic philosophy and Plato’s Republic as the templates of moral action. Though each can be translated into able agendas, I am drawn towards the measure of the good life as it is manifest in the valorised, concatenated beliefs about the properties of the enduring moral self; the lodestones of cultural worth and moral excellence: Beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. In classical Western Antiquity, one’s relation to these ideals configures the presence or absence of virtue and propriety. Tanya Titchkosky (2003: 263) argues that ‘culture organizes the lives of disabled people in a devalued way’. The shape of the ‘devalued way’ ref lects the lodestones of cultural worth; the ‘valued ways’ that form the pillars of propriety in any given historical period. In Antiquity, arete is a particularly weighty lodestone. It is the central source of the ‘aristocratic’ conception of moral embodiment. Arete – a term much used by Homer – means virtue or moral excellence. It is the mainstay of moral economy in classical society. More particularly [arete] is the virtue governing social interactions and good citizenship or leadership. In the world of the Iliad and Odyssey, arete is understood as that set of skills and aptitudes which enable someone — paradigmatically, a noble warrior — to function successfully in his social role. The key virtues of the Homeric warrior are courage and practical intelligence, which enable him to be an effective “speaker of words and doer of deeds”. (Barney 2011: no page number) Sound body and sound mind are the basic prerequisites of arete. They are the constitutional properties that disvalue physical and intellectual impairments. Hyde (2010) uses the notion of arete as a synonym for goodness and virtue and for the desire to aspire to perfection. The conf lation of ability and virtue is at

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the core of Greek culture. Greek virtue ethics embody an ableist basis: ‘There is a conceptual connection between life and good … it is not the mere state of being alive that can determine good but rather life coming up to some standard of normality’ (Foot 1977: 94). It also reaches beyond this aspiration to a standard of deity. Arete is a normative ideal, the narrative starting point and tribunal for a life well lived. It retains some contemporary resonance: ‘Antiquity may have been in some ways normative in “our” sense and “we” are also quite classical in our adherence to bodily ideals as well as its infinite algebra of self-judgement and other comparison’ (Dolmage 2014: 23). Judgement clings to virtue to find its bearings and virtue appeals to the normative to measure value. Disvalue is set south of the mean. North of it, the sky is no limit for men of great strength, courage, wisdom, intellect and beauty. ‘Noble’ citizens of Greece were expected to embody arete, to strive for fulfilment. Arete was a code and a goal, a process and an end; a pathway to virtue, to redemption. It was the ultimate marker of a moral life, the organising principle of the ethical self. Irreducible to a single value or personal characteristic, arete embraced a range of positive personal traits including, inter alia, wisdom, fortitude, temperance, courage, authority, gravitas, justice, honour, truthfulness and manliness. It was, in the round, as Cicero (106–43bc) suggested, human nature developed to its highest point, the sublime moment when ‘men’ ape gods and overcome the trials through which they must go to be all that they can be. Foucault (1988b) argues that arete, as it should be understood through life in the Roman world in the first and second centuries ad, can be captured by three analytically separate practices: Askesis or ‘mastery of self ’; melete: The process of imagining the unfolding of events and articulating the unfolding to oneself in anticipation of their realisation; and gymnasia: The training and government of the body through a regime of purification and self-enhancement; the daily rituals of ascetic self-management and the renunciation of a pallid life of instant gratification. Arete was the praxis of moral embodiment, the realisation of practical wisdom (phronesis), the ancient route to sublime humanity, the path to eudemonia, to a f lourishing life. To be eudemon was to win the approval of the gods, and arete is the means to this dazzling denouement. Eudemon came by way of the mobilisation of virtue expressed in a life of practical wisdom and extraordinary achievement. It was manifest visibly in one’s physical beauty, strength and learning and in the actualisation of these assets. Effort and renunciation deliver eudemonia. Only the fittest, the finest and the wisest need run the gauntlet of aspiration. Ugliness, impairment, imbecility, insanity were not commensurate with the attributes of a life well lived (Kraut 2010: 4). Plutarch (46–120ad), for example, argued that infirmities are best interpreted in terms of ‘vice and ethical corruption’ (Meeusen 2017: 198). Arete was the goal of moral actors. It was moral agency; the normative habitus in which ‘the brave and the bold’ were expected to excel. It was the surest source of recognition and esteem from fellows. It was the will to be better, worn on the body like a badge of honour, so that everyone knew, at a glance, that they were looking at the shape of propriety. A citizen was expected to learn virtue and

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to make it habit. Arete was a moral curriculum for life; the wings to greatness and glory; the recipe and regimen for a life well lived. It was lived virtue, embodied ethics, the practical distillation by the Greek elite of the teaching of Socrates (470–399bc), Aristotle (384–322bc), Epicurus (341–270bc) and the Stoics: ‘In the ethics of classical Antiquity, the conviction prevailed that only those persons whose modes of action could enjoy social esteem in the polis were able to lead a good life ‘(Honneth 2007: 129). There was a price to pay, however, for those who fell short of the highly prescriptive ontological benchmarks that mapped out the project of the perfectible self. Garland (2010: 12) remarks that the Roman and the Greek perspective on embodiment and culture was based on a narrow, profoundly ethnocentric aesthetic: ‘Any departure from that ideal type, however trivial, was … interpreted as a mark of the despised barbarian, whose attributed physiological defects were regarded as an expression of the latter’s cultural limitations’. Deformity, physical weakness, any indication that body or mind might be less than sound, attracted the suspicion that the barbarians had breached the walls of civilised existence, bringing unruly forms of life into civilised space. There is only one pole of judgement for deformity or defect. It is never good to be good to. It is always good to mistreat. In this section, I examine the axiological priorities of Graeco-Roman culture by examining how some of the pillars of the good life – like beauty and reason – are powerful positive forces in shaping ableist conceptions of propriety and how, for example, narratives of monstrosity are powerful negative allies in the formation of the moral economy of validated and invalidated embodiment. Aesthetics in Antiquity was obsessed with physiognomy, the relationship between the contours of the body and its moral grammar. Human corporeal perfection was anthropomorphically conceived as a vision of deity. The Greek aesthetic established a long and illustrious historical bond between the project of human perfectibility and the invalidation of disability. They were, in the classical world, the two ends of the same rope; the top and bottom rung of the ladder of value. Tobin Siebers (2010: 21–56) describes aesthetics – from a disability perspective – as a practice of ‘human disqualification’. ‘Disqualification’ is ‘a symbolic process’, that ‘removes individuals from the ranks of quality human beings, putting them at risk of unequal treatment, bodily harm and death’ (2010: 23). Aesthetics, in Antiquity, is a moral discourse. It demeans and tyrannises imperfection. Simultaneously, it lauds beauty as a paragon of virtue. The Hellenic arts are a hymn to beauty. The classical Western tradition that unites beauty with virtue propagates an ableist ‘aesthetics of oppression’ (Hughes 1999; 2000) and fosters a profoundly violent estrangement from impairment. ‘Aesthetics’, to cite Siebers (2010: 25) again, ‘is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange and frightening’; more so when it is raised to a moral organising principle of culture and a central pillar of virtue. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) – at the height of German Romanticism – described ancient Greece as ‘an image of accomplished humanity’

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(Behler 1988: 122). Greece inspired the veneration of beauty. Hellenist Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–1768) depicted Greece as ‘ideal and divine’ because ‘beauty had descended from the realm of heaven and taken its place … under a serene sky, in a magnificent landscape and among beautiful minds and bodies’ (Behler 1988: 122–123). In his classic study, ‘The Glory that was Greece’, Stobart (1911/1962: 18) argued that Greek Culture wallowed ‘in the charm and grace of youth, perfectly fearless and serving a religion that largely consisted in health and beauty’. In squaring beauty and value, Antiquity provided exceptionally fertile soil for eugenics and ableism. Classical aesthetics invalidates disability. Constructed on the evaluative foundation of embodied appearance, invalidation is evident in every ‘civilised’ accomplishment of Western classicism. Derived from the Greek aesthetic and the myths of heroic valour, Carlin Barton (2001) describes Rome as the embodiment of ‘contest culture’. In facing an ordeal or a public contest, men built a stock of honour or encountered the barbs of shame. Disabled people were excluded by the elitist concept of competition (Bertling 2015: 12). Contest was for warriors and athletes; for bodies that were whole, not ‘crooked’. To face death, to put one’s body on the line, was the most prestigious route to virtue: ‘In Roman contest culture … to will death was not to defy life but to carve its contours’ (Barton 2001: 43). These contours form the boundaries that separate virtue and shame. In virtue, one endures. One passes a test, wins a game or competition, demonstrates the ‘fire in one’s bones’. In virtue, one evokes recognition of one’s ability, one’s nobility. The two are intertwined, in the making and maintenance of one’s ‘ face’ or public persona. Through contest, one demonstrates virtuosity and one’s credentials as an authentic Roman and as a man. In Rome, one is born a male (mas) but, through engagement in honourable acts, one becomes a man (vir). Barton (2001) argues, that although the masculine conception of virtue dissipates, to some considerable extent, by the time of the late Republic and early Empire, Rome should be understood as a resolute, virile, manly, warrior culture in which signs of weakness or vulnerability are nails in the coffin of virtue. The unbowed agent is the epitome of virtue. Others, lesser men wither, socially and morally, in the presence of greatness. The indivisibility of goodness and beauty crushed tolerance of imperfection. Disability was a social, ethical and aesthetic failure. This anthropoemic approach to impairment, the desire to spew it out from the social body, was derived from a moral dogma so prescriptive in outlook that it brooked no challenge to its hegemony. The Emperor Vitellius (15–69ad), who ruled for eight months in 69ad (the year of the four emperors) killed his infant son who was born blind in one eye (Kershaw 2013: 129). The authority (auctoritas) and seriousness (gravitas) of Roman morality was belligerent in its commitment to weed out physical and intellectual weakness, and the Greeks, who sought perfection in everybody and everything, could not tolerate human frailty. Ableism is central to the Greek aesthetic. Love of the body beautiful manifest in sporting contests and sexual relations, in all manner of cultural and social

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practices like, for example, the fixation of Greek sculpture with symmetry and proportion and the myth of the muses that formed the fountain of inspiration in the production of beauty (Destree and Murray 2015). Philosophy was not immune to seduction by beauty. For Plato (427–347bc) and Aristotle, aesthetics and art were not considered, in any profound way, to be sources of value. They are trumped by enduring beauty derived from reason. Plato feared that art, particularly poetry, was a corrupting inf luence. He advocated ‘censorship’ for music and painting, for, he argued, that real beauty transcended these mundane, worldly practices. Beauty was ‘Form’, an ‘Ideal’, not available through sense perception in the real world. It existed in the domain of philosopher kings. It was a product of the divine Demiourgos, the craftsman and creator of all things. It was perfection, divine, sublime, beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. On occasion, we may glimpse ‘Beauty’ in the temporal and concrete world as dark, distant, hints of a reality that ordinary mortals cannot know. The truth of ‘Beauty’ lies in the bounty of reason and the philosophical wisdom that draws one towards its eternal weave. The metaphysical conception of a celestial plane of beauty that only the great minds can penetrate embodied ‘Beauty’ with transcendent moral worth. Platonic ideals did not, in practice, necessarily work against the ‘real world’. They enhanced the cultural mystique and mythological power of beauty. Social actors had little doubt about the moral status of beauty, even if they were only capable of seeing it through the partial sightedness of underdeveloped reason or in the works of art that ennobled their city states. Mind and soul (Psyche) perfected in reason, belonged to the ‘Really Real’ to a realm, beyond the shadowy cave, in the dazzling firmament of Helios where sublime beauty prospered, and perfect vision was restored. To escape the temporality of the soma sema – body as tomb – one had to see beyond base materiality to timeless Truth. By ascending Diotima’s ‘ladder of love’, one climbed beyond the sexual passions of Eros, to the plane of everlasting loveliness and perfection. Ideal abstractions formed the gilded ladder to the absolute. Ugliness and deformity were marred by the transcendent world of Platonic Beauty – the realm of pure thought. Imperfection was washed away, and the ‘idea’ was realised as f lawless representation. The tropos of this utopic world of Hellenic, hygienic purity stood in marked contrast to the loathsome banalities of ugliness that were marred by ‘evil, ignorance, lies … hate, unhappiness, waste and destruction’ (Synnott 1993: 79). In the Aristotelean tradition, beauty was evident in concrete, objective, natural properties; in the symphonic symbiosis of proportion, symmetry and harmony. Ugliness, likewise, was objective, and expressed itself in disorder, disproportion and in unusual occurrences of nature. Aristotle was deeply interested in deformed nature. While, he concluded, it was not ‘unnatural’ per se, it, nonetheless, transgressed what was common or usual. It offended the ‘law of generative resemblance’ (Aristotle 1956: 767b, 5–6). Nature produced nothing in vain. Some bodies and minds, however, were marked by excess or deficiency. They withered before the tribunal of the golden mean. His infamous,

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misogynistic description of women as deformed males was a thick example of deficiency in nature; a description that threw disability and gender together in an intimate coupling of nefarious representation (for accounts of the gendered nature of disability in feminist scholarship see, for example, Garland-Thomson 1997: Vandeventer Pearman 2010: Wendell 1996). Atherton (1998: x) argues that deformity and defect are ‘defined in relation to … communities and to their standards of what is good, acceptable, normal or natural … in different times, places and cultures or from different viewpoints within a culture’. In his embryological studies, Aristotle argued that the qualities of excess and deficiency had their origins in the volume of semen involved in the act of reproduction. Too much or too little explained the two types of corporeal corruption – disability and gender. The association of womanhood with deformity echoed down the centuries in outrages perpetrated against disabled women. The association turned on the male body as the gold standard of value, pivot of human ‘qualification’ and ‘disqualification’. The criteria of disqualification, deformity and defect, compelling tropes for impairment in the classical age, were signposts of excess or deficiency. Ableism in Antiquity projected corporeal corruption onto disabled people. It classified bodies into moral opposites; good and bad, strong and weak, wellformed and ill-shaped. The binaries corresponded to the rungs and the top and the bottom of the ladder of virtue in classical Western society. The Greek culture of physical exercise sustained the binaries in the curriculum of excellence in which arete was practiced. Neither excess nor deficiency were inscribed on the athlete’s body. He was the prototype of beauty, grace, discipline, masculinity and the epitome of the Olympian moment of competitive triumph. In the ancient curriculum, body and mind were enabled to f lourish through contest and dialectics. Sparta was exemplary. Milton (1608–1674) suggested that the legendry Spartan system of ‘rearing’ (agoge) was training for war but, as Kennell (2007) argues, the gymnasium was, first and foremost, a space for inculcating virtue. Sculptural, representations of athletic bodies – despite Plato’s dismissal of them as imitations of ideal beauty – suggest ‘self-confident calm: they know we admire them’ (Most 1995: 1). They are chiselled morality. Splendid appearance and ethical interiority make the classical statue an object of wonder or thauma: The captivating nature of Greek Statuary is in the interplay between surface and depth. The physical surface suggests completeness and yet beneath lies the interior ethos or character … in human terms kalos kagathos designated the connection between kalos (physical beauty) and agathos (virtue) and in the same way a statue’s thauma could herald both its surface qualities and the nature of the divine (or the divine like) that it encapsulated. (Barrow 2015: 95) Gymnasts strived for divine embodiment, including the inner moral fortitude, manifest in statuary. Greek city states, of metropolitan significance, had

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gymnasia. They built them to foster physical beauty and virtue, the glove and hand of personal growth. In these schools for the development of skills, heroism, intelligence and wisdom, young men came in search of eudemonia. Athens boasted three great stadia; the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Kynosarges. They were built to glorify propriety, to institutionalise corporeal and intellectual excellence, to develop sound bodies and minds, to stimulate competition and to test, as the Spartans loved to do, the capacity for endurance. To these privileged spaces, virtuous bodies f locked. In their hallowed halls, they practiced the skills and absorbed the wisdom that would make them worthy of esteem, honour, reputation, perhaps, immortality. One thing was abundantly clear: These great gymnasia were not designed to accommodate impairment. ‘Paralympians’ were inconceivable. One had to embody the virtues of courage and skill that with training and experience could lead to Olympian greatness. ‘Participation of people with physical and mental disabilities was not compatible with the ideological foundations of the ancient Olympic Games’ (Bertling 2015: 11). There was no place for ‘defect’ in these educational palaces where virtue sought to surpass itself. They were ‘temples of perfection’ (Chaline 2015). The root of the word gymnasium is gymnos meaning naked. Students trained and competed without clothes in spectacles of the f lesh that celebrated the beauty, power and sublime Eros of male corporeality. The naked body competing in the gymnasium was the ultimate cultural object of desire; the beautiful boy. It was assumed that only he – unity of beauty (kalos) and virtue (agathos) – could both please and win. In athletic ritual, impairment embodied a double deficiency. The audience at a sporting festival could not love an unsightly participant. Visual anomaly spoilt the homoerotic feast of f lesh and was, by the rules of ‘physiognomy’, a hopeless contestant. The role of the athlete was ‘agonistic’, to win out in combat through the application of power and strength. He must embody the nobility of contest and the codes of physical comportment that no stigmatised body could realise. A disabled boy could not (of necessity) convincingly perform ‘the recipes for an appropriate attitude regarding self ’, nor demonstrate the ‘authenticity’ (Goffman 1963: 111) required to act out the social or sexual demands of the spectacle of contest where strength, grace, beauty and power were the stakes. Athletics was a game (of life) for peacocks, not ugly ducklings. The latter were automatically disqualified from participation. Virtue – in the gymnasium or in games – was acted out by masculine muscularity that bubbled in firm folds from a scaffold of skeletal perfection. Greeks and Romans believed that ‘a vital state arises from the innate strength of its citizens’ (Winzer 1997: 82). Gymnasia were a practical manifestation of this belief. The body, the site of competitive might, was the tool for one man to test himself against another. The Greek ideal of war was not army against army, but two individuals in hand to hand combat. In the Iliad, the great warriors Hector and Achilles are pitted against one another in a fight to the death. Absolute clarity as to victor and vanquished was required. To the f leetest, the strongest, he who possessed the more guile and grace, went the spoils. Athletics

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and warfare were crafts for great physical specimens. Impairment entered into it only as f­ailure; an outcome for weaker participants. Impairment was defeat, loss, failure, a fall from grace, the destruction of one’s beauty and the humbling of one’s power: ‘In most Greek competitions, there were only winners and losers, not runners-up. Coubertin’s sentimental notion that all that really matters is that one participates is quite foreign to the true ethos of ancient Greek athletics’ (Most 1995: 5). One did not go to war to lose. The body, militarised from youth, armoured by virtue (Kennell 2007) was the agent of glory and conquest. Epinician poems or victory odes were not composed by great bards, like Pindar (517–438bc) in honour of those who did not take the Panhellenic laurels. Respectful comparisons with the gods were not made of those who finished behind the winner; nor, even, of the warrior who emerged wounded and depleted from the real ‘sport ‘of war. There was more nobility in death that in wounds that diminished one’s appearance and vitality. The athletic warrior body was most resplendent in-the-moment of victory; ‘object not only of admiration and desire but … of religious veneration and dread’ (Most 1995: 9). He was puffed up with virtue, a microcosm of the mighty body of the tyrant who had the power to make the Law as he saw fit, or who returned home, as many Roman Emperors did, a conquering hero, to f ly, momentarily more secure, on the wings of absolute sovereignty. Victory exuded virtue, its signifiers – strength, beauty, fortitude, courage, discipline – were the rallying points of the Greek ideal of athleticism and the spectacular triumphalism of Rome. There was no room for physical deficit or anomaly in the great moments of ancient history. The great and the good, the fastest and the fittest dominated the narratives of conquest and achievement. Bodies that ran and jumped and threw and wrestled and struck down their enemies with vicious blows were the icons of moral order. Splendour and virtue were evident in every ripple of muscle and every glint of the shining armour of victorious empire. In bellicose, patriotic intensity, virtue shone. Moments of heroic glory captured the ill-fated who were diminished, warped by the presence of greatness. The trappings of moral agency – to whom they belonged, to whom they did not – and the moments in which virtue was celebrated, left a long shadow of diminished cultural capital. The unity of beauty and goodness in the virtuous persona carried ‘as its counterpoint the denigration of persons with different bodies’ (Swartz and Watermeyer 2008: 189). And, one might add, persons with different minds. Virtue, in the Greek world of athletics, education and warfare was not simply a matter of physical power and beauty. It required a second pillar to secure the edifice; a skillset in which corporeal splendour was accompanied by wisdom. Virtue or arete had sound body and sound mind as its prerequisites. The centrality of philosophy and reason in Greek culture and education meant that, for the aspiring eudemon, an intensive and broad curriculum that inspired intellectual and spiritual excellence was essential. The gymnasium doubled as a scholarly space, designed around the cultivation of physique and reason. Excellence in mind and body went hand in hand. Of the

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three gymnasia in Athens, the Academy may well have been the most important. It was here in the fourth century bc that Plato founded his School. Socrates was a frequent visitor to the Academy and no stranger to the Kynosarges, home of Cynicism, or the Lyceum, the academic seat of Aristotle who taught there from 355bc. His peripatetic followers walked around its covered colonnades engaging in argument and debate, initiating the long-standing link between physical mobility and philosophical wisdom. The celebration of these great bastions of virtuous human agency, were the foundations of the dark spaces of heteronomy to which the less fortunate of body and mind were consigned In the palaces for the development of mind and body, one could find many a fine specimen for whom the epithet kalos kagathos was fitting; handsome, fit, educated, morally wholesome, aristocratic, gentlemen engaged in a curriculum of excellence who were working to be eudemon. Beauty, education, good character and intelligence were essential to membership of the gymnasium and to the palaestra or wrestling hall. These were not inclusive spaces. They provided clear markers of difference (Golden 1998). In the gymnasium, there was no place for women or slaves, madmen or cripples. No place for reason’s others. Arete came out of the Homeric tradition. It was associated with demonstrations of heroic ability and competence; feats of skill that drew upon knowledge and understanding (Miller 2004). One was expected to master athletics, music, philosophy, science and rhetoric. These were the noble subjects, the academic content that underpinned pedagogy in the gymnasia. The curriculum for excellence and the path to honour, authority, dignity and truthfulness were united in arete. It was a project that inspired the aggressive, aristocratic ambitions of the Greek city states and it was founded on the moral hegemony of a ‘master morality’ (Nietzsche 1977: 175) that marked out the very essence of propriety and ontological purity. Impairment, constructed as its stark contrast, signified ‘what not to be’. Arete described, by default, the contours of ontological otherness of deficit and f law, chaos and disorder. As Nietzsche pointed out (1993: 181); ‘every aristocratic morality is intolerant … it counts intolerance itself among the virtues under the name of “justice”’. There is no room for anomaly or amorphia (formlessness). It will be treated with severity’. And so, it was in Greece and Rome! The Romans were less inclined to sport than the Greeks that they so admired. Gymnastics and exercise were principally domains of the soldierly classes. It was embedded in their lives – professionalised under the Empire – as training for warfare and conquest. It was embodied – as brute force and martial skill – in the figure of the gladiator. Physical exercise in Roman society was preparation for bloodletting and spectacular entertainment. While it is true to say that, ‘the appeal of ancient sport, both Greek and Roman, was visceral, visual, and vulgar’ and that ‘both sport and spectacle were popular, physical, and pagan’ (Kyle 2007: 22), the Romans were more inclined to spectacle than sport. Yet at the heart of spectacle, be it circus, chariot race or the gladiatorial arena, were powerful athletic bodies; people of stature, personifications of the world’s greatest power. Gladiatorial games were important cultural spectacles that sustained

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the ‘Roman sense of identity’ (Carter 2009: 165). Spectacular entertainment ref lected the might of empire. Sanguinary force – the raw power of Proprium – was evident in every f leshy cut and thrust. Spectacle was not immune to slain and mutilated bodies. It mimicked the fate of barbarian hordes being put to the sword by Roman legions. The spectacles began with corporeal power, whole and unsullied and, in the end, the dead bodies of the vanquished and mutilated were cleared away as the state – symbolically sound in mind and body, wisdom and arms – celebrated its triumph. The phrase attributed to the poet Juvenal (Dates unknown) in Book IV: Satire X (10.356), ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ is usually translated as ‘a sound mind in a sound body’. Given his scornful rejection of all forms of social deviance, one might expect that Juvenal’s phrase represents the hegemonic mores of his day as they relate to normate self and personhood. Through his immemorial aphorism, Juvenal maps the basic sensibilities of arete as they traversed Greek and Roman cultures. It is to the end of soundness in stature and thought that Romans practiced ‘techniques of self ’; vigilance and action designed to tackle ‘all the disturbances of the body and mind, which must be prevented by means of austere regimen’ (Foucault 1988b: 41). The practices of virtue that the Greeks called arete were restructured in Rome, but its ontological markers remained remarkably similar; reason and physical strength, a perfect fusion of cognition and muscle, embodied in the masculine frame. Aristotle may have got it right when he contended that the greatest virtue was to know thyself. The epistemological insight, however, did not contend with the Western psyche to which he contributed. People disavowed their ontological vulnerability in pursuit of culturally valued attributes. Classical communities were past masters at it. To obscure from view the frailties and limitations of mortal men and project them onto others, was to abjure self-knowledge. The Western psyche was wounded profoundly by its lack of insight. The quest for virtue through perfection in ancient Greece and Rome was the Western template of ableism. At its apex, in pure contradistinction to the monster of irrationality, was reason, which, for the philosophers, was the greatest of all the pillars of virtue. Reason was the guarantor of sound mind, tormentor of chaos, excess, deficiency, deformity, monstrosity. It was the source of validity, benefactor of perfect life and polity and, for the intelligentsia, the greatest anchor of propriety. Greek philosophy privileged reason above all else. Contemporary (postmodern) debate has interrogated the relation between reason and soul (on the one hand) and body and emotion (on the other) with a view to collapsing the stubborn dualisms of classical philosophy (Ward 2007). Reason, in for example Heraclitus’ (540–475bc) view, was the principle that underpinned the universe. The Greek Stoics claimed that deity was nothing other than eternal reason or logos. Rowe (2003: 122) argues, summarising Plato’s corpus, that ‘the victory of reason over unreason, order over disorder, has every claim to be called properly “platonic”’. The virtuous nature of reason, on this view, lies in its capacity to exorcise chaos. The Greek notion of reason is teleological. Reason is in nature

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and man, but only man is, as Aristotle argued, a rational animal, and therefore only ‘he’, through reason, can unlock its secrets. Aristotle brought the Stoical notion of reason down to earth by arguing that logos is ‘reasoned discourse’, the first (though not necessarily the only) building block of a persuasive argument and the foundation of scientific understanding. In ethics, he argues that eudemonia, a worthwhile life, can only be realised under the canopy of reason. Reason and virtue are inseparable. The Roman Stoic Seneca, is his Moral Letters to Lucullus, wrote: A person is good whose reason is well developed and right and fitted to what human nature wills. This is called virtue; this is what we refer to as the honourable and is the one and only true human good. Since reason alone can perfect a human being, it is only a perfected reason that brings happiness. Because it is the only true source of human good, it is the only true source of human fulfilment. (Quoted in Miller and Reeve 2015: 430) It stands to reason, that in classical philosophy, irrationality or a deficit in reason is a scandal; a byword for chaos and disorder and the handmaid of vice and unhappiness. In the classical tradition, madness is associated with ‘visible signs’ of ‘startling or otherwise unaccountable behaviour’ with ‘objects of scorn to be avoided in the streets and excluded from the temple’ (Kromm 2002: 1). In Greek myth, the Keres personify madness. They ‘invade the body through the open mouth causing madness or blindness – an intriguing equation’ (Kromm 2002: 1). For Plato, madness in the individual is a personal equivalent of a diseased polity, of unruliness and tyranny in the government of human affairs. Though mania might be at times, positively correlated with creativity or the crazed valour of the warrior fighting in defence of a cherished cause, the advice from most proponents of the value of reason was that the frenzy of the passions must be contained and channelled if virtuous reason was to be properly served. If reason was always in the service of arete, madness or unreason were countervailing characteristics that sought to destroy it. In the moral economy of Antiquity, signs of the irrational were weeded-out. Stiker suggests (1999: 44) that the Greeks recognised insanity and intellectual deficit, not only as the antithesis of reason, but also as a form of ‘supernatural interference’ that embodied a ‘seductive obscurity’. ‘Anomalies’ bore the heavy weight of extramundane baggage. ‘Seductive obscurity’ was manifest in the morally negative potency of extraordinary mental constitutions. The non-disabled reaction to disability combined morbid curiosity with anxieties associated with the existential challenge of difference. The prurient desire for ‘monstrous’ spectacle in Rome was matched by the equal and opposite desire to isolate and exterminate anomaly in Greece. Plato in the Laws claims that, ‘the insane should not appear in the city, but each of them shall be kept in the home by those close to him’ (quoted in Stiker 1999: 44). It was not advisable for mentally distressed

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people to venture into the streets of the city states. Abuse, violence and ­v ilification were likely consequences. Segregation – disposal behind closed doors – rather than elimination was applied to irrationality and unreason, though it was ritually trotted out for fun in narrative or reality, if the occasion so demanded. In a culture dominated by a doctrine of virtue focused on a sound mind in a sound body, disorder, physical, mental or sensorial was despised. Reason and beauty were splinted together in a physiognomic trick that served a unified conception of what it meant to be able and to have the opportunity to f lourish. In both Greece and Rome, the standards associated with valorised physical and mental attributes counted significantly towards claims to social standing and reputation. Some were exceptionally focused and detailed in their fine tuning. It is worth returning to a physical indicator of arete to exemplify the masculine minutiae invested in its ideal. The prepuce (or foreskin) was an important marker of beauty and virility. Aesthetic wisdom, in this respect, was simple; the longer, the better. Violation of the prepuce was unthinkable, and the law was applied vigorously to those who might attempt its ablation. Indeed, ‘during the Roman era … circumcision was a capital crime … associated with the rejection of Greek and Roman civilization’. An ill-formed prepuce was commensurate with ‘criminality, apostasy and unpatriotic rebellion’ (Hodges 2001: 401). This example suggests that arete could express itself as a highly coded and relatively rigid system of aesthetic prescriptions about normative embodiment and associated taboos. Deviation from the moral grammar of bodies invoked life-threatening socio-legal possibilities. The moralisation of the body as a site of civility and citizenship was deeply exclusionary, constructing ‘barbarism’ out of minor f leshy variations; in this case, the absence (or attenuated length) of a small f lap of skin at the end of the penis. Exceptional forms of physical difference weighed heavily against their incumbents on the harsh scale of value. At the other end of the scale of ableism from the joy of the comely prepuce – and the master categories of beauty and reason, linked closely to it – was the horror of monstrosity. It was the master trope for profound impairment. By examining the narrative of ‘monstrosity’ in classical culture, arete can be clarified by its antithesis. If notions of worth can be drawn out of narratives of arete and the axiological summits of Graeco-Roman culture manifest in discourses of beauty and reason, they are also evident in the negative tropos of the monster where virtue was evident by its absence, impairment by its presence both obscure and palpable. In Antiquity, though more so in Rome than Greece, fascination with monstrosity was pervasive. The Greeks regarded monstrosity as too horrific to keep close to everyday life of polity and privilege. They disposed of it, anthropoemically. However, it adorned their mythology. It was the great foil to heroism, and it troubled their imaginary like no other threat to beauty, truth, order, reason and justice. It troubled deeply their sense of aristocratic propriety. Monstrous acts by monstrous gods were no strangers to Greek religion. The Roman’s cleansed their Grecian inspired gods of corporeality, weakness, violence and uselessness.

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They preferred their deities to be shorn of monstrous qualities; to be disembodied, strong, virtuous and useful (De Jaucourt 1765/2005). If the Romans forced monstrosity out of their religion, they welcomed it into their daily lives. The Romans embraced monstrosity in their everyday lives with fervour. It was a source of endless titillation; commensurate with their love of spectacle (Barton 1995). The monster, ‘freak of nature’, was feast for perverse curiosity. It was a source of entertainment and pleasure. Deformity was not banished from everyday life as it had been by the Greek aesthetic. The ‘grotesque’ had huge appeal in Rome. It spilled ‘over into every aspect of human life’ (Barton 1995: 85). Human and non-human animals that exhibited ‘gross’ deformities and malformations of the body were teras. Homer, in the Iliad, tells the story of the Gorgon Medusa, the teras of the God Zeus. Medusa was the epitome of monstrosity, the embodiment of evil. To gaze upon ‘her’ form was literally petrifying. ‘She’ turned human beings into stone. The monstrous child was the product of the sins of foremothers and forefathers, progeny prefigured by evil doing. Monsters evoked powerful emotions. Symbolising a range of cultural negatives, monsters, represented the antithesis of the hero. Monsters – hybrid and abject – represented an embodied challenge to virtue: For the Greeks monsters embodied a variety of fears; the potential for chaos to overcome order; of irrationality to prevail over reason; the potential victory of nature against the encroaching civilisations of mankind; the little understood nature of the female in contrast to the male. The Greek myths repeatedly present monsters being conquered by gods and men. The forces of order, reason, civilisation and patriarchy prevail in Greek thought. (Felton 2013: 103) In classical society, impairment and monstrosity share the same general ontological space and are drawn into the same sphere of judgement. For practical purposes of everyday understanding, impairment and monstrosity are difficult to prize apart. They morph from associates, even siblings into shades of the same identity. Wright (2013: 100–101) argues, following Foucault that, ‘monstrousness encapsulates the impossible, dreadful, amoral, inhuman, unspeakable, and even unthinkable qualities that lie at the periphery of human identity. The monstrous is the inverse or outside of what is acceptably human …’. In Antiquity, where monstrosity and deformity were frequently co-opted into the same discursive space, impairment was transformed into disability. The invalidation of disabled people was systematic. Greek myth, its monsters and hybrids, pieced together the ‘deficiencies and excesses’ of nature into a jigsaw of prejudice. The ‘unknown’ was ‘peopled’ by curiosities and creatures twisted in gory detail, just about recognisable – through the prism of hatred fear and disgust – as (bungled) human nature. The deformation of nature in mythology was built on the back of variation in nature, human decay and excess. It was anthropomorphically rooted in what was most significant to imperial dominion itself: Its importance,

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its privilege, its power and above all the superiority of its cadres over all other possible – and even impossible – forms of life. Myth generated evil creatures for great men to tame and subdue and it fed religious aspirations for redemption. The notion that the human being was the highest form of being – higher by far than awesome figments of being that stalked the imagination – ingrained hubris in classical aristocrats. The best of men – slayers of monsters – deserved a life after death in the most conducive circumstances conceivable. Aristotle, Plato, not to mention Galen (ad 130–210) and Herodotus, were trumped in their intellectual engagement with monstrosity by the Roman ‘natural historian’ Pliny the Elder (ad 23–79). He was inf luential, a popular scholar whose magnum opus, a Natural History (in 37 volumes) included four volumes (7–11) on zoology that embodied detailed sketches of monsters and marvels. Pliny placed little store in checking the authenticity of his data. He described exotic monster races including animal-human hybrids, like werewolves and evileyed Illyrians. He argues that monsters were testimony to nature’s generosity. In nature, nothing is impossible, variation is endless. The exotic creatures in his lengthy glossary come from the farthest edges of the known world, from lands inhabited by barbarians and dark peoples, in places like India and Africa. Felton (2013: 357) argues that assigning monstrosity to the edges of territorial sovereignty, beyond the borders of civilisation was common practice in the ancient empires. Monsters are the stuff of geo-political myth. Ableism and protoracism were groomed in the imaginary of empire. Empire posited a defective zoe, a deformed biology that was displaced onto territories that it sought to dominate. It demeaned everything that did not belong to the centre, to Greece, to Rome. Empire evolved a bio-politics of evangelising civilisation, that depended, for its moral legitimacy, on myths of monsters that must be slain. Empire worked out its violent appropriation of everything outside itself by a first principle that was ableist to the core. Alexander the Great’s (356–323bc) empire of the sword and Aristotle’s empire of the mind had monsters to contend with. Not all creatures of Greek myth were evil and monstrous. Some, for example, Satyrs, Nymphs and Fauns, served Eros – life and light – and were good. Others, however, like the Minotaur, served Thanatos, death and darkness, and were evil. Pliny’s natural history combined two taxonomies; one based on the phenotypes of those populations known to the Romans, and a second more indebted to creatures who belonged not to experience, but to the imagination: Cynocephali – dog-headed beings; Blemmyae – headless people from Ethiopia; Sciopods or Monopods – ‘beings’ with a single, large foot, extending from a single leg that enveloped the centre of the body that were supposedly encountered by travellers to India. Anthropophagi, cannibals, creatures that salivated at the thought of human f lesh also featured in his monstrous imaginary. In this taxonomy, one encounters ‘monstrum and the other adjacent terms that denote and vilify a transgression of norms and monsters that include “the Plinian races”, as well as “­prodigious individuals” and other groups that efface normal biological standards including dwarves and pigmies’ (Gavaert and Laes 2013: 218). These ‘creatures’, human,

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animal and mythological, populate the non-disabled antiquarian imaginary. They assign credibility to morbid visions of distorted nature in which deformity and defectiveness are menacing mutations. They materialise the fictive monsters of nightmares; the not so human, nearly human creatures that offer antipodes to ideals of embodied arete. Ethnicity (other than Greek and Roman) enters this monstrous geography, alongside disability. They are dual, interchangeable, intersections of deformity that sustain, in the Western imaginary, polarities of virtue and vice, savagery and civilisation. The imperialist epistemology of the ancients was revived in Early Modernity and enlightenment when the development of a ‘science of the other’ drew race, gender and anomaly into an intersectional network of ontological invalids: The monster is: [A] category crystallized over time in European thought to represent entities who are humanoid but not fully human (‘savages’, ‘barbarians’) and who are identified as such by being members of the general set of nonwhite races. Inf luenced by the ancient Roman distinction between the civilized within and the barbarians outside the empire, the distinction arises between full and question-mark humans. (Nussbaum 2003: 43) In Pliny’s work, geography displaces monstrosity from the heartland of the community. The monster’s lair is far from the Appian Way, far from the banks of the Tiber, far from the seat of virtue, the soil of value, where barbarian bodies and monstrous beings come only by invitation, to satisfy the curiosity of power and demonstrate the wonders of the world to those who have brought it to heel. The ontological invalidation of the monster is grounded not in a claim that puts it outside the boundaries of nature, but outside the gates of Rome. Rome, where virtue, power, beauty and truth reign! Rome, where autonomy demonstrates itself in the conquest and ridicule of heteronomy! The other is grotesque, strange, the f lawed f lesh of foreign blood. The binary of disability and non-disability, impropriety and virtue, is drawn as a line in the sand between periphery and centre, barbarian and Roman. In validating the constitutional and corporeal wholeness of citizens of the Eternal City, the other is consigned to a place of disrepute, constituted as zoē or bare life and abandoned by the law (Agamben 1998). Nomos is carved, in part, from fear of monsters. Though Pliny’s creatures are worked up from the fertile imagination of travellers and sources of dubious witness, some empirical credibility was sustained by the steady stream of people with spectacular visible impairments who turned up for sale at Rome’s teraton agora or monster market. They fetched good prices. Rich patricians were amused by grotesque spectacle. Disabled bodies were the spice and garnish of extravagant parties. The ‘monstrous races’ – at the conf luence of barbarity and disability – were risible objects in the great households of Rome. For classical empire, the monster was the master category of disvalue,

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the principle identifier of human f lotsam, a trope for every despised aspect of human variation, including the foreign nature of the barbarian. The monster was the quintessential generalised other, f lexible metonym of social denigration that called impairment out as its reference point in reality. The norm and the ideal – the touchstones of Western rhetoric – on the other hand, drew on the language of perfection and orderly bodies that had become the ‘origin and epistemological home of all meaning making’ (Dolmage 2014: 19). The monster was the antithesis of the epistemological home. Its only truth lay in its negation, while its utility lay in its f lexibility as a symbolic mechanism for attaching impropriety across a spectrum of difference. Ontology – what to be and what not to be – in classical history was most tangible when representation of the latter was spelt out in nefarious intersections. I will return to this issue in the next section when I examine Greeks and Romans at play. This classical disavowal of disability was, as a material force, geographically and culturally compounded, but it rested, undisturbed, comfortable, in the classical non-disabled imaginary, where the threat of the abject was mitigated by a psychic myth of embodied distance between social validity and invalidity; by the absurdity that frail, grotesque, excessive, exotic, monstrous, wounded bodies were forms of corporeal life that only defective others were compelled to endure. The aegis of virtue and propriety was a shroud around the good citizens of Rome and Greece. They protected themselves, from themselves, from the immediate, local, existential threat of disability by projecting it onto monsters from home and afar. As a manifesto for virtue, arete was an ideological system of bodies and minds bifurcated into good and bad; providing legitimacy for the practices of disposal that dealt unequivocally, often murderously, with the latter. Sound mind, sound body sustained the moral economy as a field of judgement made on the criterion of appearance. The pillars of virtue – beauty, truth, reason, order and justice – were available to behold positively in sound minds and bodies and negatively in monsters. The former to embrace, the latter to eliminate.

‘And those of the worst’: Disposable bodies The repertoires of disability invalidation that recommended the anthropoemic disposal of impairment, were evident in classical society in the fields of politics, medicine, law, leisure, military and religious life. Narratives of disability invalidity were deeply ingrained in the fibres of community that was bound together by the sheer moral density of positive beliefs about the able nature of human validity and negative beliefs about impairment that reduced disabled people to subhuman, liminal defectives, and treated them as disposable, indigenous barbarians. In this section, I examine the abandonment of disabled people in a variety of fields in the classical Proprium. Given the many centuries of Greek and Roman hegemony and the great geographical shifts in their respective imperial holdings, the analysis is broad-brush, yet the whole period – and the generic nature of property and propriety – was held together by the economics of chattel slavery.

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The enormous wealth and cultural dominance of the aristocratic ruling class was produced by slave labourers – what Cicero called ‘speaking tools’ – who worked in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, quarrying, domestic service and construction. Slaves – captured in conquest or born into the role – were commodities bought and sold in markets and destined for brutal exploitation. Cheap life, entirely at the disposal and under the dominion of their masters, slaves were disposable bodies (Hunt 2018). Disabled people, at least those who could speak, were not tools, but ‘useless eaters’. Some impairments ruled out the career option of chattel slavery. The slave markets had no interest in impaired labour, only – during the period of Roman hegemony – in the spectacular impairments of freaks and monsters that were bought by the ruling nobility as entertaining curiosities. The economic superf luity of impairment and its niche efficacy to property pitched disabled people into a void of propriety in which justice was served by their exclusion and elimination. I have broken the analysis below into the fields outlined above to exemplify that disabled people were disposable. Property recognised that disabled people – measured against normate standards – had zero or very limited cultural capital. Voided by impropriety, impaired bodies were justly good to mistreat. Political invalidations: In this section, I focus on eugenic politics; on how the ‘well-born’ related to and acted towards people who exemplified their antithesis. Virtue, in classical political discourse, valued, above all else, the media of its enunciation and nurturing in the propriety of sound minds and sound bodies. The ‘well born’ elite embodied the patina of propriety, the ground on which the disposal and abandonment of disabled people was validated. The politics of disposal was based on the valorisation of a heroic, aristocratic elite of able men who embodied ethical life. From the vantage point of positive eugenics, classical society was transparent about who it could do without; surplus humanity, excess bodies; persons who could be – on the precepts of negative eugenics – legitimately consigned to zones of abandonment (Agamben 1998) where social death, maltreatment, violence and elimination were the civic duties of able citizens. Anthropoemic disposal of disabled people followed the logic that marked them out as good to mistreat. Moral economy embraced practices of human disposal based on a bio-political assessment as to the just use and abuse of bodies and populations that were central to the exercise of sovereign power and its ‘moral’ continuity. Social worth was reduced to usefulness as a rule, but in the higher echelons of society, it was inf lated by the aspirational figure of the eudemon. This ideal was a curriculum for the acquisition of cultural capital and a ‘career path’ that lead to fame and immortality. Given the inf luence of arete on moral economy in Greek and Roman society, it should come as no surprise that the intelligentsia favoured a hygienic approach to bio-politics. Plato, celebrated father of Western philosophy, was a firm supporter of infanticide for disabled new-borns. ‘And those of the worst’, he wrote in The Republic (Bloom 1968: 139), ‘and any others born deformed, they will hide away in an unspeakable and unseen place, as is seemly’. One needed clear

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principles and robust practices to deal with ‘the worst’. Seneca, offering a Roman perspective on the matter, concurred; ‘we drown the weakling and the monstrosity. It is not passion but reason to separate the useless from the fit’ (Quoted in Roper 1913: 9). Horace (65–8bc), perhaps the greatest of Roman lyric poets, writing as Republic gave way to Empire, declared; ‘What an age the golden sires have left behind them!’ In homage to reason, and to the Eugene, the felicitous incarnation of human nature, the murderous disposal of disability was validated. Preachers of ‘positive eugenics’, encouraged ‘superior’ persons to unite for reproductive purposes and lauded ‘negative eugenics’ as the means to discourage the calamitous union of ‘inferior’ human stock. Concern for the quality and value of the population, its intellectual and physical improvement and with the damage that might be done to the stock of reason, if ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ were permitted to reproduce (Stainton 2001), were among the most important clarion calls of classical bio-politics. ‘Campaigns’ against indigenous embodied barbarism were evident throughout the long march of the classical empires In the late Roman world, at the dawn of Christian hegemony, empire collapsing into the barbarism that it always feared, Saint Augustine (354–430ad) exclaimed, ‘We see … how those simpletons that the common people call moriones are used for the amusement of the sane when appraised for the slave market’ (Quoted in Brock 2012: 67). He goes on to suggest that parents of such children must feel more grief for the tragedy of their blighted progeny, ubiquitously the butt of jokes, insult and bile, than if the children were born dead. The inf luence of Plato on Augustine is evident in the latter’s ready acquaintance with the ableist ambition of human perfection. Augustine valorised bodies ‘marked by harmony’ and their ‘unification of beauty and utility, of form, shape and colour’. The North African saint draws attention to ’the potential woven into the fabric of the body, present from birth and guiding its development’ (Brock 2012: 68). The eugenic Western imaginary is bridged by Augustine. It was carried over into Christendom and shaped the way in which non-disabled people in the Middle Ages continued to conceive disability as good to mistreat. Philosopher kings were the regents of eugenic politics in classical society. ‘Platonism and stoicism’ as well as ‘kindred philosophies exposed unreason as a danger and disgrace which mind, or soul must combat’ (Porter 2004: 31). Eugenic perspectives, not simply cognitively focused but mediated by the salience of physiognomy in the popular mind, applied equally to ‘defective’ corporeality. Plato advised those examining children at birth to pay close attention to their physical constitution to ensure they were not tricked into letting into the world a ‘lifeless phantom not worth rearing’ (quoted in Garland 2010: 150). Examination for defect at birth was pervasive. It instantiated an ableist politics of natality. Body and mind, considered constitutionally sound, were the basis of a healthy community. Eugenic sentiments were pushed to the fore early in the Western rationalist tradition. They stuck, providing nourishment for the ‘epistemological structures of Western modernity’ evident in the writings of, for example, ‘Locke, Kant and Ryle’ (Stainton, 2008: 445).

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Aristotle, too, supported infanticide for disabled children. His eugenic s­ ensibilities were shorn of Platonic Forms. Aristotle’s ideas on beauty, for example, are more firmly wedded to the mathematical tradition in which order was all important. His insistence on the value of the generation of knowledge by induction focused on the production of general truths or universals from ‘real particulars’. The normal or typical was epistemologically privileged. Whatever, in nature, departed from the empirically established type was less desirable than conformity to the ‘golden mean’. In this conf lation of the normal and the ideal, departures from type are deformities and radical departures are monstrosities. In this view, argued, for example, in Book 4 of the Generation of Animals, the master taxonomist creates a biological hierarchy that is wedded to the evaluative categories that it gestates. A derivation from this perspective was that a child born with physical differences or anomalies ‘appears … to be not even a human being but only some kind of animal, what is called a monstrosity’ (Aristotle 2007: Book 4). In this argument, human embodiment was reduced to a hierarchy of worth and value. Disability was characterised not only as ontologically negative, but – in cases of ‘extremity’ – as a natural ‘entity’ that did not qualify for human status. In the philosophical classics, disability was a moral injury. Its tarnished place in moral economy rendered it justly disposable. In his Politics, Aristotle (1992: 443) advised that: ‘With regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, let there be a law that no crippled child is reared’. Congenital impairment was a negation of virtue, a moral negative, incommensurate with the good life. Fact and value in nature and biology were, in his view, inextricably linked. With the injunction to eliminate the disabled child, Aristotle legitimated the dehumanisation of impairment – still evident today in philosophical ref lections on intellectual disability by notable ethicists like Peter Singer (1974: 1995). He also united disabled people and women in a generic association of crooked nature, a line of demarcation that deposited them in noman’s-land, a species interregnum – ontologically neither/nor – nearer animal than Homo sapiens (Carlson 2010: 131–161). Powerful, invulnerable, untouchable, ‘clean and proper’, the ruling class, unaccustomed to examining their ontological frailties associated intellectual and physical defect with the despised and despicable who should be eliminated or ridiculed. What mattered in decisions around the anthropoemic disposal of impairment was its ‘aberrant character in relation to the species’ rather than, as modern Western consciousness might see it, ‘the medical or adaptive seriousness of the abnormality’ (Stiker 1999: 39). As soon as the community came face to face with a new-born child that, in its view, lacked the embodied propriety requisite for adequate participation in the human-race, Western classicism entered ‘the sphere of teratology’ (Stiker 1999: 39). The invalidating, dehumanising coup de grâce of eugenic politics was founded on the valorisation of cultural propriety and human validity. Eugenic politics was intimately related to matters of gender. Classical men learned to know themselves through the lesser beings who shared their space.

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They embraced superiority of physique and mind, neither softened by the ­feminine nor misshapen by impairment. A proper man was unspoilt. The second sex and crooked bodies reminded him of his privilege, his natural advantage, his embodied virtue, his leadership, his autonomy, his agency. The inf lated ego of classical Western masculinity sucked in oxygen from subordinate alterities who existed to serve his hegemony, his story, his sharpened blade. If the natural norm of humanity was male, then woman was deviant, a defective version thereof. A woman was a ‘deformed man’, exclaimed Aristotle. The bifurcation of human value by gender and ability was buried deep in the Western psyche, shaping sharply its histories of oppression. Women and disabled people were co-located in dis-value by the script of deformity that served to muzzle their worth and place them at the behest of the patriarch. Disabled women, as Felicity Nussbaum (2003: 25), has pointed out, were cast inauspiciously in the infamous Aristotelian aphorism as bodies constructed from a shared ‘double defect’. They come into the world with natural inferiority builtin twice over, for impairment feminises men. The always already ruined disabled woman and the always already effeminate man are lives ‘devoid of value’ (Agamben, 1998: 139). Deformed femininity and effeminate disability were marked by the terrible distinction that they had no proper species home; no polity or jurisdiction, nor community to offer succour unless men offered them these protections. Women’s reproductive role insured protection. Disabled people – men or women – for the latter were considered sexually undesirable, had no place to go in the eugenic imaginary, save back to the dust of origin. There was a third alterity that classical free men measured pejoratively against their well-born, inf lated worth. Ethnic difference was drawn into the invalidating narrative of disposable humanity. Between the civilised seat of Western culture and the barbaric other was a moral and emotional wall so high and thick that it made Hadrian’s (76–138ad) effort look like a Lego construction. Citizens of Rome could be, and sometimes were, ethnic or geographical outsiders, even slaves released by manumission. Classical culture, however, was ‘proto-racist’, ever vigilant of the barbarian on the other side of the virtuous cultural wall (Isaac 2006). Pliny the Elder’s monsters, marvels and hybrid human-animals that lived ominously at the edge of empire were symbols of ethnic defectiveness and barbarism. Empire was fermented by the narrative menace of mutation; difference exacerbated, a civilising agenda sustained by the distinction between humanity at the centre of the world and monsters on its periphery. Expansion and conquest were justified by this moral agenda. Territory claimed by Greek and Roman heroes was cleansed of defectiveness, shorn of the brute disorder of indigenous waywardness. Disability was understood as a shadow presence, a threatening interloper, a resident barbarian barely tolerated within the walls of civilisation. Ethnic others were conquered, uncivilised, base brutes. Classical men were duty-bound to subdue or enculture them. Uncultivated peoples were justly slain or tamed, destroyed or educated, rightly deprived of property and virtue. Empire let loose

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with violent force, grew mighty, hard and wealthy on dehumanising bellicosity, territorial expansion and slave economics. Imperial violence turned barbarians into slaves, defeated warriors into gladiators and assimilated, through manumission, those deemed fit in body and mind to emulate classical manners. The manly aristocracies of Greece and Rome used military might and strategic genius to pursue excellence and power which formed the road to virtue along which only the ‘best of men’ might travel. The systematic oppression of indigenous women and disabled people may not have been as sanguinary as the classical military project of ethno-barbarisation, but the same dehumanising logic was applied. Barbarians, deformed and defective, should be emasculated by conquest and slavery. In the classical masculine imaginary, women, disabled people and ethnic aliens, were united in common deficit, by social and ontological inferiority. A categorical and practical space of fealty to Hellenic and Roman lord and master, was the historical hen-coop to which lesser beings were confined. A life of arete required denigrated others for its validation. The others, be they defined by race, gender or disability, were the shadows of classical virtue. The system of rank and value was sharply delineated by the concentration of cultural capital in the bloodlines of privilege and property. Aristocratic masculinity was the touchstone of propriety and cultural capital in the field of politics. Everyone else was diminished by comparison. Those on the ‘wrong side’ of the gender, race and ability binary, were stripped, systematically, of their moral worth. Foreign, female, disabled were identities, spliced in classical culture by common bonds of narrative enmity. They were generic, pejorative signifiers of each other; intersections of odium; reducible to their deformity, their defectiveness, their monstrosity. Disability emerged as a master script in the location of disvalued humanity. Worse than men though they were, women and slaves, however, had ‘use value’ – respectively reproductive and economic – that provided pathways for social mobility and the acquisition of a modicum of cultural capital. Disabled people did not. Only disabled people were defined as ‘those of the worst’. Political order in Greece and Rome depended on slave economics; on an endless supply of disposable labour to feed the insatiable desire of imperial elites for warfare, wealth and power. Relative to these ‘lofty’ ambitions, disabled people were surplus. In classical society, they were abandoned by the selective leverage of Proprium, the domain of property and propriety, where political economy and moral economy, existed in reciprocal harmony. Economic interests and ethical priorities colluded against impairment, leveraging opportunities for well-born elites, while fashioning disability into a species of social refuse. ‘Eugenic-ethics’ were sewn into the fabric of Western politics. Positive and negative eugenics were two sides of the same coin. Aristocratic ‘heads’ were enabled to f lourish disabled ‘tails’ faced barriers to their very existence. Medical invalidations: ‘Men’ devoted to the practice of medicine in ancient Greece shared many of the views of the great philosophers and were quick to give advice on what to do about people with congenital anomalies. This advice referred not to their care – for this was beyond their skills – but to the vigilance

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necessary for their elimination. The Greek physician Soranus of Ephesus (no dates available) is credited with writing a practical guide for parents to help them ‘recognise a new born child that is worth raising’ (Stainton 2008: 487) and, by inference, one that was not. The ontological question of validity was negotiated in this instance by clear advice on the positive and negative physical attributes of being and becoming, where the former determined the latter. The politics of natality, of ‘life itself ’ was settled by clear, objective, corporeal evaluations, that mapped human potential. Soranus noted, in his treatise on Gynaecology – popular not only in the classical period, but millennia thence in Renaissance Europe – that the child: Should be perfect in all its parts, limbs and senses and have passages that are not obstructed, including the ears, nose, throat, urethra and anus. Its natural movements should be neither slow nor feeble. Its limbs should bend or stretch; its size and shape should be appropriate, and it should respond to external stimuli. (Quoted in Garland 2010: 14) The body of the new-born, Greek medicine suggested, should be tested for ontological validity and cultural capital by a deep tactile examination for f laws that might be remediated or might provide conditions sufficient to disqualify life. Examination by hand massage was literally a life or death procedure. A favourable diagnostic outcome was a green light to live; an unfavourable one, a preamble to exposure and death. Diligent application of the techniques of examination for fitness were designed to f lush-out damaged bodies and consign them to the fate that they deserved: The index and middle finger when applied above the buttocks, dig a graceful depression, and the hands when applied into the upper parts of the cervical vertebrae, and when pressed forward act so that there will be forward curvature of the spine; and the same should be done in the dorsal region, opposite the diaphragm where hunching often occurs, so that all vertebrae are alike. (Quoted in Vigarello 1990: 170) The ‘soft’ words of this description of an examination for scoliosis, gloss its hygienic, murderous purpose: Should signs of deformity emerge from the examination, a prognosis culminating in a death sentence for an infant born as a ‘hunchback’ was likely. Post-natal examination was a search for the absence of validity. It was designed to put a stop to a life that embodied symptoms of degeneration. The medicalisation of disability in Greece combined reason, folklore and religion, in, for example, the ‘mix and match’ understanding and treatment of epilepsy including Hippocratic and Asclepian temple medicine (Todman 2008).

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Despite Hippocrates’ claim that the ‘sacred disease’ was reducible to rational explanation and Galen’s view that it was a neurological problem, fear of seizures attracted exotic religious explanations and medical solutions that, in Greece, invoked the god Asclepius or the moon goddess Selene. In linking seizures to the cycles of the moon, Galen probably stoked the view that epilepsy was a punishment of the gods and that Selene was the specialist in this dark art. The lunar connection probably underpinned popular notions that epilepsy and insanity were imbricated (Temkin 1971). The Romans regarded epilepsy as a consequence of demonic possession, but were also concerned from a public health perspective that it was contagious. The Senate closed its doors if one amongst its number had a seizure for it boded ill for the meeting of that august body. Julius Caesar – ever mindful of his cultural capital and ambition – kept his counsel about his epilepsy (Temkin 1971). The Romans adopted a spectacular prophylactic, initiating a ‘public health’ approach in which the strength of some men was the putative cure for the weakness of others: ‘The Roman’s lined their epileptics up at the Forum to drink the supposedly curative blood of slain gladiators’ (Winzer 1997: 97). Able-bodied fighting machines, the epitome of barbarous physical power, were expected to provide the cure for grand mal. Epilepsy introduced disorder into the quotidian spaces of civil society and state, threatening social stability. Public disorder, symbolised by the plebeian mob, was a pervasive concern of the Roman authorities, Republic and Imperial, and anything that represented a threat to social stability, symbolic or real, particularly in Rome itself – the beating heart of civilisation – was treated with seriousness and suspicion in equal measure. The queue of epileptic people supping the blood of gladiators was a public health spectacle in the moral management of seizure in which anomaly was rejuvenated by transfusion. In this example of medico-political street theatre, strength cured weakness. Legal invalidations: The ableist nomos of classical embodiment and the formal, legal invalidation of impairment, including its putative anthropoemic outcomes were codified in the Spartan legal system. The code of Lycurgus (800–730bc) was clear on matters of corporeal difference. It issued from a politics of natal disposability of impairment. Specific places for the disposal of impairment – zones of abandonment – were designated. The chasm of Apothetae at Mount Taygetus and the River Eurotes were favoured for the ‘exposure’ or termination by drowning of disabled infants. Spartan infatuation with bodily perfection was proudly eugenic, embedded in a militaristic world view and a desire to maintain a strong, healthy, soldierly population (Stiker 1999: 40). The great Spartan law-maker, Lycurgus (800–730 bc) systematised eugenics, introducing controls over marriage and child-rearing. The state regulated choice of partners and fixed parental ages for child-bearing around gendered conceptions of ‘the prime of life’ (Roper 1913). The Spartan Council of Elders or Gerousia decided whether a new-born child brought before them would live or die. Impairment, deformity, even puny appearance was enough to condemn a child to death. After the legendary stand

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at Thermopylae, the victory over the Persians at the Battle of Plataea and the ­v ictory over Athens in the Peloponnesian War in ad 404, Spartan hegemony over the Greek world, became for a period, unassailable. The consequent strengthening of the values of asceticism, militarism and physical strength provided further validity for the deadly, anthropoemic treatment of disabled people. The Athenians took a more tolerant view of the birth of disabled children and, although exposure – as we saw in the last section – was practised and medically regulated, there was no elaborate legal or state apparatus, in the Spartan mould, to oversee the process. Disability was a blight to a culture with a low threshold of tolerance for physical, intellectual and sensory difference, but impairment was not a phenomenon that necessarily demanded a death sentence. Fear and disgust in the presence of congenital impairment may, in some cases, have been displaced by bonds of parenthood. Garland (2010: 15) remarks that although, ‘Plato leaves the reader in no doubt that Socrates regards the rearing of defective infants as an act of irresponsible folly’, it is likely that, ‘some Athenian parents might have been moved and were evidently permitted by law, to spare such offspring’. It is also likely, on the contrary, that many would not have been spared. Seneca – as I noted above – was a strong supporter of the obligation to terminate the lives of unhealthy offspring. He argued (1963: 145) that good sense and moral duty demanded the destruction of ‘unnatural progeny’. Reason, he suggested, should be pressed into service to justify the exile or murder of disabled people. Wherever reason was a major organising principle of social life, it was a solid pillar of disability invalidation; the more so when embedded in statute. Garland (2010:16–18) notes that, like the Athenians, irrational bonds of compassionate parental love may have played a part in the judicial leniency of Roman fathers who spared ‘deformed’ children from capital punishment. Compassion, however, was not a value that animated classical morality or played a significant role in Rome’s economy of affects. Inspection and the potential elimination of congenitally deformed babies continued to be regarded as an appropriate and civilised practice in Rome (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 65). Exposure and drowning were official, recommended ways of disposing of deformed and ‘monstrous’ new-born babies. Romulus – or so his legend suggests – sanctioned the elimination of deformed infants, but added that it should be done in a context of community approval in which five neighbours had sight of the ‘defective’ infant and agreed to its disposal. This approach to infanticide – based on a principle of collective social sanction – proposed by the supposed co-founder of the ‘eternal city’ gave way, in the course of time, to the singular legal authority of the paterfamilias. As father of the family, owner of its property and, effectively, its priest or spiritual guide, the paterfamilias was obliged to raise healthy children (Winzer 1977: 82–83). Under Roman law he had the power of life and death – vitae necisque potestas – over his family, and in the middle of the fifth century bc, a Law was passed to ensure that the paterfamilias took responsibility for the infanticide of ill-born or ill-formed infants. The master of the house would not always sign a

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death warrant on his ‘crooked’ progeny. Many important decisions were taken by council or in consultation with senior members of the household or clan. Table IV of the legal code known as the Twelve Tables informs the paterfamilias, of his duty to dispose of anomalous progeny: ‘A dreadfully deformed child shall be quickly killed’. The paterfamilias – perhaps in council – acted as judge as to whether or not the condition of the child constituted ‘dreadful deformity’, and as executioner; though some ‘lesser’ person no doubt carried out the sentence at his command. The Empire repealed the law and by the first century bc, there was no legal requirement to dispose of new-born children with deformities. Cultural precedent, however, remained in place and the paterfamilias – guardian of family property and propriety – remained sovereign in decisions about the disposal of disabled people, since they ref lected on his cultural standing and place in community. In Rome, as in Greece, ableism was strongly gendered, manifest explicitly in the sexing of qualifications for citizenship and the ownership of property. The disposition to sanction specific ways of privileging intellectual and bodily being along gendered lines were rendered clear in Roman law. Simone de Beauvoir (1972: 153) noted that legal reasoning encoded the Aristotelean link between women and impairment: ‘Roman Law’ in ‘limiting the rights of women cited the instability and imbecility of the sex’. It recognised women and intellectually disabled people as doppelg ä ngers. Their symbolic miscegenation, in the classical imaginary, introduced a hierarchy of identity that introduced judicial order – embodied in the paterfamilias – to control the frangible bodies of women and disabled people. In the X11 Tables of Roman Law, reference is made to furiosi, or insane persons, who were assumed to be, like women, unable to manage themselves and were thus, in matters of law offered the protection of a guardian to look after their interests. Indeed, ‘the other’ in Roman law consisted of a number of groups whose legal rights were distinctly subordinate, relative to the adult male paterfamilias, who was, in law, presumed able and superior. He had full legal authority, or potestas, over kin and possessions. Infants, women, minors under twenty-five as well as ‘imbeciles’ and ‘idiots’ were all potentially tutela or curatela, eligible for support from the system of legal guardianship, but only insofar as the paterfamilias was willing to give it. There is a distinction in the literature between the furiosi, beyond reason, dangerous, inclined to violence and maniacal behaviour, and the mente capti, more subdued in their want of reason exhibiting qualities of ‘feeble mindedness’ or dementia. The male guardian in Roman law, in relation to persons so labelled, was a curator, from the Latin cura, to care for. The association between disability on the one hand and dependency and vulnerability on the other, therefore, has a long history ‘burdened’ from the outset by the stamp of legal legitimacy. This is manifest in Roman law as it related to deaf people: Those deaf from birth without speech … were considered incapable and were classed with madmen and infants, unable to perform any legal act on

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their own behalf … The law was based on the belief that deaf persons who could not speak had not been deprived of their rights; rather that they had been relieved of the responsibilities of citizenship that they could not meet. (Winzer 1997: 88) In the eyes of the law, the paterfamilias held sway in everyday matters and in life and death decisions about impairments like ‘deafness’. His shoulders were thought to be broad enough to bear the legal responsibilities for the ‘incapables’ who belonged to his household. He could appeal, however, to a variety of medical practitioners, of a rationalist or a religious bent depending on his preference, or any other person(s) in his confidence, should he feel the need for advice or support in the judgements he must make and the actions he must take about his inferiors. Like the state, the source of his sovereignty, he was the corrective, the remedy, the medicine for whatever he might decide was unruly or anomalous. Infantilised in a paternalistic relationship with a powerful other was a tale that repeated itself in the history of both women and disabled people. The intersection manifest in law, that de Beauvoir draws attention to is a double invalidation, a mutual script that locks femininity and disability into custodial spaces. Men were given legal responsibility for the keys. Leisure(ly) invalidations: In Rome, disabled people occupied roles in the field of leisure and entertainment. As exhibits and curiosities, they inhabited spaces of humiliating servitude and enslavement. In this role, they were property rather than people. Dispossessed subjectively, disabled ‘entertainers’ had an ornamental function for the rich at play. Some disabled ‘entertainers’ had skills to offer audiences, but most were, simply, objects of amusement, party-poppers for nondisabled fun. A life in the leisure industries where disabled people were used as media for normate merriment, was not an indicator of social integration or inclusion. Quite the contrary, it amounted to subjective annihilation by humiliation. In this context, the worth of disabled people was reduced to their value as freaks. In Rome, just as in Greece, fear of disability as a potential social, cultural and demographic contaminant was embedded in the non-disabled psyche, but ironically ‘monsters’ and other transgressors of physical and mental norms, perhaps because they were clearly disavowed in their humanity, became fashion accessories and pets for the wealthy and privileged of the Roman metropolis and its empire: ‘Wealthy Romans seemed to have followed the examples of their emperors and started their own collections of monsters. Foolish slaves, dwarves and eunuchs were particularly popular (Gavaert and Laes 2013: 223). Some disabled people were ‘spared’ murder, exile, sacrifice or social death because of their ‘use value’ to wealthy normates who pressed them into mortifying bondage. The patrician class had an eye for the entertainment value of spectacular human variation. It created a market that slave traders were happy to exploit. As the Roman Empire gained territory and Greek power declined, one legacy remained: hostile attitudes towards disability. The Romans, indeed,

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extended the abuse of both disabled children and adults in their open enjoyment of ‘freakery’ and spectacle (Quarmby 2011: 22) Disability found a place in Roman culture. Where privilege and power identified a use-value for disabled people, their possibilities for survival were enhanced. Roman ‘wisdom’ – on either side of the great divide in its political development from Republic to Empire – legitimated the bullying, derision and humiliation of disabled people. They were not entirely socially superf luous because they were considered aesthetically ridiculous. Visible difference was regarded as an entertainment; a role, professional in some cases, and a status in general that marked disabled people out as a class apart; marketable as ‘things’ to be toyed with; risible and ridiculous figures, not to be taken seriously. There was, however, a great deal of cultural capital to be had in owning a ‘stable’ of chattel freaks. ‘The comic stereotype of the disabled fool’ notes Tom Shakespeare (1999: 49) ‘is part of a pattern of cultural representation which always maintains physically different people as other, as alien, as an object of curiosity or hostility or pity, rather than as part of the group’. Exclusion in this context is simultaneously a form of ‘disposal’. The reduction of disabled people to spectacle and performance dehumanised and objectified them. To live life as an object of ridicule and a source of laughter was one of the few ‘useful’ social functions allocated to disabled people in Roman Antiquity. This role provided a ‘moral’ space in which disabled people could physically survive, but only if they were able to accept the constant round of humiliating treatment and the moral tyranny of a passive life of permanent derision (Garland 2010: 73–86). Claudius, before he became Emperor, had to pay, on account of his impairments, the steep price of degrading laughter: If he came to dinner a little after the appointed time, he took his place with difficulty and only after making the round of the dining-room. Whenever he went to sleep after dinner, which was a habit of his, he was pelted with the stones of olives and dates, and sometimes he was awakened by the jesters with a whip or cane, in pretended sport. They used also to put slippers on his hands as he lay snoring, so that when he was suddenly aroused, he might rub his face with them. (Suetonius 1914: 17) Claudius took over the rudder of the Roman Empire in ad 41. His ‘cerebral palsy’ brought shame to his family and he was considered by many, despite his academic abilities, to be an ‘idiot’. We began this chapter with the stoic philosopher Seneca and his withering attack on Claudius. Yet ridicule of disabled people, or anyone for that matter, was contrary to the Stoic view (Gavaert 2017: 216–7). Either Seneca was guilty of hypocrisy or his attachment to order as the basis of Roman greatness tempered his stoical disposition to avoid the disparagement of others.

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Tendentious laughter followed Claudius. Even those who might have been expected to refrain from ridicule did not. He must have become accustomed to the invalidating poison of ‘jovial’ abuse. According to his biographer Barbara Levick (1990: 14), Claudius’ mother Antonia (10 bc– ad 54) described him as ‘a monstrosity of human being, one nature began and never finished’. Augustus Caesar (63 bc– ad 14) feared that Claudius would make his noble family a laughing stock. To his wife Livia (58 bc– ad 29), Augustus wrote, of the ‘unseemly’ boy: Now we are both agreed that we must decide once for all what plan we are to adopt in his case. For if he be sound and so to say complete, what reason have we for doubting that he ought to be advanced through the same grades and steps through which his brother has been advanced? But if we realize that he is wanting and defective in soundness of body and mind, we must not furnish the means of ridiculing both him and us to a public which is wont to scoff at and deride such things. (Suetonius 1914: 9) Claudius’ public engagements were curtailed by his embarrassed family. His impairments made an ‘unfavourable impression’. Levick (1990: 15) concluded that: ‘It was the sensitivity of the Romans to matters of decorum ... that made his family hesitant to let him appear in public’. Corporeal impropriety in close proximity to the hub of power threatened the moral fabric of normate hegemony. Claudius was either kept out of sight, or had his appearance altered so that he could ‘pass as normal’. He could pass muster as a figure of propriety at a distance with the aid of few props and tricks. For example, when presented at gladiatorial games in honour of his dead father Drusus (38–9 bc), son of Augustus and Livia, he was clothed in a pallum or cloak that his deficiencies might not be recognised by the assembled. His family protected themselves, as far as they possibly could, from the shame he embodied. Claudius became emperor according to the historian Suetonius (ad 69–122) (1914: 19) by ‘a remarkable freak of fortune’, after which of course, the laughter, at least to his face, abated. One laughs with, not at, the face of power. Property protects impairment from the charge of impropriety when it is close to home. Amongst the general public, the craving for tendentious fun was also apparent. Greek symposia thrived on it. In Rome, people with intellectual or physical impairments who could be transformed into buffoons, clowns or jesters, fetched premium prices in the slave markets precisely because of their ability (sic) to amuse the Patricians (Stainton 2008: 486). Garland (2010: 46) notes that: No fashionable household was complete, without a generous sprinkling of dwarfs, mutes, cretins and hunchbacks, whose principal duty appears to have been to undergo degrading and painful humiliation in order to provide amusement at dinner parties and other festive occasions.

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In Rome, the market in physical and mental impairment was big business. Buyers and sellers of unusual bodies would meet in the teraton agora – a specialised ‘monster market’ – to trade in curiosities of the f lesh and satisfy the demand of worthy citizens for novelty and spectacle (Barton 1995: 68). Hermaphrodites, giants, dwarfs, people with missing limbs as well as ‘persons who have no claves, or who are weasel-armed or who have three eyes or who are ostrich headed’ (Garland 2010: 47) were bought and sold into slavery. ‘Idiots’ and people of short stature fetched premium prices. The wealthy were prepared to pay them. The niece of the Emperor Augustus kept the empire’s smallest man – Canopus, 2 feet, 4 inches in height – as a deliciae, or pet (Garland 2010: 47). There was also a market in small art works and figurines representing deformity and physical difference. They were esteemed, by ordinary Romans, as apotropaic objects. As a source of humour, artistic representations of disability were widely regarded, in the circles of popular culture, for their efficacy in warding off evil and envy and in def lecting the malice of rivals and foes (Clarke 2003). For the wealthy, the maintenance costs of domestic ‘entertainers’ could be significant. Seneca complained bitterly about the expenses associated with his wife’s ‘pet dwarf ’, Harpeste (Gavaert and Laes 2013: 223). Aristotle provided a source of philosophical legitimacy for Rome’s invalidating trade in impairment and its centrality to the market in entertainment and amusement. Physical differences, he argued, constituted lusus naturae; freaks or jokes of nature. Disabled people were fair game for the classical, ableist sense of fun and festivity, ribaldry and ridicule. Roman’s used the term ostentum to describe anything portentous, contrary to the ‘serious’ harmony of nature. To laugh at impairment was simply to recognise ‘it’ for what ‘it’ was; to confirm ‘its’ ontological status as a comedic object, a risible ‘thing’, the purpose of which was to amuse those of comely appearance upon whom nature – and Gelos, the Greek god of laughter – had smiled. In the epigrams of Martial, impairments were fair game for caustic remark and insulting diatribe. Greeks and Romans laughed at the ‘ridiculous’, not only as it was manifest in ‘the situation’ but also as it was embodied in the ‘individual’. Classical humour was well disposed towards aggressive and tendentious sentiment (Griffiths and Marks 2007: 8–10) and it was ‘bound up with an ideology of order, taste and superiority’ that was evident in theories of humour in the work of Plato and Aristotle (Billig 2005: 31). Buffoonery was the mark of a person of limited wisdom. Laughter bolstered solidarity and inclusion among the elite. It marked out with hierarchical clarity, who was ‘fit’ to demean and disparage (Sosen 2015: 455) and who embodied the propriety to enjoy nature’s playful extravagances. Laughter was a glue that bonded the normate community during festivals and social events. Martin (2015: 24) describes the symposium of classical Greece as ‘an all-male elite drinking party, featuring various entertainments’ at which ugliness and deformity were targets of banter and ridicule (Gartland 2010: 83–86). Conversation and poetic exchange were ‘obsessed’ with – among other things – ‘eugenics’ (Martin 2015: 26). Socrates warned that one must be very careful not

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to target one’s wit at the powerful. People on the margins of nature and society were, by contrast, fair game for tendentious comedy and prejudicial mockery. Their very being had the effect of ‘making them laughable (geloion)’ (Sosen 2015: 465). Able co-participants in social events revelled in the misfortunes of the objects of their malicious mirth. In Rome, spectacle was exploited to create visually comedic situations that amused and titillated. Bodies that transgressed the norm excessively (Clarke 2007) were the target of staged humiliations. What passed for amusement in Greek and Roman culture distinguished between the morally risible and people who privileged not only wealth, but sound mind and body. Laughter bound property to embodied propriety. It vindicated the gravitas of power and entitlement. Objects of indignity as the playthings of power acquired a modicum of social worth by their proximity to the luxurious trappings of Proprium. It was cruelly acquired. The tit-bits of pleasure that the patrician classes enjoyed from staring and pointing at impairment was an ephemeral disparagement that caused a lifetime of pain. Disabled people who escaped the murderous sensibilities of their classical communities by becoming chattel ‘entertainers’ in wealthy households managed to sustain life by converting their recognised social function as monstrous objects of ridicule into ‘work’. Others were not so ‘lucky’. Their lives were profoundly tarnished by physical and economic hardship as well as isolation, exclusion and discrimination (Garland 2010). Winzer (1997: 83) argues that disabled children who survived the potential perils of widespread eugenic thinking and their attendant anthropoemic practices led blighted lives: In Rome, many blind boys were trained to become beggars or were sold as rowers; blind girls became prostitutes. Mentally retarded people were sold as slaves, taken for beggars, or sometimes deliberately maimed to add to their value as objects of charity. Charity, however, was in short supply. Disabled people must have expected lives of abandonment. How else could it be? An unbridgeable moral space was opened up between non-disabled people and their ridiculous opposites. The possibility of a reciprocal hermeneutic of mutual recognition and understanding between the two groups was annihilated. Graeco-Roman culture created and maintained a distinctive moral separation between disability and non-disability, nowhere more clearly than when the ‘community’ was at play. Disabled people were domesticated like pets or toys and humiliated by enslavement to classical customs of leisure and entertainment. In the moral sphere that shaped the non-disabled imaginary, there was no hint of tolerance of difference. The aristocratic elite policed propriety by dominating fashion and taste. They sucked in the oxygen of cultural capital by denying it to their ‘playthings’. Luc Brisson (2002: 8) notes that the inspection of Greek and Roman infants for defect and deformity is an anxious search ‘for signs that might indicate that

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the human-race was no longer as it should be’. The non-disabled gaze searched for congenital signs of moral and ontological catastrophe that the disabled body was understood to represent. Where this ominous other did survive the trials of infant inspection or if disability was acquired later in life, it was put in a place in which ‘its’ humanity was obliterated; it was a pet, a toy, a plaything, an amusement. These degrading careers accomplished one thing: They paid homage to privileged embodiment. Military invalidations: There was probably more tolerance of acquired than congenital impairment in Greece and Rome, but the disfigured veteran did not necessarily escape the disgust associated with physical and mental defects that was abroad in classical communities (Van Lommel 2013; 2015). As militarised societies, impropriety of impairment was, to some extent, mitigated by veteran status. In some of the Greek city states, there were systems of public assistance for those who acquired impairments through accident and war (Sticker 1999: 45). Pensions provided to wounded warriors in Athens (Rose 2003: 95–100) were limited and based on application. This was not the case for the conscript armies of the Roman Republic, but professional soldiering for the Empire was a pensionable role that sometimes included the settlement of a small plot of land. These rewards suggest that soldiers were recognised for their contribution to the state. However, it would wrong to assume that scars of battle enhanced one’s cultural capital. Disfigurement was improbus, no matter its circumstances. Some men with impairments acquired in battle continued in military service. Agesilaus (443–360 bc), famed lame King of Sparta, was the most celebrated. Yet the shame of impairment, even in the wake of a glorious past was difficult to shake for people who once embodied the mantle of arete. The glorious context of the acquisition of a wound bordered on an irrelevancy. The shame of injury abrogated the heroism of its acquisition. Philip of Macedonia (332–386 bc), father of Alexander the Great was profoundly ashamed of his damaged eye and crippled leg, even though both wounds were sustained in the heat of battle (Meeusen 2017: 205). The war wound, mark of courage, was simultaneously a source of shame. Stigma of the body and blemish of character, promoted in the lay morality of antiquarian physiognomy, were difficult to disentangle from a life of duty and service. The invalidating landscape of congenital impairment was, to some extent, reproduced in dismissive attitudes to acquired impairment. Many a wounded warrior must have felt the shame of living with disfigurement, particularly in Roman Antiquity, where disfigurement was regarded as a manifestation of effeminacy. They may have been tortured by the deep disappointment of missing the moment of putative ennoblement associated with glorious death in battle only to experience the ravages of time and the onset of debilitation: To die young in battle was not only to be immortalised as a hero, it was also to escape the decline and decay of old age. Far from being tragically cut short, youthful beauty, virility and strength were profoundly confirmed in

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heroic death – not least because they were thus released from the attrition of time and destruction. (Dollimore 1998: 17) Bodies ‘reduced in nature’ either by war, age, catastrophe or accident found themselves at the whim of the gods who entertained themselves and their mortal minions with the risible spectacle of deformity – congenital or acquired. Suicide was an honourable option for warriors who had been ‘weakened’ and ‘shamed’ by the scars and mutilations of impairment acquired in battle. Soldiers who felt the stigma of a wounded body may have been sufficiently morally distracted by their cruel fate to embrace the drastic option. In the Homeric tradition, wounds were a disgrace. The hero either lived – intact – to fight another day or died on the battlefield. There was no glory in limping off into the sunset. The mutilated survivor was assumed to have been abandoned by the gods: What must be kept in mind is that in the Iliad being wounded is a form of punishment and has a strong symbolic value. Most of the warriors, therefore, try to hide their injuries both out of shame and to avoid giving the enemy any reason to celebrate. This way of looking at the wounded or diminished body retains a firm place in the classical tradition. (Samama 2013: 213) Soldiers scarred and mutilated were, in Rome, subjected to contradictory interpretations. Were their impairments occupational hazards or evidence of sacrifice for the general good or a sign of the displeasure of the gods? Van Lommel (2015: 94) argues that ‘there was tension between admiration and aversion, and between pride and shame’. The wound interpreted as religious vengeance was transformed into a stigma; a mark of moral failure. Opportunities to participate fully in everyday life may have been curtailed for ex-soldiers with acquired impairment, not only by physical barriers or impairment effects, but also by the whispering classes of normates who felt entitled, by religious belief, to blame wounds on the wounded incumbent. The fear, hatred and disgust associated with congenital impairment could be, on religious grounds, legitimately transferred from their proximate cause in the heat of the battle to the moral failures of former hoplites and legionaries. Prejudice in the face of acquired impairment was transfigured into self-harm by supernatural explanation. Wounded ex-soldiers and others with acquired impairments experienced exclusion and isolation which kept some from public office or curtailed their attendance at religious festivals (Garland 2010). Van Lommel (2015), however, is not convinced by this argument. Though the prohibitions applied in Greece, he provides evidence of some disabled Roman veterans having successful careers in public life. The conf lation of biological and social worth that marked the classical justification for the anthropoemic disposal of deformed bodies would, however, have weighed heavily on the minds and constrained the opportunities of disfigured veterans.

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Although, in Rome, the army was probably ‘the only way’ for men from ‘the lower social classes to move up the social ladder’ (Van Lommel 2015: 109), rank-and-file veterans did not – unlike their noble counterparts – have the wherewithal or cultural capital to transcend their origins, let alone their acquired disfigurements. The chances of sinking into impropriety, of living half-lives as burdens to their families were high. To be fully human in the classical age, as Kierkegaard might have it, required the synthetic embodiment of necessity and possibility. In the non-disabled imaginary of the day, however, impairment was all necessity and no possibility. The possibility of ‘becoming’, of prospering, of actualising the virtues of sound being and self-determination were assumed to be beyond the grasp of the vulnerable. Romans had ‘a stronger tendency than the Greeks to revere the body of the war veteran’ (Laes 2013: 188), but they also ‘had the habit of linking bodies with scars with the status of servile submission’ (Laes 2017: 15). Bodies of difference – scarred, deformed, monstrous – were disposable, not only because they were objectified by cultural priorities and constructed as useless but also because classical culture refused, on philosophical grounds, to condone compassion and pity for the ravages of mortal existence: Plato and Aristotle rejected compassion as the basis of our moral obligations because it carries the danger of overwhelming us with emotions, a sentiment identified with “femaleness” and detrimental to the ancients’ concern with timeless justice as the basis of moral virtue. Compassion and pity were seen as the loss of moral autonomy and of self-control. (Sznaider 2001: 19–20) Compassion was a form of sentimentalism and a ‘slave morality’. It was abjured not only in the military but in general custom and culture as pandering to weakness. Military strength was the economic mainstay of classical Proprium. Greek expansionism and Roman imperialism used martial conquest to extract natural and human resources from ‘barbarian’ territory. Violent force was the modus operandi of property. Propriety valorised it – and its collateral mutilations were regarded as an unavoidable consequence of economic necessity. Religious invalidations: In this section, I keep my comments on classical religion brief. I return to it in the next section to extend the review of its invalidating narrative. There were strong religious motives for the pariah status that burdened disabled people during the classical period. Although the card of reason was dealt regularly to explain Rome’s anthropoemic approach to congenital impairment, religion and superstition also had a role to play. Romans regarded the birth of a deformed infant as ominous, a warning; a sign from the gods of the coming ill-wind of disaster. Infanticide was not only a means to eradicate impairment but for the religious, moral purification of parents who produced anomalous offspring; a way of ameliorating the portent by returning the bad omen to nature and the gods.

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The Roman gods adapted from the Greeks were much more reasonable than their Hellenic counterparts, who were vicious, unpredictable, weak and risible, who could explode emotionally into love, anger, jealousy and hatred and who interfered, often nefariously, in the material, mortal world. In contrast to the image of religion in Hesiod’s Theogeny and in Homer’s oeuvre, Rome distrusted mythology and kept it out of religion. The Romans abjured the idea of a deity that embraced vice, crime or was understood in the carnal form of ‘men’, and they rejected forms of worship that embraced the Dionysian dithyramb or appealed to emotion. Divine law – jus divinum – was not an elaborate belief system or creed, but a sort of instruction manual on religious ritual related to the practical details of ceremonies: ‘Romulus … had accustomed the citizens to think and speak well of the immortals, to not impute to them any unworthy inclinations … Rome wanted wise Gods … and removed from their conception of deity any uselessness, vice, weakness, corporeality’ (De Joucourt 1765/2005: no page number). In Rome, disabled people were a bellwether of divination. The Roman word monstrum, described a wide range of ontological variations in embodiment, but always pointed to ‘a certain transgression of moral and physical norms’, that included in its invalidating net ‘ugly people or strange animals’, ‘deformed babies’, the ‘morally ugly’ and ‘the mutilated’ (Gavaert and Laes 2013: 212–213). Physical anomaly was derived from the word moneo meaning ‘to warn’ and monstro meaning ‘to show’. The word was pregnant with religious connotations. Impairment embraced the pejorative meaning system invested in portent and spectacle. The etymology suggested that congenital impairment was a prelude to dreaded events (Bogdan 1988) or to the incarnation of a terrible sight to behold. This view may have been partly derived from the Greeks, but also had roots in Assyrian and Babylonian culture in which impairment embodied the threat of misfortune and disorder. Babylonian clay tablets that date to 2000 bc were inscribed with representations of congenital abnormalities – 62 in total – and teratoscopic divinations or prophecies were associated with each of the malformations: some ‘good’, some terrible: In the former category, an example of a prognosis associated with bringing prosperity is embodied in the following epigram: ‘If the infant has no penis, the master of the house will be enriched by the harvest of his fields’. On the other hand: ‘If a woman should give birth to an infant that has no mouth, the mistress of the house will die’. An infant with a missing right hand embodied the prophecy of an earthquake (Warkany 1959). Portent and its relationship to human variation played an important role in classical religion. For example, sexual dubiety and hermaphroditism, in infant or adult, in Greece and Rome was associated with sinister portents. Brisson (2002: 2) argues that in Antiquity, for cases of hermaphroditism and androgyny, the manner of disposal and the causes of such bodies were relatively clear but changed with the coming of the Empire: In ancient Greece and Rome up until the Republic beings possessing both sexes seem to have been pitilessly eliminated as monsters, as foreboding

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signs sent to human beings by the gods to manifest their anger or announce the destruction of the human race … under the Empire, beings endowed with both sexes were regarded as an agreeable f luke of nature and were put on show as freaks. The change in attitude amongst the Roman elite from a religious view of ­portentous impairment that supported its elimination to a more secular view that supported its subjective annihilation in the entertainment market may be indicative of a decline in piety as Empire replaced Republic. Greeks and Romans had ‘crippled’ gods known respectively as Hephaestus (who we have met and will have occasion to meet again in the next section) and Vulcan. The former was a great source of amusement to his fellow deities. Vulcan, however, gets little mention in Roman religion. It seems that ‘the Romans were uncertain what to do with a disabled member of the pantheon’ (Hartsock 2008: 56). It was acceptable, fashionable to demean impairment, but the idea of a physically f lawed god was incommensurate with the seriousness and solemnity of Roman devotion. Not so for the Greeks! In the Odyssey, Hephaestus is quoted by Homer as saying: Father Zeus, and ye other blessed gods that are forever, come hither that you may see a laughable matter and a monstrous, even how Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus scorns me for that I am lame and loves destructive Ares because he is comely and strong of limb, whereas I was born misshapen. (Quoted in Bazopoulou-Kyranidou 1997: 148) The Olympians enjoyed amusement and had to hand for this purpose their own risible misshapen deity who was a stark contrast to able Ares, god of war. Even in the heavens, disability was good to mistreat. I return to a discussion of religious practice in the next section. This review of some of the important fields of classical life suggests that there was no socio-emotional bulwark to mitigate the anthropoemic elimination or subjective annihilation of disability. There was no affective tribunal to appeal against the harsh treatment of people who were physically and mentally different. There was no disposition in the moral and affective economies that inclined ‘men’ towards the kind of pity and sympathy for disability that arose in Western society, later, in the wake of the decline of Rome and the rise of Christianity. There was one pole of judgement for impairment. Disability was good to mistreat. Why else would the citizens of Rome throw stones, for fun, at people with intellectual disabilities (Laes 2013: 185). Disabled people were disposable; conceived dispassionately as barren existence and frozen future. The ‘use value’ of impairment in Antiquity was profoundly limited, its efficacy, instrumental; a source of laughter, or perhaps, in troubled times, as I will argue in the next section, a ‘scapegoat’ for communities in crisis.

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Pharmakos: The disabled scapegoat Disabled people were used in classical societies, formally, as scapegoats. They were ritually expendable. I have isolated this type of disposability of impairment, in a section of its own, for it was a form of ritual abandonment by sacrifice. The scapegoat exemplified the ritual and just abandonment of impairment in the classical Proprium. In what follows, I discuss the pharmakos myth and practice and map out appropriate candidatures for the role of pharmakos demonstrating that all impairments fit the bill. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable (Agamben 1998: 28, italics in original) Thersites was the only disabled warrior in Homer’s Iliad. Not only was he ‘the ugliest man that came to Troy’ (Stobart 1911/1962: 59); he was also twisted by multiple deformities of body and character. Shakespeare introduced him in Troilus and Cressida as a ‘deformed and scurrilous Grecian’. When he opened his mouth in Homer’s epic poem, his words were interpreted as invective and greeted with derision. The Achaean heroes of the Trojan war despised him. They applauded Odysseus for quieting his spiteful tongue by chastising him and beating him with Agamemnon’s sceptre. Thersites was a very minor player in the Iliad, but the detailed description of his body and character suggest that he carried the weight of a transgressor. He offended the corporeal contours and moral codes of heroes and warriors. He was a scapegoat for the angry Achaeans as they pondered their frustrations and discussed strategy for battle. In times of social crisis or natural disaster, Greek communities would choose a pharmakos or scapegoat (Garland 2010: 23–26), usually a disabled person (or a criminal) who would be ceremoniously beaten, exiled from the polis and (sometimes) killed. Aristotle had argued that: ‘those who were capable of living outside the city, beyond the rule of law … had to be either animals or gods’ (White 1972: 23). Those chosen as scapegoats were not gods. The violent treatment and expulsion of the pharmakoi (plural) was a ritual of purification in which the evil and chaos of social and economic disorder – the loimos or pestilence visited on the community by angry gods – was expurgated. The pharmakos was ‘expelled from the polis as a ‘“miasma” so that other individuals’ would not ‘become infected by his presence’ (Tatti-Gartziou 2010:184). The scapegoat, by virtue of physical or mental difference or reputation for unacceptable behaviour, was a moral outsider, a pariah justly deserving of sacrificial abandonment. In Athens, the pharmakos ritual was enacted annually, in early summer, during the festival of Thargelia. In Apollo’s presence, a cathartic expulsion of an embodiment of evil took place as

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citizens processed through the city beating the alien scapegoat before expelling the contaminant from its midst. The status of being alien, an offender on the margins of the community, but ‘recognised’ by the offence and marginality, was important on two counts: Firstly, it determined the selection of the ‘victim’. Secondly, it was significant in terms of the alignment of the body to be abandoned with the symbolic aspects of the purification ritual. To abrogate the woes visited upon the community, a body loathed by peers, an offending/offensive body, portentous of life’s disasters, marked with the physical signs of impropriety, was chosen for abandonment and exile and offered to the local deity in exchange for the return of social order. The putative exile, by definition, did not have the opportunity to share in the harmonious outcome. The abandonment of disabled new-borns and the ritual exclusion of the pharmakos served similar purposes of social and moral restoration: The evil deformed child that must be expelled to avert loimos finds an adult correlate in the figure of the scapegoat. The expulsion of the scapegoat was similarly intended to secure fertility and ward off sterility: like the teras, the scapegoat was a pollution. (Ogden, quoted in Quarmby 2011: 19) The ritual of blame and restoration into which the scapegoat was conscripted had efficacy only if an identified impurity or contaminant within the community was removed. Restoration of order coincided with the anthropoemic moment of extraction of the abject object, the stigmatised body, the foul smell. The body politic, reconciled with its deity, recharged itself. The community became once again whole and healthy and hygienic. The relationship between body and society in the pharmakos ritual was isomorphic: ‘aberrancy within the corporeal order is aberrancy in the social order’ (Stiker 1999: 40). So, too in moral order! The insults visited on community by disaster and disease, were expurgated by acts of decontamination and exile. Communitas was restored by removing a body that was, both on its surface and at its core, a manifestation of physical and moral corruption. Crisis and disaster brought fear. Community pariahs invoked disgust; the most moral and evaluative of all the emotions. Expungement of the contaminating margins confirmed the purity of the centre. The affective economy was rebalanced by the release of fear and disgust. The disabled phamakos, stigmatised by the prevailing norms of culture and embodiment, was taken beyond the city walls; geographically and symbolically separated from community; perhaps to meet a violent end, though this was not necessarily the case. It was not the bloody sacrifice of a physical body that was important. It was removal and exile that counted above all else. To abrogate the woes of community, a manifestation of indigenous evil, was selected for exile and abandonment. The efficacy of the ritual lay, as the last paragraph suggested, in the removal from the community of an identified impurity. The anthropoemic

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moment of extraction of the abject object from community made it whole again, strengthening its immunity (Esposito 2010) to catastrophe. The material and moral insult visited on the community by disaster or disease was expurgated – or as in the case of ‘Thargelia’, anticipated – by the act of abandonment. Aff liction, infection was removed from the polis, restoring human relationships, regenerating moral life. To cleanse public space, make it, once again, a place of propriety, a ‘constitutionally’ unruly body was excluded. The separation of good from bad served the purpose of purification. The pharmakos represented the poison or evil that had entered the community. The sacrificial ritual enacted its extrication. An excess body was sacrificed on the altar of social solidarity. Problems of the community were projected onto the scapegoat who became the singular bearer of its collective transgressions (Girard 1986) and the salve that saved it from disorder. The pharmakos myth is deeply embedded in Western consciousness (Girard 1986). The ‘tradition’ of the scapegoat crossed from Greece to Rome in the figure of the ‘devotio’, a body sacrificed or devoted, sometimes voluntarily, to the gods as an offering for a positive outcome in a forthcoming battle or for appeasement. Walter Burkert (quoted in Quarmby 2011: 23) argues that the ‘devotio’ was a man of political and military importance who offered himself as sacrifice for a cause or a disabled person, pressed into the service of the commonweal: ‘Either the victim must be … subhuman, particularly guilty or “offscourings” to be dumped, or else he is raised to superhuman level, to be honoured for ever. The extremes may even be seen to meet, deepest abasement turning into divinity’. The possibility of such transformation in the afterlife for a noble apotheosis may have been attractive to a second rate general whose ambition had not matched his expectation, but the opportunity of voluntary sacrifice was for the elite, not for the disabled devotio. It has been argued that the Oedipus myth was a metaphor for the pharmakos ritual (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1998: For an extended and brilliant interpretation of the Oedipus myth and its relationship to disability, see Stiker 1999: 47–59). Oedipus was cast out of Thebes, then Corinth and Thebes again. He was lame for the first two exiles – spiked through the feet at birth – and, in addition, blind for the third. Oedipus, disabled person extraordinaire, lived his fictive life in the contradictions that circle like vultures around his story of disablement. The binaries of integration and exile, belonging and strangerhood, nature and culture, sub-human and superhuman, lawmaker and lawlessness blossomed and died in the wake of his tragic journey through impairment and disability. In the Oedipus story, impairment was the catastrophe at its beginning and consequence at its end when the protagonist, unforgiving of himself, engaged in auto-­ mutilation by gouging out his own eyes. The myth of the scapegoat thrives in narratives of disability. In philosophy, vindication of the role is evident. For Plato and Aristotle, reason was the key marker of humanity. To be wanting with respect to the noetic faculties; to be intellectually disadvantaged or mentally distressed, smudged one’s humanity.

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One deserved to live life on the margins of community (Stainton 2001) to exist beyond sovereignty without legal protection. The stigma of bodily, intellectual or sensory imperfection troubled the body politic, undermining its ethic of excellence and perfection. The polis exiled blemish and burden from its ranks. It supported moral repair for whatever might tarnish its propriety. Impairment, an allegory for chaos and irrationality, marked out individuals as candidates for ritual abandonment. A preference to select for exile lusus naturae, freaks and jokes of nature, who had escaped infanticide, stood to reason. The pharmakos myth – wedded to ableism in Western culture – mandated impairment to the scapegoat role. Any impairment would do! To be deaf, for example, would have been credential enough and sufficient cause for an individual to qualify for the role of sacrificial lamb. Intellectual impairments, sensory impairments and, indeed, acquired impairments or illnesses that lacked the visible features of postnatal deformities and monstrosities; indeed, all those categories of persons who might have escaped selection for infanticide (Braddock and Parish 2001: 15; Stiker 1999) would qualify to act as the detritus that would become the cleansing agent of community. The Greeks associated deafness with speech and communication deficit, conf lating it with ‘dumbness’ and stupidity: ‘Deprivation of hearing … meant deprivation of verbal communication and perceived intelligence’. It also ‘meant separation from the political and intellectual arena’ (Edwards 1997: 35). Aristotle associated loss of hearing with loss of intelligence and reasoned that lack of hearing would make its bearer uneducable (Winzer 1997: 87–88). To make a deaf person a pharmakos was intelligible in terms of these invalidating assessments of the ontological worth of someone with no hearing (and ergo, in the Greek view, with no speech). Sophist philosophers privileged rhetoric. Though the inf luence of the Sophists declined, as Greek culture become increasingly ocular-centric ( Jay 1994), the value of hearing and the ear in the classical period remained significant and central to its learning culture. Rhetoric was an important element in the curriculum for excellence. Jay Dolmage (2014) argues convincingly that rhetoric embodies ableism. It is the medium by which ability is communicated as the ontological ideal. The rhetor or orator must be, as Cicero (106–43 bc) argued, able-bodied: ‘there are some men, either so tongue tied or so discordant in tone, or so wild and boorish in feature and gesture, that even though sound in talent and art, they cannot enter the ranks of orators’ (Cicero, quoted in Walters 2014: 19). Demosthenes (384–322 bc) was the obvious exception to Cicero’s rule though he appears to have made good his defects. The classical tradition of rhetoric was a memorial to virtue and propriety; an encomium to ‘ideal bodies’ that were vehicles of persuasive power. A f lawed body had little or no rhetorical inf luence, for it was associated with defective reason and unintelligibility (Edwards 1997: 35). Rhetorical skill was a route to public life in Greece and Rome. The political currency of oratory made impairment anathema to it.

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Orators must be well formed and not only fully but perfectly ­functioning … At rhetoric’s height in pre-Macedonian Greece and later, in the Roman Republic, the orator perfectus who led the nation by virtue of his publicly performed orations had to embody all the classical virtues, including energy, wilful self-control, and physical, intellectual and financial resourcefulness. (Brueggemann and Fredal 1999: 130) Oratory was a source of inspiration and a vehicle of clarity and order in communication. It required performance of the skills of advanced citizenship. Speech impairment, by contrast, was a major impediment to public ambition; a butt of jokes, an embarrassment, a stigma from which the young Claudius, prior to his inauguration as Emperor of Rome, could not escape. His family, as I have noted, were ashamed of their ill-formed, stuttering kinsman. According to Van Ripper and Emerick (quoted in Shapiro 1999: 166), ‘Cages along the Appian way held various grotesque human disabilities, including Balbus Blaesus “the stutterer” who would attempt to talk when a coin was f lung through the bars’. Demosthenes, in Quintilian’s view, the greatest orator of the classical age, was ‘said to be soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overtly feminine demeanour’ (Dolmage 2014: 26). He ‘overcame’ his, ‘personal deficits’ of embodiment in order to excel in public speaking. In possessing a negative relation to the community of language, people without speech were categorised as barbaros; meaning, ‘anyone who could not speak Greek, one who babbled … who lacked the power by which political life could be achieved and true humanity realised’ (White 1972: 19). No reasonable or intelligent man could be without the faculty of speech. Plato believed that speech should f low from the soul in a river of eloquence and that verbal argument – more so than the written word – could inspire men and impassion the polity. While speech appealed to the mundane senses, rhetoric, if it were to inspire, required for its delivery, as I suggested above, the perfect body of ableism. In Greek culture, deaf was dumb, in the widest sense, and speech impairment was risible, the mark of a buffoon. Both impairments were the antithesis of the virtues embodied in reason and rhetoric. People who possessed these characteristics struggled to establish their ontological validity within their communities. They qualified as pharmakoi. The love of beauty and order enshrined in philosophical principle and delivered by rhetorical persuasion were embodied forms of moral eloquence; pillars of virtue and nutrients of community. They curried the favour of the gods who demanded offerings to offset catastrophe. Impairment, antithesis of community and communication, stood out as a putative oblation. Disability, ethical and ontological deficit, negative judgement of the heavens offered up by the good denizens of the ancient world would restore balance to besieged communities.

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Even ugliness, offensive to the non-disabled gaze, could single one out as a potential scapegoat. Blindness, however, the most terrible of all the impairments in classical culture, as we will see in the next section, was the offering most attractive to the greedy gods. Sight was valorised, valued more highly than all the other senses. It was the principle carnal gateway to the apprehension of beauty, knowledge, truth and to proper judgement in the evaluation of objects and persons: [S]ight in my opinion is the source of greatest benefit for us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered … and from this source we have derived philosophy, that which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal men. (Plato, quoted in Synnott 1993: 131) The inner eye of the mind, rather than the organs of mundane perception, received Plato’s keenest philosophical plaudits. The action taken by Democritus (460–370 bc) to blind himself was based on his devotion to Plato’s insistence that intellectual rather than sensory vision was the pathway to truth and wisdom. Aristotle demurs: ‘Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses’, but he too, in evaluating the senses, placed sight on a pedestal. Sight was the principal vehicle of empirical discrimination (Cranfield 1970) sensible observation and moral evaluation. It was the medium of scientific knowledge and rational choice. In the rank ordering of the senses, Aristotle made sight foremost amongst them. In the context of high-minded testimonies to the virtues of sight, visual impairment and blindness were regarded as most disturbing anomalies. If blind people were not cast out or ‘employed’ as seers or bards or musicians, they were easy targets for abuse and derision. As blind Nicolaides, in the account of Aristophanes (450–(circa) 385 bc) in the Ekkleziasousai, put forward his candidature for political office, a heckler intoned: ‘Isn’t it a scandal that a fellow who hasn’t managed to save his own eyesight should dare to give us a lecture on how to save the state’ (Quoted in Garland 2010: 32). He may have been better suited, in the eyes of his detractors, to save the state in a time of crisis as a sacrificial offering. A cultural and religious legitimation for the exclusionary practices that placed disabled people in the ranks of the pharmakoi was found in the shape of Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, volcanoes, and craftsmen, particularly blacksmiths. According to Homeric legend, Hephaestus was, as I noted in the last section, ‘crippled and deformed’ and had the distinction of being the only disabled Greek deity. The ‘crippled one’ was exiled from Olympus, either by his father Zeus, or his mother Hera. The Iliad gave two accounts of Hephaestus’ exclusion from the heavens. In Book 1 of the Iliad, Homer reported Hephaestus blaming his expulsion on his father; ‘he caught me by the foot and hurled me from the heavenly threshold’. In Book 8, however, his mother Hera was the perpetrator; ‘I had fallen afar through the will of my shameless mother that was fain to hide

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me away by reason of my lameness’ (quoted in Bazopoulou-Kyranidou 1997: 145–6). Hera was appalled by her son’s deformity. He brought shame and disgrace; ­aischos in Greek. The parents of disabled children in ancient Greece were expected to embody guilt for producing defective offspring who, if they survived, would be economically, socially, morally and emotionally burdensome. Hephaestus, in his earthly incarnation, however, after his fall from the heavens, bucked the trend, in terms of his economic utility. He fabricated wondrous objects from precious metal. His skill and craftsmanship were peerless. His ability was a rare exception to the rule of uselessness that tarnished the reputation of disabled people. For Dolmage (2014), Hephaestus and the much maligned, cunning female goddess Metis provide opportunities to re-write the history of rhetoric in ways that do not privilege the mean or the ideal. What would history look like if Metis and Hephaestus were the great heroes of antiquarian myth, if every move to historicise rhetoric was also a move to embody it differently. A positive narration of disability did not take hold in the ableist Western imaginary and disappeared subsequently from disability narratives. Hephaestus as Olympian pharmakos was the narrative that prevailed. Ableist normativity ‘constrains our available means of persuasion’ (Dolmage 2014: 92). It writes with a pen dipped in normate ink and with the conviction that the impaired body is the archetypical outsider ideally fitted to a sacrificial end. Though he made a return to Olympus, it was the exile and fall from grace of the crippled deity that set the pattern for the treatment of disabled mortals in the classical world. Hephaestus was the pharmakos of the troubled, ableist heavens. The ‘deformity mocking gods of Olympus’ (Miller 1997: 203) transferred their collective transgressions onto the one in their number who was physically less than perfect. For Greek communities, divine and earthly, the disabled pharmakos was the outcast, the model of ‘what not to be’, transformed into a community asset only in the moment of banishment. The epitome of ontological superf luity, selected to symbolise the troubled collective, the scapegoat is defined, with easy moral conscience, as ‘fit’ for exile and abandonment. The expulsion of disability was a ‘win–win’ situation for the non-disabled community. Through forced eviction, it rid itself of loimos and derived considerable healing benefit in the process. In Mayan sacrifice, it was mutilated human f lesh that appeased the gods. Classical sacrifice regularly spilt the blood of animals, but the sacrifice of the pharmakos was a cleansing ritual without a corresponding loss to the community: A community outcast was cast out. A living offence against the axiological precepts of an otherwise clean and proper community was dispatched. The experience of the pharmakoi was testimony to a culture of exclusion that put disability in its ‘seemly place’, unspeakable and unseen, beyond the visual horizon of the virtuous citizen of polite society. Exile is a metaphor invoked by contemporary disability scholars (Clare 1999; Michalko 1999). Michalko (1999: 97) notes that adventitious blindness can feel like banishment from the visual

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world that was once the ‘homeland’ of experience. Exile was also a fair descriptor of the experience of disabled people incarcerated in institutions during the ‘great confinement’ of the modern period. It has been used in many different historical contexts as a technique to dispose of and regulate disorderly bodies. It put them out of sight and mind (Humphries and Gordon 1992). The pharmakos of ancient Greece established a pattern for the social disposal of disability. Agamben (1998: 181) argues that the banishment of what he calls ‘the exception’, is the ‘original political relation’ because in this compelling moment of exile and invalidation, the regime announced its legitimacy, mapped out its parameters, defined its borders and boundaries, articulated its norms and laws. It was the outsider who made and shaped the insider. The abject, foreign body – in the very moment of banishment – signalled the righteous embodiment of the valid subject. The abject according to Kristeva (1982: 1–3) embodied one defining objective quality, ‘that of being opposed to the “I”’. She goes on to argue that the normative subject was ‘constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection’ and yet paradoxically’, the banished abject is, ‘after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’. Just as the gods of Antiquity, in mocking deformity, failed to realise that they mocked themselves, so too the citizens who abandoned disability remained blissfully unaware that they simultaneously disavowed the abject resident within. The exile was banished geographically, but it remained in situ as a ghostly, unconscious, presence: It remains part of the subject, repressed, denied but lurking, hovering, whispering, barely audible from some liminal place in the recesses of the imaginary. It gnaws at the coherence and stability of identity. It is as if the chaos and incoherence of the pre-linguistic stage of infancy or what Kristeva, invoking Plato’s distinction between form and matter, called the chora – despite innumerable attempts to make it go away – has retained a presence in the orderly realm of the symbolic. It is this, the threat of which one is barely aware, a stalker lurking in the shadows of existence that animates the concept of abjection. (Hughes 2009: 405) ‘Ideal bodies produce ideal communication’ while rhetoric and discourse police ‘non-ideal bodies or betray them’ (Dolmage 2014: 24). Classical communities betrayed impairment by offering it as a sacrifice in times of crisis. The sacrifice and banishment of disability was based on the ableist equation of privileged embodiment with the essence of humanity; the reduction of the good life to a ‘clean and proper’ body. The disavowal of disability, at the core of the ritual abandonment in the pharmakos myth, was dependent on a bold ableist narrative of human being and becoming. The exile of the disabled scapegoat was the sacrifice of a community that could not face up to the abject nature of its own humanity. The community defined its moral parameters and who belonged to it by the enactment of a ritual of self-renunciation.

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An ocular-centric culture of appearance and light: Being blind in Graeco-Roman society “Idea” derives from the Greek word meaning “to see”. This lexical etymology reminds us that the way we think about the way we think in western culture is guided by a visual paradigm. Looking, seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined. Thus, the manner in which we have come to understand the concept of an idea is deeply bound up with issues of “appearance”, of picture, and of image. ( Jenks 1995: 1) In this section, I assess the evidence about the treatment of blind people in Graeco-Roman society that I touched on brief ly in the preceding section and draw out the ways in which they were ‘perilously intertwined’ in classical ocular-centric culture. I argue that cultural context and textual evidence suggest that the high value placed on physical appearance and ‘sound’ embodiment had invalidating consequences for blind people. Moral emphasis on the cultural value of light and spectacle including the ocular-centricity of the antiquarian world would, most likely, have played out in the everyday lives of blind people as a daily round of invalidating experiences. In Antiquity, physical appearance was a tribunal of worth. The disabled subject was readily marked down as a moral agent in classical culture on account of the ableist propensity to be persuaded by the truth claims of the ancient art or pseudo-science of physiognomy, notably its view, pressed into the service of eugenics, that the ‘good body was the necessary correlation of the good soul’ (Roper 1913: 14). Physiognomy was the art of the discernment of the inner and the unseen from the outer and the visible. It was ‘a paradigm of access to the ephemeral and intangible workings of the interior body’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2013: 222). It was rooted in the world of visual observation and based on the notion that surface and appearance hid deeper truths that could be derived from revelations of the eye by the eye. Physiognomy was the conviction that corporeal differences were not ‘coincidental external manifestations independent of a person’s inner qualities but … a correlate of the soul’ (Bertling 2015: 11). Physiognomy had its etymological roots in two words: ‘gnomos’, meaning character and ‘physis’, meaning nature. It suggested ‘an intrinsic relation between form and content, exterior and interior, physis and psyche’. In physiognomy, the body ‘is perceived as a legible text that openly communicates a person’s character and provides an insight into the disposition of man …’ (Baumbach 2010: 582). Reading character from body surface was the essence of this inductive pseudoscience. Both Garland (2010) and Evans (1969) argue that Antiquity is marked by a ‘physiognomic consciousness’. Laes (2013: 179) takes a more tentative approach, based on the curious argument that the widespread nature of ‘physiognomic beating’ suggests that ‘we cannot rule out that physiognomic prejudice occasionally played a role in the evaluation of fellow humans with disabilities’.

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The consensus suggests that prejudicial physiognomy held a central cultural position in everyday practice and was used to ascribe moral meaning and make judgements about the credibility and worth of people. One might describe it is as a methodological source for the daily, quotidian evaluation of propriety. That physiognomy was also a source of lay morality in Antiquity is revealed by the meaning of another term that we have met so far on more than one occasion. In Greek, the terms ‘beautiful and good’ were combined in the ‘ideal’ of a ‘man’ who was ‘kalos kagathos’; pure, both inside and out. The surface of the body was indicative of interior goodness. In the Anthology of Stobaeus (dates unknown), we find a turn of phrase that captures physiognomic consciousness: ‘Thou art unpleasing to look upon and thy character is like to thy form’ (quoted in Roper 1913: 22). Worth in moral economy is based on the revelations of appearance. For Plutarch, ‘atheism is compared with blindness and superstition with an eye disease that needs to be cured’ (Meeusen 2017: 197). For the physiognomist, the eyes were the most revealing of all the surfaces of the body. ‘Eyes were regarded as highly sensitive indicators of illness or health’ (Laes 2013: 89). ‘On’ them lies a pool of truth about the soul within and one can read the soul – its tempers, turbulences and delights – through these translucent ‘mirrors’ (Lincicum 2013: 16–17). The first chapter of Polemon’s treatise on physiognomy was concerned with the eyes (Swain 2007). He took on board Aristotle’s advice to – when in the company of others – examine the eyes, thoroughly. Physiognomy was treated as a quotidian tool for making moral evaluations in everyday interaction, and it marginalised and invalidated disabled people who tried to circulate in networks of propriety. Hartsock (2008: 40) notes that in ancient Greece, being physically disabled was ‘automatically assumed’ to indicate ‘a negative ref lection on ones’ character’. The idea that the assumption is automatic is another reference to the widespread use of physiognomy in Antiquity and its centrality to the everyday culture of character assessment, and assassination, in which books were (most definitely) judged by their covers. At the dawn of Western culture, it is from bodily signs that the character of the soul was assessed. Appearance was assumed to provide evidence to support claims of substance and was a central source in the allocation of social credibility. It was an immediate, ocular touchstone (sic) for decisions about worth, value and virtue. Appearance was the compass of judgement in classical moral economy. Character traits were read off from physical markers in which – to gloss the complex principles of ancient physiognomy – goodness rested in corporeal beauty. Persons who were dissolute and degenerate were deformed in countenance, gait and posture and were, in the extreme, defective, ugly and monstrous. Optics grounded the practice of physiognomy. Light gifted the eye with the wisdom of judgment. It made it the means and method of assessment of propriety and it was, first and foremost, into the eyes of others that the physiognomist (professional or lay) would look to assess the worth of a person. In this cultural context, blindness was blighted on all fronts, and darkness was an abyss of ignorance

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into which only the worst and most damned had been consigned. Blindness was akin to banishment to Hades where the dark was never penetrated by the cleansing light of the sun. Physiognomy embedded prejudice in Greek culture through, for example, authentications of inductive method in Aristotle’s philosophy and its use by Pythagoras (569–496 bc) as an assessment toolkit in making admissions decisions about students who applied to his school. Appearance pervades Aristotle’s ‘doctrine of the mean’ propounded in his Nicomachean Ethics. At the mid-point between excess and deficiency, one finds virtue. The rule can be used to judge character from appearance, and the eye is the medium of moral interpretation in any such evaluation. Handbooks of physiognomy, widely used in philosophical, medical and rhetorical/political diagnostics (Boys-Stones 2007), were common and popular in Greek and Roman cultures. Galen (may have) produced a treatise on physiognomy aptly entitled ‘The Soul’s Dependence on the Body’. Physiognomy was also widely used in Roman rhetoric, including political character assassination and encomia. Polemon, whose celebrated work on physiognomy has had an impact down the ages, used physiognomy in the context of political rhetoric, praising his emperor Hadrian for the beautiful light of his eyes. In Greece, these encomia were usually reserved for the gods whose ‘eyes gleam and their very presence is enveloped in an atmosphere of radiance’ (Christopolous and Karakantza 2010: XV11). Apollo is ‘etymologically “the shining one”, the deity of light … his eye must be sun-like as befits his origin’ (Nietzsche 1993: 16). The evidence for the ontological credibility of blind people in Antiquity was largely limited to the presence in myth of the figure of the blind seer, particularly Teiresias, who in Sophocles’ (497–406 bc) work, Oedipus Tyrannus, is portrayed as a paragon of insight, a clairvoyant and a prophet blessed with the gift of ornithomancy (Kelley 2007: 44). The idea that the ‘insight attributed to the blind may be divinely or diabolically inspired’ (Garland 2010: 87) suggested that the hand of goodness may be behind some blind people. The propensity of the Olympians, however, to behave disgracefully may suggest that this aphorism does not assume a distinction between good and bad. However, a blind bard or poet – sometimes portrayed as a culturally positive figure – was present in myth, though there was little evidence of such characters, in reality (Garland 2010: 33–4). While positive evocations of blindness – tempered by Sophocles’ depiction of Teiresias as dependent and pitiable – creates some ambivalence about representations of blindness in classical Antiquity (Kelley 2007: 44), it goes against the grain of the literature in which blindness is depicted, negatively, as a metaphor for darkness, ignorance and death (Buxton 1980). Dolmage (2014: 63) argues that one can interpret Teiresias’s gifts as a product of his blindness. Blindness is generative power rather than a ‘stigma and disqualification’. On this view impairment is cited as a source of alternative rhetoric that can transform ableist meaning into new forms of persuasion. When Odysseus blinded the Cyclops, the one-eyed monster got what it deserved. For Bernidaki-Aldous (1990), blindness in Greek culture was a source

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of superhuman insight and the most potent loss that any human being could experience. This powerful dialectic prefigured modern forms of disability invalidation in which impairment was represented as both a great blight and a platform for the extraordinary. In texts through which we know the ancients, examples of positive compensation for the punishment of blindness is not uncommon. Demodocus, deprived of eyesight by the Muses, is given the special gift of musical f lair. However, Hartsock (2008: 66) argues that in Greek culture, ‘blindness is the most negative condition that can befall a person’. He re-iterates Herbert Covey’s (1998: 192) view that blindness was regarded by the Greeks as a ‘fate worse than death’. The theme of darkness, death and blindness as loss (of light) were central to Greek Literature and myth: ‘To “see the light of the sun” is, in Greek, the equivalent to being alive. Conversely “not to see the light”, is equivalent to death. Thus, blindness is a weaker expression for death’ (Letoublon 2010: 167–168). Sound mind and sound body, the guiding infrastructure of the curriculum of arete, was played out in the intimacies of quotidian moral attributions: ‘In a world where one is conditioned to think physiognomically; to encounter a blind character would inextricably cause the reader to make assumptions about the moral character of the blind person (Hartsock 2008: 61). Trentin (2013) and Rose (2003) argues that there is nothing exceptional or highly discriminatory about the way in which disabled, and particularly blind, people were treated in Antiquity. In the ancient world, it was perhaps more reasonable to assume that one would lose at least some of one’s sight. It follows that … sighted people knew blind people and sightimpaired people well enough to understand the abilities and limitations of failing vision and that there was not the cultural gulf between the sighted and the blind that exists today. (Rose 2003: 79) This argument conf lates propinquity with empathetic knowledge and assumes that the ubiquitous presence of blind people forms a bulwark against ‘sightist’ and ableist attitudes. One struggles to find evidence for this. Georgina Kleege (2007) argues, to the contrary, that the propensity for sighted culture to completely misunderstand blindness is well known. She bemoans the figure of the ‘hypothetical blind man’ that philosophers conjure up to make sense of alien experience. In the grip of an overexcited, ‘sighted imagination’, blindness was turned into a cipher, seen through the eyes of visual culture dominated by assumptions about blindness, drawn from speculation rather than experience. She suggests that in visual cultures like Greece and Rome, blindness was used in everyday life as a synonym for inattention, ignorance or prejudice’ or was regarded as a ‘tragedy too dire to contemplate’ (Kleege 2007: 456). The notion, proposed by Rose (2003), of an integrated blind community in Antiquity is an interesting one. Blindness involved a double form of cultural invisibility. It referred to ‘both he who does not see but also, he who is not visible, he who cannot be

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seen’ (Tatti-Gartziou 2010: 182). Exclusion from the ‘culture of light’, from this perspective, suggests that a blind life was one of ‘invisibility’. If a blind person was a ghost figure, an absent presence, an exemplary pariah consigned to an experience of complete inattention by everyday practices of social distancing, an integrated blind community would have made sense. In Greek and Roman cultures, there was a widespread use of ‘physiognomy as invective’ (Hartsock 2008: 59). It was used by, for example, Heraclitus and Hippocrates (460–375 bc) as a method to construct dubious arguments about race (Lincicum 2013: 14–15). Appearance alone was justification enough to make a person ‘an object of derision’ and it was embodied in Greek and Roman poetry and theatre (Garland 2010: 73, 76–8). Physiognomy was a platform to demean disability and approve the tendentious laughter targeted at disabled people. Appearance was a central apparatus in the production, reproduction and distribution of value in the moral economy. Invalidating derision played out in the spaces of interaction that brought disabled and non-disabled bodies into contact with one another. As Cicero put it; ‘laughter has its foundation in some kind of deformity and baseness’ (quoted in Garland 2010: 74). Few people with impairment were spared the demeaning objectification of tendentious bile. As I argued in the preceding section, even wounded war veterans did not escape (Garland 2010: 78). Warrior culture provided little protection from invective. Death in battle was glory, an outcome infinitely preferable to the aesthetic blight of scars and mutilations. In a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphosis describing the heroism of battle, one finds the virtue and honour of Rome invoked in the line ‘there is no leaving alive from today’s battle’ (Barton 2001: 39). In Rome, one can be wounded and (yet) admired if one’s animus – one’s core, one’s spirit – is not impaired, but given the impact of physiognomic consciousness on lay morality, the honour of a wounded man was fragile, under surveillance, subject to harsher forms of proof. Invective directed at bodily difference was, as I have alluded to above, a tried and tested strategy of invalidation in everyday life. Disavowal of impairment by non-disabled people was clarified by the moral and emotional distance that derision put between ‘the clean and proper body’ and its abject opposite. Hartsock (2008: 61) argues that in a culture where one was ‘conditioned to think’ judgementally from appearance, it was likely that ‘to encounter a blind’ person would lead to negative assumptions ‘about the moral character’ of a life without sight. It is little wonder that ‘eyes that were blind were a source of terror to the ancients’ (Hartsock (2008: 61). Hartsock (2008: 207) suggests that the average Roman citizen would likely have drawn three conclusions about a blind person; ‘that the … person was spiritually blind’ that ‘the person was … being punished by the divine world and that the person was helpless and pitiable’. Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 6) argue that: [O]ne might argue that physiognomics came to be consolidated out of a general historical practice applied to the bodies of disabled peoples. If the

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extreme evidence of marked physical differences provided a catalogue of reliable signs, then perhaps more minute bodily differentials could be catalogued and interpreted. In this sense, people with disabilities ironically served as the historical locus for the invention of physiognomy. (My italics) Support for this claim of invention in the cultures of Antiquity can be found in the field of oratory. Fogen (2009) argues that in oratory, propriety in relation to bodily techniques including gesture, deportment, expression and voice was part of a curriculum formed by using marginalised and invalidated bodies of, for example, disabled people and effeminate men, as guides to what not to do. Didacticism of bodily bearing, in the act of speech-giving, was founded on able visual virtues; ‘presentations of self ’, taught in the negative through reference to forms of comportment that were culturally offensive. In the public eye, it was best, if one wished for success and esteem, to look good; particularly when ‘sounding off ’. Truth and conviction came in well-wrapped packages. If the culture of appearance served ends that diminished the worth of disabled people generally and blind people particularly, the culture of ‘light’ provided a context to aid and abet the invalidating environment. If appearance and the rules of physiognomy lie at the heart of moral life and the moralisation of bodies in Antiquity, then ‘light’ paves the way for the spectacles of visual culture that make physical appearance and artistic achievement shining monuments to the Apollonian virtues of beauty, truth, goodness and (especially) order. Light and spectacle are engrained in the political culture of Antiquity that begins with the ‘Hellenic affinity for the visible’ ( Jay 1994: 21). The stunning quality of light in the eastern Mediterranean made the fascination with vision and optics appear as a natural extension of people’s relationship to their environment. Affiliation with nature grounded epistemological and philosophical priorities in the dreamy illusion of light, while through classical art, divinities in human form were made accessible to the devotional eye. Light was a mirror of positivity in the culture of ancient Greece. Darkness signified the presence of chaos and disorder: ‘Light may denote vision, clairvoyance, the Olympian order, the salvation of the psyche and the world we inhabit’, whilst darkness ‘may stand for ignorance, evil, and the ominous, violence and barbarism and the world beyond’ (Christopoulos and Karakantza 2010: XV). Martin Jay (1994) argues that the Greeks introduced into Western society the notion that sight should be privileged above all other senses. Hellenic ocularcentrism and the ontological prioritisation of light valorise sight. The Western tradition of epistemology owed its origins to the vision centred cultures of Antiquity. Even Plato, for whom the natural sensuous world was subordinate to the purity of the ‘idea’, rated the eye above all the other sense organs. Plato connected sight to light and to the solar divinity of the sun, Helios, who was ‘the author of sight’ (1974: V11, 510). Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with praise for the sense of sight which, he argued ‘enables us to acquire knowledge and bring to light many differences between things’ (quoted in Fredrick 2002: 2). Light had

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deep ontological significance for Greek culture. As the blind, Greek scholar, Bernidaki-Aldous (1990: 18) writes: In Greek culture, it is not a figure of speech to say that life equals light and death equals darkness. Life and light as well as death and darkness for the Greeks is an experience, a way of life, the understanding of the meaning of existence as the human condition dictates. Following Bernidaki-Aldous (1990), Hartsock (2008) argues that, in the culture of light, blindness became associated with three negative ontological dimensions. Firstly, blind people – in experiencing a fate worse than death – were ‘helpless, dependent upon others and have found dis-favour with the gods’ (Hartsock 2008: 64). Secondly, blindness was a punishment inf licted by either a divine or a powerful earthly source, usually for moral transgressions committed by or associated with the blind person. Punishment by blinding an offender for, inter alia, a breach of hospitality or a sexual transgression was – in Greek myth – written into the Laws of Cronos (Tatti-Gartziou 2010). Thirdly, blindness was indicative of ignorance, a deficit of knowledge and moral sensibility. There was, however, a fourth dimension to blindness that had positive connotations. Blindness was epistemological surplus; an endowment of prophetic powers (Hartsock 2008: 64). Teiresias who, in compensation for the loss of the first and greatest of the senses, acquired a sixth sense that opened him to a world beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. This special epistemology – Plato calls it philosophy – suggested that men liberated from the dimly lit cave of existence, saw far more than the shadows of passers-by. Teiresias was one of the original super-crips! The nature of moral economy is illustrated by the social response to the presence of genius and deformity, brilliance and blindness in the same person. How did the ableist imaginary solve this puzzle? Awe and wonder with a little veneration thrown in for good measure? The brilliant mind in the blighted body went against the deeply rooted classical tradition of ‘physiognomic consciousness’. Wonder, prodigy, the unfathomable; such figures transgressed the ubiquitous grain of visual truth and the relentless rules of experience. They confounded the wisdom of the philosophers, tyrants, physicians and other experts on life who wedded beauty and truth in perfect marital harmony. Blind people were either (nearly always) sub-human or (very rarely) superhuman in Greek culture. Either way, they were excluded from the moral mean. Without light they were morally dead, yet they were ‘seers’! Light was the medium that underpinned Greek culture’s love affair with visual aesthetics (Bernidaki-Aldous 1990). It was the ‘spectacle’ that enervated Roman ocular-centrism and provided the ableist context for the invalidation of visual impairment as a worthy way of being: As a visual culture, the Romans thought (and wrote) about the gaze more intensely than any other in Antiquity. Given the importance of

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spectacle and performance and the related emphasis on looking and being good to look at, loss of sight had a significant effect on the way in which an individual viewed members of the community and, of course, on the way in which an individual was viewed by members of the community too. (Trentin 2013: 91) Roman emperors used spectacle to display power and win the popularity of the masses. People with spectacular bodily differences, were used, likewise, to political ends (Gavaert and Laes 2013: 213). Domitian (ad 51–96) demonstrated his love of grotesque spectacle by pitching dwarfs into the gladiatorial arena, sometimes to fight women (Amazons). These were not life and death struggles, but comedic interludes. Dwarfs were too ‘valuable’ to slaughter. Their numbers far more limited that the endless supply of barbarians and slaves that could be sacrificed in the name of popular entertainment. If the great gladiator was a ‘star’ in the ‘powerful opera of emotions’ (Barton 1995: 12), so too was deformity; its appeal was less visceral and heroic, more ‘light entertainment’, an intermezzo side-show to satisfy the populist and quotidian ‘Roman fascination with the monstrous’ which the Greeks did not share (Felton 2013: 106). The Romans loved visual candy. They absorbed the extraordinary spectacle of the monster into their everyday lives: ‘They were interested in “freaks” of nature’ including ‘monstrous animals … deformed creatures … dwarfs and hunchbacks’ (Felton 2013: 127). Depictions of hunchbacks made into artefacts were used as good luck charms (Trentin 2015). In the circus, disabled people were used as ‘objects of merciless amusement’ (Bertling 2015: 12). Romans had a penchant for putting monster paraphernalia on view including ‘gigantic bones; the skeleton of the sea monster that threatened Andromeda and the hair of Medusa’ (Felton 2013: 129). The spectacular order of Rome – including Romans subduing monstrous disorder – provided a sharp contrast to the chaos of barbarism and the palpable attributes of darkness that Rome had put to the sword. When Cicero described Julius Caesar as the ‘forest of light of all nations and of all history’ (quoted in Barton 2001: 34), his sycophancy was embedded in the moral contrast of light and dark, order and chaos, beauty and monstrosity, Roman and barbarian, sighted and blind. Visual spectacle – embodied in the great leader – evoked power, control and military might. These too are feasts for the eyes; the splendid sight of legions marching in and out of the city having subdued or about to subdue the ‘monstrous races’. Spectacles of violence embodied in Roman literature, like Lucan’s (ad 39–65) visual and visceral Civil War (Lucan, 1928), where the bodies pile up in fields of blood and glory, are encomia to able, virtuous slaughter. But spectacle too was – as we have seen – embedded in popular leisure, where power was once again enacted for all to see; in the amphitheatres and the theatres; in the Circus Maximus, in chariot races and animal baiting; in buildings and statues, in banquets and in the Saturnalia that invited the grotesque in everyone to come out and play.

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The display of physical majesty and might, monstrosity and deformity in the gladiatorial arena was visual fuel in populist politics, from which blind people, who may have attended, attracted by the aural elements of the spectacle, were effectively excluded. And what a sight it would have been: The gladiator ‘fought with marvellous weapons amidst an elaborate ceremonial with the entire physical universe of the arena arranged to display his valour’ (Barton 1995: 33). The whole spectacle was designed around an assumption of visual access to power. The pompa or opening festival that preceded a gladiatorial contest and ‘the moment of truth’ that concluded it, in which Editor and audience decided the fate of the defeated party, were intensely ocular. The roar and baying of the audience, the clash of weapons and the screams of the mutilated, men and animals alike, must have been ‘compelling’ from an aural perspective, but in the ‘moment of truth’ when the audience is raised up in a tease of agency, blindness is a void without consolation. In this society of spectacle, there was a more pressing moral disadvantage for blind and visually impaired people: It is important to understand that in ancient Rome, looking was not passive but active. To look was to challenge. The spectator was inspector, judge and connoisseur … who failed the test of being seen was improbus, unsound not satisfying a standard, improper, incorrect, morally defective. (Barton 2001: 60) In Rome ‘being was being seen’ (Barton 2001: 58). To be blind was to forego the negotiations of visual reciprocity on which pedigree, honour, virtue and shame were constructed. Blindness was social impotence, deficit of agency. Laes (2013: 88) argues that Galen’s list of 124 eye diseases, the 150-plus Greek and Latin terms for visual impairment (Laes 2013: 8) and the vast number of eye remedies on the market were indicative of the ancient’s interest in ophthalmology and the culture of ‘being seen’. The ‘monster’ or ‘dwarf ’ was better placed than a blind person to survive in this scopic regime: He or she could command a price and play a role in the visual culture as object of ridicule. ‘Social utility’, in this benighted form, may have meant a roof over one’s head, a bed to sleep in, enough food to eat or the ‘advantage’ of being an adored ‘pet’ in a wealthy noble family; the opportunity to languish in a gilded prison cell. Similar ‘opportunities’ for blind people would have been rare. Blind people inhabited a culture where the moral importance of physiognomic consciousness and the deification of light framed them as improbus. The Western tradition of epistemology owes its origins to the vision-centred cultures of Antiquity. Blindness is constructed as the abomination that plunges its bearer into ignorance; a world void of the fruits of knowledge. Profoundly impressed by Plato’s prioritisation of the mind’s eye and seeing beyond the senses to the idea and the ultimate accomplishments of the intellect, Democritus blinded himself. In a state of ‘ideal vision’, he believed he would see through ‘theoria’, with the intensity of a philosopher king. Oedipus sought justice in blindness for his

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hapless, craven acts. Basking in the light of reason, blindness doubled as ­painful path to wisdom and just dessert for the most heinous crimes. Wise Oedipus – who solved the riddle of the Sphinx and was rewarded with the throne of Thebes and the hand of his mother in marriage – chose auto-mutilation of the eyes. His culture offered guidance on a punishment to fit his crimes. Sophocles described Oedipus stabbing at his eyes with Jocasta’s sharp pointed dress pins. Perpetual darkness was the only fitting atonement for patricide and incest. No other form of self-harm could help him salve his tortured conscience. In a visual culture of moral seeing that rested on the trick of discerning soul through the prism of the body, the non-disabled gaze established a secure foundation for judgement and justice. The ordinary peoples of the classical world – far less wise than Oedipus – developed a lay culture of ref lex moral calculation that equipped them to see clearly through to the relationship between crime and punishment. In ancient Greece and Rome, blind people were invalidated as scourges of impropriety because blindness was conceived as the just outcome for cosmic offences.

Concluding remarks Martha Edwards (1997) argues that Graeco-Roman Antiquity does not host a norm of embodiment against which human variation can be measured. It is not the norm, but the ideal and the mean in nature around which normate community organises itself. Ableist sentiments are harnessed by the curriculum of arete and the principles of virtue that are attached to a sound mind in a sound body. Beautiful bodies occupy the moral high ground. Kalos kagathos collapses beauty and goodness into an ideal moral subject. Core cultural beliefs and practices situate corporal norms at the heart of social life and form tribunals of everyday judgement against which impairment is reduced to impropriety. Classical scholar Benjamin Isaac (2006) described Graeco-Roman civilisation as ‘proto-racist’; a template on which Western values about ethnic difference have been developed. The parallel with disability is instructive. The earthworks of disability invalidation in the ‘West’ are created in the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean out of ‘refined’ conceptions of embodied value that form pillars of virtue and propriety. In 1913, Allan G. Roper picked up the Arnold Prize for his manuscript Ancient Eugenics, in which he outlined the debt of past to present, the links between Spartan common sense and Galton’s science of heredity: ‘While they lived their short lives’, he writes with bloated approval, ‘the weakly, the deformed and the superf luous were a burden to the tribe. Human law, superseding natural law, strove to eliminate them at birth. This was the atavistic basis on which subsequent eugenics was built’ (1913: 2). Antiquity was dominated by a moral economy that revolved around arete – an aesthetic ethic of embodiment that pushed disability to the edge of the community inclined to its disposal by exile or served it up on a platter of entertainment, as an object of ridicule and derision. The politics of virtue was a craft for action that formed a partnership with the aesthetic of embodiment. Virtue and

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virility, built into the architecture of gymnasia, prefigure the vicious sting of great armies that march victoriously across the known world. In Homer’s epics, heroes, nurtured by the exploits of men who mimic gods by performing feats of greatness, are candidates for deification. Impairment, by contrast, evokes beast and barbarian, at best, comic deity. Physiognomy judges it harshly. It has no positive ontological value, no intrinsic validity to contribute to moral economy. It is, however, far from irrelevant in the making of the classical moral fabric. It is the weave of its antithesis; offending, deeply, the standards of the ableist habitus in which meaning of virtue is enacted. Disability is the shadow of standards set out by heroes who embody nobility, beauty, reason, truth and order; the characteristic cultural icons from which spring the vital forces of men who f lourish, excel and dominate. Positive moral economy is sealed off from the inf luence of impairment. Flawed reason or physical weakness are the very negation of the heroic credentials. Disability is the hopeless case through which eudemonia can be inferred. According to Aristotle’s ‘virtue ethics’, persons with diminished physical and mental attributes are likely to be akratic; that is ‘incontinent’, lacking in mastery, chronically impetuous or weak, motivated by passion rather than reason (Kraut 2010: 16). Biological ‘­corruption’ in the classical period is squared with social and intellectual failure. A ‘crooked’ body and want of reason are, in the ‘doctrine’ of arete, invariably conf lated, though want of reason alone is sufficient to dismiss the value of a life. According to Stainton (2008: 485): The association of reason with human value, citizenship and humanness came to be firmly established in Greek Classical thought. These ideas have been key inf luences on the epistemological structures of Western modernity and through them on the construction and social response to intellectual disability, those who are perceived to lack a particular type or degree of reason. Graeco-Roman culture established a benchmark of aesthetic and moral excellence. It brooked little tolerance of physical variation from the standard to which it became inextricably betrothed (Garland 2010: 87–104). For Aristotle citizenship begins with self-knowledge. Self-government unlocks human freedom. It is beyond the ken of the classical perspective that an impaired mind or body could oversee itself with sufficient efficacy to command the credentials of citizenship. If for Herodotus, deformity is beyond the call of happiness, then for Aristotle, it is beyond the call of freedom. The German/Jewish Scholar Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) writing in the eighteenth century celebrated his physical differences by digging deep into classical literature to find examples of greatness in the clear and visible presence of impairment: He took to poetry to outline the connection Great you call Demosthenes, Stuttering orator of Greece;

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Hunchbacked Aesop you deem wise; In your circle, I surmise I am doubly wise and great. What in each was separate You in me united find; Hump and heavy tongue combined. (Bobrick, 1995: 78) Mendelssohn’s autobiographically inspired selection of classical bodies wages a mini counter offensive against the moral contours of arete. Impairment is not necessarily a barrier to wisdom or communication. The proof of the claim lies in the achievements of, inter alia, Aesop (620–560 bc) and Demosthenes, in stories and speeches that, despite coming from ‘crooked’ bodies, ride across the ages in seminal waves of wisdom. And when the waves meet Mendelssohn – millennia later – he, unlike Demosthenes, does not see his redemption in overcoming his impairment; by developing and practising the techniques that would cover over his faltering speech. Nor is he in awe of his life of capability amid impairment. Mendelssohn recognises that his scoliosis and his stutter are part of what he is and has become. They are ontologically integrated into who he is and are, therefore, key contributors to his many achievements. His poem anticipates sentiments associated with a much later date, with the late twentieth century movement of disability pride. The poem is a minor collision of distant past, recent past and present and in it we can identify some of the signs that constitute the beginnings of the struggle against classical ableism which one can detect, for example, in the work of Nietzsche (Goodley, Hughes and Davis 2012: Smith 2005). Nietzsche (1968) takes Socrates to task. His philosophy does not ref lect his unsightly material being in the world. He does not take the opportunity to deploy his un-predisposing physique as a critique of Athenian virtue. Rather, seduced by commitment to classical idealism, he reproduced the usual discourse that left ableist views of his fellows unchallenged: Nietzsche points out that much of Socrates’ appeal for the Athenians was based upon a freak-show like spectacle of a philosopher who champions rationality as beauty in spite of physical evidence to the contrary. Nietzsche’s Socrates dishonestly ignores the corporeal source of his power and, in so doing, diminishes the master’s mythic stature to little more than a symptomatic conformist. (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 91) Socrates – sound mind in a crooked body – is, in Nietzsche’s view, an embodied challenge to arete. Why does no one – not least Socrates himself – use his person to mock the classical view that the body beautiful ref lects the brilliant moral and aesthetic qualities of the inner self? If moral correspondence between inner and outer self was naked truth, axiomatic for Greeks and Romans, then the

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‘ugly’ Socrates could have been no more than a mediocre intellect. The logical ­contradiction could not have escaped the great Athenian philosopher. As he goes to his death charged with corrupting the youth of Athens, he does so, as Nietzsche suggests, deservingly, recognising, as he willingly consumes the draught of deadly hemlock that will be his final act, that he is, in fact, guilty as charged. Graeco-Roman culture adheres tenaciously to the fiction of arete. Despite the evidence, of which there must have been plenty, of broken bodies with sound claims to greatness – Aesop, Demosthenes, Socrates, perhaps Homer (of whom the claim to blindness is disputed) to name a few – classical culture remains tied to the view that there is no dignity or nobility in physical or mental difference; GraecoRoman representations of disability are wrought out of the harshest judgement: ‘Sinner, slave, scapegoat, stigma and spectacle – a human without humanity, who should be banished from sight and segregated permanently’ (Quarmby 2011: 26). Antiquity is firmly anthropoemic in its relation to disability. It casts out deformity, ridicules ‘jokes of nature’, mocks mortals and men that offend the moral contours of its civilisation. The project of arete, of the perfectible self, incites the non-disabled imaginary to conceptualise disability as natural disaster and a metaphor for socio-cultural disorder. It legitimates infanticide for disabled new-borns and conscripts disabled people into the role of pharmakos to cure collective maladies and rehabilitate the troubled polity. In the antiquarian attitude to disability, we encounter a culture that, ‘has almost no interest in, and sometimes would rather kill, alternative ways of being in the world’ (Titchkosky 2003: 236).

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Kromm, J. (2002) The Art of Frenzy: Public Madness in the Visual Culture of Europe 1500– 1850, London, UK: Continuum. Kyle, D. (2007) Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Laes, C. (2013) Disability and the Disabled in the Roman World: A Social and Cultural History, Antwerp, Belgium: University of Cambridge Press. Laes, C. (Ed.) (2017) Disability in Antiquity: Rewriting Antiquity, London, UK: Routledge. Letoublon, F. (2010) Blind people and blindness in ancient Greek myths, pp. 167–180 in M. Christopoulis and E. Karakantza (Eds.) Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Levick, B. (1990) Claudius, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lincicum, D. (2013) Philo and the physiognomic tradition, Journal of the Study of Judaism, 44: 1–30. Lucan. (1928) The Civil War (Pharsalia) (Translated, J. Duff ), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martin, R. (2015) Festivals, symposia and the performance of Greek poetry, pp. 17–30 in P. Destree and P. Murray (Eds.) A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons. Meeusen, M. (2017) Plutarch’s philosophy of disability: Human after all, pp. 197–210 in C. Laes (Ed.) Disability in Antiquity: Rewriting Disability, London, UK: Routledge. Michalko, R. (1999) The Two-In-One: Walking with Smokie: Walking with Blindness, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Miller, S. (2004) Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (2nd Edition), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Miller, W. (1997) The Anatomy of Disgust, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, P. and Reeve, C. (2015) Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (2nd Edition), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Mitchell, D. and Snyder, S. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, D. and Snyder, S. (2013) Narrative prosthesis, pp. 222–235 in L. Davis (Ed.) The Disability Studies Reader (4th Edition), London, UK: Routledge. Morton, C., Braund, S. and James, P. (1998) Quasi-Homo: Distortion and contortion is Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, Arethusa, 31(3): 285–311. Most, G.W. (1995) The athletes body in ancient Greece, Stanford Humanities Review, 6(2). Online at: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/6-2/html/most.html (Accessed 24/02/2011). Newman, B. (1998) Possessed by the spirit: Deviant women, demoniacs, and the apostolic life in the thirteenth century, Speculum, 73(3): 733–70. Nietzsche, F. (1968) Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1977) Beyond Good and Evil, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. (1993) The Birth of Tragedy, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Nussbaum, F. (2003) The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1974) The Republic, London, UK: Pan Books. Porter, R. (2004) Flesh in the Age of Reason, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Quarmby, K. (2011) Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, London, UK: Portobello Books. Roper, A. (1913) Ancient Eugenics, Oxford, UK: Cliveden Press. Online at: https:// archive.org/stream/RoperAllenGAncientEugenics/Roper_ Allen_G_ Ancient (Accessed 8/6/2015).

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5 DISABILITY IN THE CHRISTIAN MIDDLE AGES

Introduction My Grandma used to say I that I’d been cursed and that I’d been punished by God for what I have done in a past life. (Quoted in Humphries and Gordon 1992: 11) These words evoke Medieval meanings of disability. They recall a world deep in the past when impairment was a mark of sin and a sign of God’s displeasure. They were, however, spoken in the middle of the twentieth century. Prejudice surfs the waves of time; washing up like f lotsam and jetsam on the shores of the present. This narrative – secularly eroded survivor from the past – is an enduring fossil, its invalidating passage through history accompanied by a parallel curiosity that still surfaces in contemporary life. In Medieval Christendom, disability was associated with the healing power of Christ, the temporal presence of immortal grace (Cusack 1997) and the human bond of caritas that secular modernity has reformed into the institutional arrangements associated with scientific medicine and a mixed economy of welfare. I argue, in this chapter, that disability was at the heart of moral economy in the Middle Ages. Impairment was perceived and represented as fundamentally ambivalent. Disability signified simultaneously the poison of sin and the comfort of redemption. In Antiquity, impairment was unambiguously disposable; dismissed contemptuously as a moribund being; a negative ontology; a clear marker of what not to be; a deficiency to be eliminated without qualm. There was no incentive to draw disability into the normate community and give it a settled place. Despite compensation – in Athens – for wounded warriors, the idea that impairment ‘merits alms’ was entirely ‘foreign to the Greeks’ and to the moral economy of the ancients (Rose 2003: 98). In the context of Christian hegemony,

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disability could not simply be abandoned with anthropoemic disdain. It raised important theological questions that the earthly powers of Church and nobility could not ignore. The moral and emotional juxtapositions of Medieval morality kept disabled lives in mercurial tension: ‘On the one hand, the sick, the poor, the insane are objects of … deeply moved pity born of a feeling of fraternity … on the other hand, they are treated with incredible hardness or cruelly mocked’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 26). The weight of moral negativity carried by impairment was counterbalanced by its use-value for privileged stakeholders in the Proprium, for whom it was an instrument in the spiritual quest for redemption. Disabled people were a distinctive collective in the massed ranks of the wretched poor. Their place, on the margins of community, was insecurely secured by their strong presence in biblical narrative, from which followed the ‘right’ to a mendicant life. Disabled people were spiritual fodder in a system of charity (Stiker 1999), and poor relief and the miraculous elimination of impairment was the most tangible and awesome material ‘evidence’ of God’s existence. In the blessed moment of its abrogation, impairment provided concrete evidence of the immutable, the infinite and the eternal in the midst of the protean, the finite and the mortal. As evidentiary matter in the performance of miraculous works, impairment was a spiritual scaffolding in the metaphysical politics of salvation on which depended the promise of redemption for the propertied, landed classes. Structures of assimilation and integration of disability, absent in the classical world, were necessary in Christendom. In their role of spiritual and moral mediation, disabled people distinguished themselves from the wretched mass of ‘the poor’. They too were a means by which non-disabled people – including ‘the poor’ themselves – could do good works to promote themselves as worthy of God’s favour. The poor – though exploited and in bondage – were not, however, a target for persecution on the same sacred grounds as disabled people, for though everyman was sinful, not everyone was a specialist in suffering or visible evidence of sin or God’s punishment for it. In these respects, disabled people, much more so than Stiker (1999) suggests, distinguished themselves from the great mass of impoverished peasants who lived as vassals and underlings. Impairment was a nuanced system of moral communication, mediating between the sacred and the profane the miraculous and the mundane, damnation and salvation, grace and dis/grace. The moral framework of disability invalidation was not based solely on a pejorative set of signifiers, for it was pivotal to a complex system of charity or caritas. Charity, however, as I will argue in this chapter, was an instrumental system of welfare that benefitted the non-disabled community far more than disabled people. It was not based on unalloyed compassion and altruism, but on cleansing opportunities for nondisabled people who, through the offices of the system, were able (sic) to win heavenly kudos through merciful acts and gift giving activities. Disability structured relations of religious power, efficaciously, as a conduit for the distribution of spiritual opportunity.

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The doctrine of redemption suggested that perfection and impairment were not necessarily, as they had been in classical culture, mutually exclusive. Disability was a platform for the salvation of the able. Impairment was redeemable when death or the miraculous came knocking. Jesus, during his earthly incarnation, mixed with all manner of ‘undesirables’ and made it clear that union with Christ in heaven was possible for even the most wretched. Strategies of disability invalidation in the Christian Middle Ages embraced an anthropophagic element. Approaches to impairment were based on merciful accountancy. However, as the quotation that begins this chapter suggests, mythic, Medieval representations of disability continue to this day to embrace profoundly negative traditional Christian conceptions of disability (Keith 2001; Robert 2013) that were evident in theological debate and biblical narrative during the Middle Ages. Dread, guilt, fear, pity and disgust, as well as grace and salvation, mediated the complex moral meaning system that impairment inspired. Augustine used ‘a negative vocabulary for impairments to indicate’ that those so ‘blighted’ were ‘homologous with evil and a deprivation of the good’ (Brock 2012: 70). Impairment was conceived as sin and as a medium for the expression of monstrous and demonic activity. Disabled people were targets for theologically justified violence and popular ridicule. While the potential to be assigned the role of scapegoat or pharmakos remained very much alive for disabled people in the Middle Ages – particularly through the discourses of the monstrous and the demonic that attached themselves to impairment – recognition by non-disabled people of disabled people’s instrumental use-value for their personal projects of redemption, bound disabled people, ambivalently, into a complex and contradictory economy of moral exchange. Disabled people were for non-disabled people a means through which they could demonstrate mercy, piety and neighbourly concern. ‘Gifts’ were given in exchange for redemption. For disabled people, this combination of contradictory roles bequeathed an ambiguous socio-moral status and a liminal, mendicant existence as objects of scorn and vehicles for others’ pursuit of everlasting life. Scholars of the history of the Middle Ages argue that in its practical affairs, Christianity was Janus-faced, insofar as it embraced simultaneously a tradition of ‘holy violence’ and the Nazarene’s imperative to embrace peace and forgiveness (Drake 2011; Gaddis 2005; Huizinga 1922/1999). The former was called the ‘eristic tradition’, the latter the ‘irenic tradition’. I argue that disabled people in the Middle Ages are trapped in this vice of hypocrisy. The disabled sinner was good to mistreat and chastise, but as an important figure in Christ’s ministry, was simultaneously good to be good to. Medieval ableism pivoted on a contradictory combination of violent cruelty and charitable works. In the first two sections following, I examine the eristic tradition and the trinity of power – God, church and nobility – through which property developed and exercised control over propriety and validity, to its mundane and cosmic benefit. I then examine theological invalidations of impairment, including the complex relationship between god and man; the incarnate, the incarnate made

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carnal and the carnal, and how the sinful impurity of the last of these corporeal positions sustained dogmas of good and evil that made disability into a matter of theological and practical turbulence and everyday intolerance. I argue that the sinfulness associated with impairment and physical difference (Black 2006; Covey 1998) invited eristic intolerance and violent forms of social rejection. Impairment fell foul of the ableist binary of good and evil that shaped questions of validity, underpinned social relations and contributed to the turbulent contradictions of the ambiguous moral economy. These dis/graces of disability are manifest in the exclusion of deaf and blind people from sacramental rites, in representations of disabled people as vessels through which monsters and demons express themselves and in the daily round of ridicule that difference inspired. In demonstrating that saints need impairment for their celebrity, I suggest that disability mediated grace and disgrace and that it, in its miraculous elimination, provided proof of God. I also examine the irenic tradition of caritas and acts of mercy. I argue that it is the non-disabled elites who reap the eschatological benefits of a system that exploits disabled people for their spiritual use-value. In the classical world, disabled people were non-persons – perduta gente. A ‘defective’ lacked the basic carnal or intellectual raw material required to enter the ranks of virtue. Impairment signified a deficit in strength or wit to engage, effectively, in the struggle to realise the ethical self. In ancient Greece, impairment was not commensurate with eudemonia. In Rome, it was irreconcilable with the criteria for developing the manly virtues of excellence. Save as a source of entertainment for bored elites or as a pharmakos to abrogate the problems of troubled communities, impairment in Antiquity had negative moral use-value in the normate order. Impairment was best returned ‘to the gods’, for it was a form of life that ‘symbolized their anger’ (Stiker 1999: 75). Christian ableism embodied a complex, ambivalent semiosis. Disability had moral use-value for propertied classes and ecclesiastical elites, serving as a means to their redemptive ends and as a scapegoat for social violence.

Eristic Christianity The ambiguous nature of moral relations between disability and non-disability was structured by a wider factor (nominally) extrinsic to this relationship, which was derived from Pagan hostility to Christianity that, before Constantine’s conversion to the teachings of the Nazarene (circa ad 312), had suppressed violently the cherished beliefs and practices of Christ’s followers. Gaddis (2005: 15) argues that the Christian ‘biblical tradition offers ample material to support both militant violence and pacifism’. These were known respectively as the eristic and irenic traditions. This section examines the former as the context in which disability was good to mistreat. The irenic injunction to turn the other cheek and to promote peace and reconciliation was one set of practices common to Christianity, but no less so was the eristic tradition involving intolerant persecution and the wielding of whatever

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violence was necessary to defend the Truth. ‘Holy violence’ or ‘action pleasing to God which elevated personal holiness and godly zeal above the restraints of secular law and order’ was deeply embedded in the psyche of antiquarian and post-antiquarian Christianity. Violent and militaristic language was central to Paul’s epistles and evident ‘throughout Christian discourse and practice in’, for example, ‘Baptismal ritual, prayer and ascetic discipline’ (Gaddis 2005: 27). ‘To the Medieval world, violence was a part of God’s plan. Suffering, insecurity, violence were everyday occurrences … Medieval saints’, no less than crusading Christian warriors ‘accepted the cruelties of Medieval life’ (Sznaider 2001: 27). Narratives of martyrdom and references to ‘the soldiers of Christ’ confirmed the centrality of a sanguinary approach to the disciplinary practices of the Church of Rome and the feudal overlords, bishops and princes that carried their swords in the name of Christ. The merciless wrath of Christian conviction was taken out, with bloody zeal in dealings with the old pagan enemy, though Church policy waxed and waned on this issue as power struggles between bishops and emperors f lipped uneasily between tolerance and persecution (Drake 2011). When militant Christian piety was at its peak, however, Paganism, the former source of Christian persecution, felt the full force of the vengeful boot on the other foot. The Christian God was a jealous God, and His Church did not tolerate competition from polytheistic upstarts nor from the monotheistic effrontery of Islam or Judaism. The infidel at the gates of Christendom and the monster within were also targets of the eristic tradition. The ecclesiastical establishment and the warrior aristocracy mounted bloody crusades against Saracens and Moors, supporting and, in some cases, organising the ‘spontaneous’ butchery of pogroms against the murderers of Christ. Closure and destruction of pagan temples and icons were commonplace in late Antiquity (Nixey 2017), but as this threat was crushed ‘Heathens’ – Jews and Muslims – became the principle targets of eristic dogma and the blessed steel of Christian soldiers. The machinery of violence did not stop at these outsiders. Heretics, too, were violently persecuted. So too were sin-sodden minorities like prostitutes and lepers (Nirenburg 1996). In the high Middle Ages, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) invoked by Innocent III ‘laid down’ a new ‘machinery of persecution for Western Christendom’ (Moore 1987: 16) that would run through to the Reformation. Persecution of minorities became a righteous duty (Caldwell Ames 2019). Truth came down on error with the bloody force of conviction and impairment was not infrequently a casualty of its crushing certainty. Despite Constantine’s initial irenic leanings, the Christian church in the fourth century, as the established church of the crumbling Roman Empire, was marked by dogmatic certainty and intolerance (Momigliano 1986). Zealous suppression of paganism and polytheism were characteristic of Christian government in late Antiquity (Gibbon 2000). Augustine provided theological justification for the kind of Christianity that condoned the murder of the female philosopher Hypatia by a zealous Christian mob in her native Alexandria (Drake 1996). John Chrysostom recommended violence against blasphemers: ‘Slap them in the

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face; strike them around the mouth; sanctify your hand by the blow’ (quoted in Gaddis 2005: 31). By the late Middle Ages, ‘prelates and princes’, bound together by centralising ambitions, supported by divine intervention in the form of theological ideology and scriptural dogma developed the political instruments of ‘persecution’; the means to fabricate and put down communities that contested orthodoxy; the tools to construct threats from difference and turn dissent into heresy (Moore 1987). Throughout the Middle Ages, ‘heresy’ was used to manufacture intolerance and legitimate the violent forms of social control and governance of everyday life. Heresy helped make the Middle Ages a ‘special period of judicial cruelty’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 15). As a threat, heresy was the kind of issue that would turn the … conf lict between eristic and irenic messages that had given Christianity so much f lexibility in earlier centuries into a weapon for militant use. For within that conf lict there lay an unresolved tension between the commandment to love one’s enemies and the equally strong injunction to reject Satan and his acts. (Drake 1996: 30) This was precisely the ambiguity that trapped disabled people in a culture in which they could be treated, as if without contradiction, with abuse and compassion. Heresy had been a byword for coercion from the days of Constantine whose irenic approach to pagans contrasted with his eristic approach to traitorous insiders. Heresy was ‘the issue that mobilised the monks behind a message of coercion rather than love’ (Drake 1996: 31). It was central to the identification of the enemy within and to the violent processes of moral regulation that it brought into being. ‘Holy zeal’ was a political tool that ‘unleashed passions in the service of faith’ (Gaddis 2005: 151). The centralisation of moral authority, the politicisation of right and wrong swept disabled people into a violent, deadly, web of power. Government by persecution and pogrom was not uncommon. Jews, people with views that differed from the Papal orthodoxy of the day and lepers, more likely anyone with blemished f lesh (Gaddis 2005: 78–79), became the sources of moral anxiety, potential targets for persecution. Those who argue, like Brendan Gleeson (1997) and Irina Metzler (2006), that impairment was so ubiquitous during the Middle Ages that disability qua oppression was simply not in evidence are too committed to the diachronic view of disability as a bastard child of industrial capitalism to recognise the invalidating cultural dynamics of the socio-religious and economic relations of ableism that made the Middle Ages tick. As targets of charity and persecution, disabled people were at the heart of a volatile moral economy. Violent forms of moral regulation and social control executed by princes and prelates readily acquired theological validity. Brock (2012: 65) argues that Augustine’s ‘framing of any given question was to set the basic parameters

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within which centuries of Western Christians were to think’. One should not ­underestimate his inf luence on the Christian propensity to do ‘proper’ violence in the name of God. Augustine provides ‘an endorsement of muscular state violence in matters of faith’ (Gaddis 2005: 133). Augustine, in The City of God, summed up the eristic tradition: ‘That all superstition of pagans should be annihilated is what God wants. God commands! God proclaims’ (quoted in Woodhead 2004: 87). The militant and aggressive nature of fourth century Christianity established the eristic tradition of coercion and intransigence. Bloody force was a much-used tactic in the playbook of Christian rule. There was scriptural justification a-plenty: The Parable of the Great Feast in Luke (14. 15–24) where reluctant guests are forced to attend a festivity; the tale of Paul’s violent conversion; the bellicosity of Moses and Elijah and so on. Even Christ is not always irenic in his sensibilities and practices. He takes the whip to the traders in the temple. Those who refuse to believe in him like the people in cities who mocked his teachings would be, on the day of judgement, the victims of a terrible, holy revenge. His message was about love, but he was quick to anger and the sword figures in his mission, particularly in the violent apocalypse that he predicts. Forced conversion of pagans or heretics like the Donatists, saved souls by bringing them to Christ (Shaw 2011). What could be greater justification for coercion and persecution? As Christianity established itself as the dominant religious power in late Antiquity, the religious tolerance and pacifism preached by, for example, Tertullian and even by Augustine himself in his early works, rapidly evaporates. Use of violence to save someone from sin was right and proper. Gangs of monks roaming the countryside, vandalising pagan temples, attacking and terrorising sinners, heretics and unbelievers were common in the fourth century as Christianity f lexed its muscles and took revenge on its old enemies, not in the name of vengeance, but to save souls that might otherwise be lost to God. In Augustine’s view, one who spared the rod did not demonstrate paternal love. Although Augustine warned against excessive zeal and unrestrained violence, he also argued that if one uses fear and compulsion to right a wrong or to correct the spiritually misguided, one’s conduct can be interpreted as an act of love. Impiety should be met with righteous and proportionate persecution: When anyone use’s measures involving the inf liction of pain in order to prevent an inconsiderate person from incurring the most dreadful punishments by being accustomed to crimes which yield him no advantage, he is like one who pulls a boy’s hair in order to prevent him from provoking serpents. (Augustine, quoted in Gaddis 2005: 138) Augustine argued that there was propriety in the use of paternalistic violence and in punishment if it was used to correct folly and sin. Valid violence protects or restores grace. Sometimes it is good to mistreat. In his Confessions, Augustine refers

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to the ‘beatings’ that he received at the hands of God and to his long and t­ ortuous journey to Christ. Violence, he suggests, is central to Christian discipline and to its corrective, purifying power. In the City of God, he exclaims that it is right to be angry and indignant with people in a state of sinfulness. The same logic applies to the chastisement of self and the asceticism of monastic life: Violent self-discipline administered to correct sin is a moral act. Sin provokes violence; appropriately so. The irenic tradition of charity in which neighbourly consideration and love for one’s enemies is paramount, finds itself in a constant struggle with its bellicose counterpart: In 681, a Council of Bishops in Toledo, Spain called for the decapitation of all who practised in unchristian ways. Charlemagne offered the enemies of Christ ‘baptism or death’. The 4,500 pagans killed at the Massacre of Verdun in 774 were victims of this policy. ‘Violence showed up again and again in the various contexts of the papal inquisitions, the militant ideologies of crusade and imperialism’ and later in ‘the persecutions of Reformation’ (Gaddis 2005: 337). With the truth and the power to make it known to all who may doubt it at its disposal, Christendom was much inclined to use the iron fist. The ambiguities at the heart of Christianity’s key texts and historical legacy play out in practice as unresolved tensions between peacemaker and warrior. Indeed, turpitude in the everyday conduct of ordinary people was far from exceptional. People in the Middle Ages were ‘incomparably more ready’ than their modern equivalents to leap with undiminished intensity from one extreme to another’ and ‘slight impressions’ and uncontrollable associations’ were ‘often enough to induce these immense f luctuations’ (Elias 2000: 238). The righteous violence that disabled people faced at the hands of secular and religious authority was also likely to raise its head in the quotidian spaces of community. Disabled people were trapped between, on the one hand, the irenic tradition of love and compassion derived from Christology and the New Testament injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ and, on the other, the eristic tradition of intolerance and violent persecution that also had a strong scriptural basis (Gaddis 2005). Disabled people, themselves bearers of an ambiguous legacy of sinfulness and grace were caught in the froth where currents meet; in the turbulence of the propensity of monotheistic Christianity to embrace, often at random, both compassion and violence. Disabled people in the Middle Ages are both good to be good to and good to mistreat; targets and objects of pity and coercion. How could they know, in any given situation, whether they would be recipients of gifts or beatings? They were trapped in the ambiguities of the irenic/eristic contradiction. Kindness and persecution were equally legitimate modes of conduct towards disabled people.

God, church and state: Normate power triangulated Hypocrisy f lourished! The aristocratic warrior, wed to the mores of chivalry, for whom infidelity to its codes was as frequent as his power, ambition and

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avaricious attraction to the spoils of war allowed him to be! The prelate, whose piety was in inverse proportion to the luxury and ostentation that surrounded his lifestyle and the simony that secured his position! Nobility and privileged ecclesiastics lived off the fat of the land and the bulging coffers of fief and church, f leecing all below – merchants, guilds, peasants, lesser lords and clergy – in the name of war, secular or holy, or by taxes to prop up leisurely pursuits like jousting and feasting and conspicuous consumption of furs, wines, goods made of precious metals and the construction of great monuments to their insatiable hubris. Vassalage was a protection racket for ‘nobility’ and princes who taxed at will to fund war and private ambition. Papacy and prelacy lived off the tithe – a tax of one-tenth of everyone’s income – and the sale of spiritual insurance policies. The poor, milked dry by prof ligate pulpit and avaricious castle, were in bondage of toil and service to the vanity of entitlement and gilded piety for their economic and spiritual penury. Exploitation of labour and soul was signed-off as a social contract by God’s will. Property may not determine propriety, but it bends – by force and fraud – the normative to its interests. The echo chamber of privilege orchestrates the cacophonous sound of virtue. Kolakowski (2012: 158) argues that the history of Christianity is a tale of hypocrisy, of a ‘chorus of the well-fed and well-satisfied … lecturing the hungry and deprived about the worthlessness of earthly goods and the pointlessness of worrying about their temporal lot’. Christian belief played a central role in linking past and present: The decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 left the Eastern Empire based in Byzantium to cradle Christian belief (Gibbon 2000). The Papacy remained constant – at times obscure, schismatic, always a site of power struggles – as the Church of St Peter; its western Ostrogothic base (493–537) shifting ideologically to the east when Justinian I (483–565) reconquered Rome and instituted a Byzantine Papacy that lasted from 537 to 752. The Western Empire was nominally rekindled by the crowning of Charlemagne as ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ by Frankish Pope Leo III in 850. Power in Europe developed through the enmeshment of princes and church and ‘over the course of the fourth century Christian Bishops came more and more to exercise varieties of power, political, economic, judicial and even on occasion military, traditionally regarded as “secular” or “worldly”’ (Gaddis 2005: 251). The ecclesiastic potentate or the ‘tyrant bishop’ stepped onto the pages of history and married ‘the charismatic zeal of the holy man with the effective power of the institutionalised episcopate’ (Gaddis 2005: 251). With God on his side, and the backing of nobility, from whence the great prelates also came, the tyrant bishop was a force to be reckoned with. God, property and propriety was a potent authoritative trinity. In the wake of Rome’s ‘conversion’ to the faith that it once despised, the Christian Church became ‘the one international ingredient which bound together disparate peoples in … shared faith and ritual and a common learned language’ (Logan 2013: 2). Elements from the classical period encroached into an age traditionally regarded as dark, ignorant and static. Christian doctrine blended with classical

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philosophy, in, for example, the inf luence of Plato on the work of Augustine (Brock 2012). In the high Middle Ages, the Christianisation of Aristotle was taken forward by the great scholastics, notably, St Albert Magnus (c. 2100–1280) and St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The Code of Justinian, the Corpus Juris Civilis, a massive compendium of Roman law collected into a handbook in ad 533 which included, in significant detail, the statutes that applied to disabled people, was ‘merged with the codes of the Germanic invaders to form the basis of the law in most European countries’ (Winzer 1997: 88) and ‘Latin words such as imbecillis, deformans and defectus were used to describe embodied phenomena’ (DePoy and Gilson 2011: 15) to signpost the varieties of impairment that God left on earth for purposes known only to Him. His earthly representatives were left with the terrestrial task, guided by His word, of making moral sense and ethical order out of the vicissitudes of life and nature. The economic interests of the earthly representatives prevailed. The church dominated spiritual, moral, social, cultural and emotional life in Europe, west and east, in the Middle Ages and alongside the nobility, often in partnership, sometimes tense and conf lictual, steered the precarious ship of life. Political philosophy and practice were derived from the Vulgate. Obedience to the powers that be, to God and his anointed rulers was expected; ‘even if wicked, it is wrong to rebel and especially, to make an attack on the person of the ruler’ (Samuel 1:14–16): ‘He that resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist purchase to themselves damnation’ (Romans 13: 1–3). The idea that kingship was a secular manifestation of divine authority was a commonplace of Christian didacticism conveyed, for example, through tales of lions in the bestiary (Haist 1999). Rank and value were based on ownership of land and landlords were God’s ministers. The landless peasants who worked the great estates, carved up between church and nobility, were condemned to a life of servitude. Medieval Christianity was indifferent to slavery. It did not condemn it. The Scholastics taught that bondsmen must accept their bonds. Servants must serve their masters (Macfarland and Parens 2014). Ancient Stoicism taught that it was possible to be free even in chains. This view crossed the bridge from classical life into Christian Europe. The wretched masses could find freedom in a dung-heap of external constraint. After all, the afterlife, the kingdom of heaven, was theirs. Disabled people too lived in terrestrial bondage amongst the poor and infirm, but their position amongst the wretched was exacerbated by their relationship to good and evil in Catholic theology. Impairment and defect pop up in theodicy from Augustine to Aquinas (Hick 1966). A central distinction in the theology of evil is between ‘malum culpae’ and ‘malum poenae’. Cessario (1990: 86) explains: ‘“Culpa” is something that man does, “poenae” something he endures’. The first refers to evil by fault or guilt, the stain of sin caused by a defective act of will. The second refers to an evil of punishment or penalty, a defect of pain, suffering or aff liction that appears to be – if not inspired by divine decree – then allowed to exist under His sovereignty.

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Impairment exemplifies ‘malum poenae’. Disabled people are simultaneously damned by the evil penalty that they endure, but sanctified by the visible suffering that they bear in His name or by His will. Impairment – particularly the generic term ‘defect’ – was used regularly in Medieval theological discourse to identify evil by punishment or ‘malum poenae’, but why these penalties are inf licted congenitally is far less clear. Disabled people appear to be ‘victims’ of His inexplicable letting of the evil of suffering into the world. Original sin combined with failures of human will might explain malum culpae, but the specialist class of sufferers punished by defect appear to have done nothing, on top of their connection to Adam and Eve, to deserve their punishment and their association with evil and its remediation. Parental sin was one common explanation that was used to make up for the non-sense of theodicy, but weak explanations of suffering and aff liction in terms of ‘malum’ had – and continue to have – a profoundly invaliding impact on the moral reputation of disabled people. Impairment is however, also – in biblical narratives – punishment for evil that has been executed at will on those who are culpable for evildoing. Leprosy visits Miriam for f louting the authority of Moses (Numbers X11: 9–12) and Nebuchadnezzar’s narcissism is punished by insanity (Daniel 1V: 28–33). Consignment of the understanding of impairment to a bruising discourse of good and evil, was, in the moral politics of everyday Medieval life, a place of wretched complexity; of deprivation and anointment of grace by penalty. Impairment was a sacred profanity; a defective ontology created by Perfection – a potential whipping-boy that could be tossed around in the triangular vortex of power that united the sovereign domains of God, church and nobility. The ruling nobility owned vast tracts of land but ‘by 1050 the Christian church was probably the largest landowner and most powerful single institution in Western Europe’ (Rollason 2012: 231). Christianity became the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire at the behest of Constantine (306–337) in ad 312. Its impact was enduring. Christianity defeated paganism by violence and ‘syncretism’; by absorbing some of its ideas and imagery, not to mention its practices of sacrifice and its philosophical predilection for Neo-Platonism. Moral and spiritual life was simplified by monotheism and the dogmas of catechism. Regarded by many powerful ‘barbarian’ kings and rulers as a religion of military success blessed with an efficient missionary system, it was evident that, by the end of the eleventh century, Western Europe had been completely transformed into ‘Christendom’. Networks of monks and monasteries, formed trans-European organisations, designed to bring order to spiritual life and the business of living (Ekelund 1996). In a society socially differentiated by ridged gradations of rank, being impaired, or the extent of one’s ‘scathed’ body or mind, was dependent on one’s place in the social order. If God was ‘unscathed’, kings and nobility – though scathed – were far less scathed than peasants and bondsmen. This is evident in some of the grand theological arguments of the Middle Ages: Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

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(quoted in Adams, 1979: 442) argued in his Summa Theologica that sin and social stratification are inseparable: Sin which is committed against God is infinite. For the sin is the more serious as the person against whom one sins, is the greater. For example, it is a more serious sin to kill a prince than to kill a private citizen. Rank had inordinate privileges. The Aquinian view of reparation had a northern parallel in the Medieval European system of punishment known as wergild. A Nordic word, meaning ‘man-price’, wergild was embodied in Germanic and Anglo-Saxon Law and was widely practiced as a system of compensation in Feudal Europe. It was blood money; paid by the perpetrator as compensation for murder or injury to the kin of a victim. The sum varied, depending on the status of the victim. Nobility commanded a far higher price than those from the lower orders. This striking system of ‘tort’ refused, unsurprisingly, to embrace any conception of equal value for human beings. Rank ran relationships down to the finer points of deferential comportment. Even broken bodies and minds could not be deprived of their birth right. Nobility and disability could and did go hand in hand. Rank was impervious to malign disruption. Impairment could not wound it. Only in transgressive festivals of landless peasants (Bakhtin 1968) or in off-stage courtly mockery, was the value of nobility undermined by impairment. However, the relationship between rank and disability was structured by a system of spiritual dependency that tied the privileged to the ‘broken timber of humanity’. There is little doubt that in the Middle Ages, impairment had universal social significance as a measure of moral action and moral responsibility for those who were not trapped in poverty. Disability was spiritually valuable to those who had rank and the wealth to invest in their heavenly future. In Medieval society, unlike its classical predecessor, impairment had enormous moral significance or ‘moral use-value’. It was good to lambast and persecute and, simultaneously, be good to. ‘Cripples’ as Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 185) argue ‘are those who inspire pity and pathos while also evoking fears of divine retribution and an illogic of nature’. The credibility of disability was invalidated by both the affect structure derived from the system of charity and gift and by the centrality of divine causality in which the wrath of the maker (or his antiChrist) was manifest in the (un)holy ‘brand’ of impairment; the visible badge of God’s displeasure. Norbert Elias (2000: 61) characterises the Middle Ages as an era of moral ‘­ simplicity’ marked by the ‘simple opposition between “good” and “bad”, “pious” and “wicked”’. Each moral polarity was embedded in the consciousness of the vassal and peasant classes by the combined moral authority of the powers-that-be and the Power of Omnipotence; the former, through revelation, at the behest of the latter. It was against the background of these simple binaries, and their roles as the determinants of people’s worth, that recognition and invalidation of disabled people in the Middle Ages was best understood.

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Moral simplicity, however, as Elias (2000) points out, sat alongside emotional and physical volatility. Explosions of violence and unpredictability served the interests of the ruling elites. Sensationalist accounts of scriptures created a world dominated by sin, fear and guilt which by the late Middle Ages was transformed into a more holistic system of governance in which visceral emotional responses were played-out in a violent culture of persecution (Moore 1987) that subjected heretics and groups designated as demonic or spiritually ‘diseased’ to the strictures of sanguinary holy order. Huizinga (1922/1999: 15) is struck by the ‘vehement pathos of Medieval life’ and by ‘the extreme excitability of the Medieval soul’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 20). The relationship between disability and non-disability in the run of the mill day-to-day excitability of the Medieval period was ‘an acceptance at times awkward, at times brutal, at times compassionate, a kind of indifferent fatalistic integration’ (Stiker 1999: 65). Impairment was an important political symbol for property and propriety. Anonymous disabled people turned-up in the Bible as extras to frame the lead actor’s claim to be the Son of God. The mendicant framed the rich man’s generosity and the cleric’s piety. Impairment was a token of spiritual noblesse. Goodness was enlivened by suffering; highlighted by malum and wretchedness. Proprium was ennobled by poverty and impropriety. Impairment was integrated at the level of bare existence. Fed, clothed or sheltered by the system of charity, disabled people lived precariously, at the frayed edge of material community. Impairment was, however, drawn to the moral centre by its narrative prominence in scripture and by the alms-giving and other charitable activities that conferred moral agency on privileged people. The difficulty of ‘placing’ disabled people in Medieval society is because they occupy simultaneously the social and economic margins and – in an ambivalent and extrinsic way – the moral centre. They animate the ‘moral economy’, yet only through their spiritual use-value. The giving of alms has more to do with the salvation of the givers than the recipients. Stiker struggles to express this peculiar dialect of included exclusion. He describes disabled people as (1999: 88) ‘spiritually integrated; never integrated, for they were always on the social fringes’. The precarious nature of disability value, in the context of a system that used disabled people to fashion moral order, was revealed by a curious case of competition around the mendicant activities that kept disabled people from starvation. The multiplication of mendicant religious orders in the late Middle Ages provided stiff economic competition for disabled people in the shape of pious, priestly beggars ‘who live to the detriment of inmates of leper houses and hospitals and other really poor and wretched people who are truly entitled to beg’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 155). That disabled people occupied a permanent place at the edge of the community – with some entitlements – seems to have been manifest in the built environment. Stigmatised bodies were spatially removed by the position of hospitals, alms-houses and leprosaria on the outskirts of town or outside the city walls. The inner space of the conurbation provided sanctuary for

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the pure and uncontaminated. Space was deployed by power through a matrix of inclusion and exclusion centre and periphery (Gilchrist 1994). As means to the end of their salvation, the normate community supported disabled people with material help, tossing coins of redemption in the general direction of persons of embodied and spiritual dubiety. Pious, ecclesiastical mendicants would have been better value for money, but adventurous supplicants of God’s blessing might have visited the social periphery where the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ huddled in anticipation of acts of magnanimity. Or it may have been that the mendicant priesthood, in the late Middle Ages, were among the few to reach the mendacious margins. Despite the entitlement to beg, perversely because of it, the potential for violence against disabled people was ubiquitous. In the wake of collective troubles and social crisis, disabled people were likely to become folk devils and scapegoats (Quarmby 2011). From their ‘vantage point’, on the edge of acceptability, disabled people might shiver in existential ambiguity, waiting for the wound of charity, or worse, wounds inf licted by eristic cruelty. The periphery was the geo-social location for those who carried the marks of divine punishment on their bodies. To read the material periphery as a moral one, does not however, do justice to the complexity of the situation. The propensity for disabled people to mediate in the exchange of ‘saving grace’ between God and his sinful f lock made them too important to be reduced to a crude antiquarian ‘politics of disposal’. The scars of sin, of which people with visible impairments were an obvious sign, made good deeds – though not necessarily compassion – a common response to disability. However, there was no need to rub shoulders with wretched impropriety. Disabled people were, from a nondisabled perspective, good to be good to but they were terribly aff licted with the dreadful contagion of evil: Piety … conceived the notion of punishment or vengeance from a Divine Master in retaliation for the sins of the affected individual or the parents. Rampant superstition, for example, placed deaf individuals “under the special curse of God” … Madness signified divine punishment and blindness was “one of those instruments by which a mysterious Providence has chosen to aff lict man” … Many disabled persons were viewed as polluted, creatures of evil omen, dangerous to the community and to themselves. (Winzer 1997: 85) Such perspectives did not guarantee a fireside welcome. They encouraged remote forms of charity; alms at arm’s length. Those well-protected by the armour of great piety or priestly conviction might approach with caution, but the rule was to keep this wretched vehicle of salvation at a distance. One might recognise the spiritual utility of disability, but this did not mean that one had to get up close and personal. Through homilies that described the tortures of the afterlife and the omnipresence of evil, an evangelism of fear kept the people focused on the

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opiate effects of God’s promises and the devil’s temptations as they picked at the scabs of original sin festering on their f leshy surfaces (Delumeau 1980). The cultural history of sin is, for Professor Delumeau, a history of the destructive effects of evil on the minds and bodies of men and women; a history of melancholy and battered self-image, of contempt for the f lesh. The ‘sacred canopy’ (Berger 1967) provided by the aegis of the church and the nobility offers a lone shark’s protection. Love of f lesh in the culture of Antiquity is replaced, as the Middle Ages progressed, by deep contempt for the vile sinfulness of carnality (Synnott, 1993), though it was cosmologically recoverable through repentance, confession, absolution and other practices of worldly asceticism. The church commanded both problem and solution; a double jurisdiction into which disability fitted like the proverbial glove. The general tenor of ontological negativity towards the f lesh, particularly visibly scathed f lesh – mediated by the terrifying contaminating figure of the leper (Rawcliffe 2006) – had consequences that manifest themselves in anthropoemic practices that were exacerbated by the demographic devastation of the plagues of the fourteenth century. Two centuries before this, in 1179, the Third Lateran Council had ordered that lepers should not live among the healthy and should be separated for purposes of worship and burial. Leprosy was ‘a focus for almost anything that Judeo-Christian cultures have found particularly troubling’ (Edmond 2006: 4). The moral imperative to strike anomalies of nature from the social roll call did not traverse the moral universes that separated Antiquity from the Christian Middle Ages. Impairment – even, perhaps especially, leprosy – carried a moral weight that was inscribed in Holy Scripture. The Proprium embodied a notion of spiritual cleanliness and purity that was only evident in great cathedrals and palaces. Evaluation of moral excellence was no longer based on classical notions of an ethical curriculum of soundness of mind and body, but on the religious idea of holiness, including the cleanliness associated with ‘wholeness and completion’ (Douglas 1966: 64–65). Moral excellence was founded on a life lived in faith and spiritual cleanliness under the guidance of the teaching of Christ, his earthly clergy and those nominated by him to be the masters of men. Cathedrals and castles were spaces of purification in which the impure could come, but not mix with their betters, unless their presence therein was legitimated by servitude to property and propriety. The body/soul of the serf was the target of triangulated power. The promise of salvation and the ‘body negativism’ of formal Christianity were major sources of political constraint for the wretched. Temptation gnawed at the f lesh. It is important to note, however, that the popular culture of the Middle Ages offered a picture of bodily being that was rather more bawdy and ribald (Bakhtin 1968). It did not embrace the lauded asceticism suggested by the life of the saints or the chivalry of knights, armour glinting in the sun as they rode, blessed, into battle in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. While the courtly upper classes, during the late Middle Ages, developed refined conduct, the peasants remained deeply

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wedded to a life that was coarse, rustic and vulgar (Elias 2000). The relative shamelessness of the world of popular embodiment and the sensual, pre-literate nature of popular culture may well have been welcoming to physical, mental and sensory difference (Mellor and Shilling 1997). This world of everyday life and leisure, played out in spaces where the supervision of masters and monks was far less intrusive, would have been, relatively speaking, inclusive of disabled people, particularly those who had the opportunity to contribute to family and community and were, thus more or less part of local peasant life. On the other hand, the Medieval period was the ‘age of ridicule’ (Shapiro 1999). The ‘carnivalesque’ of popular culture may have provided little protection from the mundane symbolic violence of insult and indignity. The open body of the Middle Ages is often contrasted with the ‘closed body’ that pupated from it during the Reformation (Mellor and Shilling 1997). The civilising processes of the early modern period exacerbated shame and repugnance around matters of bodily conduct (Elias 2000) and grounded propriety in everyday comportment and manners. This process expanded the social distance between disability and non-disability and transformed impairment into a more anthropoemic object. The desire to segregate disabled people from the community became more apparent in the civilising agenda of Early Modernity (Hughes 2012). One can see the origins of this shift in the form and strategy of invalidation in the increasingly inhospitable approach to vagrancy and begging that began to develop in the late Middle Ages. The ‘deserving’ status of disabled people was undermined by these processes (Hughes 2015). As modernity encroached, the controlling triumvirate of God, church and state began to realign strategies of governance to ref lect the growing role and power of the latter. In the Middle Ages, however, everything and everyman was penetrated by religious meaning and symbolism, so much so that the sacred collapsed into the profane; the blessed dissolved into blasphemy (Huizinga 1922/1999)! Disability was pitched into the whirlwind of supernatural meaning at the political heart of Christendom’s ambivalent moral economy. The doctrine of imago dei – man made in the image of God that will be examined in depth in the next section – suggested a deep ontological affinity between mankind and God. The strong connection between the scathed and the unscathed and the possibility that the former might come into eternal communion with the latter, was central to the politics of hope that was built into the eschatological promise of redemption. Heaven meant shedding the skin of carnal corruption and the patina of f lawed nous. The possibility that one might come to abide, when earthly life ends, in the lap of glorious perfection was a powerful opiate that kept the masses temperate in earthly ambition and tied to the system of tradition and rank. Privilege, on the other hand, exploited wretchedness to its own eschatological ends. Disabled people were objectified by the politics of hope, not so much because they might be delivered by it, but because they represented a means by which property could stake a claim to everlasting propriety.

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In the moral stock market of the Middle Ages, the rich could transform hope into certainty by investing in the bank of salvation. The system of charity was the enabler of the exchange of wealth for moral and spiritual capital that would never depreciate. The purchase of propriety by property gave confidence to prelates and nobility as to their ultimate destination. In practical religious politics, wealth was the greatest guarantee of access to sublime infinity. It may not have been regarded in theology as one of the morphological or noetic substances that contributed to righteousness, but in practice, property had unimpeded access to propriety – to the telos in which sin, original and acquired, was wiped away. The deficit of genuine compassion in the Medieval system of charity is not a theological legacy of Judaism and the Old Testament. It is pure politics. The triangulated authority of God, church and feudal power that included mutual back-scratching between prelates and nobility who were often from the same privileged lineages, enabled the rich to glide through the eye of the needle and stroll into the kingdom of heaven. Disability served the moral dynamic of the Christian system of power during the centuries of superstition over which it imperiously presided. Disability was damned by ambivalent association with God’s merciful and miraculous presence, the rising stock of the devil and the self-serving magnanimity of those who rode, piggy-back, on the shoulders of impairment, through the pearly gates and into God’s kingdom. God, church and nobility were, in the terrestrial politics of the Middle Ages, the ‘real’ Holy Trinity. The body, particularly the disabled body, ‘was the site of intense visual scrutiny and surveillance by the church, was subject to the bonds of feudal lordship and was, at the same time, caught in a cosmic network that controlled its internal and external movements (Camile 1994: 62).

Theological invalidations: The others of the unscathed Between the anthropoemic excesses of the treatment of disability in Antiquity and the complex antinomies of the Christian tradition in Europe, there is some evidence that pagan, archaic, oral societies took a pragmatic view of disability finding ways to reconcile impairment with custom and culture archaic oral societies found such people ideally suited to be central repositories of the society’s relatively static tradition its mythology, religion, history and literature. Given the careful economy of resources characteristic of archaic societies, we may imagine these societies selecting members who exhibited physical exceptionalities such as blindness for roles as singers, priests or shamans, not only because such members were ineligible to become, for example, warriors, and would otherwise devolve into burdens on the community, but also, more positively, because archaic societies exploited the special suitability of such members to fill these important social positions. (Bragg 2002)

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The reception of disability in the Christian Middle Ages is far less pragmatic, much more complex and negative than the portrait painted above. The human and its relationship to Christ, as God incarnate, are powerful mediations in the reception of disability in Christendom. The problem of impairment in the religious ideals of the Middle Ages begins with its antithesis; the infinite kingdom of absolute perfection. Arete, as I argued in the last chapter, is fashioned around a normate view of human validity that is based on the potential perfectibility and apotheosis of a virtuous elite of heroic males. Classical soteriology was a minority sport. Christianity offered the hope of salvation to everyone. In the doctrine of ‘imago dei’ – common to the Abrahamic religions – man is made in the image and likeness of God. St Augustine (354–430) made this a sine qua non of Medieval theology. This biblical idea expressed, inter alia, in Genesis suggests that humankind, is the foremost expression of God’s creativity and should have dominion over the animals. Humanity is a potentially transcendent community. It is only ‘men’ that God has made in His image and likeness. Mankind is the vehicle for God’s mysterious plans and purposes. Classical and Christian cultures shared a redemptive view of humanity as theomorphic. Both embrace a teleological and narcissistic self-conception of humanity in the form of a deity, through apotheosis, for the ancients, and through reconciliation with Perfection in Christianity. In the grand scheme of things, when Western ‘men’ look in the mirror, they see a perfect ending. Ableism is profoundly hubristic. The doctrine of imago dei aligns God and man by common substance; sometimes morphological, sometimes noetic. Nous or intellect was the substance most commonly invoked to liken human to Deity (Hall 1986). Augustine argued that to be created in God’s image was to possess a ‘rational soul’ and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) (Summa Theologica 1.93.6) took the view that ‘only in a rational creature do you find resemblance to God in the manner of an image’. Rationality was an essential quality in the definition of what made human personhood mimic deity. Reynolds (2008: 175–187) argues that the selection of reason or intellect as the characteristic that binds the finite and the infinite theoretically excludes people with intellectual disability or mad people from communion with their maker. The tarnished image of a mind lost to reason or in intellectual deficit suggests a human constituency, irrelevant to, and excluded from, the doctrine of imago dei. The dignity and sacredness of human life manifest in the doctrine loses its universality through the ableist criterion that underpins it. Intellectual impairment and insanity are incompatible with the theomorphic promise. The Greeks did not embrace a theomorphic conception of themselves per se, but in the Platonic conceptions of logos and telos, they developed the idea that human beings could and should aspire to deity … for it was their purpose. It was within the grasp of the historical agent to reach the giddy heights of the Absolute. The Greeks implanted human hubris in the historical ego of the West, put mankind on a cosmic pedestal. Betterment, perfection eudemonia was attainable, though only for the few. Only the very best would conquer the celestial battlements of perfection – the privileged aristocrats of Greece and the mighty

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emperors, great warriors and fabled politicians of Rome. The celebrated bodies and minds of Antiquity were anthropomorphically depicted in stone. In these men of power, it was possible to glimpse the gods, f lirt with immortality, grasp logos and arrive at the ultimate purpose. Finite power could become infinite for the greatest and the best. Through the doctrine of imago dei, Christianity transformed Greek polytheistic anthropomorphism into theomorphic monotheism. Theomorphism (man in the shape of God) is, man’s ‘notion of his own unique capacity’ and it is ‘is modelled upon an ideal image of conscious being, conceived as the creator of rational order, the author of moral good and the incarnation of love’ (Marcus 1980: 126). Christ as Man and God welded together finite and infinite. The promise that the former could become the latter and put an end to suffering made the theomorphic idea not only a great opiate for the wretched, but also a great prize for the privileged who, through the intercession of the church, developed structures of charity and alms that offered them a smooth path to redemption. Moral good and justice were immanent in the world insofar as they were goals that had to be realised, reached for, grasped by intellect and will. Power and virtue were tools to these ends, though in scripture, it was only the latter that was supposed to count. The path to redemption in historical Christendom was, however, paved with inequality. For if there was one all powerful and just God ordering the whole, how could the differences between men be explained, save by some principle which postulated a more perfect and less perfect approximation of the ideal form of humanity contained in the mind of God as a paradigm of the species. (White 1972: 9) Martin Hagglund’s (2008) discourse of ‘radical atheism’, argues that religion, in all its forms, is based on the ideal of ‘the unscathed’; a transcendent being that exists beyond the blemishes of profanity and corrupt embodiment. Anyone who argues, like Derrida, for example, that nothing can be pure, breaks with the central tenet of religious perfectionism and falls into the arms of atheism. Christian monotheism is auto-immune to the desire, to deconstruct the belief in absolute perfection. ‘The unscathed’ represents the ultimate point of illumination, the measure of all things. Aesthetics, ethics, politics must bend to its all-encompassing demands, must accept the hubris of a telos of perfection that depicts the human journey as the fulfilment of God’s purpose. Those that fall furthest from the ideal teleion (1 Corinthians 13: 9–10) will struggle for validation. Redemption, the telos of deliverance, shapes the non-disabled imaginary in the Christian Middle Ages. ‘Scathed’ of f lesh and mind may come to perfection after death, but in the terrestrial here-and-now, they are held up as visible signs of ‘what not to be’. We are corrupted; one and all. Everyone is ‘scathed’, save God Himself. His validity is the only validity. Christ – God incarnate, God as Man, the Word made f lesh – is the benchmark of virtue. Some, however, in

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realpolitik are more scathed than others. Women, for example, lack the substance to embrace the theomorphic promise. St Paul told the Corinthians (11: 17) that: ‘A man has no need to cover his head because man is the image of God and mirror of His Glory whereas woman ref lects the glory of man’. The Latin Church Father, Tertullian (c. 155–255) in his De Culta Feminarium argued that woman – a temple built over a sewer – is the ‘devils gateway … that has destroyed so easily God’s image’ (quoted in Learner 1993: 141). It is the male of the species that is made in the unscathed image of perfection. For Augustine, woman, inferior to men in f lesh and reason, was not made in God’s image but begotten of matter, from the rib of a man. Her raison d’être lies in her role as helpmate to her master. Aquinas following Aristotle conceived of women as misbegotten males. The male, however, can only avoid the abjection that stalks human corporeality by (also) being ‘able’. Women’s physical impairments have, according to St Albertus Magnus (c 1193–1280) compellingly negative consequences for their characters: Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore, she is unsure of herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions … one must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she was a poisonous snake and horned devil … Thus, in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman towards evil, just as reason impels man towards good. (quoted in Paludi and Ellens 2016: xx) Imago dei is stratified by gender and it is the language of impairment that is used to make the case. For Aquinas, woman is naturally defective. Patriarchal Christian doctrine relies for force of argument on the tropos of impairment. It draws upon the mythic qualities of impairment in extreme and extraordinary form. It represents a challenge to ‘natural, God given goodness’: ‘The doctrine of woman the misbegotten male suggests that woman is at once not in the ordinary course of nature and not necessarily of the same species of man … Aquinas associates women with “other monsters of nature”’ (Maclean 1980: 12). In Leviticus, women and disabled people embody impurities that prevent them from crossing the boundaries to the sacred: Skin conditions, leprosy, ulcers, sores, burns are literally profanities; Blind and lame people, people of short stature or who are deformed are unclean. Woman, as Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) suggested, is a castrated figure (Ide 1984: 86), amputated in her nature. In a state of deformity, she cannot be likened to God. The doctrine of imago dei cannot escape the patriarchal ableism at its core. Woman’s weakness and infirmity, her impairments and sexual abjection, disqualify her from identification with the image of God (Sawyer 1996:149–150). Salvation does not/should not depend on ones’ degree of variation from the ideal imago. On the other hand, human weakness and anomaly disturb the noetic and

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morphological continuity between created and Creator. Christian theology – for which masculinity is the embodiment of virtue – has to settle its account with the problem presented to it by feminised impairment. Women and disabled people are far less capable than men in negotiating the high hurdles in the race to redemption! In Christianity, sin is the major manifestation of mortal and carnal corruption and it pulls apart the relationship between shepherd and f lock. The harmony of ‘imago creationis’ is suspended in earthly time, awaiting, as Aquinas would have it, the ‘imago re-creationis’ of celestial contentment. The wretchedness of life, the failures, scars, defects, improprieties and impieties of the fallen, constitute the rancid meat between two slices of perfection. ‘By sinning’ wrote Augustine (1965: 14:5.22) ‘man lost justice and the holiness of truth and thus the image became deformed and discoloured’. The impact of the Lapse on humankind is measured in a language of loss – triggered by women – that draws on disability and race. Humankind is forced to contend with the fissure between God and man imposed by events in Eden. ‘[F]or Medieval Christianity with its belief in human descent from bodily perfection of the single progenitor, Adam, morphological difference represented the corruption of the species either by miscegenation, or, as a result of, divine punishment for collective or individual sin’ (Shildrick 2002: 53). Porter (2004: 24) observes that: ‘Although destined for resurrection, the f lesh had of course, been ceaselessly vilified in Medieval preaching and teaching as corruption, as the potential antithesis of holiness’. Fleshy impropriety was embodied in women and defectives. Yet the Christian reception of impairment is more complex that this harsh reception of the f lesh suggests. Shildrick (2005: 760) argues that: A good part of the debate occupying the church fathers was centred on whether corporeal aberrance was an instance of God’s power to vary the natural order at will, or alternately, a break with that order that signified the exclusion of the fallen and sinful. The debate, regardless of specific positions within it, was united by the view that f leshy corruption originated with women and that her moral weakness could be traced to corporeal aberration. In spite of the cult of the virgin, the morphological continuity proposed by the doctrine of imago dei was irrevocably masculine and the misogyny of the church fathers was articulated in a narrative that invalidated women and disabled people. In her work, focused on narrative accounts of women and disability during the three centuries from the twelfth to the fifteenth, Tory Vandeventer Pearman (2010) argues that the female body and the disabled body are inextricably linked in Christian discourse by both inferiority and deformity. The male body in the mind-set of the Middle Ages is the tribunal of worth and propriety. Eve was the theological-anatomical prototype of ‘defectiveness’. Adam comes direct from the ingenuity of the Creator, f lesh of his breath and, though both are sinners,

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Eve is made from secondary material, from weaker stuff, from a substance once removed from divinity, from the rib of the first man. Her conduct, her corporal weakness and moral fickleness in the face of temptation bring about ‘the fall’ of ‘man’. Masculinised norms of bodily integrity were reiterated by communities that made monsters out of difference by exaggerating ‘the bodily aberrancies of various cultural others in the hope of shoring up their own collective identities’ (Vandeventer Pearman 2010: 15). Rebecca Raphael (2011) argues that deformity and prostitution, the cripple and the whore are morally aligned in biblical texts; creating parallel images of depravity and degeneration. ‘Corrupted virtue’ is a fable, interchangeable in application between women and disabled people. In the absence of the male norm, the image of human perfection embodied in the theomorphic promise is a shoddy tale of vice. Women and impairment are the two original figures of corruption that undermine the normate soteriology of perfection. Original sin – embodied in Eve – fractures the ontological affinity and morphological continuity between Shepherd and f lock embodied in the doctrine of ‘imago dei’. All that is foul and scathed is released into the world by the foul temptress. Wholeness, completion, perfection, is tainted and soiled. In Medieval Christendom, impairment and disease are empirical signs of the fall manifest in ‘malum culpae’ and ‘malum poenae’. In the journey of humankind back to eternal rest, back to the Light and to His Likeness, out of the temporal mist of earthly exile, impairment is a mediating presence, a sign of, and threat to, the spiritual and moral constitution of the Christian community. It signifies sin, past and present. Impairment is punishment for evildoing (Black 2006) and a manifestation of the toxic presence of evil, of the devil (Bengtsson 2016: 274). Christian theomorphism is thrown into tension by corrupted nature. Theomorphism is comfortable with harmony, proportion, order and beauty, with a utopian vision of humanity as a mirror of deity. Spectacle that transgresses the beatific vision of morphological continuity between God and his f lock is, theologically and practically, dangerous. It undermines the integrity of the special likeness of man and maker. The tension is resolved by occluding it; by disavowing and dehumanising bodies and minds that have a disconcerting impact on the theomorphic imaginary. Could it be other? One doubts it. The theomorphic imagination assumes division, hierarchy; the hegemony of some humans over others. In the vast expanse of the universe, humankind is prioritised over all other phenomena. Ruler over all that it surveys, the human species revels in the superior qualities that the intimate bond with deity assigns to it. Dominion over nature, including all other species, is the great responsibility of humankind in a universe stratified in favour of the species elect. Theomorphism was species-narcissism – a promise of perfection immanent in imperfection that was troubled by the original concrete imperfections of human frailty.

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Christianity was an able utopia. It promised absolute perfection, ultimate alignment with the infinite, the immutable, the transcendent, the omnipresent and the omnipotent – a cleansing, purifying cosmic drama. Guided (in the first instance) by Platonism, Christian Europe in the Middle Ages cast itself, human kind, in the role of the great protagonist of history and master of nature. It gave itself big boots to fill as the representative of God’s will and as likeness to the Supreme Being. The historical ego of Western civilisation was inf lated to the maximum. Super-confident in its place as agent of history, property strutted about its domain with imperious grandeur. Meaning was resolved in the utopic, sublime destiny of true believers. Christ was logos, come to earth to show the way to a perfect, unworldly world, unscathed by the temporal, but intense, suffering of our separation from Our Father in Heaven. The Western imaginary was full of itself. The Hellenic tradition bristled with heroic hubris. Rome venerated empire. Christianity considered its destiny as redemption and eternal relief from suffering. Brock (2012: 65–66) argues that Augustine’s notion of a hierarchy of human wholeness (Augustine 1998: 470) and his ‘theological account of the perfection of the human body and mind’ are strongly inf luenced by his ideas about disability. Augustine developed a ‘theological norm for human life’ (Brock 2012: 68); its embodiment was marked by perfection – a tribunal against which disability was always not only in deficit, but also its antithesis. The ‘theological norm’ of wholeness or completion was an ideal about being and corporeality derived from the doctrine of imago dei, a vision of human nature formed in the image and likeness of God. Life on earth was a wretched pause en route to perfection (Augustine 1998: 534). Mary Douglas (1966: 64–65) argued that the idea of the ‘holy’ serves a mythic anthropological notion of ‘wholeness and completion’. She notes that in Leviticus, the sacred is uncontaminated ‘without blemish’ purified, cleansed. Holiness is ‘an external physical expression of the wholeness of the body seen as a perfect container’. Christian theomorphism is obsessed with the perfect container and, by definition, with the imperfect container that can usefully shed light on its unimpaired antithesis. A transcendent notion, in which Beauty, Truth, Reason, Order and Justice are embodied is dependent for its mundane representation on its ostensive negation. In The City of God, Augustine (1998: 354–430) asks whether monsters are God’s creatures. He is troubled by the question and feels the need to search for an answer to it, because transcendent Perfection and human ‘wholeness’ can be illustrated by it. He appeals to ‘the divine plan’ to transcendent Reason. It guides him to answer in the affirmative. Because of his ‘faith in reason’ as a transcendent quality, that had likeness and affinity with the same human quality that separated men from monsters (even though both belong to the terrain of nature) he also legitimated an inferior and despised position … leaving those who were considered to have an intellectual disability on the margin of social life

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and subject to a charity ultimately undertaken for the salvation of the giver rather than for the welfare of the recipient. (Stainton 2008: 494) The search for human wholeness draws other ‘lesser beings’ into the net of disparagement. They join the roll call of moral and spiritual defectives. Augustine (1957: 115) detects in children for whom reason is wanting, the just punishment of God: If nothing deserving punishment passes from parents to infants, who could bear to see the image of God, which is, you say, adorned with the gift of innocence, sometimes born feeble-minded, since this touches the soul itself. A ‘fool’ is begotten by evil. This too is a part of ‘the divine plan’, but the contrast between the grace of innocence and the defectiveness of the feeble-mind is deeply troubling. Despite its fondness for apophatic (or negative) theology manifest in the teachings of, for example, the Syrian Saint Simeon (390–459), the Eastern Byzantine church had celebrated ‘holy fools’ and recognised a link between ‘­idiocy’ and goodness (Thomas 2009). The fool believed intuitively in God without the fuss of a considered position on the subject. Augustine is not drawn to the same conviction, for the able norm of completion or wholeness is not compatible with intellectual impairment. At the end of life too, corporeal and intellectual deficits are irreconcilable with the perfect purity of heavenly existence There will be, in Augustine’s view, no monsters or fools at the resurrection (Pender 1996). In that enchanted, definitive moment of eschatological glory, contaminating defective f lesh and ‘deficiencies’ of mental life will fade to oblivion or descend to hell. Wholeness will be restored to everyone who participates in the space of perfection. Impairment will have no place behind the crystal battlements of paradise. There will be no place for disability in the home of the ‘unscathed’, where the morphological and noetic continuity of Creator and his children will finally be realised. The perimeter guards at the gates of paradise seem to specialise in ableist selection practices. Concerning monsters which are born and live, however quickly they die, neither is resurrection to be denied them, nor is it to be believed that they will rise again as they are but rather with an amended and perfected body … And so, all other births which have some excess or some defect or because of some conspicuous deformity, are called monsters will be brought again at the resurrection to the true form of human nature. (Augustine quoted in Brock 2012: 69) Impairment may be of nature but ‘it’ does not ref lect its Truth. It is a despoiling error of the imago. Impairment will not rise again. It will be transformed into a

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chip off the block of Absolute Perfection. In Christian soteriology, ­impairment is air-brushed away. It was a contaminant unfit for heaven and – according to the Old Testament – the most sacred places on earth. Susan Oylan (2008; 2011) argues that the Hebrew Prophets used ableist rhetoric to characterise the false gods of other religions as defective and contaminating. The superiority of Yahweh, and for Christians, His New Testament successor, was evident in the absence of impairment from sanctified domains and in the narrative use of it as a descriptor of the antithesis of the theological norms of wholeness and completion. Christ’s ministry of miracles embodied a hygienic approach to impairment. Augustine believed that all descendants of Adam, regardless of their difference from the norm should find a place in the family of man (Augustine 1998: 107–108). What he will not accept, however, is that monstrosity is the work of an ‘imperfect craftsman’. Human imperfection cannot be an error of Truth. Monstrous creatures, therefore, may not be descended from Adam or they must serve a purpose beyond the wit of men (Augustine 1998: 109–110). In its popular form, the doctrine of imago dei does not escape the mundane prejudices of corporeal or intellectual negativism in a culture, like its antique predecessor, still in thrall to physiognomy and the tendency to conf late grace with beauty, spotless soul with spotless body (Hartsock 2008). Some, more than others, are made in the image of God! Defective f lesh is ‘unholy’ matter. Medieval Christendom was in awe to a religion founded on the premise that the almighty was made f lesh and that perfection held its hand out to corruption. It was preoccupied with points of contact between ‘the physical and the transcendent’, what Caroline Walker Bynum (2011) called ‘holy matter’. The Imago had a popular-cultural dimension for a visually literate community that could not be dependent for its conceptualisation of Absolute Perfection on the theological doctrines of the Scholastics. Christian art and iconography impacted on the way in which the imago was conceived in popular culture. It was a visual rhetoric designed to invoke pictures of perfection. Images of ‘Christ in Majesty’ cloaked in the luminous, golden, radiance of an aureole or statues of Christ, Mary and the saints, resplendent in their physical likeness to human beings, sustained popular conceptions of ‘the look’ of righteousness and corporeal perfection. Material examples of Christ incarnate were central to Christian art and ‘omnipresent’ in people’s experience of religious worship. They were didactic points of reference for worshippers that helped them conceptualise deity and drew them into emotional intimacy with the saints to whom the ‘beatific vision’ or Visio Dei was revealed. The image of a body sanctified by spiritual perfection was also an aspiration for the f lock in their journeys to salvation. In the ‘whole’ body of holiness artistically represented or conjured up by saintly seers, the mundane met the immutable, the temporal embraced the eternal, the immaculate encountered the soiled. Art conveyed doctrine through crude images of perfection. It adorned churches and palaces, functioning as a prosthesis of authority and power. It was used to represent the perfectible self of spiritual and corporeal propriety.

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The human being, combination of soul and f lesh, crafted from matter and spirit, was both mortal and immortal. The icons and objects representing the divine were visual forms of holy propaganda embodying the (possibility of ) the transformation of corrupt, filthy, f leshy matter into holy forms. Christian ­statues – like their antiquarian predecessors – were steeped in apotropaic magic. They represented goodness and truth and eternal beauty in a world of evil and error and corrupted matter. The Medieval preoccupation with ‘holy matter’ sat alongside the preoccupation with corrupted matter exemplified in monstrosity, defect and deformity. ‘Holy matter’ and corrupted matter were objects of visual consumption in a moral economy based on the promise of redemption. Pilgrimages, shrines, saintly healing, the paraphernalia of ‘miraculous matter’ (Bynum 2011) and artefacts related to worship blended the mortal and the immortal, just as f lesh – concupiscent and corrupt – played cultural mediator in the everyday dialectic of good and evil. ‘Holiness’ and wholeness were at the heart of the Christian aesthetic. The two – the good and the good to look at – were conjoined in the visual culture by the telos of perfection. Thomas Aquinas was no crude physiognomist, but no theologian, no matter how great or how much he owed to Aristotle, could escape the axiological imperative of comparison between Absolute Perfection and the multiple imperfections of existence. Aquinas argued that beauty arose from three conditions or standards available to our visio or perception, namely; proportion, integrity and claritas (best translated as radiance). Radiance ‘catches the eye or the ear or the mind and makes us want to perceive it again’ (Gilson 2000: 35). Proportion celebrates the harmony and symmetry of an object or action, and integrity refers to ‘wholeness’, completion or perfection. Though Aquinas does not confuse goodness and beauty in his aesthetics, he creates standards of judgement that diminish anomaly and aberrance. Deformity and defectiveness are, by definition, taken out of the realm of satisfactory sensual and intellectual engagement with the world of objects and actions. They cannot meet the criteria that Aquinas sets for beauty. Impairment forms a counterpoint to the conditions of beauty. Images of proportion, integrity and radiance are features of the cultural icons of Catholicism and thus to the way in which goodness and truth are presented to the illiterate visio. Holy power and ‘divine light’ are communicated through religious artefacts like statues and stained glass windows. Theological aesthetics were stripped of metaphysical abstraction by visual representations of perfection in cultural artefacts of worship in clumsy human attempts to represent and glorify God. Christ was the epitome of light, radiance, proportion and beauty. He was imperfection’s emblem of hope. Christ occupied a double role in Christianity as both a temporal, historical, f leshy figure and an immutable, supra-historical essence. His hybridity – if one can use an idea ‘tainted’ by Monophysite and Nestorian heresy – was a promise of infinite perfection for anyone who played by the rules. Christianity’s ableist essence lay in the promise of transformation: profane to sacred, vulnerable to invulnerable, scathed to unscathed. The waters of purification were universally available, but in mundane

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Christian culture, the theological binaries of perfection and imperfection and the danger of ­contamination of the former by the latter was de-coded in practice into a moral binary that separated disability and non-disability. Impairment represented corporeal and spiritual imperfection. It could be emplotted against the teleological journey to wholeness and completion. Despite the corporeal negativism of the Christian establishment, the ‘­shamelessness’ of popular culture – if one is permitted to make a very ‘proper’ modern claim about a world we have lost – might have accounted for some tolerance to bodily difference and the carnal frivolities of everyday life. The body was omnipresent in solemn religious practices and in the secular folk festivals that often parodied the seriousness of official ritual (Bakhtin 1968). Flesh had a powerful ambivalent, cultural, moral and spiritual presence. The body and blood of Christ materialised by the Eucharist and wine in the Catholic Mass and the body of the saints materialised and memorialised in relics were the most important forms of ‘holy matter’ in Medieval Christendom (Ritchey 2014). Prayer enhanced one’s spiritual relationship with God, but the actual presence of ‘holy matter’ was a tangible means by which one could get physically close to the Origin of Perfection. The blood of Christ was a cultic infatuation as the Middle Ages drew to a close (Bynum 2006). Exemplary holiness gathered around the purifying promise of transubstantiated matter. Pious persons craved routes to holiness and wholeness for these attributes formed the cultural capillaries of propriety. The moral weight placed on chastity, on resisting temptation, on the appetites, on renunciation of bodily desire were heavy indeed. They were practices associated not only with saintly asceticism, but with ordinary people who wished to embrace the possibility of the perfectible self. Some pious couples practiced ‘spiritual marriage’. They embraced a union of sexual abstinence to bring their somatic urges under control, to confirm their spiritual worth by living as Christ had lived (Elliot 1995). The ascetic body was seduced by the attraction of Absolute Propriety and simultaneously repulsed by the cultural signs of its absence in corporeal and spiritual manifestations of defect, deformity and monstrosity. In life and in art, sin and ugliness, in Medieval culture, were conf lated: For example, ‘Later Medieval artists produced an arsenal of negative portraits founded on the basic principle that cultural and religious difference is externally signified by foul appearance’ (Higgs Strickland 2003: 29). ‘Physiognomic consciousness was also promoted by biblical narratives. Abraham, Isaac and Moses were all praised, after the fashion of classical physiognomy, for the link between their physical beauty and moral strength’. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 bc– ad 50) argued that there were strong connections between physical deformity and a moribund soul (Lincicum 2013: 19–20). [I]f the soul has received a good nature, good instruction and thirdly therewith exercise in the principles of virtue, none of them f luid and superficial, but all cemented within it, firmly impressed and strung as it were into a

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unity, it wins health, wins power, and to these are added the fine hue of modesty and a robust and comely form. (Philo, quoted in Lincicum, 2013: 20) However, in the notoriously ambivalent culture of the Middle Ages (Bakhtin 1968: 187, 382), impairment may have been a blessing in disguise. The body beautiful was a source of temptation, problematic from a spiritual point of view. Though beauty was aligned with goodness in the doctrine of imago dei and in art and physiognomy, physical attractiveness was the serpent’s ruse, a factor in the lapse that produced the fall. Mastery over the perfidious potency of the body, be it an outcome of fasting, deprivation, illness or injury, was a potential source of spiritual merit. The body’s detriment was the soul’s opportunity. It enhanced the possibility of piety, even of a saintly life, lived in complete dedication to Christ. It followed, despite narratives to the contrary that have been outlined in this section, that physical deficit – like holy innocence – suggested spiritual advantage. The moral iconography of disability in the Middle Ages was never straightforward. It was dragged back and forward across the moral binary of good and evil with relative ease. In New Testament Scripture, disabled people play a significant role in Christ’s work. Narrative proximity to Wholeness and Perfection imbued impairment with spiritual significance. Disabled people have been described by one commentator as graciosi, that is, as blessed ‘recipients of God’s special grace’ (Cusack 1997: 417). This representation of disabled people was derived from Christ’s miraculous cures of impairment and his compassion for the ‘aff licted’. However, as I will argue in more detail below, divine grace was not located in the impaired body per se, but in the Divine Agent that delivered impairment from the evils of suffering and defectiveness. Christ met impairment as Good met Evil, and through His intercession, Evil was banished. Grace was manifest in the anthropoemic elimination of impairment. Disabled people were only ‘recipients of God’s special grace’ insofar as they were cleansed by Him of the very property that made Him interested in them in the first place. Good works through evil, demonstrating His deity by smiting it, by bringing it back into His domain. The disabled beggar, in the moral landscape of the Middle Ages, was a ‘­recipient’ rather than a bearer ‘of virtue’, (Bengtsson 2016: 272). Similarly, the disabled character in the plot structure of the bible did not exemplify grace. Impairment was, therefore, not a moral force in its own right, or a legitimate basis for respect and recognition, but a means to Holy ends for holy others who benefitted from spiritual reputation and propriety from their relationship to it. The doctrine of imago dei stood man up as the theomorphic myth of human perfection and holiness, but backtracked in real sociocultural space as male, privileged, able, spiritual and economic elites made rank the tribunal of its application. God was the Western idea of Perfection theomorphically conceived in the Christian Middle Ages in a soteriology that imagined man becoming one

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with His image and likeness, but it was not universal in its practical application. Out-groups fell on the sword of perfectibility. Women and disabled people were aligned with the contamination of holiness and wholeness alongside heretics and heathens. There is little evidence of a canopy of grace and sacredness that protected disabled people from theological and cultural invalidation, let alone from the popular prejudices of physiognomy. The Western pillars (or columns) of propriety and validity manifest in Beauty, Truth, Reason, Order and Justice were collapsed into a singular Capital. God subsumed them all and promised them to those who believed in him. Take beauty for example: ‘In the Middle Ages f lawed physical form came to be identified with character defect and moral failings … the ideas that provided the complex infrastructure for the simple Medieval dichotomy of beauty = virtue / ugliness = sin’ (Higgs Strickland 2003: 29). The dichotomous morality of physical appearance was a manifesto for disability invalidation. Impairment had no narrative investment in holiness or wholeness. In narrative, it was the negation of perfection, an evil bystander, dragged into the story to demonstrate the hygienic prowess of the Almighty. As I will argue in the next section, impurity in the form of sin stuck to impairment with far greater narrative and practical ease.

Ambiguous God, ambiguous scripture and ambiguous testaments of sin and disability Despite its status in the Christian faith as a universal aff liction, the stigma of sin in Medieval culture attached itself aggressively to impairment and placed disabled people in a socially precarious and highly visible position of moral invalidity. Disabled people were a f leshy metaphor for sin. They stood for it, conjured the fear of it in their non-disabled counterparts, reminding everyone of the guilt that circulated like air in Medieval Europe (Delumeau 1980). Augustine found it necessary to dwell upon the phenomenon of sin in order to disclose the noumenal workings of grace, so too in his “prophetic history” of mankind, he was compelled to focus on the sinful, heretical, insane and damned in order to limn the area of virtue occupied by the pure, the orthodox and the elect. (White 1972: 4) Though we are all trapped, in Augustine’s view, in the original moral wrong of the ‘fall’, some – the pure, the orthodox, the elect … the able – were better placed to escape its hellish consequences. The moral landscape of Medieval society was pockmarked with sin. The sin of birth – the heritage of everyman – and sins of misconduct. White’s point is, however, sociological rather than theological. The explication of purity, in the creation of the social order of the Middle Ages, required symbolic ‘fall-guys’ – the sinful, the heretical, the insane, the damned – to make the moral economy meaningful to those who participated in

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it. Evil – as a tool of moral order – made good sense and was easily understood when those who embodied it were identified. In this section, I focus on sin and how it mediated understanding of impairment in the Middle Ages. Augustine’s doctrine of ‘original sin’, of the corrupting inf luence of ‘the fall’ on humanity, was accepted as an article of faith by the Christian church at the Council of Orange in ad 529. Prior to Augustine’s transformation of the story of Adam and Eve into a narrative of original sin, the passages in Genesis relating to the Garden of Eden, had been interpreted as a tale of mankind’s condemnation to pain, suffering and death that could be ‘resolved’ by the exercise of free will. Choose God, choose grace; choose to do good rather than evil and find one’s way back to the kingdom of heaven. Pelagius (c. 360–420) argued that people were not born evil and not condemned to sin by procreation. Augustine argued, however, that the perverse conduct of Adam and Eve – more precisely, Eve’s betrayal of Adam – was embodied in mankind as human nature and laid down in our very being as a predilection to choose the wrong path and disobey God. Humankind fell from purity into sin. It stained its origin in perfection. Augustine’s doctrine of ‘original sin’ transforms the Genesis narrative of ‘the fall’ into a ‘story of human bondage’ (Pagels 1988: xxvi). The f loodgates of guilt and shame were opened, and their murky waters poured endlessly thereafter onto the fields of Western, Christian culture (Delumeau 1980). There was continuity (in religious and medical narrative) between Augustine’s Platonic misogynist portrait of Eve, the vile protagonist of the fall, and the theology of the high Middle Ages that was inf luenced by the rediscovery of Aristotle: Aristotelian writings which inform most medical texts from the twelfth century on, deem women essentially as imperfect men whose matter was not “concocted” long enough during pre-natal development. A woman is, in fact, an “undercooked male” … a deformity … which occurs in the ordinary course of nature … Biblical and patristic discourses in the Middle Ages, propagate such biological notions and additionally present women in relation to Eve as sinful, weak, inferior and potentially dangerous. (O’Tool 2010: 28) Deformation of nature plays a significant role in the fall and in the doctrine of ‘original sin’. In Augustine’s inf luential hands, ‘the fall’ was presented as the triumph of desire over reason, abjection over purity, imperfection over perfection, women over man, good over evil. The outcome of the actions of Adam’s temptress was original sin transmitted to all, as guilt and defilement. Christianity became a religion founded on a doctrine that proposed the original, endemic corruption and deformity of humankind that was caused by the conspiracy of Eve and the diabolical serpent to trick Adam into going against God’s commandment. Evil was the privation, alienation or absence of God that arose from the corruption of God’s purpose by what Augustine called concupiscence – sensual

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longing, appetite or desire manifest in the submission to the temptation of the ‘forbidden fruit’. The myth of the fall suggests that anthropologically, we are ‘born impure, contaminated from the beginning by the parental seed, by the impurity of the maternal genital region and by the additional impurity of childbirth’ (Ricoeur 1992: 29). The three symbols of evil – defilement, sin and guilt – form what Ricoeur calls a cycle of infection. We are abject. The soul is stained. Only redemption can cleanse it. The Adamic myth in which Eve gets the blame for releasing evil into the world is not so much a story of ‘the fall’ as, according to Paul Ricoeur, a myth of ‘going astray’ (1992: 233). The story of exile from the garden of perfection and the beginning of sin is a normate parable. The beginning of man is the story of how the unscathed became scathed. It tells of the birth of imperfection. Sin is the corruption of perfect order. Sin corrupts, but Christ was in the business of forgiveness. The Christian West was ambiguously good and evil. Believers were consumed by the endless love of the Nazarene and obsessed by a vengeful God of fire and brimstone. Life was lived in awe of a terrible power, paternalistic and judgmental. Contrariwise, a gentle alter ego stalked the pages of scripture. The New Testament message of mercy and divine justice with which Christ was associated was a second personality, deeply at odds with His vengeful counterpart. Christian monotheism proposed a God with more than one mood: Eristic, violent vengefulness and irenic, peaceful compassion merged in an ambiguous dynamic. The conviction of God’s boundless love was in destructive tension with ‘the conviction that despite redemption, there would remain only a chosen few, all humanity having deserved hellfire because of original sin; the certainty that each sin is both insult and injury to God’ (Delumeau 1980: 248). This latter conviction found many supporters in the waning of the Middle Ages and in the Reformation that followed it (Huizinga (1922/1999). Earthly catastrophe breathed life into the view that damnation and redemption were precariously balanced. The promise of a return to the ‘Garden of Perfection’ vied with the expectation of the diabolical prospect of hellfire and damnation. The God of sulphurous brimstone and the forgiving God of Christology created an ambiguous psychology of sin. By the end of the Middle Ages, the vengeful God was in the ascendency and the zealots who promoted His cause used sin as a scourge to beat their enemies with. ‘To violent and impulsive spirits’, sin ‘was only too frequently another name for what their enemies did: The ‘barbarous idea of retaliation was reinforced by fanaticism’ (Huizinga 1929/1999: 15). Sin sought revenge upon its own insidious presence in the affairs of ‘men’. It was the aff latus that transformed piety into violent, idealistic zealotry. Those marked by sin were in constant danger from those who felt duty-bound to stamp it out. Sin was the principle signifier of sociocultural disorder and the excuse for the persecution of those who were thought to be responsible for its vile impurities. Douglas (1966) argues that the idea of purity spreads its wings. It becomes a system of structures, classifications and evaluations that inhere in sociocultural

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life by signifying what is ‘in place’, orderly or proper, and what is out of place, disorderly or improper. Anything out of place is a pollutant. To study purity is to study the symbolic system. Purity is the manifesto of social order. A pollutant is a violation of the social system of classification and judgement. It is, ergo, if it is or becomes socially embodied in a group or person, a punishable offence. Pollution and purity ‘inhere in the structure of ideas itself ’ (Douglas 1966: 123), the breaking of which offend against the socially specific doxa of propriety. If one thinks of the generic system of binary classification of purity and pollution recommended by the great anthropologist of dirt, then, sacred/profane, clean/unclean, proper/improper, order/disorder fall in easily alongside the original binary. In the Christian Middle Ages, sin fits into the binary system of classification as the primary metaphor for pollution and the key measure of propriety and impropriety. Sin – as the negation of purity – makes the Christian world of the Middle Ages morally intelligible to itself. Whosoever it touches is ripe for judgement. In the battle between good and evil, disability and disease were squarely on the side of the latter, or at the very least a clear sign of its malignant presence. Homiletics brought scripture to the poor and ignorant peasant masses, laying down the moral imperatives that would help them avoid the dark passions and take the side of God rather than Lucifer. The Seven Deadly Sins, though much revised over time from their scriptural basis in Galatians and the Book of Proverbs, formed the backbone of what not to do. The capital or cardinal sins – wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony – were the passions behind all sins, the generic vices that drew men and women into the way of temptation and put them on the pathway to hell. In ad 590, Pope Gregory produced a definitive list of the cardinal sins, offering clear guidance to Christian clergy and the faithful multitudes as to the earthly affects that paved the route to spiritual ruin. The tropos of the deadly sins appealed to abominable dis-equilibria of the body: Each of the church’s seven deadly sins was conventionally associated in homiletic literature with a pathological condition of the body … Pride, which was a swelling up, was symbolized by tumours and inf lammations. Sloth led to dead f lesh and palsy. Gluttony meant dropsy and a large belly. Lust produced f luxes and discharges, leprous skin and by the sixteenth century, the pox. Avarice was associated with gout or dropsy; envy with jaundice, venom and fever; wrath with spleen, frenzy and madness. Of course, these were essentially allegorical or poetic ways of conveying the nature of the sins themselves. But they were also taken literally as indications of the judgements likely to descend upon sinners. (Thomas 1997: 16–17) The conjoining of disability and sin by way of the folkways of physiognomic reason and didactic homilies made wayward f lesh and spiritual corruption easy and obvious bedfellows. Scathed f lesh, in an illiterate culture was ‘read’ as sin and divine punishment. The stigma on the surface of the body carried symmetrical

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marks on the soul. To avoid the ‘scathing’ of the body and the consequent moral invalidation that went with it, one was expected to embrace the cardinal virtues of humility, charity, kindness, patience, chastity, temperance and diligence. A daily regimen virtuously guided constituted a pledge of piety to the almighty. From such good living, the blights of disease and disability might be avoided. Eiesland (1994: 70) argues that in the Middle Ages, disabled people were pressed into one of two extreme, exotic categories: ‘divinely blessed or damned … defiled evildoer or spiritual superhero’. Scathed and unscathed, sacred and profane, sin and purity – embodied ambiguously in impairment – battled one another to bring about the victory of evil or good. The volatile, Medieval body ‘maintained a sensual relationship with the sacred’ (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 37). The sinful world of the f lesh produced extremes of self-inf licted corporeal deprivation and asceticism (Bynum 1987), which were often interpreted, in a context of ubiquitous supernatural explanations, as indications of great piety and religious devotion. Demonstrations of religious ecstasy provided a route by which some women and disabled people could find themselves the subject of popular awe and respect, though being accused of demonic practices was an alternative, but far less favourable, outcome of this kind of holy ‘celebrity’. The line between being perceived as good or evil, between sinfulness and purity was sometimes paper thin, and the passage across the moral binary an imminent danger. It should not be forgotten, as Rose (1997) notes, that in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the cultures that it inf luenced, the Leviticus prejudices associated disability with the incarnation of impurity and as a punishment for sin. Although Leviticus – in its most ‘Christian’ moments – warns against mistreating deaf and blind people, the causal relationship between impairment and sin provides a theological justification for the maltreatment and even physical elimination of disabled people: ‘During the late Middle Ages the “crooked and deformed” were sometimes consigned to the fate of a draft of hemlock because of their association with earthly malignancy and witchcraft’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 64). In these violent acts of anthropoemic invalidation, continuity with the eristic traditions of the Old Testament and the abandonment of disability in classical society was evident. Representations of disabled people in the Old Testament plotted onto Medieval society suggested that shame and disgrace followed disability around like a faithful hound. Disabled people were ‘shunned by all who did not wish to be defiled or corrupted, or who had any regard for the safety of their own body or soul’ (Winzer 1997: 85). It was not, therefore, the compassionate God of the New Testament at work in the hearts and minds of those non-disabled people who regarded their impaired neighbours as contaminating and treated them as if the story of the Good Samaritan had never been told. Believers were spiritually split between the ‘two gods’ – vengeful and merciful – that stalked the moral landscape of the Middle Ages. However, Winzer (1997) may have over-estimated the degree of practical everyday exclusion that disabled people qua sinners faced (Metzler 2006).

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The attitude that saw in impairment the potential for spiritual harm was matched simultaneously by a sentiment recognising impairment as a valuable moral instrument for non-disabled people to acquire spiritual capital through alms-giving or works of mercy. The dominant classes needed a relationship – no matter how vague and distant – with specialists in sin and suffering as it was manifest in the embodied misery of the most scathed, wretched and ragged members of the community. The great and the good were bound to these miserable creatures by the moral and spiritual ‘use-value’ that the foul masses embodied. The pariah status of sin and the robust Old Testament ‘impulse’ to shun and segregate impairment was alive and well in the non-disabled imaginary, but it was inf lected and redirected by the promise of salvation. The tension between Old and New Testaments forms the ambiguous scriptural framework for a complex and contradictory moral economy of sin and its relationship to disability. The common explanation in Judaism for ‘atypical appearance and activity was … spiritual and moral reprehensibility’ (DePoy and Gilson 2011: 14–15). In the Old Testament, the disabled body is regularly represented as unclean, as a pollutant and contaminant, but the institutionalised forms of social exclusion associated with ‘cultic impurity’ (Stiker 1999: 24) are much less in evidence. The sinner is still side-lined and maltreated, but also invited, on occasion, to share sacred and profane spaces, because non-disability can profit from the perfidious presence of the sinner. Old and New Testaments; the wrathful and the merciful; the eristic and the irenic work together to form the pattern of disability invalidation in Medieval culture. In Leviticus (21, 16–20), Moses is told by God that keeping one’s distance from impure bodies is recommended. Potential contaminants include ‘a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf, or a man with defective sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles’. Disabled people join menstruating women and prostitutes as persons who must keep clear of sacred places. Anyone with a blemish ‘shall not come near the veil or approach the Altar’. God fears that such bodies might ‘profane his sanctuaries’ (Leviticus 21, 16–20) and, therefore, excludes disabled people from the priestly caste. Leviticus founds the tradition of aligning disease and disability with contamination, through a binary of purity and impurity that takes legal form in the Hebrew Bible. Disability is too profane and stained to be in ritual communion with the sacred. In the Old Testament, disease and disability are the punishments of a God who declares, in Deuteronomy; ‘I kill and make alive: I wound and heal’. Sin – the refusal of God’s authority – may be met with divine retribution visited on f lesh or mind. Health, well-being and even prosperity are, on the other hand, the reward of the righteous, of those who adhere to God’s law. In Samuel 5, 6–10, we find King David exhorting his army to slaughter the lame and the blind that are counted, for reasons of potential defilement, among His enemies. The anthropoemic sensibilities of the Old Testament are given short shrift in Christ’s teaching, where healing and charitable acts are regarded as the

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appropriate response to impairment. The Gospels do not represent disability as a ‘cultic impurity’ or a contaminant: ‘before the coming of Jesus the pure and impure comprised two objective zones, after and because of him it is human beings who create and demarcate them’ (Stiker 1999: 34). Christ reaches out to disabled people. He heals impairment, even in the temple, in sacred places where the impure are unwelcome and should tremble to tread. And he invites the wretched and unfortunate of the earth to be the first to enter the kingdom of heaven. Charity, love is to be extended to everyone. There are no exceptions. People with impairments, once cured, are told to go and sin no more. Sin, even for the merciful Christ, is still an indelible feature of impairment. In John (V: 5–15) Jesus says to the ‘cripple’ that he has just cured: ‘Leave your sinful ways or you may suffer something worse’. Healing of impairment forgives the sin embodied in it as a punishment that may be repeated if sinful ways continue. Disability, defect and monstrosity in the Middle Ages were ‘proof of God’s power and man’s sin’. Aberrant bodies were a manifestation of ‘corporealizing, in violation of nature’s rules, of vices like lust, gluttony and bestiality’ (Benedict 2000: 127). When punishment of vice was made f lesh, sin was worn for all to see. In the Middle Ages, the tenets of the Old Testament remained formative in shaping the moral landscape, but the brushstrokes of the New Testament suggested that Christian life should be guided by the message of peace and forgiveness embodied in the resurrection of Christ, by God made f lesh, by the incarnation and suffering of the Divine Being (Bynum 1991; 1995). Christ is a corporeal presence, an embodied person, fruit of Mary’s womb; Christ is healer: He touches and heals disease and impairment, and he suffers for the sins of humanity. Edward Wheatley (2010: 10) argues that the hegemony of the Christian church, over ‘the discursive terrain of illness and disability’, ‘grew out of New Testament theology’ in which the issue of sin as impurity was less evident than in the healing mission of the Nazarene. This was probably more evident in the High Middle Ages than, as I argued above, during its catastrophic decline towards the brutal ricorso of Reformation. The merciful God of Medieval Christendom was a forgiving deity who offered, through the sacrifice of his loving son, salvation to those believers who did good deeds and loved others as themselves. This God who embodied being and doing good in the world was very much alive and well in New Testament scripture. One found this vision of love and forgiveness in the teachings of the Medieval church, in the words and deeds of men like St Francis of Assisi, in the doctrine of imago dei – positively and optimistically interpreted as the good God in men – and putatively in the narratives of charity that appealed to those under the impression that, through living a life modelled on the example of Jesus Christ, it was possible to overcome the evil of sin, find God’s favour and come into His company on the day of judgement. Jesus Christ tried to put an end to the cultic ‘prohibitions’ of the Old Testament (Stiker 1999: 33–37). He opened the door to charity, made it the central principle for the social organisation of aberrancy. He mixed with disabled people.

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He healed impairment. He did not countenance fear of contamination by disease and impairment as Yahweh had done. Christ did not focus on disability as taboo and defilement. He welcomed contact with it, primarily as the scriptures make clear, in order to abrogate it. To keep embodied signifiers of sin like leprosy at a distance was ‘moral sense’ that only the saintly would dare to ignore but the embodied presence of sin in the impairments of others was an opportunity, as well as a threat. Unlike Jesus and His Saints, however, one did not need to get near to impairment in order to reap benefit from the grace and disgrace that it represented. It was the duty of good Christian men and women to admonish sinners: ‘If thy brother shall offend against thee, go and rebuke him … if he shall hear thee, then thou shalt gain thy brother’ (Matthew 18:15). No doubt many disabled people – given their association with sin – experienced admonishment from local worthies who would have taken their duty of fraternal responsibility seriously enough to interfere in the lives of those with less spiritual capital. Interventions of this type would have been a means by which individuals could add to their stock of spiritual capital. Who knows how violent such admonishment might have been? A fit of pious pique on the part of a non-disabled worthy, might lead to much more than a scalding. A good thrashing in the name of the Almighty might be a normal occurrence in a society where, as Elias (2000) notes, violence in everyday life was customary. The absence of manners and the immature systems of state formation in the Middle Ages may have failed to ensure peaceful relationships between people, but the contradictions between the two Testaments of the Bible could only have made things worse. The holy violence validated by scripture augmented and reinforced the customary violence of the warrior class and their brutal oppression of the peasants in the late Middle Ages, graphically illustrated by historians like Huizinga (1922/1999) and Tuchman (1978). If God reigned over his f lock with omnipotent ambiguity, his scriptures provided an equally ambiguous testament about the meaning of sin and impairment. The Vulgate is packed full of examples of the causal relationship between sin and disability, disease and personal misfortune. The healing saints, guided by the hand of God, could bring health and wholeness to the body and redemption to the soul. Those heavy with the burden of sin might be struck down by illness or bodily defect as punishment for their transgressions or those of their parents or those who begat them and so on down the line until we come to Genesis and the origins of sin in the actions of the first man and woman. Malum poenae and the impairments of the suffering classes could be seen from an Old Testament perspective as a chain of botched being that stretched back to the beginning of time. In the odyssey of life that promised salvation or damnation, impairment, sign of sin though it was, had one theoretical advantage, namely, Christ’s love of ‘the poor’, the sick and the disabled and his mission to bring comfort to the great mass of suffering unfortunates. This was succour and opiate to those, vast in number, who fell into the ranks of wretchedness. Bubonic millions experienced the terrifying proximity of disease and death. From 1347, when the ‘black death’ first

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appeared, grimly reaping huge sections of the European population, it was as if the world was drowning in profanity, aff licted by a terrible force of evil, either the devil at work or God’s punishment for the sins of his wayward followers (Tuchman 1978: 98–133). In those terrible times of war – France and England battled for Western European supremacy for one hundred years! – disease and unprecedented levels of mortality, magic and superstition f lourished. The sins of humanity were often cited as the cause of catastrophe, the source of the pervasive troubles and upheaval that visited the blighted fourteenth century and the catastrophic social decline that prefigured Renaissance and Reformation. Read through the terrible times of the late Middle Ages, the ambiguities that surrounded the didactics of sin and impairment, were, for many, signs that God had abandoned them. It was not uncommon, in this context of moral normlessness, for disabled people to be made scapegoats for the arrival of disease, famine or natural disasters (Quarmby 2011). Van Gennep (1960/2004: 120) argued that ‘where the social system requires people to hold dangerously ambiguous roles, these persons are credited with uncontrolled, unconscious, dangerous, disapproved powers – such as witchcraft and evil eye’. The battle for life in the late Middle Ages became focused, on the one hand, on material survival and on the other on the mythic evil of demons and witches and the magical virtues of saints. Disabled people found themselves assigned – in the narrative clash between good and evil – to both camps.

God’s tease: Saints and sinners A quick count of healing narratives in the New Testament reveals that Mathew mentions 16, Mark 11, Luke 21 and John only 4. The miracle brings impairment onto centre stage in holy scripture and, as I will argue below, into the heartland of the Medieval moral economy. Disability was validated, and simultaneously invalidated, in the moral economy, by the legacy of miraculous healing; by what I call God’s tease. He visited impairment upon his f lock as a punishment for sin whilst, in the same moment, offering the healing hand of love. To take away and to give – as was His prerogative. The message, at a cultural level, was monumentally mixed. The way in which His love was prepared to offer up a tangible, worldly vindication of itself was on the back of a vindictive act. Theodicy is the form of explanation that such a contradiction seeks, but never solves – other than by offering the platitude that God acts in mysterious ways. Impairment entered the world as a punishment, a suffering to endure, unless, or until, it was miraculously eliminated by the omnipotent god who had introduced it to the world in the first place. The miracle was not formulated in compassion, but by the execution of good magic in the wake of bad. Both spells were cast by the same Almighty source. Medieval Christendom pinned disability in an ethical trap of tainted origin and cleansing promise; made it a figure of irredeemable and unmistakable ambivalence, simultaneously a portent of evil and a conduit that brought the Source

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of Light into the lives of humankind. Aquinas clarified Christian thinking on miracles: He ‘argued that miracles can only be performed through the power of God and are invariably undertaken for the profit of mankind in order to confirm the truth of faith and to demonstrate the sanctity of a person whom God has designated as an example of virtue to others’ (Goodich 2007: 19). In the demonstration of virtue, the interceding saint was the example of virtue. Impairment was merely a means to demonstrate ‘profit’ and ‘value’. Being impaired did not represent a state of grace per se. On the contrary, it meant that one was a defiled body that had been punished by impairment, but that one could also be relieved of it by Divine intervention. The connection between grace and disability was ‘theological … and made itself apparent in religious discourse of all kinds: sermons, the visual arts, drama and … vernacular literature’ (Wheatley 2018: 22). In all of these contexts, impairment was a mere mediator of grace. This mediational role was most apparent, in popular culture, in the relationship between the saints – the ‘holy company of heaven’ – and disabled people. The ‘divine medicine of saints, relics and shrines’ specialised in the remediation of the aff lictions that medical experts declared incurable (Metzler 2006: 143). The grace putatively connected to impairment was by association with the miracles of God’s mission on earth and the holy acts of the saints who were able to accomplish feats that mimicked the extraordinary ministry of the Nazarene. Grace, however, was manifest in the narrative that surrounded the miraculous removal of impairment and the work of the Saints who pleaded with God to relieve the suffering that impairment represented. Disabled people were, in this respect, ‘specialists in suffering’, for unlike the great mass of the wretched poor, only they were in a position to be stripped of the palpable, embodied presence of their punishment. The miracle texts themselves gave no indication of a close relationship between impairment and grace. On the contrary, their focus was anthropophagic. Their narratives centred on remedy, on the restoration of embodied order though the elimination of impairment: ‘Impairment was … both a disturbance of rightful ordering of the individual body and, at the same time, disruption to the community’ (Skoda 2010: 58). The miracle abrogated both disturbance and disruption. Order, light, grace returned when the impairment disappeared. The miracle was the cleansing process that washed away impairment and transformed impropriety into propriety. Grace belonged to the moment of healing and the healers who brought those moments about. Miraculous intervention ended the vilification of an individual’s impairment by taking it away. At a generic level, impairment remained an object of vilification that had the potential to be visited by grace. More importantly, the miracle demonstrated that a form of sinful abjection that earthly wit and wisdom could not abrogate could be wiped away only by Divine intervention. Impairment was a kind of earthly purgatory, where one waited to be absolved from punishment by miraculous intervention. Miracles ‘conform to orthodox prescriptions; they are all posthumous … all modelled upon Gospel stories of miraculous cures’ (Skoda 2010: 56).

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Miracles embodied a pedagogy of Christ’s absent-presence, proof of God’s existence as Master Puppeteer pulling the strings that made the universe work. The miracle was the puff of holy smoke that demonstrated the veracity of the teachings of the Christian church. Impairment was the f lammable material that allowed the demonstration to take place. In The City of God, Augustine argued that saints drew God and mortals together (Goodich 2007:14). Saints acting on impairment helped God to reveal Himself to his f lock. Impairment was imbued with the potential to reveal, if not become, ‘holy matter’. It awaited intercession by a celebrity (to be), a charismatic prophet, as Weber might have it, to take up its cause. Impairment passively waited for the opportune moment in which it might be mimetically aligned to a gospel story and, therefore, re-play the work of Christ. Texts about saints used the ‘trope of disability in an agenda of moral edification’ (Goodich 2007: 55) in which the Saint is both medium and beneficiary. The miracle cure was not a narrative about ‘the cured’. The story of the life of the cured before and after the cure was untold, limited in detail, not part of the core agenda. It was the miracle itself, the enactment of holy power; the elimination of deformity and amelioration of suffering, the divine moment in all its wondrous, cleansing, infinite ephemerality that dominated the narrative and sharpened its moral effect. Impairment was eradicated by divine intercession and through it, God revealed Himself to the world. The miracle was part of the ‘vita’ of the saint, the mimetic appropriation of the Ideal. Impairment was merely its instrument. The elimination of impairment demonstrated the theomorphic promise, of ‘man’s notion of his own unique capacity’ to ape ‘the ideal image of conscious being, conceived as the creator of rational order, the author of moral good and the incarnation of love’ (Marcus 1980: 126). Hagiographies made saints into model Christians. Special status was conferred on those who had realised the theomorphic promise. They were central to the spiritual and moral lives of the masses and very attractive to disabled people who believed in the saintly powers of miraculous cure. Saints were intercessors, qualified by their exemplary goodness to make petitions to the Almighty on behalf of the mortals who asked them, through prayer, to do so. They were celebrities, famed in popular culture by stories about their holy ‘vitae’. Literary, non-religious texts recognised that the ‘celebrity’ of sainthood, was a useful rhetorical device to represent character and virtue. In Malory’s (1415–1471) Morte d’Arthur (1490) the greatest of all the Knights of the Round Table, Galahad and Lancelot were given saintly powers of miracle cure (Wheatley 2018: 24). They were also the most beautiful and heroic of the Knights. They were able to reproduce the bodily protocols of saints, the physical performance of goodness as it was manifest in prayer, genuf lection and prostration. The miracle was an exercise in the restoration of physical or intellectual purity, sometimes evident in the grace, moderation or exemplary appearance of the saint. Saint Marie d’Oignies was described thus; ‘The holy grace of the spirit was ref lected in her face from the fullness of her heart, so that many were

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spiritually refreshed by her appearance, moved to tears by her devotion and ­reading the unction of her spirit in her face as if they were reading from a book, they knew that virtue came from her’ (quoted in Simons 1994: 15). Marie was outer and inner perfection; ableist ideal of pious womanhood in the Christian Middle Ages, less exalted though than the cultic exemplar of female purity, Mary Mother of God. It was through her grace, her purity, her perfection, and others like her who embodied saintly comportment, that the scourge of impairment was washed away. Popular images of women in Medieval literature were bifurcated by archetypes of goodness like the immaculate Mary and the radiant Marie d’Oignies and, on the other hand, by the evil embodied in the perversity and deformity of Eve or the concupiscence of the common prostitute (Fries 1986). In the early Middle Ages, martyrdom was the most compelling qualification for beatification but by the mid-to-late Middle Ages, when the hegemony of Christianity in Europe was unassailable and martyrdom, consequently, rare, evidence of miraculous work became central to saintly candidacy. In the twelfth century, documentary evidence of miraculous deeds became a mandatory requirement for sanctification. In 1198, Pope Innocent III declared that evidence of the completion of two miracles was a requirement to become a candidate for canonisation. Saints were venerated. They embodied virtus, a word that signified a combination of virtue and power. They were often associated with specific places where relics of their pious and miraculous deeds were kept. These holy hot spots became shrines, the destination of pilgrimages, journeys of worship and penitence. Relics were material objects of holy matter associated with saints, including their bones or memorabilia that had touched their sacred lives. They connected earth to heaven, matter to immortality, and provided a means of communication between the two. Disabled people seeking a miracle cure for their impairments might choose to travel to the shrine of their favourite saint where, in close proximity to the tangible power of relics, they could best invoke his or her healing intercession (Goodich 2004, 2007; Scott 2010). Through relics, shrines, pilgrimages and, most spectacularly, through miraculous events like the curing of impairment, saints were able to connect God to humankind in tangible, material ways meaningful at the level emotional ecstasy: ‘Miracles are … sign events, unusual and astonishing that point to the mystery of being and are received in ecstatic experience’. They cement the ‘God-world-relation’ (Del Colle 2011: 250), and the cure of impairment was often the means through which this fundamental relation was enacted. However, impairment could and did make miraculous appearances on the bodies of holy persons in the form of stigmata on hands, feet and the side of the torso, after the fashion of the crucified Christ. This ‘miraculous change of body shape’, for medicine could not explain it (Wilson 2014: 51), was a strong sign of saintliness. The acquired impairments, the five wounds, that testified to Christ’s suffering through crucifixion and subsequent resurrection and were used by him to appease those who doubted his defeat of death are the consecrated blemishes

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of his ministry, proof of his status as Son of God. Imitatio Christi was a sign of grace, celebrated most famously in the first quarter of the thirteenth century when St Francis of Assisi was visited by the wounds of the Passion and suffered as Christ had done. Impairment mediated between God and humanity in the moral transformation of f lesh and blood by a holy intermediary. Wheatley (2018: 19) distinguishes between ‘miracles of cure’ and ‘miracles of chastisement’. While the former was far more widely celebrated, the latter were not uncommon. ‘Cycles of cure, and punishment for transgression seems to be the hallmarks’ of some saints, like Saint Foy and Saint Mary of Rocamadour (Metzler 2016: 148). The ‘miracle of chastisement’ reminded the faithful that God punished with impairment if he so willed. He was – where sin was not a consequence of human free will and submission to temptation or malum culpae – the author of suffering and of its removal. The punitive miracle was the Almighty, through saintly intercession, taking responsibility for acquired impairments just as He was responsible for the congenital impairments that were punishments for the sins of the forefathers and foremothers of disabled people – the genealogy of evil that begat more of the same through the pernicious seed that carried it from generation to generation. Punitive, eugenic Christendom could also work miracles of chastisement that did not need, necessarily, distorted seed for their justification. The willed evil of human actors brought to the attention of one of God’s ‘holy company’ could bring the miracle of chastisement into play. For example, St Benedict is credited with at least two counts of ‘crippling’ peasants’ arms as punishments for moral infringements; of blinding a bailiff for the theft of a pig; and of paralysing a peasant who had accused the holy man of failing to protect him (Davis, Mayr-Hartling and Moore, 1985: 87–88). Metzler (2006: 142) argues that: ‘Sometimes punishment by the Saint might be elicited if healing by a physician was sought in addition to saintly healing’. Some ecclesiastics and saints took a dim view of secular competition provided by medicine, but it seems clear that ordinary people were far more pragmatic in their attitudes to the available healing options. The complex and contradictory character of God, God of Old and New Testament, merciful and punitive, is narrated through impairment, as it is ubiquitously constituted as the object of miraculous intercession. Hagiographies repeated these narratives of wonder and healing, suffering and its removal. They were artefacts of propaganda that reinforced the faith of the faithful. God’s wonders to behold were made more meaningful and concrete through stories of local saints and their miraculous works. Hagiographies ‘present miraculous healing as the restoration of true self to the sufferers, as earthly versions of the restoration which will be achieved at the last judgement’ (Skoda 2010: 58). In a world of wretchedness and suffering, hope sprang from legends of restoration and their barely cryptic promises of salvation. The Golden Legend was a popular work of the late Medieval period. It was a compendium of saintly deeds and was ‘probably the most important work

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in the Medieval canon for the study of miraculous interventions relating to disability’ (Wheatley 2018: 23). It was also a compendium from which stories of saints and miracles could be extracted and verbally diffused to the masses who were in thrall to tales of Almighty Agency and to the deeds of His most blessed followers. All the better to impress, when stories of saving grace had geographical resonance; if a member of the ‘holy company of heaven’ had been active in the land or parish to which one belonged. The God-world-relation was made more concrete to the believer by the mundane materiality of His proximity. Christian theodicy trapped disabled people in a narrative vice of good and evil that was exploited by the activities of the saints. The suffering – malum poenae – imposed by God’s will, that impairment signified, gave disabled people a silent, arbitrational role in the contract between God and Man, between earthly wretchedness and eternal bliss. Disabled people arbitrated, however, not in person, but through myth. In the Christian imaginary, impairment was the foil for legendary saints who had established themselves formally amongst the intercessors and had demonstrated that they could appeal successfully to the Almighty. God revealed himself to mankind demonstrably by eliminating the suffering that had its provenance in His will. The paradox of theodicy can be reduced to a tease. The power to remedy suffering, after the fashion of the Son of God, made saints into legendry celebrities. They were household names; worshipped, cultic, inspirational. In prayer, they were on everybody’s lips and their litany marked the passing of days, weeks, months, seasons. The calendar of religious events revolved around ‘saints’ days’. Time in Medieval Christendom was a memorial to the good works of beatified souls who had proved themselves worthy to take up a place in the company of the Almighty. Those able to mimic the most impossible aspect of Christ’s mission were those mortal immortals who had demonstrated that they could vanquish impairment or bring it into existence as a punishment for sin and evil. The suffering mediators who had the intercession of a saint to thank for their cleansing transformation, were little more than anonymous tools of ecclesiastical propaganda They were also popular proof of God’s infinite mercy and His real, material interventions in terrestrial life. Saint Augustine concluded that both evil and its relief are ordained by God. They are part of His plan. This is not an easy argument to be convinced by. Theodicy ties itself in knots. It is trapped in contradiction. It cannot square the problem of human evil and suffering in a world made by Infinite, Omnipotent Good. It is a conundrum – a tease as I have called it – that is resolved or dismissed by faith alone. Saints and sinners, impairment and its miraculous elimination carve a narrative out of theodicy that provokes profound ambivalence around the meaning of disability in the eternal battle between good and evil. Impairment is anthropophagically invalidated when the pillars of propriety – beauty, truth, reason, order and justice – are restored by its miraculous elimination.

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No ears to hear, no eyes to see … the wonders of God It is worth noting that, in the complex system of damages associated with Jewish law, deaf-mute persons are ‘pegi’atan ra’ah’ or ‘bad to meet’. The phrase embodies a hard attitude of moral approbation towards disabled people; an attitude that informed the hermeneutic of misrecognition that prevailed in everyday encounters between disabled and non-disabled actors in the communities of the Middle Ages. In the tradition of Jewish law, compensation for shame is important, but no compensation for shame is made to deaf-mute people for their representation in the nomos as figures of shame. Bad to meet and good to mistreat rub shoulders in the Medieval moral economy. Sensory impairments were viewed darkly through the lens of Catholic theology. The connection between sin and impairment underpinned attitudes that led to the marginalisation, segregation and exclusion of disabled people but exclusion found legitimacy also in sources that, though related to belief and scriptural testament, were not derived, necessarily, from the ready reductionism that made sin and impairment such regular bedfellows. Take, for example, the case of deafness in the Middle Ages. Invalidation rested less on a direct appeal to impairment as sin and more on its status as ‘lack’; a corporeal deficit that blocked the word of God. Deaf people did not hear the bells ‘that called upon the citizens to mourn, now to rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to pity’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 10). These information deficits may have had little to do with the dominance of theology in the moral economy, but the theological intelligentsia weighed in with their interpretations, nonetheless. Deaf people were beyond religious edification, excluded from oral communication; from the sermons and homilies delivered from the pulpits and from the propaganda of the Papal machine. The church struggled to sustain a relationship with deaf and deaf-mute people. Innocent III (1160–1216) in 1198 ‘recognised the right of deaf people to take part in the Supper’ and ‘to marry’ (Kvicalova 2018: 111) but, in practice, exclusion from the sacred community and its sacramental institutions were not unusual. Aristotle taught that the ear was the sense organ that determined intelligence, inaugurating the causal connection between deafness and stupidity. The Pauline corpus, despite its dim view of the human senses as natural pathways to temptation, had taught that faith had to be acquired through hearing. A deaf person, on the road to Damascus, would have been oblivious to God’s voice. Deaf people may have been safe from the temptations and pleasures of the ear, from, for example, what the Church father John Chrysostom described as the dangerous raptures of the beauty of music (Synnott 1993: 134–135). But the ‘good news’ ended here. Deafness was also demonstrably, as the Bishop of Hippo, had suggested, beyond the word of God. It was therefore, a deficit that left its incumbents incapable of participating appropriately in the community of faith. Until the decretal of 1198, further restrictions and exclusions followed from this premise: ‘Augustine’s declarations effectively denied church membership to

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deaf persons; they were restricted from the celebration of mass, disallowed the ­sacrament of communion’ (Winzer 1997: 91). Deafness was a theological challenge and a moral problem for the Church. Without confession, there could be no absolution nor access to the lustration (or purification) of the Eucharist. No access to ordination, marriage, and in some cases, extreme unction (the opportunity to make death-bed peace with God) were not unusual. Deaf people were often denied the sacraments and, therefore, the possibility of covenant with the sacred order. Deaf people had no legal rights. Fear of deafness in the non-disabled community of the Middle Ages was analogous to the fear of the heathen; the unconverted, someone beyond salvation, outside, the community of belief and, therefore, not in communion with the values of the social body. Penance was beyond ears that could not hear. Sin might build up in the soul and spread like moral plague. The arrival of confession as a core Catholic sacramental practice in the thirteenth century provided significant ammunition for the invalidation of deaf people. Taylor (2008) demonstrates that in early Christianity, confession was a marginal, even unimportant practice. Its centrality grew alongside the accent on sin and penance. The roots of the practice can be traced to Augustine’s view of humanity as damaged spiritual goods, and his recommendation to seek forgiveness for recurring transgression of God’s law: Woe, woe to you, you f lood of human custom! Who can keep his footing against you? Will you never run dry? How long will you toss the children of Eve into a vast, terrifying sea which even those af loat on the saving wood can scarcely cross. (Confessions 1.16.25: 55–56) Prayer was out of the reach of deaf people, but prayer alone was not enough to sustain a soul in grace in such an unforgiving world. Unable to hear the word, assumed to be bereft of the power of prayer, and denied the confessional, deaf people had little chance of getting close to the ‘saving wood’. In transforming the peoples of Western Europe into ‘confessing animals’ (Taylor 2008), the Medieval church placed deaf people in a spiritual limbo. They had no opportunity to speak the truth of their ‘inner corruption’. They were doomed to moral stagnation. They were closed storehouses of spiritual degeneracy. Immunisation against the guilt culture of confessionalism may have been a benefit, but it was another deep difference with the rest of the sacred community. Taylor (2008) argues that Augustine’s text, Confessions, is more a confession of faith than a discourse on sin; an ‘autobiography’ in which he does not spill the beans, but pleads with God to speak to him: Augustine is writing in the hope that God will respond, crying out in the hope of an answer. The straining of his ears, the ears even of his heart, is the painful longing which pulsates through his entire confessions. (Taylor 2008: 40)

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Taylor’s analysis suggests a symmetrical, if not symbiotic relationship between the autobiographical bishop, yearning to hear the word of God, and his view of deafness as a spiritually moribund dessert in which God’s love cannot grow. If ontological and spiritual security was at stake in acts of regular contrition, then deafness was without hope. Dark despair confounds those who suffer in and from God’s interminable silence. It is little wonder, that for Augustine, children born deaf are a sign of God’s anger at the sins of their parents. People steeped in the seed of sin have no opportunity to hear the word of God and therefore, no pathway to faith or redemption. The vow of silence taken by Benedictine monks – and other religious orders – was a route to revelation, a strategy to silence earthly chatter and clatter and hear with clarity the word of God and be blessed by its heavenly silent percussion. Ironically, the cloistered monks, in need of human communication, turned to systems of signs, inadvertently developing a way to bring the word to life for those excluded from it (Bruce 2007). Monastic virtue, however, was faith in silence, and silence embraced to enhance faith. Deafness, by contrast, was a barrier to faith itself, to the saving grace of the Word that called it forth in the first place. Monasticism in the high Middle Ages, however, suggested the beginning of a rapprochement in communication between deaf people and the church, that had struggled to come to fruition. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Augustinian sensibility that had kept deaf people from the church and had responded to their pleas to cross its threshold with deep suspicion, began to fade. Saint Jerome had proposed – a millennium before the Reformation – an ‘inner ear’ that made the word of God audible to deaf-mute persons. This sentiment appears to have been resurrected in the Summa Angelica, written in 1486 by Angelus De Clavasio (1411–1495). It pronounced that deaf Catholics should have access to the communion host, which suggested that the reform of 1198 had been toothless. The reformed churches in France in 1576 and Calvin’s Genevan Church – in 1573 – took a similar view, inviting persons who were ‘sourd et muet de nature’ (congenitally deaf-mute) to embrace their communities of worship, as long as they behaved in a manner befitting their status as members of the congregation. They were expected to demonstrate spiritual illumination by pious demeanour. Luther agreed that deaf people – if they could pass as rational in their conduct – were eligible to participate in the Supper (Kvicalova 2018: 111–113). Signs that deaf people were educable were abroad and came to fruition in 1558 when Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk, inaugurated a curriculum for deaf people that Winzer (1993) regards as the beginning of the modern system of ‘special education’. However, as Luther himself noted, it was common practice amongst priests to give unblessed wafers to deaf people (1955–1986: Vol. 35: 110). The view that they were unfit to participate in the Eucharist – despite the pronouncements of the Summa Angelica and the declarations of appeasement of the reformed churches – may have been widespread amongst the parish clergy in late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. The Western tradition that had conf lated deafness

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with a deficit of reason, did not – despite Luther’s view – wither quickly on the vine. Deafness, in the Catholic tradition, despite Benedictine progressiveness, retained its mythic qualities as a spiritual desert that could f lower only by its miraculous elimination. Deaf people, though ‘heathenised’ and excluded in the ways described above, were joined to the community by their potential to bring proof to the aid of faith, to unlock Christ’s spectacular healing powers. Sensory impairments were crucial to the potent cult of the miraculous and the constant battle with doubt and temptation that the good Christian was supposed to fight on a daily basis. This ‘utility’ for the normate community may have helped to mitigate the exclusionary impulse in the Augustinian canon, but it could not have supressed the narrative that being deaf was a wrong awaiting divine restitution. If deaf people had their noses pressed against the stained glass windows of their parish churches, watching from outside as ‘good souls’ enjoyed the communion within, blind people found themselves, likewise, tarnished in the eyes of the able congregation, (though clearly) not by the cultural prejudices of spiritual oralism, but by the visual requirements of fruitful participation in religious life. The sacred culture of Medieval Europe was – save for the religiously educated intelligentsia – illiterate. Christian culture did not appeal to cognition or ref lexivity, nor did it express itself in the process of mass inculcation by the written word. It was not until the Reformation and the arrival of the printing press that textual culture, as a mass phenomenon, began to unfold. Medieval culture relied on images and ritual, on appeals to the senses. It was an intensely visual and ocular-centric: From the act of preaching to the speculative debates of university-trained philosophers and theologians, the dialectic of seeing and being seen provided the model and the tool with which people during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries sought to articulate their spiritual lives and to achieve their spiritual salvation. (Denery 2005: 18) In the visual culture of the Middle Ages, religious imagery, spectacle and ritual were important media of communication and community. ‘Devotional images’ were not only central to religious life, but to the maintenance of social life and belonging which pivoted around collective rituals of celebration (Marks 2004). These epistemologies of the senses, particularly the eye, are what Mellor and Shilling (1997) call forms of ‘carnal knowing’. Though this medium propriety was didactically transmitted. One knew and belonged through participation in rituals of spiritual enhancement and purification, regular sensual, corporeal involvement in the seven sacraments and the pomp and circumstance that underscored the pedagogy of the church. This visual, sensual culture had many mundane ways of invalidating blindness. Most significantly, the sacramental centrepiece of Christian celebration, the Eucharist including the elevation of the host or the ‘elevatio’, the crowning glory

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of the Catholic mass in which the body of Christ was raised in presentation for the faithful to behold, depended on sight. Though they may have been able to hear the words that accompanied the Divine Liturgy, by definition, blind people were cut off from the experience. The ceremony of the Last Supper that the Nazarene had recommended to his Apostles to re-enact in his memory was an ecstatic visual experience in which blind people could not participate. How could they fully appreciate the Way, the Truth and the Light? They must sit out the special moment of communion between the body of Christ and the eyes of his followers (Wheatley 2010). If there was no way to overcome spiritual deficit – as doubting Thomas had done – perhaps blindness, like deafness, bore the stamp of the heathen. Attitudes to blind people in Medieval society were steeped in this ‘logic’ and in the narratives of invalidation that sustained it. Hartsock (2008: 207) writes that in the Jewish and Christian traditions ‘the blind topos’ is standard and provides a concrete way of understanding the characterisation of blind persons. Wheatley (2018: 27) notes that ‘blindness … was frequently deployed in Medieval religious discourse to describe Jews’ refusal to see the divinity of Jesus’. It was a metaphor of insult to hurl at unbelievers and heretics, a synecdoche for the heathen. It is little wonder that the infirmatus ocularum that affected Saint Francis of Assisi towards the end of his life was largely passed over in his vita. Blindness carried a heavy negative weight of stereotype and stigma including association with characteristics such as Jewishness and s­odomy (Wells 2010: 67–69). Three characteristics formed the blind topos in the Middle Ages; the repertoires of invalidation that clouded its perception in the non-disabled imaginary. Blind people were helpless and pitiable: They were punished for sin by divine force and they were morally blind. In Luke-Acts, for example, ‘the blind topos is standard in every case; and central to Christ’s mission for he brings “true vision” to those who cannot see’ (Hartsock 2008: 28). Christ’s message is hung-on ‘physiognomic consciousness’, the cultural centrality of which is carried over from Antiquity into the Medieval period (Hartsock 2008). Blindness was reduced to moral incapacity that could only be restored by the drama of God’s intercession. Sensory impairment was revealed and relieved by its defeat. Its conquest was a moral victory for the forces of good. Blindness was scored on the body for all to see, and its inviolable permanence drew Wrath and Mercy to it. Hartsock (2008: 201) writes that just as ‘the coming of the Kingdom of God meant the healing of blind eyes’, so, too, in the Acts of the Apostles, ‘the story of the expanding church’ is ‘the story of the opening of blind eyes’. The material expansion is also a moral expansion. Paul’s mission to convert the gentiles is based on the moral blindness of these communities. It is little wonder, that ‘damning stereotypes of idleness, avarice and wantonness were … associated with poor blind beggars during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’ (O’ Tool 2010: 13). The Catholic tradition of Christendom prioritised reaching its illiterate communicants through their embodied emotions and senses: ‘The power of the church to forge particular links with persons can be best understood’, argue

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Mellor and Shilling (1997: 79), ‘with regard to its privileged role as creator and maintainer of a community which engaged all the body’s senses’ (emphasis in the original). Those who had senses who could not be reached were troublesome in the extreme. They could not be organised into sacramental life or drawn into the system of social solidarity and control in the normal way. Deaf and blind people were a conundrum for power. Their ambiguous status was interpreted through the lens of sin and punishment on the one hand and on the other, through their position as ideal subjects for the demonstration of God’s miraculous powers. Blind people were great ‘material’ for healing saints and exorcists who, through their wondrous works, could enhance their holy celebrity as proxies of Christ’s power on earth. As charitable objects and potentially ‘miraculous subjects’, people with sensory impairments possessed significant instrumental moral value. They helped to maintain the spiritual hegemony of the church. Outsiders with respect to its sensuous system of faith and meaning and conundrums for the system of social control, sensory impaired people experienced an ambiguous combination of exclusion and utility. Their moral validity was borderline and tenuous, yet charged with expectancy. With Church doors open to all who believed in Christ, sensory-impaired people, blocked or hindered from entry to the sacred space therein, would have been regarded by the non-disabled community as being in a state of profound impurity. The portal art at church entrances, in the Romanesque tradition, was designed to emphasise passing from the profane outside to the sacred inside (Altman 1986: 6–15). Deaf and blind mendicants, dependent on the whim of charity, would have found the profane space of exclusion an economically valuable place to gather.

The era of ridicule In 1468, in the court of Charles the Bold, a locksmith was commissioned to produce two iron collars; ‘one to make fast Belon the fool and the other to put round the neck of the monkey of her grace the Duchess’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 26). There is tendentious comedy in the juxtaposition of animal and human. Belon and the monkey are pets, amusements. Comedy need not be an exercise in inequality and injustice or a form of ontological invalidation. It was not necessarily so, in some, contexts in the Middle Ages; one of which I will highlight below. In the ancient Norse, Scottish and Anglo-Saxon traditions of ‘f lyting’, two distinguished bards (or for the Norse, two ‘distinguished gods’) squared up in a poetic joust. In Scotland in the late Middle Ages, bards convened before an audience to enact a battle of wit and wisdom for the entertainment of the assembled. Through mutual slander and amusing invective, they tested one another’s ability to make light of insults and witticism exchanged in the course of comedic combat. There was nothing tendentious in the exchange; no hierarchy that turned one party into an object of abuse.

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Anthropologists tell us that the origins of humour lie in visceral exchange of excrement, where people, for a laugh, literally, threw shit at one another, in an act of mutual self-effacement through which bonds of community were ritually recognised. ‘Flyting’ re-enacted the excremental bonding process without recourse to the splatter of faecal matter. Two contestants faced each other as equals, wrestled with words in the spirit of mutual recognition and respect. In this ritual of reciprocal moral insult, the humanity of all concerned – participants and audience – was never in question. There were no fools or jesters or impairments to laugh at. Though one of the bards may be bested, it was the exchange between the two protagonists, the poetry and ribaldry of interlocution and insult that was the risible object. Though ‘f lyting’ was a feast of ridicule, it was not a harvest of humiliation. On the contrary, a mismatch made for an unsatisfactory spectacle. By contrast, tendentious humour is legitimated in scripture. The Psalms attested to the ‘abominable iniquity’, corruption and faithlessness of the ‘fool’. In some Christian narratives, the fool was redeemed by his or her ‘holy innocence’, but invalidation by ridicule may be reasoned with ease into a Christian act. I offer this vignette of Medieval comedy and entertainment as an egalitarian counterpoint to the demeaning practices visited on disabled people during what Shapiro (1999: 168) described as the ‘era of ridicule’. In the Middle Ages, the Graeco-Roman penchant for laughing at disability was replayed in royal courts and lordly castles, theatres and carnivals for the leisure, entertainment and hilarity of the ‘great and the good’ as well as the far less exalted. Impairment was regarded as risible in-and-of-itself. No festival was complete without a cast of carnival characters upon whom the assembled could vent the prurient violence of the Medieval sense of humour. The shit was thrown unidirectionally to demean. The ‘fun’ lay in the inferiority of the ‘object’ of laughter. In the fifteenth century female dwarfs were objects of amusement as they still were at the court of Spain when Velasquez painted their infinitely sad faces. Madame d’Or, the blonde dwarf of Phillip the Good was famous. She was made to wrestle at a court festival with the acrobat Hans. At the wedding feast of Charles the Bold in 1468, Madame de Beaugrant, the female dwarf of Mademoiselle of Burgundy enters dressed like a shepherdess, mounted on a golden lion larger than a horse; She is presented to the young duchess and placed on the table. (Huizinga 1922/1999: 26) Impairment – in the quotidian every-day of the Middle Ages – thrived as a source of joviality, ridicule and amusement and was institutionalised in tendentious forms of leisure (Billington 1984). Laughter was condemned by Church Father John Chrysostom who declared that it came ‘not from God but from the devil’ (Bakhtin 1968: 73); a view rejected in the irreverent shadows of Medieval popular culture where, official, pious solemnity was lampooned. It was a form

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of resistance to ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. ‘Medieval Laughter’, Bakhtin (1968: 88) suggests, was ‘directed at the same object of Medieval seriousness’. Laughter and irony ‘were … put to universal and progressive ends’ but also turned into ‘abuses and oaths’. They exercised a ‘debasing function’ (ibid.: 187). ‘Folly’, for example was ‘deeply ambivalent’ (ibid.: 187) and the fool was ‘an ambivalent abuse’ (ibid.: 382). Impairment was a popular target of ridicule. The grotesque body dominated ‘the comic genre’ and ‘the grotesque concept of the body’ formed ‘the basis of abuses and oaths’ (ibid.: 319). The culture of the grotesque harboured complex contours of ableism: ‘on the one hand’, it created ‘the formless and the terrifying, on the other hand the comic, the buffoon like’ (Bakhtin 1968: 43). The Medieval tongue was quick to lash out at intellectual, physical and sensory difference and, in the context of popular festivity, to make power its allegorical companion. Barnes (2003: 3) notes that: ‘During the Middle Ages and thereafter, people with perceived “deformities” and intellectual impairments were displayed for money at village fairs and on market days, festivals and holidays’. Objectified by the white-hot gaze of nondisabled tyranny, the spectacle of impairment, in the muddy fields of Europe, was paraded for the pleasure of normate curiosity; a tradition that persisted well into the modern period (Garland-Thomson 1996). The freak-show was a mainstay of Medieval culture. The conspicuous ‘curiosities’ attending the ‘fair of fools’ and other festivities, aroused schadenfreude in the assembled. People who were ‘shown’ in these tortuous tableaus were victimised by the objectifying violence of the demeaning stare of normality (See Garland-Thomson 2009). The base emotions that fuelled the popularity of monstrosity were catered to by a visual feast of difference. The popularity of invalidating Medieval ridicule provided continuity with the classical Western sense of tendentious humour evident in Roman Antiquity. It chimed with the ‘symbolic violence’ visited on disabled people by normate sensibilities. The moral contours of Medieval practices of humour legitimated the mistreatment of disabled people. They were justified, not only by the folkways of physiognomy, but also by strands of association that bound deformity and disfigurement to the emotional fear and social hierarchy of tendentious laughter. Minstrels and jesters – professional or natural fools – were (etymologically) ‘little servants’, risible by their stature and status. Ridicule of disabled people may not have embodied an affective economy motivated by pious disgust, but it embraced the kind of contempt that could transform symbolic violence into casual, random acts of brutality, justified by the ‘limited humanity’ of someone given a role that, by its very design, stripped them of dignity. The same people who were targets of mercy, become, in the spaces of leisure, mercilessly tormented and systematically disrespected. The moment that a disabled person in the Middle Ages was treated as though they were good to be good to could pass in a f lash and be transformed into an eristic nightmare. Fiedler (1978) argues that ‘idiots’ had great cultural currency as entertainers throughout Europe. The ‘fools’ of England, the hofnarren of Germany and the

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bouffons or fous of France found gainful employment and a measure of economic security working as comics in the service of aristocracy or as ‘show people’ who plied their teratological trade in the fairs of Europe. The great courts of Medieval Europe drew servants of all sorts to their golden halls and vast palaces and disabled people came to participate, and even star in, a ‘theatre of the absurd’: ‘The idiot’ wrote Tietze Conrat (quoted in Shapiro 1999: 168), ‘was not only prized for his idiocy, but for the bodily abnormalities that accompanied or conditioned his absurdity’. Prized, rather than cherished; for this was tendentious humour. It required a ‘victim’. The court was a space in which the nobility rolled out people who were mentally and physically different as a comedic spectacle for the enjoyment and titillation of power and privilege (Southworth 1998; Metzler 2016:184–220). Power – proximity to which a few disabled people experienced and profited from – fashioned them as supplicants of ridicule and humiliation. It brought them into the purview of history where they were compelled to clown around in the background while entitlement did the serious business of courtly intrigue. Fools, jesters, dwarfs and monsters filled a frivolous space in the lives of the state’s key actors and decision-makers, the latter swelling in superiority and dignity as ‘performers’ were diminished in their humanity. The interface of clown and crown did, however, provide a space of material survival for the former, and occasionally, a locus for agency. No amount of applause, however, could dignify the experience of objectification or the underlying contempt of an audience that drew amusement from such demeaning labour. The elite used otherness to display power, magnify its magnificence, privilege and wealth, demonstrate – through ostentatious display of aberrancy – the embodied, courtly meaning of validity. In pageants of humiliation hosted by power superiority and inferiority were drawn for all to see. Disability demonstrated – by alterity – the serious business of power, courtliness and statecraft. Caught in this web of able entitlement, disabled people fulfilled a destiny of light relief; puppets in a carnival of privileged joviality; appreciated – off-stage perhaps – as much-loved pets or toys. The jester, clown or fool embraced numerous ‘types’ and a physical or an intellectual disability could easily satisfy the requirements of less privileged audiences seeking a comedic spectacle. People of short stature, for example were, favoured for their ‘natural comic presence’ in both classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Billington 1984). The ‘rustic fool’ – a character traceable to classical theatre – was the predecessor of the professional clown who replaced the ‘natural fool’ as the theatre ‘modernised’. In the modern theatrical tradition, disabled people were much more likely to be played by non-disabled people. In late Medieval theatre, the fool was an important figure in narrative, plot and message. Parts written for fools were important. They became the mouthpiece of issues of thematic, moral and political significance. Dressed in cloaks of satire and subversion, the fool’s role was a treasure trove of cultural wealth (Hornback 2013) that did not, however, enhance the ‘fool’s’ social status or validate ‘his’ identity. Distinguishing the role of the fool from the person was of little import.

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The template for laughter, mockery and humiliation was still the ‘real life’ fool; the poor, ignorant boor, the rustic idiot. The brute, innocent ignorance of the fool positioned ‘him’ – in the non-disabled imaginary – as vessel and mediator of social critique. The vessel of critique was ‘empty’. Satirists used the fool as a shield against the vengefulness of power, and when the lights went down and the curtain closed, the applause was for the role of the fool and the allegorical nuances that ‘he’ represented. The fool remained, in the environs of state and theatre, ridiculous and perennially good to mistreat. The relationship between church and ‘theatre’ or entertainment in the Middle Ages was fraught. Christian Rome and Byzantium had a powerful inf luence over the early Middle Ages. The power centres were concerned about the corrupting inf luence of the Pagan past in the sphere of culture. It was bound to embody the work of evil. The closure of the ancient academies and the banning of athletics tournaments and theatrical performances were a manifestation of the fears of the early Christian church and its search for institutional security through the imposition of a moral canopy that covered every aspect of life. Indeed, the very sites developed in the classical age for the performance of nobility and the development of the ethical self were designated, by Catholic dominion, as places of moral corruption. Theatre re-emerged in the tenth century in the form of ‘liturgical drama’. Visually rich to appeal to illiteracy, liturgical drama was derived from the spectacle of the Christian Mass. It became an important vehicle of spiritual didacticism and moral control, supplementing sermons and homilies. Theatre grew, as the Middle Ages unfolded, to become a central part of religious festivities, particularly during the celebrations that surrounded the great feasts of Christ’s birth and death. Quem-Quaertis – Who do You Seek? – was a regular dramatic offering. By the twelfth century, liturgical drama had moved into the realm of popular culture, through lay control of its content. The dramatic thrust, however, remained religious, though its focus shifted to ‘miracles’ and mystery plays. The still-famous, Oberammergau Passion Play, first performed in 1634, and the ubiquitous ‘nativity plays’ performed by school children in many Christian countries today are directly descended from the Medieval liturgical dramas (Hartnoll and Fond 1996). There was little room for comedy in this theatrical tradition, but plenty for violence in the theatrical genre that grew out of the relaxation of the church’s control over drama. Jody Enders (1999) argues that pain, torture and violence were thematically central to the theatrical tradition of the late Middle Ages. They were integral to narratives of law and rhetoric and to an aesthetic of cruelty that was a core feature of the period. The penchant for denigrating and demeaning discourse were the underbelly of disability ridicule. The constitution of disability as an object of laughter and ridicule was manifest in the stereotypes of the time. In his book on Medieval disability, subtitled Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind, Wheatley (2010) examined representations of blind people in Medieval France and England where responses to disability ranged ‘from Christian charity to violent humiliation’ (ibid.: 4). Stereotypes of

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blind people were ubiquitous; abounding in cruel literary representation, less so in England than France, where a tradition of blinding people as punishment was well-established. Stereotypes of blindness in the non-disabled imaginary included, inter alia, the following: Blind people were stingy, miserly and greedy (ibid.: 92, 102, 107); practiced sexual excess (ibid.: 82), including sodomy (ibid.: 92); were prone to gluttony (ibid.: 97); were false mendicants who f leeced decent folk (ibid.: 93) and – most curious of all – were arsonists (ibid.: 94). In this litany of moral perfidiousness, there is much ado about virtue and vice and plenty to amuse. Cardinal sins are attributed to blindness. It was associated with a catalogue of impropriety. For the entertainment of audiences attending Medieval farces and plays, ‘blind characters’ were ‘subjected to physical abuse and cruelty because of their blindness’, and disability was performed ‘in a degrading manner’ (Wheatley 2010: 128) The ‘fool’ was not only an object of tendentious humour, but also a theological and social problem. Billington (1984) draws attention to Psalm 14: ‘The fool said in his heart there is no God’. The fool burdened by heathen sinfulness and atheism formed a marked contrast with the ‘holy fool’ or religious innocent naturally disposed to Christian piety that St Paul had praised in his Epistles to the Corinthians: ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world’. Scriptural contradiction and ambivalence of guilt and innocence – moral worth and moral danger – haunted the figure of the fool. For the church – as we noted above – the carnival ‘fool’ was a bawdy, irreverent, figure in the pageants that incited disorder by mocking the religious authority of the pompous, pious priestly caste. The fool as an iconic figure in popular culture did not endear ‘itself ’ to the church and its sense of ‘theatre’ in which fun and satire did not play a part. Paul Carus (1900/2008: 289) argued that the ‘Devil figures in the mystery plays in the guise of ‘intriguer, harlequin and fool’. In the last of these representations, evil and defective intellect are packaged together for the whole community to enjoy in the theatrical treats that marked the great celebrations of Easter and Christmas. It seems that no matter how pious, no ‘entertainment’ in the Middle Ages was complete without the introduction of the grotesque. Bakhtin (1968: 43) – following Victor Hugo – recognised that the grotesque was an aesthetic of extraordinary f lexibility: ‘On the one hand it creates the formless and the terrifying, on the other hand the comic and the buffoon like’. It is to the former that we now turn.

From monsters to demons ‘The tall, well-proportioned white-skinned, blond figure exhibits northern European physiognomy and stands in front of northern forest landscape filled with fir trees’ (Higgs Strickland 2003: 39). This is not a short passage from the Nazi propaganda machine in the 1930s, but the words of an academic describing the abled contours of propriety in a study of the ‘pictorial codes of rejection’ that dominated Medieval art and iconography. The image of propriety and nobility

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that reminds us of Goebbels’ dark arts, stands in stark contrast to the outcasts that it signposts; the monsters that haunt the Medieval moral economy. The monstrous is constitutive, producing the contours of both bodies that matter (humans, Christians, saints, historical figures, gendered subjects and Christ) and, ostensibly bodies that do not (animals, non-Christians, demons, fantastical creatures and portentous freaks. (Bildhauer and Mills 2005: 2) It was not unusual for Medieval cultural artefacts to ‘represent monstrous deformity as genuine physical disability’ with ‘social ostracism’ indicative of its outcome (Wheatley 2018: 21). In the much-read Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1357) the monster was defined as a body that is ‘deformed against kind’ (Verner 2016: 123–154). Monsters appear in Arthurian Legends, Medieval romances, the bestiary, monumental sculpture, heraldry and ornaments. Stiker (1999: 72) gathered a ‘motley-crew’ of disreputable characters to fill the archive of Medieval undesirables, noting that ‘beyond these figures so important in the Middle Ages – the beggar, the monster, the criminal – lies the silhouette of the disabled, borrowing features from the other all at the same time or successively’. Disability was represented by multiple intersections of nefarious, f lawed figures, invalidating ‘scripts’ that conjured muddied morality, fabulous beasts and marginalised humanity. To Sticker’s list add ‘the demon’– perfidiousness personified, the great monster of Christendom – a further crucial character in the story of disability invalidation in the Middle Ages. Cohen (2008) extends the cast of disreputables in twelfth century England. It sweeps up an array of marginalised ethnicities, including Jews and the peoples of the Celtic fringe. The church created heretics to add to the cast and demonised the Saracen as the endogenous threat to European Christendom: Infidels rattling scimitars at the border of civilisation, threatened the Holy Land with heathenism. Indeed, ‘twelfth-century responses to Saracen alterity were frequently expressed through the sign of monstrosity’ (Bildhauer and Mills 2005: 9). The art of the period was replete with images of degenerate infidels who epitomised the formless and the frightening (Mellinkoff 1993: Higgs Strickland 2003). The ‘silhouette’ of impairment that carried the register of deformity and crookedness informed representation of these multiple figures of disreputability that peopled the moral politics of difference in Medieval Europe. It is little wonder that the parents of disabled children who gave evidence in canonisation depositions witnessed in their offspring a portentous and monstrous nature (Kuuliala 2016: 76). The monster, insofar as it is some kind of animal or beast, curiously conceived in the imagination, represented the aversion of humanity to the animal that lurks within (Salisbury 2010). The appetites remind ‘men’ of their animal nature, particularly the libidinal urges. The animal ‘impaired’ by the absence of ratio has no shame. Postlapsarian man was, according to Augustine, drowning in his own quagmire. ‘Men’ fear the animal within them and in their aversion to it, draw

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away in disgust (Wier and Jerman 1999: 80–90). The inner monster is chased out and recognised in others who better fit the bill. In the Middle Ages – shame constant in its moral milieu – the monster provided a categorical space in which real people could be fitted-up to become the guilty: Women, prostitutes, heretics, Jews, Saracens; ‘the lame’, ‘the maimed’, ‘the insane’, ‘the blind’, ‘the deaf ’, ‘the mute’, ‘the leper’ … provided a discursively deep swamp at the edge of the parish into which one could toss the excrement of guilt. The monster haunted deformity and deformity gave monstrosity a hook for the non-disabled imaginary to conjure the terrifying from the familiar. Semiotic practices of allegory and physiognomy were evident in the texts that made a major scriptural contribution to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition (Lincicum 2013). Reading into the surface of the body signs of a deeper, darker significance was the mundane means by which impairment attracted judgements of notoriety and moral invalidity. Impairment and monstrosity were situated on the same plane of meaning in everyday interaction. In the Aquinian aesthetic, deformities of the soul were matched in the material world by deformities of the body. Disequilibrium and disharmony at a moral and spiritual level were signalled by what was missing or lacking in the body (Metzler 2006: 50–51). Beauty required proportion; the very quality absent in deformity or monstrosity. Physical ‘inadequacies’ and ‘excesses’ were heralds of deeper f laws; absence of piety and lack of devotion to the almighty. An explicit conf luence between disability and monstrosity is evident in the work of Isadore of Seville (560–663). This ‘last great scholar of the ancient world’ produced a compelling taxonomy linking impairment and monstrosity through a continuum of foul f lesh; ‘The taxonomy is ultimately … a normative grid; the degrees of embodied impairment-as-monstrosity are inherently part of a moral map of the corporeal body itself and the ways in which society might relate to it’ (Quayson 2007: 6). The same ableist grid was evident in the work of ‘writers and artists’ who ‘routinely used physiognomic description and pictorial representation not only to signify the moral failings of enemy groups or individuals but also to communicate the virtue of Christ, the Virgin, Angels, Saints and ordinary Christians’ (Higgs Strickland 2003: 39). Augustine used the monster as propaganda to shape the sinful Christian self-concept; deploying ‘the monstrous races as a way of understanding and providing justification for the deformed “among us” – the monster within’ (Bildhauer and Mills 2005: 9) For St Augustine (1998), everything in The City of God – including monstrosity – was a product of divinity and divine providence. Monstrosity – as we have seen – was part of the divine plan. God’s creation, in its totality, required the co-existence of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, perfection and deformity, proportion and monstrosity. Ugliness and deformity, like the presence of evil carried object lessons about what constituted propriety and goodness. Harbingers of moral degeneracy inscribed in nature were palpable inverse sources of moral guidance. Defective creatures – ‘real’ and imaginary – were a paper-trail of righteous conduct. An exemplary didactic inhered in nature’s demonstration of

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what to be and what not to be, the light and dark of ontological validity. Aquinas agreed with Aristotle and Empedocles that monsters were errors of nature, deficiencies, corruptions that would continue to appear until their eschatological undoing: The same thing is true of those substances which Empedocles said were produced at the beginning of the world, such as the ‘ox-progeny’, i.e., half ox and half man. For if such things were not able to arrive at some end and final state of nature so that they would be preserved in existence, this was not because nature did not intend this, … but because they were not capable of being preserved. For they were not generated according to nature, but by the corruption of some natural principle, as it now also happens that some monstrous offspring are generated because of the corruption of seed. (Aquinas, Physica, Book 2, Lecture 13: 263) Nature, Aquinas argued, was nothing but ‘the divine art, impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end’ (ibid.: 268). Monster culture began with the bifurcation of the human species into male and female. The biological degeneration of the latter was positioned alongside the natural nobility of the former. Nature showed creative purpose in coupling perfection (man) and anomaly (woman), truth with error; (de)forming the foundation pairing of the system for the reproduction of the species. Monstrosity and deformity clarify the nature of value. Corruption confirms truth and wholesomeness; error confirms the norm and the aspiration to betterment – what is most usual, most beautiful, most desirable. In offending nature, monstrosity clarifies its Author’s intention. God’s creative design of nature is auto-immune to critique, but human culture uses it to divisive ends of invalidation. The view that there is continuity between fictive monsters and the congenital monsters of humanity was one of the popular epistemologies of the day (Verner 2016). The remote ‘monstrous races’ of the East helped Christendom to depict the abject and the unintelligible. They embody the tensions of the age, helping to solve major theological puzzles, like what it was to be fully human and who was fit to have a relationship with God (Bildhauer and Mills 2005). If ‘bodily distortion became the preferred method of expressing negative ideas about rejection’ (Higgs Strickland 2003: 29), it also doubled as a method for accentuating value; what should be included, embraced and celebrated. The monster was a moral system, a springboard of evaluation encountered, for example, in representations of sexual impropriety and lust (Brown 1999; Weir and Jerman 1999). ‘Deformed children’, according to Caesarius of Arles (470–542) were ‘a consequence of God’s punishment for having sex on the Sabbath’ (Laes 2013: 184). Friedman (2000: XXVII) argues that: ‘In a Medieval Encyclopaedia of 1408 … [in] John de Foxton’s Liber Cosmologie … we find the idea that intercourse with a menstruating woman will produce destruction and even monstrosity’. The outcome of such an act was that ‘the child conceived will have leprosy, be a

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hunchback and monstrous’. Sexual taboo and disability were bedfellows; locked together in Medieval consciousness in a foul, lascivious bedchamber. Woman’s threatening fecundity was linked with the genesis of disability in much the same way that Eve – the beguiling temptress – was responsible for the original sin that precipitated the abandonment of man by God. The potential monstrosity of woman’s sexual potency was fully registered in the foul bodies of their defective progeny. The monstrosity (of the ‘fallen’) was demonic, for the devil is the author of insatiable promiscuity and lust (Elliot 1995). Stiker (1999: 69–70) argues that beyond the breaching of sexual taboo, there was, in the Middle Ages, another facet of cultural life that drew the figures of monstrosity and disability into close moral and emotional proximity: [M]onsters are located, in a geographical unknown, on the boundary of the explored world, and they provide relief for the fear in people’s hearts. They “demonstrate” what could happen to the human body. The anguished question to which they give the answer is: how would we be if we were not the way we are? Otherwise, they confirm our normality. The disabled, the “monsters” immanent in our society and not on its borders, heighten our fears because they are already there. (Stiker 199: 69–70, italics in the original) At the ends of the earth and in the dead of the night, uncanny things weighed heavily on minds formed from religious and supernatural inf luences. Fears far and near collide. Demons, immanent in the parish, are sucked into the tropos that binds invalidity to monstrosity. Demonic monsters lurking ominously in the swamp-lands of the Medieval imaginary demonstrate the elasticity of evil. Monsters were alive, for example, in the Bestiary, a Medieval encyclopaedic, literary genre that catalogued animals, monstrous races and fantastic mythical creatures (Griffins, Mermaids etc.) that had been consigned by God to Adams dominion (Hassig 1999; Verner 2016: 45–90). The creatures were attributed moral qualities, not always evil, just as the tales told about these creatures were moral tales. These exotica lived, as did the dark and dangerous ‘races’ who shared their heathen spaces, on the periphery of the world, threatening its sanctified borders. Another kind of monster was much closer to home. The Devil lived among the people, tempting them to live in ways contrary to God’s word. The Medieval bestiary was ‘the culmination and apogee of allegorical function for animals, assembling stories of beasts and birds’ and fantastic creatures, ‘for purposes of moral instruction and courtly entertainment’ (Hassig 1999: xi). The bestiary was didactic, religious literature popular amongst the propertied classes offering lessons on virtuous conduct and the avoidance of evil. Images of demonic beasts inf lated the forces of righteousness encouraging them to identify monsters who lived alongside ordinary folk. Difference signalled equivalence to the lustful animal or demon within. The monsters and demons of the bestiary pointed to the visible signs of moral and spiritual corruption at the heart of the community.

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As the empire of the devil expanded in the late Middle Ages (Carus 1900/2008), gnostic heresy crept closer to Catholic orthodoxy. That the monstrous was diabolically inspired was a simple, popular way to ascribe meaning to natures errant and corrupting manifestations. Supernatural power made the demon first amongst monsters, gateway to the terrifying darkness of evil. In the imaginary, demons become more ubiquitous: As ‘Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings’ (Huizinga 1922/1999: 30), good and bad do battle. Demonology – the devil as cause – played an important role in mediating the relationship between monstrosity and impairment in the late Medieval period. Disability was drawn into the narrative of demons and the toxic representations that surrounded the diabolical (Bengtsson 2016: 274). It became – in an environment increasingly conducive to a gnostic world view – a prominent repertoire of disability invalidation. The demon, ugly and hybrid, deformed and malevolent, was the master of torment and temptation. Lucifer, the fallen angel and instigator of the most outrageous heresy in the cosmos, was the source of filth from which all that was demonic oozed (Boureau 2006: Russell 1984). During the long period that constitutes the Middle Ages, the devil grew from a minor character in the religious imaginary to the most potent mischiefmaker in Christendom (Carus 1900/2008). His minions were marked by physical malignancies and hybrid animal/human appearance; hirsute bodies, horns, tails, cloven-hoofs; figures dredged from the imaginative inf luences of pagan mythologies, Norse and Greek. Particular impairments were associated with ‘supernatural or demonological causes’, including ‘intellectual disability, mental illness, deafness and epilepsy’ (Braddock and Parish 2001: 17). In the fourteenth century, undesirable traits became enmeshed with spectacular social paroxysms involving mass demonstrations of demonic inf luence. Torments ignited in the devil’s fiery dungeons, erupting on earth in spontaneous communities of ecstasy. It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from Aixla-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighbouring Netherlands. In Liege, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive immediate relief on the attack of the tympani. This bandage was, by the insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight. Many, however, obtained more relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready to administer; for, wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At length, the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages, they took possession of the religious houses; processions were everywhere instituted on their account and masses were said and hymns were sung, while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror. In Liege, the priests had recourse

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to exorcisms, and endeavoured, by every means in their power, to allay an evil which threatened so much danger to themselves; for the possessed, assembling in multitudes, frequently poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction. (Hecker 2007: no page number) The passage describes the great dancing epidemic of 1374 that began in Germany and rolled over the ‘Low Countries’. It was an aftershock of the Black Plague that preceded it and lingered, deep and dark, in the memory. Dancing plagues were manic outpourings, emotional paroxysms in which ‘Dionysiac urges’ were ‘­awakened’ (Nietzsche 1993: 17). Thousands of men and women gyrated in trance-like states until they dropped with exhaustion, or collapsed, foaming at the mouth in epileptic convulsions. The mania ‘had the appearance of persons possessed’ as if a ‘demoniacal epidemic’ had spread across vast tracts of countryside (Hecker 2007: no page number). The belief in the Middle Ages, that demonic possession caused mental disorder (Kemp and Williams 1987) was stoked by events such as these, and they fed into a hermeneutic that made possession and insanity, particularly amongst women, umbilically related (Newman 1998). The collective frenzy appeared to be choreographed by none other than Satan himself. Some believed it, however, to be punishment sent by St John or St Vitus or by God Himself. St Paul had warned the Corinthians (11: 13–15) that ‘Satan disguised himself as an angel of light’. Deception, in matters of spiritual possession, was always possible. The problem was one of ‘discernment of spirits’; how to tell if ‘possession’ had its origins in good or evil. This was not a straightforward process, and experts in discernment used the surface of the body as data to decide whether the ‘holy spirit’ or a ‘false prophet’ was at work (Caciola 2003). The events that began in Aix-La-Chappelle resonated with the diabolical imagery that leapt from the pages of Dante’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy. Writing at the end of the high Middle Ages before the devil has reached the zenith of his celebrity, Dante describes a spiritual journey through hell, purgatory and paradise; a pilgrimage that began in the murky moral morass of Hades and ends in blissful communion with the Almighty. In this most Catholic and Gothic tour of other worldly spaces, the battle between good and evil, the demonic and the devout is played out through poetic interlocutions with characters corrupted and noble, seduced by sin or inf lamed by piety, or morally betwixt and between, struggling to find the path to salvation and fearful of the pitfalls of temptation that might drag them into damnation. In Dante’s allegorical fantasy, the real events of 1374 are partially prefigured as exorcists do battle with demons while poor corrupted souls dance to the drums of damnation and open-mouthed onlookers stare, incredulously, at the spectacle from a purgatorial vantage point. Minds and bodies impaired by sin, scarred and crooked souls, are the battleground around which faith, punishment and salvation circle. The events of 1374 and the images in Dante’s text describe the moral contours of the Christian Middle Ages and, at the same time, the unpredictable nature and monstrous,

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demonological excesses of Medieval embodiment. Spiritual ecstasy – as noted above – however, could elicit mutually exclusive interpretations as a sign of the demonic or the righteous. [T]he volatility of the Medieval era could co-exist quite happily with a tendency for the f lesh to become a site for the pursuance of … religious “body regimes” … structured f lights into physicality which sought to harness the emotional and physical extremes characteristic of the Medieval era of religious goals. (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 36) Righteous ‘body regimes’ epitomised by, for example, ‘carriers of the cross’, or Crusaders could also be recognised in the conduct of f lagellants, macabre dancers, prophets and ascetics whose actions might also be interpreted through the lens of the demonic. The ‘body regimes’ on the borderlands of Christendom where east met west and in southern Spain were also troubled by the devil. In these ‘benighted’ places, the cursed enemies of Christ – Muslim Saracens – ­practised their demonic faith. In 1087, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was blocked by Turks who had encroached into the crumbling Empire of Christian Byzantium. In 1095, Pope Urban II called a ‘crusade’ to restore access to the Holy City. Crusades to check the ‘heathen expansionism’ of the Muslim demon continued – on and off – for three centuries. Their holy fervour was often accompanied by the massacre of European Jews, religious outsiders – killers of Christ – who could be cut down easily in the name of God, without the bother of an epic journey to the ends of the earth. The Crusades ramped up the eristic tradition of zealous violence. Elimination of non-Christians and heretics was legitimised by both Papal and ‘noble’ authority. The mass mania of the dancing epidemics and the ecstatic violence of believers, armed with the inalienable truth, signalled the chilling presence of diabolical talents. The eristic tradition dominated moral practice in claims of spiritual awakening or surges of ecstasy. It manifested itself in what David Williams (1996) called ‘deformed discourse’. ‘Deformed discourse’ described ways of relating to threats from near or far, and of interpreting the presence of good and evil, friend and enemy in terms of a sanctified notion of embodiment. Angels, saints, monsters and demons were recognisable in their relation to the absence or presence of deformity in their figures. ‘Discerners of spirits’ (Caciola 2003) used deformity as a sign system to identify virtue and malignancy. Deformity, monstrosity and demonic behaviour legitimated righteous, eristic violence and were used as repertoires in the propaganda of hatred and in the discernment of propriety and impropriety. Disabled people were good to mistreat. Their monstrous f lesh exuded the pernicious qualities immanent in the demonic countenances of Saracen, Jew (Higgs Strickland 2003) and the other disreputable monsters that formed the negative backbone of Medieval morality. An irenic tradition of ‘neighbourly love’ informed a second-string to the moral economy, a charitable discourse in

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which disabled people were represented as good to be good to. It is to this apparatus of merciful conduct that the discussion now turns.

Merciful conduct: A stairway to heaven Mary Douglas (2000: 1X) wrote: ‘Charity is meant to be a free-gift; unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue, we know that it wounds’. Charity in the Middle Ages embodied the logic of the ‘gift’. Giving was central to the Christian tradition of caritas and to the merciful deeds or acts of mercy expected of the faithful. To give alms or make an effort to benefit and bring comfort to others was a demonstration of virtue, of the right and proper way for human beings to relate to one another. Charity was, as Marcel Mauss (1923/2002) argued, a system of exchange; part of a wider social compact and network of reciprocity, social solidarity, division and hierarchy. It also established an important role for disabled people and their benefactors in the Medieval moral economy and informed their emotional relationships. Caritas framed the expectations that surrounded the everyday mundane practices of lay morality. Charity reinforced relationships between rank and afforded opportunities for the acquisition of spiritual capital by the propertied classes. For those with resources, there were blessings a-plenty to be had. Alms giving and good deeds in the Christian Middle Ages were never disinterested activities. The wealthy laity donated material gifts, especially land, to their preferred monastic orders and through these gifts, benefitted ‘directly … from the monk’s prayers’ ( Jamroziak 2013: 92–93). It is not surprising that ecclesiastical patronage in the Middle Ages was widely practiced by the privileged classes throughout Europe (Gemmel 2013). The Cistercian Order, the first ‘multinational organisation’, did particularly well in the ecclesiastical competition to attract donations. Benefactors, who were well-aware of the eschatological returns on their investments, were easy to find: The relationship between Cistercian monks and their benefactors was based on the concept of reciprocity common to all religious-lay interactions in the Middle Ages; in return for material donations, usually land, the monks prayed for the salvation of their benefactors. This was the fundamental purpose of the grants and the chief motive of the laity in supporting monastic houses. ( Jamroziak 2013: 94) For the giver in this moral economy, there was abundant spiritual profit to be had. Giving alms was ‘considered spiritually efficacious’ (Wheatley 2018: 18): For the recipient church/corporation, there was material gain in the form of money or donations of land and estates. The recipient was supposed to use these donations to benefit poor and disabled people; a silent third party ‘beneficiary’ in this complex system of gift exchange. However, circulation of wealth stayed in

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the hands of nobility and church. Alternatively, benefactors might give directly by offering food, clothing, shelter or money to mendicants or poor people. To be a disabled person in the Middle Ages meant that one must be a target for and a recipient of merciful love and charity. Christ, in Holy Scripture and the scholastic intelligentsia who refined and codified the system of caritas, demanded demonstrable piety by acts of mercy. Visible impairment and the begging bowl marked out the obvious recipients of merciful acts. The cultural system of mores, steeped in Western ‘physiognomic consciousness’, created a binary of exchange between good givers and bad bodies (Carter 2011; Hartsock 2008) between who was good to give and who was good to be good to. The visible distinctiveness and ‘scathed’ nature of impairment, its association with base, sinful carnality, and its biblical remediation at the hands of the saviour marked off bearers of physical, mental and sensory stigma in the community as a major marketplace in the practice of propriety. In the journey towards Absolute validity in the kingdom of heaven, impairment was of significant spiritual use to the non-disabled population. Caritas was an investment in the bank of salvation. The practical relation between disabled and non-disabled persons abrogated the theoretical advantage that disability derived from its centrality to Christ’s mission. God’s capacity for infinite forgiveness transformed the sinner, without equivocation, into an object of love. However, in the Proprium of the Middle Ages, property exploited propriety to its own ends. The cultural context of Caritas made it easy for wealthy aristocrats, prelates and burghers to ‘pass as pious’, to carry-off successful and bankable practices of virtue by using the palpable sinner and mendicant as means to end. The relationship between disabled and non-disabled persons in the ‘system of charity’ (Stiker 1999) was mediated by instrumental use-value that made the rich into winners in the race to salvation. The moral economy and spiritual life of the Middle Ages revolved around everyday redemptive practices. Disabled people were sanctifying stepping stones for their non-disabled counterparts who practised propriety through their merciful actions towards the broad class of the wretched and suffering to which disabled people not only belonged, but in which they stood out by their – often ­precarious – right to mendicancy. As Stiker (1999) points out, the great mass of the poor in the Middle Ages, was a ragged, wretched, lumpen identity to which disabled people were easily assigned, not just on economic grounds, but through their common status as objects of charity, in a complex system of almsgiving, that made both poverty and disability integral instruments of moral economy and sacred order. The existence of the poor was accepted as part of the natural order, and the poor were perceived to offer opportunities for wealthier citizens to do good by providing alms … In this context, persons with disabilities doubtless had more widespread acceptance as part of the poor. (Braddock and Parish 2001: 19)

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Although the impaired body was figured in the non-disabled imaginary of the Middle Ages as a clear sign of sin and corruption and a signal of the presence of evil, the relevance of this apparently positive ‘calling’ to the ‘moral economy’ and the use-value attendant upon it was ambiguous. Impairment was both a palpable manifestation of spiritual impurity but also widely appreciated by non-disabled people as their ‘stairway to heaven’: [T]he poor and the disabled, though excluded and marginalized – in fact because of their exclusion and marginalization – became sites of access to salvation through charity. Additionally, through their ties to Christ in the Franciscan view of the less fortunate, these groups became associated not only with wretchedness and poverty, but also with the promise of divine redemption. New Testament depictions of Christ’s miraculous cures of the sick and disabled further linked divine reward to helping those in need, and Medieval hagiographers often employed this construction of the physically impaired as a figure in need of divine charity in order to demonstrate the saintliness of their subjects. (Vandeventer Pearman 2010: 32) A visit to the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia in the Italian city of Naples will bring one face-to-face with Caravaggio’s (1571–1610) magnificent, The Seven Works of Mercy (1607), a beautiful, unusual ref lection on the works of mercy produced during the Counter-Reformation. Caravaggio’s altarpiece is the most famous depiction of the ‘acts’, but thousands of others had been produced during the Middle Ages, long before the masterpiece – painted to please a wealthy congregation with Papal connections – adorned the Misericordia. Duffy (1992: 358–359) in his celebrated book, The Stripping of the Altars, includes a citation of the ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, an English vernacular poem in Yorkshire dialect that clearly indicates the terrible consequences of failing in one’s duties with respect to the demands of the Seven Works. The fires of hell; an afterlife of eternal damnation is the prospect for those who neglect their duties. From the twelfth century, the penalty for neglect of the duty of compassion is reduced from an everlasting sentence to a temporal one by the introduction of purgatory as a place of detention for, inter alia, the sins of omission associated with failures to carry out the charitable acts necessary for salvation. The Works of Mercy were represented pictorially in religious and monastic manuscripts and appeared as wall paintings in Italian Churches from the twelfth century (Botano 2011). The acts of mercy were the subject of countless artistic representations, including some still celebrated today and many, workaday etchings lost in the folds of time. Wall paintings, in particular, had didactic value for the illiterate faithful; providing popular and accessible representations of The Works of Mercy. The virtue of mercy is evident in the conduct of persons who see that it is their duty as Christian subjects to bring relief to misery and suffering: The Seven

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Works of Mercy are divided into two kinds: Firstly, the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy which instruct the faithful to: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Feed the hungry; Give drink to the thirsty; Welcome the stranger; Clothe the naked; Visit the sick; Visit the prisoner; Bury the dead.

The most obvious source of scriptural legitimacy for these moral prescriptions to give succour to suffering was the gospel of Matthew. It is worth noting, however, that the last command was added to the list in the Middle Ages to make a ‘sacred’ seven that would align numerically with the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues and so on. The instruction to bury the dead was not included in the Gospel according to Matthew. For I was hungry, and you gave me not to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me not to drink. I was a stranger and you took me not in; naked and you covered me not; sick and in prison and you did not visit me. (Matthew 25: 41) In the case of administering to the spiritual welfare of others, in some instances, specialist skills were required. The Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy included: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Teaching the ignorant; Counselling the needy; Chastising or admonishing the sinful; Comforting the sorrowful; Forgiving enemies; Suffering tribulations; Praying for all.

The Seven Works, subdivided into two groups, ref lect the central ontological distinction in Christianity between f lesh and soul. The Corporal Works of Mercy – doing good to enhance the bodily welfare of others – traded on the subsistence and maintenance of the temporal. The Spiritual Works of Mercy – doing good to enhance the spiritual welfare of others – traded on the eternal, though corporal acts, as we have seen, were also a means for the laity to establish credentials of dutiful piety that had an everlasting pay-off: [T]he Seven Corporal Works focused on bodily acts of charity like feeding, clothing and giving shelter to the needy, caring for the sick and imprisoned,

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and providing proper burial for the dead, while the Seven Spiritual Acts concentrated on contemplative acts like teaching others, reproving sinners, praying, patiently enduring personal injuries and forgiving those who inf lict them, and providing comfort to those who are grieving. Lay people particularly focused on the Corporal Works, whereas clerics were more prepared to complete the spiritual works. The disabled were consequently an integral part of the economy of charity and salvation. (Vandeventer Pearman 2010: 32) The gates of the kingdom of heaven were closed, temporarily or permanently, to those who did not attend to the corporal and spiritual needs of the less fortunate suffering classes. The Works of Mercy provided an elaborate map of activities to speed conduct along the path of goodness. The church taught that charitable acts would be rewarded. Good deeds, including almsgiving, would help one to make one’s way up the stairway to paradise. One might conclude that in the Middle Ages, it was much more difficult for the camel to make it through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to pass through the pearly gates. The system of moral and spiritual reward served well the interests of property in its relationship with God. It was not in the interests of the Christian Behemoth to point out that the (metaphorical) carcases of poor and disabled people formed the raw material from which the stairway to heaven was built, but it was very much in the interests of the church to promote caritas and mercy: ‘The church needed people with impairments for reasons of both earthly economy, manifested in the creation of foundations and institutions and the economy of charity and salvation of individual Christians who gave alms to disabled beggars’ (Wheatley 2010: 19). Works were a duty. Failure to enact them constituted sins of omission; matters for contrition and penance. The Seven Works of Mercy as they were represented, invariably pictorially, to the illiterate mass of believers were didactic representations of a good life; guidance as to the good deeds that would best approximate Jesus’ message of merciful love and His mission to save sinners, relieve suffering, return outcasts to the community and heal sick and disabled people. Both sets of Works of Mercy were (and still are for many contemporary believers, including Catholics and Methodists) central instruments in demonstrating love for others and laying down evidence that one was fit for eternal salvation. All the ‘Spiritual Works’ are not within the competence of everybody. Teaching (the ignorant), counselling (the needy) and chastising and admonishing (the sinful) were pastoral tasks that fell to clergy. Forgiveness, patience and prayer, however, could be expedited by anyone so inclined. Potentially, therefore, most people could embrace propriety through spiritual acts, though it was the more mundane corporal acts that inspired artistic representation on a grand scale. One such representation was created by the Master of Alkmaar (dates of birth and death and the identity of the artist are disputed) in 1504 for the church of St Lawrence in the Dutch town of Alkmaar. It is a polyptych, on view today in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Each of the seven works of corporeal mercy

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are portrayed by a single panel. Disabled people are liberally represented in the moral collage that the polyptych speaks to. In the panel entitled Feeding the Hungry, a non-ambulant beggar is seated in the foreground staring upwards at two magnanimous burghers – husband and wife – who are dishing out bread to a wretched assembly of paupers, one of whom is a blind man tended by his wife. (see Figure 5.1) In Giving Drink to the Thirsty, a crippled man is the recipient of sustenance offered by a wealthy man and his wife in the portico of their mansion. (see Figure 5.2) A blind man appears in the panel that depicts Welcoming Strangers and Caring for the Sick portrays the inside of a well-equipped hospital in which the infirm are being tended. The figure of Christ appears in various guises in all the panels. The painting is about ‘civic virtue’ (Decker 2010) and propriety and how the burghers of the town embody it.

FIGURE 5.1 The

Master of Alkmaar: The Seven Works of Mercy: Feeding the Hungry.

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Master of Alkmaar: The Seven Works of Mercy: Giving Drinks to the Thirsty.

FIGURE 5.2  The

I chose to focus on this representation of The Seven Works, not so much because it is well-known or because it survived – with a few minor scratches – the iconoclasm of Reformation, but because it was produced in 1504, on the cusp of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Early Modernity, and because it represents the bourgeoisie, a new player in the Proprium, propertied by the successful manufactures and trades of the Low Countries and seeking to add the reputation of civic charity and propriety to its status. The Reformation was in the wind and Catholic hegemony on the wane. The times were changing. The importance of ‘acts’ would soon be challenged by the prophets of ‘faith’. The Master’s polyptych, however, suggested that property sought propriety and that the system of charity gave ‘privilege’ special access to the means of salvation. Disabled people were conceived less as contenders for the accumulation of spiritual wealth, more as instruments for non-disabled people to amass

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the spiritual capital that would fuel their journey to a contented end with their maker. In the centuries before the bourgeoisie came to town, Grand Seigneurs prepared the road to their personal salvation through wills that involved massive endowments. For example, one fourteenth century worthy ‘left 40,000 gold ecus for 50,000 masses, all to be said within a year of his death’ and another ‘endowed two masses every day and in perpetuity’. In addition, he assigned ‘one hundred livres a year for the upkeep of the monks and augmentation of the divine service … the money to be taken from perpetual rents and the taille’ (Tuchman 1978: 291). His redemption was to be paid for not just from his personal fortune, but from taxes that he charged to the towns and villages under his fief. These endowments were important revenues for the church, but it is unlikely that the ‘sick and needy’ benefitted much from them. The clergy too, had distinct advantages in the journey to salvation. In addition to practising works of mercy from which the faithful masses might benefit, they could make their way up the stairway to heaven through the application of the specialist spiritual skills which set them apart. Some of these specialist pastoral duties would have brought the clergy into contact with disabled people, both parties benefitting from the instructions, admonishments and consolations offered in good faith by members of the priestly caste. The clergy also controlled the institutional arrangements in which charity and acts of mercy were manifest. Residential institutions for disabled people provided segregated social spaces for the provision of good works, including the kind of instruction and consolation for the suffering and the sorrowful which only specialists in spiritual well-being could administer. Charitable institutions mushroomed throughout Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages. Bethlem Hospital in London began to admit people considered mad in 1430. The first of many asylums in Spain was established in 1409 in Valencia, and the earliest known house of confinement for mad people was established in Erfurt, Germany in 1385 (Braddock and Parish 2001: 19–20). The emergence of places of ‘hospitality’ for a variety of marginalised populations including asylums, hospitals, hospices and alms-houses was a key feature of the spread of institutional care that had its roots in the leprosaria of the declining Roman Empire (Stiker 1999: 74). The system of confinement of madness and impairment in Medieval Europe was not just a means of segregating populations because they were regarded as potentially dangerous and demonic (Spierenburg 1984); it was also a mechanism for developing a system for delivering the Works of Mercy, both spiritual and corporal. Under one roof, the clergy could shelter, feed, clothe, visit, harbour, instruct, counsel, admonish and pray for the sick, the disabled, the suffering and the poor. Institutional settings provided ‘hot spots’ for non-disabled people to accumulate spiritual capital. The wealthy aristocratic nobility and the church provided the material means for the clergy to deliver. Disabled people were third-party beneficiaries, the poor cousins, in a system of institutional arrangements that paid handsome dividends to privileged benefactors and pious priests. One fourteenth

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century princess ‘maintained three priests whose only duty was to say prayers for her deceased first husband’ (Tuchman 1978: 292). The extent to which ­thirdparty beneficiaries benefitted is not particularly clear, but caritas was usually little more than a sticking-plaster for the wretched. Nevertheless, there was a relatively elaborate system of hospitality from which poor and disabled people were supposed to benefit. A Christendom-wide network of provision thrived – ecclesiastically organised and located, in many instances, in and around the monastic settlements where hospitals and alms-houses would be well-placed to f lourish (Burton and Stober 2008). Some monastic orders and some Abbots were more generous than others in their disbursement of alms and in their efforts to nourish disabled people in body and spirit. Despite the duty of hospitality enshrined in scripture and the monastic ‘Rule of Benedict’ that supported it, complaints from clergy about the cost and bother of feeding and tending to poor and disabled people (particularly where ecclesiastical settlements were on the main pilgrimage routes) were commonplace ( Jamroziak 2013: 108; Kerr 2007). On the other hand, well-heeled ‘paying guests’ were well-served by the duty of hospitality when they required the ‘hotel’ services provided by religious institutions. Some might, in later life, become ‘Corrodians’; laypersons who secured long-term accommodation in religious establishments in exchange for a gift or a rental fee. These kinds of ‘guests’ represented an income stream rather than a drain on the resources of the church. Unlike their wealthy ‘superiors’ who could pay for ‘guest house’ accommodation, poor and disabled people presented as beggars and would have been treated as such in what was, essentially, a ‘two-tier system of hospitality’ ( Jamroziak 2013: 108). As Douglas (2000) suggests, for these lowly recipients of the gifts of caritas, there was a sting in the tail. Wounds of shame and humiliation were exchanged for scraps of magnanimity. On the other hand, the spiritual return on these scraps for donors that supported religious and monastic activities were significant: ‘The eschatological benefits of monk’s charitable activities were automatically “transferred” to the benefactors’ ( Jamroziak 2013: 108). Priests, especially prelates, did well as mediators in this system of charity and mercy, in which they and their noble allies hogged the riches that piled up in the spiritual treasure chests of Europe. Nobles could acquire blessings to count towards their salvation without having to go anywhere near a ‘wretched’ object of their works of mercy. Institutional arrangements for charity helped to keep social distance between ‘the good’ and those who were good to be good to. For disabled people and older people with long-term care needs, there were Christian ‘alms-houses’; rudimentary places of shelter, sponsored either by the Church or by wealthy laity. Alms-houses, ‘favourite recipients of Christian Charity’ during the fourteenth century (Tuchman 1978: 37), sprang up in towns and cities throughout Europe. A feature of the European system of caritas, almshouses ‘were founded and supported with donations from Kings, church dignitaries, nobles and merchants, all keen to ease their passage to heaven with good works (Historic England, No Date). McIntosh (2011) argues that the number of

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alms-houses expanded significantly in the Middle Ages alongside the ‘parish’ which became the hub of local organisation and authority. The parish, where collections for poor and needy people were central to the Christian mission of the congregation, formed the basis for early forms of secular state welfare. It became the pillar of a community-based system of poor relief that developed as the Middle Ages grew to a close and a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ (Goose 2010) developed. However, despite the steady growth of sponsored institutional care in and around the religious settlements of Medieval Europe, most ‘mad’ people and people with impairments were looked after in their communities. Parishes, towns and families played important roles in material, corporal care. Systems of support and compassion provided the well-off with plenty of opportunities to get involved in a ‘worthy cause’. The notables of town administrations, for example, sponsored ‘pilgrimages to distant religious sites for people with epilepsy and mental illness to seek cures’ (Braddock and Parish 2001: 18). Poor, sick and disabled people were not in short supply and would congregate in the towns (Stiker 1999: 66–67), particularly if their feudal connections to the land, their families and the local nobility had, for whatever reason, broken down. These conurbations provided non-disabled urban dwellers with the opportunity to get involved in alms-giving or donate to new, local institutional arrangements that would break up the ghettos of mendicants: Craft guilds deducted what became known as ‘God’s penny’ for charity from each of their completed contracts and donated it to worthy causes (Tuchman 1978: 37). The towns were lively markets in spiritual and moral commodities and services from which non-disabled people could benefit. As the bourgeoisie acquired property through manufacture and trade in the late Middle Ages, they too began to benefit from a system of charity that brought propriety into line with property. Endowment of a chantry was another means of spiritual aggrandisement for the wealthy. A chantry was ‘a foundation for the maintenance of one or more priests to offer up prayers for the soul of the founder, his family and ancestors and usually of all Christian souls’ (Cutts 1898/2013: 438–439). And the least of these was the last. Two thousand chantries were founded in England between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The deeds of endowment that set up chantries would usually include instructions for carrying out religious ceremonies, acts of mercy and/or almsgiving activities. Among the ‘beneficiaries’ would be ‘the blind, lame, impotent and most-needy people’ (ibid.: 448). Almsgiving, the material gifts and favours donated to support those in need, was central to many of the corporeal acts of mercy. To feed, clothe and shelter those who could not do so themselves were obligations that came much easier to those who could afford to do so. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica was clear that almsgiving brought propriety to property. Payment of the price was the key to salvation, even if the means had been extracted from the toil of impoverished peasants.

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Charitable acts pleased God but their performance also demonstrated the goodness of the giver: The harvest of blessing to be reaped by almsgiving amply suffices to inspire noble minded Christians “to make unto themselves friends of the mammon of iniquity”. First of all, almsgiving renders the donor like unto God Himself (Luke 6:30, 36); nay, more, it renders God himself debtor to those giving alms (Matthew 25: 40). Moreover, almsgiving adds special efficacy to prayer (Tobit 4: 7), tends to appease divine wrath (Hebrews 13:16), liberates from sin and its punishment (Sirach 29), and thus paves the way for the gift of faith (Acts 10:31). (O’Neil 1907: no page number) The non-disabled elites reaped the ‘harvest of blessings’, the ultimate of which was salvation itself. Meanwhile the church, through its marketing machinery, advertised these blessings and benefits. It reaped a bumper economic harvest that came in the form of donations from the landed warrior class and the burghers in the towns. The surplus that had been squeezed from the sweat of peasants and artisans became a passport to redemption for the rich. Salvation and alms were the bounties that tied the economic and moral dimensions of Medieval life together, creating a blissful union that spliced religion and wealth into a tight rope of corrupt governance. The system of spiritual and economic exchange between rich and church exploited the labour of the masses living in rural bondage or urban squalor, as well as the disabled people whose iconic status as signs of God’s punishment and object of His mercy and miraculous works, made them very valuable, but colourless, pieces in the moral jigsaw of Medieval life. The masses trapped in poverty and impairment represented, graphically, the inevitability and indelibility of earthly pain and suffering. The system of charity did not serve its elimination. That was not the agenda: Medieval charity does not … express universal sympathy and striving for human happiness. It differs from modern humanitarianism, based on public compassion. It alleviated suffering but did not imagine the possibility of ending it. Indeed, given the fall and humanity’s sinful nature, it presupposed the inevitability and the justice of suffering in the world. (Sznaider 1998: 123) The ‘justice of suffering’ built into the politics of the Middle Ages legitimated the wretchedness of the lower orders. Charity was not a means to end the suffering ordained by God; rather, access to His kingdom was mediated by one’s involvement in corporal and spiritual acts of mercy that mitigated, but could not eliminate, the baggage of malum poenae that inhered in His Divine Plan. Caritas provided a means for the privileged to pay for their passage out of the world in which pain and suffering was a constant companion. Disabled people,

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as instruments of salvation in the moral economy that organised around it, were ‘good to be good to’, but the good that this did them in terms of their terrestrial comforts was, by design, of limited value. The system and ideology of charity objectified ‘disability’, yet the Christian doctrine of agape, or love and compassion, was reduced to pity and crass instrumentalism (Nygren 1938). Love was supposed to have arisen from merciful charity rather than from a motivation or accessory external to it. Caritas, in practice, imposed conditions on the unconditional. In the realpolitik of charity, the purity of agape and the self less deeds that were supposed to spring spontaneously from untarnished benevolence were wrapped up in an unseemly scramble for eschatological glory, secular struggles for power and control and in base greed to amass private wealth and spiritual capital – property and propriety. Francis of Assisi, champion of the poor, was one of the few churchmen to see through the tarnished moral economy. He embraced agape, advocating: ‘Esteem for the poor and the aff licted by reason of their spiritual value and their essential humanity, and no longer simply as the still servile instrument of the salvation of the rich’ (quoted in Stiker 1999: 68). St Francis recognised that the mass of impoverished and disabled people was a means for the spiritual advancement of the elite. He understood that Christian charity and mercy was not based on agape. It was a savings plan to invest in a ‘first-class’ journey to salvation. Agape was corrupted by cupboard love. In this rotten core, the seeds of Reformation grew, though, ironically, the reformers were also quick to de-sanctify the mendicant that was so central to the ‘barefoot’ Franciscan conception of holiness and love. In claiming that ‘disabled’ people have spiritual value ‘in their own right’, St Francis exposed the self-indulgence and hypocrisy that ‘deformed’ the Christian imaginary and its system of charity. Franciscans valorised the figure of the beggar; encouraging members of the order to live in poverty and suffering as a sign of commitment to those who were at the heart of Christs mission of salvation (Beier 1985). In resisting the instrumental architecture of the moral economy, followers of St Francis offered a critique of caritas; its dearth of compassion and the favours it offered to the wealthy and the able-bodied rather than those most in need. The Franciscan critique illuminated the hypocrisy of the economy of affects that formed in Medieval life and to which some in the Franciscan order itself succumbed: ‘Enjoying the favour of the rich, the Franciscans preached to them and dined with them and took office in noble households as counsellors and chaplains’ (Tuchman 1978: 33). Agape, even for its most enthusiastic ecclesiastics, was susceptible to the corruption of Mammon. The acts of mercy, ubiquitous in the calendar of everyday Medieval life, drenched the economy of affects not with agape, but with blunt, impotent pity. It gathered, alongside guilt, like thick dew in peasants’ fields, ecclesiastical lands and knights’ estates as the empty emotional aff latus of a corrupt system of ‘merciful exchange’. Merciful compassion was cleaved; cloistered in the disavowal of misfortune and squandered by the instrumental righteousness of the donor classes. Poor and disabled people, also in thrall to the duty of mercy, for it fell

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to everyone, lacked the wherewithal to buy into a system that depicted them, erroneously, as its benefactors. Their importance as the suffering classes was a will-o’-the-wisp. In the Proprium, impairment was a sacred profanity; a worn prosthesis to the system of charity, an impersonal mediator in the message of miracle and the celebrity of saints, a vessel of sin in a sea of redemptive opportunity. To act mercifully in the context of a system that corrupted its crucial agents was the emotional and moral silage that fertilised peasant allotments, ecclesiastical lands and knights’ estates. There was a paradox at the heart of the moral gift economy of caritas and its poetics of donation and mercy. Charity was the gift that kept on taking; expropriating the dignity and autonomy of its recipients by validating the propriety of giving. Disability saved souls, rescued sinners from damnation in return for a pittance and the ephemeral, insubstantial, violent blessings of a beggar’s life. The merciful donors made excellent investments, but for the target of charity, the return was poor. Disability mediated exchange between the pious and privileged on the one hand and Church and God on the other. The gifts were banked, the ledger tallied, the spiritual interest returned to whence it came. Disabled people were go-betweens in a pact of cosmic-reciprocity. They relied on the promise of scripture for their reward; to believe, in order to salve their suffering, that the Kingdom of Heaven would be theirs. The system of Christian charity brought the promise of propriety to property much more effectively than it brought relief to poor and disabled people. There was little hope that the simple values taught by the Nazarene would find expression in the human institutions of Christendom. By the start of the disastrous fourteenth century, the great bureaucracy of Catholicism that reached deep into the hearts and minds of its f lock, was a rancid multinational organisation with financial interests in every corner of Europe. The poor would get no blessing, not, as Christ prophetically remarked, on this earth, at least. Their reward to come was far greater than all the earthly trinkets that prelates and nobility could acquire and store, in their material and spiritual treasure chests! The irenic tradition of Christian love and charity collapsed under the weight of greed and corruption.

Concluding remarks The chapter began with a short quotation indicating that Christian attitudes from ‘the dark ages’ continue to glow. Most strains of Christian fundamentalism make no apology for the ableist doctrines and practices of the past. Evangelical certainty and biblical inerrancy are usefully deployed in the whitewash. Christian theologians and ecclesiastics of a libertarian bent, however, look back on the history of the relationship between church and disabled people with varying degrees of discomfort. Advocates of ‘disability theology’, in particular, are prone to a radical revisionism haunted by a massive mea culpa for the ways in which the Christian church fed disabled people to the lions (Eiesland 1994; Yong 2011).

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A critical tradition of emancipatory Christianity forged in Latin America in the late twentieth century (Gutierrez 1988: Boff and Boff 1987) discovered a ‘God of the oppressed’ (Cone 1997). It proposed ‘a mingling of spirituality and protest’ and a search for ‘liberation and justice’ (Danforth 2005). These revelations produced a narrative that combined social model thinking with a politics of salvation. It sought to tear down the barriers, both theological and practical, to disability participation in religious life (Creamer, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008; Eiesland 1994; Mintz 2006). This internal critique of Catholic ableism has been a long time in the making. Disability theology proposed three new conceptions of deity: an ‘accessible god’ (Block 2002); an ‘inclusive God’ (Black 1996; 2006) and a ‘disabled God’ (Eiesland 1994). The last and most radical of this holy trinity of theological revisions, ‘incorporates the fullness of human contingency and ordinary life into God’. It presents a vision of the crucified/resurrected Christ who ‘[i]n presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends … is revealed as the disabled God’ (Eiesland 1994: 100). Freeman (2002: 83) supports this vulnerable version of imago dei by arguing that radical theology allows us to understand the story of Christ resurrected ‘not [as] a perfect God but a disabled one’, which thus ‘affirms the full personhood of people with disabilities’. Furthermore, it ‘deconstructs norms of embodiment and makes us rethink the limits and boundaries of our bodies’(ibid.). Amos Yong (2011) argues that, through centuries of Christian tradition, scripture and theology, disability has been read through an ableist lens. Even here, however, where the language of Critical Disability Studies is used to evoke a history of disability oppression, the argument falls on stony ground. Yong (2011) suggests that Christ’s experience of pain and suffering, vulnerability and helplessness is at one with the experience of disabled people. The development of ‘disability theology’ recapitulates some traditional prejudices. The rhetoric of spiritual compensation construes disability as a personal calamity that can only be “survived” with the promise of heavenly reparation, and does little to undo entrenched notions of disability as a solely individual, rather than social or political, matter, or of the disabled body as synonymous with a diminished self whose worth can only be restored through divine intervention. (Mintz 2006: no page number) ‘Disability theology’ is a tortured settlement, a guilt trip, that fails lamentably to address the indignities that disabled people suffered under the yoke of Medieval Christendom. The repentant mood, in which the twisted body of Christ is the latest version of imago dei, depicts the terrible passion of a forlorn figure. It does not take Disability Studies beyond the bathos of a broken body slumped on the cross in an exemplary moment of suffering and personal tragedy. In the Middle Ages, the eristic tradition legitimated the use of ‘holy violence’ against sinners. The trinity of God, church and nobility used disability to

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fashion its sense of propriety; to exonerate the war against manifestations of sin and evil and to forge a virtuous pathway to salvation. Beneficiaries of disability ‘value’ exploited the theological, biblical and cultural antinomies through which impairment was interpreted. The lives of people with physical, sensory and intellectual impairments, hinged on their conception in the non-disabled imaginary, simultaneously as God’s creatures and Satan’s spawn. Charity and persecution, kindness and vilification, shelter and mendicancy, integration and exclusion, centrality and liminality were the ambiguous and contingent possibilities that shaped disabled people’s experience. Trapped in a double hermeneutic of light and dark, good and evil, disabled people did not know from day-to-day to which interpretation they would need to respond. Disability was located in a zone of spiritual ambiguity of mixed moral messages about how the normate community could and should react to impairment. Treated as both impure and vulnerable, abject and wounded, disabled people were subjected to the expropriation of their dignity and their agency. Morally pejorative explanations of impairment co-existed with notions of divine exoneration for those who acted mercifully towards disabled people. In the subtitle of her book on Disability in Medieval Spanish Texts, Scarborough (2018) poses the question: were disabled people Graced or Disgraced? I have argued that they were disgraced by grace; good to mistreat in the eristic tradition and good to be good to in the irenic tradition. Disabled people in the Middle Ages embodied dis/grace. Impairment was a spiritual gold mine, a maker of saints and in its miraculous elimination, was tangible proof of God’s existence and the pedagogy of the Almighty. It sat at the heart of the moral economy, underpinning the system of spiritual exchange between God and mortals who sought to share in immortality. For the non-disabled community, impairment was an opportunity to demonstrate piety and good deeds and to make headway in the tempestuous journey to salvation. Antithetically, bodily and intellectual difference was used to invalidate; to justify practices that cleansed and persecuted; to weed out the monstrous and the demonic, the spiritual infestations that roamed the earth and dragged the Christian spirit into darkness. They were lightning-rods for God’s wrath; media in the foul play of satanic interference. Propriety legitimately related to impairment, deformity, defectiveness etc., as embodiments of evil and targets for ‘holy violence’. Disability anchored theology and moral practice at both ends of the spectrum of life. It was a guide to the sin of origin to the despoilment of the pre-history of life on earth and to the unspoiled image of God that people used to envisage the ultimate reward of harmony and perfection. Human weakness, submission to temptation, exile from paradise, the misery of separation from the almighty; the woe and the gloom that catastrophe burned into life after the lapse and the stain of sin that all had to bear as a result of Adam and Eve’s unholy mess was written, for the benefit of the illiterate masses, on ‘crooked’ bodies and ‘feeble’ minds. The Medieval politics of natality represented impairment as a sign of God’s punishing wrath. At the other end of the spectrum of life, disability was

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a godsend; a ticket to paradise for the normate community. In the defining moments of existence – beginning and end, birth and death, coming into the world and departing this mortal coil – disability was pregnant with disconcerting meaning. It bridged the bookends of dasien and signed the way beyond: to the glorious triumph of salvation or the endless fires of hell. Christian eschatology brought meaning and relief to beginning and end, using impairment as a tool in its semiotics of origin and salvation. For the faithful in the Middle Ages, there were few questions to ask, but many beatitudes to absorb. Disabled people represented spiritual advantage. In the charity nexus, they were a means to virtue but not intrinsically agents of it. The normate self was agent; source of deliberation and free will who choose a path to God through donation, works of mercy or holy violence directed at sinners and heretics, monsters, demons and fools. In the dialectic of giver and recipient, the latter inhabited a moral void; the former, a space of moral opportunity. Disabled people become media of righteous activity for people who could afford to make impairments do spiritual work for them. The charitable self was an aspirational nomenclature for the normate community, beneficial to it in this world and the next. The ‘clean and proper’ collective was structurally aligned with opportunities to do and be good; even to be righteous in practices of violence against those who embodied dis/grace. The cultural remove of propriety from the sin incarnated in impairment and the assumption of the elite as to their relative likeness to the noetic and morphological attributes of the saviour were embodied advantages, that ‘property’ and privilege embraced. Disabled people – on the other hand – carried the heavy noetic and morphological burden of impairment as signs of sin, as corruption anticipating the miraculous, as graceless mediators of grace. In the moral economy, disabled people represented a crooked, unsettling, settlement of sacred profanity. The eristic and irenic traditions of Christianity were rolled up into a curious package that shaped the role of disabled people in the moral economy and the economy of affects. Through charity and acts of mercy, the normate community fulfilled the biblical requirement to ‘love thy neighbour’. The economy of affects was not, however, f lush with agape. The irenic tradition was reduced to pity and cupboard love, to spiritual avarice. The pious and privileged climbed the stairway to salvation as self-serving donners and doers of good deeds. The eristic tradition of violence legitimated by dogmatic conviction and motivated by disgust – physiognomic and theological – deepened in violence as the Middle Ages fractured into the sectarian wars of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Medieval Christianity was drowned, as a moral and cultural order, by the weight of religious hypocrisy and the corruption of rank and privilege. Many knew this and worked against the graft of corporate church power to establish a kingdom of Christ on earth where love and charity were genuine rather than instrumental; ‘for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul’. The forces of Mammon in the Catholic church, however, far outgunned the ascetic, principled Christian outriders whose voices were often

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barely audible in the Holy See of Rome (or Avignon) where buoyant coffers, the weeding-out of heresy and the exercise of power were the key concerns. Medieval Christianity, fixated on wealth, property and rank, broke the contract between Christ and man that was supposed to be based on love and the renunciation of worldly goods. Disability was a useful tool for corrupt church and papacy. Dragged through debates about good and evil and positioned as a real or allegorical presence in them, disabled people were in the thick of a moral edifice in which they were invalidated by the multiple and contradictory usevalues to which they were put. Reformation promised a renewal of the contract between God and humanity. Renaissance sparked antiquarian revivalism and secular renewal. In the next chapter, we turn to the impact of Early Modernity on the lives of disabled people.

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Metzler, I. (2016) Fools and Idiots? Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mintz, S. (2006) Ordinary vessels: Disability narrative and representations of faith, Disability Studies Quarterly, 26(3). Online at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/722/899 (Accessed 16/3/2015). Mitchell, D. and Snyder, S. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Momigliano, A. (1986) The disadvantages of monotheism for a universal state, Classical Philosophy, Lxxxi: 285–297. Moore, R. (1987) The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Newman, B. (1998) Possessed by the spirit: Deviant women, demoniacs, and the apostolic life in the thirteenth century, Speculum, 73(3): 733–770. Nietzsche, F. (1993) The Birth of Tragedy, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nirenburg, D. (1996) Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nixey, C. (2017) The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, London: Macmillan. Nygren, A. (1938) Agape and Eros, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. O’Neil, J. (1907) Alms and Almsgiving, in The Catholic Encyclopaedia, New York: Robert Appleton Company. Online at: http:​//www​.newa​dvent​.org/​cathe​n /013​28f.h​t m (Accessed 25/4/2012). O’Tool, M. (2010) Disability and the suppression of historical identity: Discovering the professional backgrounds of blind residents of the Hopital des Quinze-Vingts, pp. 11–24 in J. Eyler (Ed.) Disability in the Middle Ages: Considerations and Reverberations, Farnham: Ashgate. Oylan, S (2008) Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oylan, S. (2011) The ascription of physical disability as a stigmatising strategy in biblical iconic polemics, pp. 89–102 in C. Moss and J. Schipper (Eds.) Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Pagels, E. (1988) Adam, Eve and the Serpent, New York: Random House. Paludi, M. and Ellens, J. (Eds.) (2016) Feminism and Religion: How Faiths View Women and Their Rights, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Pender, S. (1996) No monsters at the resurrection: Inside some conjoined twins, in J. Cohen (Ed.) Monster Theory, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Porter, R. (2004) Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, Harmondsworth. Quarmby, K. (2011) Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, London: Portobello Books. Quayson, A. (2007) Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia University Press. Raphael, R. (2011) Whoring after cripples: On the intersection of gender and disability, pp. 117–128 in C. Moss and J. Schipper (Eds.) Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Rawcliffe, C. (2006) Leprosy in Medieval England, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press. Reynolds, T. (2008) Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos. Ricoeur, P. (1992) The Symbolism of Evil, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Ritchey, S. (2014) Holy Matter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Robert, J. (2013) Disabling excess: Sacrificial violence and disability as divine punishment, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. Online at: http:​//cjd​s.uwa​terlo​o.ca/​i ndex​.php/​ cjds/​a rtic​le/vi​ew/14​4/234​.

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6 RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION Disability invalidation in Early Modernity

Introduction The Renaissance spans the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, embracing, loosely, the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The Reformation is often more precisely dated. It began in 1519 when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral (if, indeed, he did so) and concluded with the final volley of the European Religious Wars in 1648; 30 years of terrible conf lagration that swept through central Europe causing the deaths of one-fifth of its population. MacCulloch (2003) waives this precise periodisation in favour of a broader span, from 1490–1700. The Reformation, like the Renaissance, sat between the Middle Ages and Modernity. Both periods overlapped. The humanism of the later informed the cultural development of the former. Together they constituted ‘Early Modernity’, a curious cacophony of civilisation and barbarism, science and superstition. Early Modernity was a globalising age. Wallerstein (1974) regards the fifteenth century and European expansionism as the spark for the development of ‘capitalist world economy’. The West became the global centre. It thrived on the exploitation of the peripheries that it created. Through imperial ambition, Europe’s maritime states strove to become dominus mundi or ‘lords of all the world’ (Pagden 1995). Colonisation of the New World and the enslavement of millions of people from Africa expanded trade and f looded Europe with precious metals and new consumer goods that were appropriated by the aristocracy and the growing class of merchants in expanding conurbations. Pursuit of abundance and colonial profiteering coincided with a mini-ice age in the sixteenth century that led to crop failure and harsh lives of penury and subsistence for the peasantry whose ties to the land were unsettled by enclosure, population explosion and unemployment (Eklund 2016).

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The ‘discovery of America’ in 1492 or the fall of Constantinople in 1453, were obvious landmark events that provide potential, fixed starting points for the Early Modern period. The moral economy of the emerging ‘global West’ was re-oriented by tales of ‘exotic strangers’ that populated the imaginations of the colonisers. A hierarchy of racial worth was the moral basis for colonial rule. Disability acquired siblings in strangerhood and inferiority; brothers and sisters in damaged credibility and withered worth. Repertoires of invalidation drew on a new range of pejorative narratives that invalidated multiple marginalised groups. The suppression, regularly violent, of this rainbow of difference was justified by the long-standing Christian custom of holy violence. The eristic tradition, armed with guns and mighty cannon, pointed its weapons ‘at demonic enemies within and without’ (Canizares-Esguerra 2006: 9). The camps of belief that divided the house of Christianity used a lexicon of eristic vitriol to represent the moral corruption of their religious enemies. Jesuits were described by reformers as ‘Romish locusts’ and ‘pernicious caterpillars’; as ‘servants of Lucifer’, committed to upholding ‘his tottering Antichrist kingdom’. They sought to enlarge his ‘infernal dominion’ (Walsham 2009: 42). Catholic calumniation of Protestant reformers matched the bile of the apostates. It was not surprising that the Early Modern period was marked by an obsession with moral purity (Monter 1987) that singled out impairment and bodily difference as signs of demonic, monstrous abjection. The Renaissance embodied a rebirth of classical ideas and aesthetics. Building on the work of some Scholastics who, from the time of Charlemagne, had nurtured some classical texts, humanists recovered, from the academically more advanced Islamic East, the lost works of Greek philosophy, including Aristotle’s corpus and Seneca’s letters. Renaissance ‘men’ reinvented the lust for learning and artistic production that had marked the classical period. As the church remained entrenched in theological scholasticism, humanists, following Petrarch’s (1304– 1374) lead in rejecting ‘dark age’ thinking, began to fashion a secular understanding of the universe. The Renaissance produced an intellectual vanguard that prepared the way for the Enlightenment. It nurtured some of the greatest artists who have ever lived and great thinkers like Machiavelli (1469–1527), Erasmus (1466–1531), Descartes (1596–1650), Leibniz (1646–1716), Spinoza (1632–1677), Hobbes (1588–1679) and Montaigne (1533–1592) (Burkhardt 1860/2000). The Renaissance grew out of the wellspring of talent and inspiration that was fourteenth-century Florence. In the seat of humanism, an extraordinary wave of artistic, scientific, cultural, political and educational activity f lourished. A curriculum for citizenship and civic engagement was promoted through the promulgation of humanities. Legions of ‘Umanisti’ spread the word north where it met with sympathetic figures like Erasmus and with the growth of religious dissent, inf luencing some of the major figures of the Protestant Reformation, including Martin Luther (1483–1546). Renaissance humanism sowed the seeds of the long three century process in which the autonomous individual, that singular unitary subject of modernity, escaped into the light of day from under the rock of collective superstition:

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The humanist movement, encouraging a delight in the human being as the glory of creation and the growth of rationalism, culminating … in the Cartesian cogito … fostered a sense of the conscious self-determining individual as the one sure point in the universe. (Marshall 2002: 13–14) As the individual became the fulcra of evaluation and the measure of worth, personal talents and shortcomings were highlighted. The ableist imaginary developed a sharpened focus on the comparative embodiment of everyday existence; on how each, holds ‘his’ own in the conduct of faith and life. The Catholic Church was weakened in the late Middle Ages. The seeds of Reformation sown by the Great Schism of 1378–1417, by Lollards in England and Czech Hussites, followers (respectively) of John Wycliffe (died 1384) and Jan Hus (1369–1417) who condemned indulgences, monasticism and transubstantiation. In the second half of the fifteenth century, dissenters promoted predestination and iconoclasm and pointed to papal prof ligacy and ecclesiastical hypocrisy. Catholic orthodoxy was faced with many wings to clip. Theology fragmented as scientific explanation began to find its feet. Copernicus – though the air was still thick with superstition – published De Revolutionibus in 1543. The balloon of hubristic western geocentrism burst. I began this chapter by suggesting that the Early Modern Period is an ‘interregnum’, a morbid crisis prone period. I argue that the tropos of disability can be emploted through a number of repertoires of invalidation. These include the celebration of normate embodiment in classical revivalism and the representation of impairment in narratives of disreputability that associate it with demons, witches, monsters, savages, heathens, vagabonds, beggars and fools. In the final section of the chapter, I discuss the emergence of the ‘Protestant modern body’ and the arrival of a new model of normate embodiment that was suited to the rise of bourgeoisie as a significant player in the Proprium.

Interregnum One might describe the social metamorphosis of Early Modernity as a long interregnum. Antonio Gramsci used the term in the Prison Notebooks (1971: 210) to describe a period of social discord, where: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and that the new cannot be born’ and ‘a variety of morbid symptoms appear’. Bauman (2012: 51) regards interregnum as a collapse of legitimacy. It applies to: extraordinary situations in which an extant legal frame of social order loses its grip and can hold no longer, whereas a new frame, made to the measure of the newly emerging conditions responsible for making the old frame useless, is still at the design stage and has not been fully assembled or is not strong enough to be put in place.

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The church was ripped apart by internecine strife as monolithic, sacramental Catholicism yielded ground to a pluralistic ‘Priesthood of All Believers’ and Islam extended its reach to the gates of Vienna (1529). The Reformation dismantled the props of Catholic life in northern Europe, melting candlesticks, collection plates and other traditional religious objects made of precious metal; smashing icons, relics and paintings; destroying chasubles; reconstituting everyday religious life that one historian sums up in the phrase ‘the stripping of the altars’ (Duffy 1992). The great rituals, relics and adornments of Catholicism, including the sacraments, become vastly reduced in significance, to the point of redundancy. Calvinist iconoclasm in Geneva spread through Germany and the Low Countries in a whirlwind of riotous, righteous abandon in which Catholic religious paraphernalia was trashed and churches stripped of the trinkets of papist excess. Feast day celebrations were removed from the calendar as the celebrity of saints declined. By undermining the paraphernalia and ritual of the sacraments and the mass that made the Catholic clergy into intermediaries between God and laity, the reformers encouraged a direct relationship between Maker and f lock mediated by faith. Under Henry VIII (1491–1547) between 1536 and 1541, England, Wales and Ireland experienced the dissolution of the monasteries, while the inf luential Erasmus attacked ecclesiastical laziness and corruption. Protestant piety attracted millions, and others, disillusioned by religion, were drawn to rationalism and free-thinking. The erosion of tradition and the collapse of certainties that had lasted for centuries brought chaos. Church and state of whatever denomination worked, sometimes together, to discipline the lower orders who were becoming dislocated from the tradition that had held them in servitude to land and master (Beier 1985). Control over and constraint of bodies, including external forms of social control to civilise the unruly populations of Western Europe reached a peak during the late Medieval/Early Modern period; bellicose states and God’s houses – Reformed and Roman – were involved in the systematic destruction of traditional ways of life, accomplished through ‘the constraint of bodies and the submission of souls’ (Muchembled 1985: 85). It was a period of extraordinary unrest. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) may have coined the immortal phrase bellum omnium contra omnes – war of all against all – to illustrate life in the ‘state of nature’, but it was an appropriate description of life in the world in which he lived. The civil war in England, a time of ‘continual fear and danger of violent death’, was played out in the abstract in the pages of Leviathan. If interregnum sounds too contrived a description of a deeply troubled, lengthy period, no-one can deny that many morbid symptoms appeared. Julien Febvre (1982: 132), in his inf luential history of Early Modern religion, described the sixteenth century as a ‘world full of “witnesses” with clenched fists’; of ‘schism’, of insult thrown in homilies of hatred and theologically justified violence practised against those who could not see the ‘light’ of certainty manifest in every utterance or riposte. Apocalyptical anxiety and everyday

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accusations of heresy and witchcraft, he adds, made one ‘always someone or others atheist or Pantagruel’ (ibid.: 140). The Early Modern period was a time of ‘psychic fracture’. Emotional and religious ecstasy produced ‘aesthetic shattering and selfnegation; in which a ‘religious tradition dubious of claims of individual self-importance’ and ‘an aesthetic of excess’, including ‘cultural practices that encouraged public display and shared catharsis’, met with the rising tide of private faith and bourgeois, Protestant individualism (Marshall 2002: 1). Moral disgust was, in a time torn between doubt and certainty, ubiquitous. The voices of humanism and rationalism, though often clearly articulated, were drowned by thunderous accusations of witchcraft and heresy, as ‘worshippers of Satan’ were winkled out and exterminated by the forces of superstition. Reason and enlightenment struggled with what Hegel would (much later) call the ‘night of the world’, where unreason bubbles and explodes in a carnival of negativity and destruction. Scientific breakthrough and inquisition, artistic excellence and religious civil war were among the great tides of this particularly troubled epoch. The great social, economic, religious, cultural and emotional currents of the day swept the lives of disabled people into many torrents and whirlpools: ‘The violence accompanying the establishment of new forms of religious and state authority gives vivid testimony to the uneasiness or even terror with which many people in the Early Modern era confronted their autonomous existence’ (Marshall 2002: 14). For those on the margins of this beleaguered and bellicose interregnum, struggling amidst its massive contradictions, there were many dangers. Disabled people were amongst the most likely to be drawn into its conf lagrations by the magnet of terror. They were pressed, regularly, into the role of pharmakos or folk-devil (Quarmby 2011), ‘victims’ of the sheer volatility of the age and the deeply dislocated moral order. Renaissance rekindled Antiquity. Revitalised, the ableist aesthetic of the classical period enhanced the collapse of lay morality into the pseudo-science of physiognomy to which Medieval Christianity had been wedded (Hartsock 2008). Disability transitioned from ‘wonder to error’ (Garland-Thomson 1996: 3). Other couplets might also be used. Turner (2006: 8) suggest a few more; from the ‘marvellous to the deviant’; from the ‘moral to the medical’; and – most compelling of all given the struggle throughout the period between superstition and science – ‘from portent to pathology’. Wonder, marvel and portent suggest a Medieval relation to disability that was mediated by curiosity and specular awe. Error, deviance, pathology suggest a new settlement beyond the twisted spires of interregnum. However, during the interregnum, eristic violence and irenic cupboard love remained intact in the ableist arsenal. Disability remained good to be good to and good to mistreat; though the centrality of the former to moral economy diminished as the ideology of charity was undercut by the Protestant critique of indulgences and the focus on faith. Though new portraits of impairment appear, disability in the Early Modern period, continues to ‘be subsumed under other categories, notably deformity and monstrosity’ (Turner 2006: 4). Impairment is also absorbed into the discourse

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of the demonic and the violence of the witch hunts. The devil was far more ­powerful than he had been in the Middle Ages. Disability invalidation took on new complexities. Aesthetic, scientific, teratological, Christian and social explanations of bodily difference and deficit contributed to a refreshed gallery of ableist images. Western expansionism created new foreign monsters whose portraits were painted from the palate of disability invalidation. The rise of the closed, Protestant modern body, increasingly individualised and marked by a personal relation of faith with the Maker (Mellor and Shilling 1997), diminished the role of disability as the iconic centrepiece of moral economy, particularly as healing became more secularised and scientific and as charity was drawn more explicitly into infant modern, centralised systems of social control. Disability was recruited into debates about the moral status of difference, in which it became part of a lexicon of meaning to describe a range of perfidious alterities. The normate community constructed its self-image on these invalidations but also recognised itself in classical revivalism.

Aesthetics and classic revivalism ‘You should know’, wrote lyric poet Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556) in his celebrated guide to Early Modern etiquette, ‘that men are wonderfully desirous of beauty, proportion and decorum … conversely, they avoid as much as possible that which is heavy, shapeless and deformed’ (quoted in Vigarello 1990: 153). Aesthetic sensibilities were central to the moral economy of the Renaissance. Disability invalidation during this period of extraordinary creativity was heavily indebted to an ableist imaginary in which ethics and aesthetics – including medical aesthetics – were mutually reinforcing sensibilities. Deformity was despoilment – of nature, of beauty, of form, of shape. It was recognisable through its instant affiliation with an improper aesthetic. Deformity was a Renaissance portrait of botched virtue; used pedagogically to demonstrate that manners and taste were the embodiment of physical and cultural capital. Deformity should be avoided, as Della Casa advised. It was ripe for anthropoemic or anthropophagic reckoning. Deformity, as the Middle Ages crumbled, was a moral category of great axiological import, strongly inf luenced by the revival of classical aesthetic sensibilities. The ableist emphasis on the upright body and orthopaedic normality (Vigarello 1990) as signs of moral stature meant that ‘crippled and crooked bodies’ were highly stigmatised (Turner and Stagg 2006: 5). The Renaissance was hooked on classical revivalism. It embodied a rejection of the dark ages in favour of the splendours of Antiquity (Burke 1987), most especially its splendid sense of aesthetic discernment. Renaissance artists introduced new techniques that took painting, in particular, to new levels of genius. Perspectivism and realism in art blossomed during the period, and fashionable aesthetic sensibilities associated with representing and promoting beauty and nature f lourished in the Italian republics and city-states, as Michelangelo (1475–1564), da Vinci (1452–1519), Raphael (1483–1520), Titian (1488–1576)

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and Botticelli (1445–1510) – to name but the best of the greats of the era – made beauty live through their extraordinary prowess. Burkhardt (1860/2000), like Della Casa (mentioned previously), argued that the Renaissance was marked by a self-conscious commitment to beauty. The period rekindled the classical emphasis on art as a mirror of the beauty of nature, but did so in a new milieu of subjective individualism and of technical superiority over its antiquarian predecessors. Perspectivism permitted greater mimetic integrity, greater accuracy in representation, clearer articulation of the multi-dimensional nature of ‘proportion’. Renaissance artists produced exquisite ‘figures’ in which normal anatomy and moral stature seemed indistinguishable. The inclusion of deformities of feet and fingers in Renaissance painting has resisted explanation (Lazzeri et al. 2015). Persuasive realistic beauty of the norm at the core of the creation and the minutiae of twisted nature at the very extremities of the image of the body were perhaps mutually reinforcing concessions to the skill of the artist, or perhaps a critical appraisal of the medieval penchant for the grotesque. Bildhauer and Mills (2003: 9) note that in the late Medieval period, deformity and monstrosity was most likely to occur ‘at the margins of any civilised space; the margins around the texts in a manuscript folio; the portals and capitals of cathedrals, churches and monastic buildings; as well as the imagined fringes of Medieval cities and courts’. Yet these examples of the grotesque were central to representation. There was no doubt, however, that in the Renaissance, sumptuous beauty claimed moral priority: ‘The central idea of the Italian renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection’ (Wolff lin 1932: 9). Polished refinement was at the heart of value. Deformity represented the lowest rung on the axiological ladder of the age. Dante’s (1265–1321) medieval demons – Alichino; the allurer, Barbariccia; the malicious, or the ‘evil tailed’ Malacoda – represented an age that had not succumbed to the allure of perfect beauty. Spenser (1552–1599) in his Hymne to Beauty was, according to Baker (2010: 43) guilty of a physiognomic sleight-of-hand that associated ‘physical ugliness with evil character’. This was not unusual in an age that had fallen under the spell of beauty. In Early Modernity, beauty and perfection, ugliness and deformity faced each other off as opposites in the representation of propriety and validity. If it is the case that great art ‘trap(s) the psyche into the illusion of human perfection’ (Siebers 2010: 35), then one must conclude that the artists of the Renaissance were masters of illusion, able to make anew the project of human perfectibility that had sustained the classical curriculum of arete. I noted in Chapter 4 that the classical project of human perfectibility constructed a parallel process of invalidation in which disability was conceived as an ontological disaster, a life less valuable, more disposable. In aesthetics, the Renaissance revivifies this trend, not only by mapping the body beautiful but by inventing ways of redesigning bodies, through the use of – admittedly crude – cosmetic prosthetics. It inaugurated in medical aesthetics an anthropophagic approach to bodily difference that prefigured modern rehabilitative sciences. These new techniques

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were designed to transform impairment that its bearers might attempt to ‘pass as normal’. Increasingly, as Renaissance and Reformation gave way to Modernity, the desire to transform difference into similitude through correction, became a hallmark of the way in which ‘progress’ articulated, at least implicitly, the importance of a world striving – through the illusion of perfection – for ‘better’ bodies. To be disabled was to be out of kilter with the kind of appearance that carried weight and worth in the world. In Medieval art – though not so in the good life, as Aquinas suggested – the principles of symmetry, proportion and harmony were rarely technically evident. The Renaissance inaugurated a revival of aesthetic ableism, insofar as it provided a clearly articulated invalidating counterpoint to what Tobin Siebers (2008) called ‘disability aesthetics’. This, he argues is a ‘critical concept’ (2008: 2) that ‘prizes physical and mental difference as a significant value in itself ’ and ‘does not embrace an aesthetic taste that defines harmony, bodily integrity and health as standards of beauty’ (2008: 71) Moreover, ‘disability aesthetics’ opposes the ‘aversion to disability required by traditional conceptions of human and social perfection’ (ibid.). It embraces what has classically been ‘disvalued’ in art and beauty. The ableist aesthetic is exemplified by da Vinci’s homage to Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80–25 bc) in the drawing of Vitruvian Man, a work in which the human male body ‘described’ – more precisely, is inscribed in – both circle and square – the basic shapes of the cosmos – and celebrates the geometrical proportion of human physicality. Two superimposed sets of outstretched arms and legs touch the sides of their cosmic containers. Vitruvian Man is simultaneously homage to proportion and an invalidating dismissal of deformity that ‘summons up a geometry of the universe’ (Vigarello 1990: 154) (see Figure 6.1). Indeed, the architectural doctrines of Vitruvius, mapped out in De Architectura, (written in the first century bc, but rediscovered in 1414) place man and nature alongside one another as mutually reinforcing symbols of harmony and form. For example, the columns of Greek architecture – the Doric, Ionian and Corinthian – are anthropomorphic, representing respectively man, matron and young girl. In the chapter in De Architectura entitled ‘On Temples and the Human Body’, Vitruvius describes the ‘canons of proportion’ that inspired the detail in da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian Man. Vitruvius (2006: 3.1: 2–3) wrote. For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the underside of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the underside of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising

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the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of Antiquity attained to great and endless renown.

FIGURE 6.1 Leonardo

da Vinci: Vitruvian Man.

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One might analyse this passage as an ableist manifesto as the ideal of e­ mbodiment in representation; where representation is simultaneously depicted as aspiration. The shape of humanity in its ‘proper form’ is a testament to symmetry; to nature perfectly conceived and, better still, executed in aesthetic practice to the same standards of harmony upon which truth and virtue stand; bold, upright and perfect. Whatever lacks symmetry and proportion struggles for aesthetic and moral validity. Impairment is a violation of axiological principles and the classical ‘revival of physiognomic thought and theory in literature and culture towards the end of the sixteenth century’ (Baumbach 2010: 585) plays an important role in the assignment of impropriety to bodies of difference, particularly at the intersection of disability and gender. ‘Ugliness’, as Baker (2010: 187) notes, ‘in Early Modern culture … is aligned with female matter’. At the conf luence of gender and impairment, one found the waters of beauty polluted. The humanist priority of faith in the nobility of ‘man’, at the heart of Florentine art, found expression in the relation between ordinary people as beauty recovered its powers of judgement. The great painters and sculptors of the Renaissance were well-equipped by ‘physiognomy’s ‘seminal part’ in ‘Early Modern literature and society’ (ibid.: 583) to match the quest for beauty with the reputation of physical symmetry for moral renown. Through the invention of the technique of perspective, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) mapped out in his treatise on painting Della Pittura the means by which artists were able to put life – in all its beauty – onto surfaces not apparently fit to capture its dimensions. Perspectivism provided the means to translate three-dimensional space onto a one-dimensional surface. It applied the science of optics to art in order to give the impression of three dimensions on canvas. Alberti recommended a geometrical trick that made the surface of the work of art the meeting point of two pyramids; one that disappeared into the vanishing point of the paper and one that returned to the eye of the artist. By this means, combined with the operationalisation of a grid and a ‘velo’ (thread-like lines that mapped the relationship between foreground and background) it was possible – with the addition of shading to ref lect the angle of light – to create depth and distance in painting. The objective was to elicit the harmony in the object of representation in order to extract and enhance its beauty. The painter could thus become the guardian of the idealised gaze, a pursuant of the perfection inscribed in nature. Perspectivism introduced a new visual age ( Jay 1994: 52–61) in which the non-disabled gaze celebrated the perfection of nature. Deformity, however, was, by contrast, reinvented as a ‘scandal’. Alberti’s measurements of harmonious representation embodied a deep cultural desire for physical perfection that was assimilated into and ref lected the aesthetic sensibilities of the age. The period inaugurated a notion of space that was not only deep and precise, but ordered and uniform. ‘Realistic’ representations of a world without defect were also instrumental in mapping the

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contours of ableism and in continuing the connection between aesthetics and the ­invalidation of disability: The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics – not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgements for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgements about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. (Siebers 2010: 26) In the work of Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599), regarded in some scholarly quarters as the founder of aesthetic surgery (Cock 2015), the repair of deformity as an art and science began to take shape. The work of moral judgement of value embodied in the Renaissance aesthetic manifested itself in new ways of trying to manage and ameliorate the scandal of impairment, as if to ease away from proximity and sight the reminders of wounded humanity that pockmarked the landscapes of beauty and perfection. The syphilis epidemics at the end of the fifteenth century provided a glut of physical defects – particularly the absence or malformation of the nose – that made the trade in body repair and cosmetic prosthetics a lucrative profession. Practitioners in the Renaissance used the term ‘beauty surgery’ in homage to classical physiognomy and Galen’s view that the face was the mirror of the soul. Though there was little evidence of practical success, the doctrines of ‘beauty surgery’ suggested that physical symmetry could be restored and a moral blight abrogated. Through the surgical correction of impairment, medical authority claimed to be able to unite beauty, health, truth and goodness, simultaneously restoring happiness to disfigured unfortunates (Gilman, 1999: 10–12). In the case of the ravages of syphilis, a missing nose was a hyper visible sign of ugly, contaminated, promiscuous embodiment. The ‘missing nose marks the person as sexually contagious. Horror, deep abjection, is the only response to seeing this face’ (Gilman 1999: 207). Such forms of physical deterioration, met with repulsion and rejection, not simply as a reaction to diseased and damaged f lesh, but also by metaphorical association with moral corruption. It offended the civilising aesthetic and many forces of order, including medicine, combined in the name of beauty and, where possible, its restoration. The Renaissance aesthetic was a forced marriage between f ledgling science and physiognomy; that ancient invalidating epistemology, so engrained in ‘Western consciousness’ that it had become a master template of moral evaluation. The new sciences, and the ancient pseudo-science, swept together through the arts and sciences. Tagliacozzi had many peers. Ambroise Pare (1510–1590), the great French battlefield surgeon and paediatrician, contributed to a growing aspiration towards the correction of impairment by technical solutions, recommending,

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for example, the ‘iron corset’ as a means to straighten ‘crooked’ bodies. The link between medicine and aesthetics that continues today in the age of genetics (Hughes 2000) was boosted in Renaissance ableism by the development of technologies of consumption designed to amend and enhance the body. In the sixteenth century, two types of corsets appeared: those whose stiffness derived from whalebone stays, acting mainly in feminine aesthetics and those whose stiffness was due to metal fastenings, for therapeutic purposes. Both show a new sensibility towards physical uprightness, but the former is the creation of a tailor and pertains mainly to fashion in dressing, whereas the latter is the instrument of a surgeon. (Vigarello 1990: 175) Renaissance aesthetic revivified the cult of physical beauty and its association with moral excellence, but added anthropophagic solutions to difference to its arsenal. In the Middle Ages, although physiognomy underpinned lay morality, ‘the frequency with which people could suffer from disfiguring illness and disease never provided a basis for the widespread modern obsession with outer appearance’ (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 39). Early Modern sentiments revived the classical connection between appearance and moral worth. Beauty swept back into fashion as the production of great works of art and great f lames of cultural and scientific genius lit up the future with new possibilities for human progress, including the repair of corrupted corporeality. The golden age of aesthetics had arrived. The cult of the body was one of its close companions. Christian suspicion about the body, its openness to temptation and appetite and the perfidious habits inculcated by them, may have been important to the reformers, but the Umanisti embraced the lovely contours of nature, in all its able glory, in all its mechanical and artistic potentialities. Impairment still aroused strong moral suspicion across the Christian religious divides, but the ‘betterment’ of bodies, in spaces; in representation; in form; in figure; in fashion; in elegance and in ‘grace’, was gaining ground in secular life as artisans, architects, painters, sculptors, scientists, mechanics, manufacturers, mathematicians and medical experts, brought skill and insight to bear on the human condition and its corporeal possibilities and aspirations. In this context, the beauty of the body as a basis for ableism was opaque in comparison to the Classical period when beauty and goodness were merged with a striking clarity that made impairment ‘automatically scandalous’. The secular intelligentsia brought the body out of the realm of scandal and onto a path of anthropophagic progress, just as their puritanical contemporaries were hardening their arteries over corrupt, grotesque, Catholic corporeality. The new corporeal aesthetic and its f leshy, secular positivity did not provide a breathing space for disabled people, nor have much impact on their lowly place in the hierarchy of propriety. Quite the opposite. The rehabilitated body was

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the classical normate ideal of human validity. The body conceived as a signifier of beauty and truth, created a climate in which physical anomaly, once again, became a marker of aesthetic dis-value, and hence an object of disgust and aversion for the sophisticated ruling classes – the courtly aristocracy, the humanists, and even the ever more confident and wealthy bourgeoisie – who patronised the arts and sponsored its production. The networks that bound property and propriety together were tense, but expanding. Where aesthetic sensibility and disability met, the tendency was, for the normate community, to recoil in horror. ‘Eugenics’, for example, wherever it surfaced embodied a triple promise, ‘to make humanity not just strong and smart but beautiful as well’ (Pernick 1997: 91). The psycho-emotional distance between the dominant classes who absorbed the aesthetic sentiments of the age and the disabled poor, expanded as the Renaissance culture of beauty spread out across Europe from its Florentine base. The eye for beauty was opened. The clear blue water between civility and incivility widened (Elias 2000). Limping gaits, awkward comportment, hunched backs, ‘idiotic’ expressions in their fumbling, falling, stuttering, staggering disunion were the antithesis of the symmetry and proportion that the keen Renaissance eye saw in the orderly contours of nature and its potential for reform and perfectibility. Representatives of imperfection were more easily invalidated, more likely to engender curiosity, fear and contempt: Aesthetics is the domain in which the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange and frightening. Whether the effect is beauty and pleasure, ugliness and pain, the sublime or terror, the emotional impact of one body on another is experienced as an assault on autonomy and a testimony to the power of otherness … when bodies produce feelings of pleasure or pain, they also invite judgements about whether they should be accepted or rejected in the human community. (Siebers 2010: 25) Nowhere were these sentiments more apparent that in the art of the northern Renaissance. With feudalism in decline, manufacture on the rise, the slave trade developing apace in the nation states of the Atlantic Rim, the gathering pace of money economy, the decline of the power of the Roman Catholic church and the rise of the religious reformers, property blossoming in the soil of fading religious order, a host of possibilities for financing new forms of artistic expression f lourished. The Low Countries situated at the heart of these epochal changes produced artists who painted in the rhythms and rhymes of their extraordinary times. Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) was one of the most imaginative and original painters of his (or any other) day. Inf luenced by the extraordinary religious passions and conf licts of the Reformation, Bosch was a bridge to the gothic grotesque of the Middle Ages and to the Manichean battles between good and evil that haunted its moral landscape. Monsters and demons, insanity and defect

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stalk his canvases. If painting of disabled figures in the late Medieval and Early Modern period often had designs on depicting moral despair, Bosch’s Cripples depicted impairment as botched character (Parkony 2003) (See Figure 6.2). Bosch was the master of demonic symbolism. His triptych, the Garden of Earthly Delight depicts sinners and their punishments as they are confined in the

FIGURE 6.2 Hieronymus

Bosch: Cripples.

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abominable spaces of eternal damnation. The nightmarish and phantasmagorical quality of his work is manifest in the ubiquitous appearance of strange, hybrid and unearthly characters, gruesome bodies and distorted minds. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a powerful meditation on good and evil. The Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve consorting with God on the left-hand panel is f lanked by a morally ambiguous cornucopia of earthly delights in the central panel. Hell is depicted in the panel to the right. From left to right, one reads moral decline from serene perfection, through earthly human propensities for sin, carnal lust and corruption, to figures who, fallen by temptation to damnation, have been cast down into the dark satanic pit, where monsters, human-animal hybrids and demonic figures cavort in a disgusting orgy of appetite, violence and destruction (See Figure 6.3). A pessimist and a moralist, Bosch’s paintings were homilies on human corruption. Demonic insanity and monstrosity figured large in his corpus, in for example paintings like the Cure of Folly and the Ship of Fools. In many of his productions, sin is in the centre of the canvas in cosy mutuality with its soul mate temptation, the long-armed lure of evil. In these sermons on human depravity, chaos, damnation, apocalypse, monstrosity and madness were the regular dancing partners. They signalled diabolical outcomes for those who became snared in the deadly traps of sinfulness. Bosch’s work mobilised disgust. It was the key emotional response to the grotesque bodies and deranged minds that haunted his paintings. Disgust, as William Miller (1997: 2) argues, ‘has a feel to it … of uneasiness, of panic of varying intensity that affords the awareness of being defiled’. Bosch – once described by Jung as the ‘master of the monstrous’ – was fully aware of this. He worked his easel to bring his audience into a world in which the depiction of repulsion and odiousness would encourage audiences to

FIGURE 6.3 Hieronymus

Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delight.

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soldier on against temptation. It was through the representation of abject b­ odies and their well-established relationship to evil that he achieved his stunning evocations of the horrors of damnation. In Bosch’s Reformation aesthetic, the trope of monstrosity shackles impairment – physical and mental difference – to sinfulness, evil and damnation. In the garden triptych, he exposes the stark moral contrast between divine beauty and the repulsive realm of the abject: a realm that is impure, unclean and disorderly … a murky, disavowed world that threatens propriety and identity. The abject finds expression in affronts to the ‘civilised’ human condition, including incest, cannibalism, human sacrifice, perversion, monstrosity, infection, disease, decay, death and the waste products of the body, all those substances and f luids that might pass from the inner to the outer body and that embody the capacity to disgust and repel. (Hughes 2009: 405) Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569) followed Bosch in his attraction to the grotesque and the abject, to folly and vice, lust, gluttony and pride as they manifest themselves in moral life. In his representation of the Parable of the Blind, entitled The Blind Leading the Blind, want of vision was represented as a universal condition. The blind lead the blind – as Matthew (15:14) would have it – into trouble so that ‘both shall fall into the ditch’. Blind people in Bruegel’s work are figurative and didactic. Sensory ‘defects’ suggest spiritual and moral blindness. For Bruegel ‘Blindness signified moral bankruptcy, prof ligacy and folly’ and he ‘demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of his blind’ figures to an audience steeped in the ‘contemporary discourse … about the untrustworthiness of beggars’ by ‘giving them several attributes that confirm their status as dishonest’ (Edwards 2013: 64). Deceitful impairment stumbled around in moral oblivion. Bruegel’s powerful work expresses ‘a host of socioeconomic and moral anxieties which associated disabilities of various kinds with moral duplicity, criminality and ultimate peril’ (ibid.: 63) (See Figure 6.4). Like painting, Renaissance literature was no stranger to representation and negative evaluation of disability (Mitchell and Snyder 2000: 95–117), most famously invoked in Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) play Richard the Third. The play was inf luential in setting the tone for and understanding the ‘character’ of disability in Renaissance England. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in his mini essay ‘Of Deformity’ was clearly on the same page as the Bard as he executed his chilling portrait of the ‘unseemly’, vengeful Richard of Gloucester. Bacon (2003: no page number) wrote: ‘Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt hath also a perpetual spur in him-self to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore, all deformed persons are extreme bold’. Bacon went on to argue that people with physical disabilities were prone to play on other people’s weaknesses. This character f law stemmed from a bitter

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FIGURE 6.4 Pieter

Bruegel: The Blind Leading the Blind.

desire to compensate for their palpable, natural inadequacies. As Paul Longmore (2003: 133) puts it, there was a long and strong ‘association between disability and malevolence. Deformity of body symbolises deformity of soul. Physical handicaps are made the emblems of evil’. Furthermore, people with defective bodies made good lackeys for men of power. Given that ‘they are envious towards all’, they are disposed to be ‘more obnoxious and officious towards one’ and because they are vengeful, they are likely to make good spies and sneaks (Bacon 2003: no page number). The moral correspondence between inner and outer self invoked classical physiognomy, the inseparability of ugliness and evil, defect and dastardliness. Shakespeare’s ‘crook backed’ king was made in the mould of this Renaissance stereotype, and he spoke simultaneously to prejudices formed in the past. Mitchell and Snyder (2000: 102) note that the portrait of Richard: [D]raws the same bold equations between external deformity and psychic immortality that are embodied in the Medieval grotesque; Renaissance audiences would readily understand Richard’s misshapen figure to invoke the demonic figure of vice from morality plays of the previous era. With the growth of Early Modern drama and arrival of the printing press, disability was propagated negatively, to a far wider audience and with greater textual granularity. It was constructed through a growing number of portraits, a cast of nefarious characters, profiles that mark it out in text after text as a culturally improper way of being. The character defects of impairment were

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painted in individual detail. Richard III was vengeful and vindictive. Hamlet and Coriolanus displayed autistic characteristics that led to ‘exclusion, ridicule, rejection, dehumanisation and … tragic death’ (Loftus and Ulerich 2015: 75). Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar regarded the ‘falling-sickness’ of the eponymous protagonist as a sign of the impending political seizure of Rome. The blinding of Gloucester in King Lear suggested that spooning-out the eyes of a traitor was an appropriate punishment for treason, if not for the servant who tried to stop the horror show, then at least for the worthies that perpetrated it. Montaigne (1553–1592) felt himself a monster; his humanity celebrated in his auto-­ethnographic admission of abjection. Gripped by his battle against evil, Luther saw ­changelings – at times empirically and individually – in the swaddling clothes of infants; evil bedded-down in the beds of babies who had been touched by hell on earth. Portraits of disability multiplied in characterful depictions of moral degeneracy, but portraits of secular normates multiplied at a far greater rate. Donatello (1386–1466) revived portrait sculpture. The portrait – in art and literature – hung on the principles of classical physiognomy revitalised in the Renaissance. It redrew – in rich, personal detail – the causal lines that tied physical beauty to inner goodness (Baumbach 2010). In secular portraiture, the individual was celebrated. Wealthy families discovered and popularised a granular way of representing themselves by commissioning famous artists to depict them for posterity. European nobles and rich burghers ennobled themselves in paint. The British aristocracy used portraits to proclaim ‘their wealth, power, dignity and/or martial prowess’: Hence the countless pictures of British nobles in the finery of the Order of the Garter, the looming equestrian figures, the allegorical canvasses that hint at heavenly glory, the beguiling images of beautiful wives and daughters dressed exquisitely in the fashion of the day, that adorn so many British stately homes. (Bryant 2017: 144) The unique in each person wealthy enough to be able to commission a portrait was depicted as a record of their singular normate humanity. Fictive normates appeared on stage, in for example, Shakespeare’s characters Orlando and Romeo (Hobgood and Houston Wood 2018: 33). They were sharply opposed to characters with impairments. Gaber (1988: 91) argues that images of ‘the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice’ were ubiquitous in Early Modern English literature. In the Duchess of Malfi, Webster (1580–1632) made twins of unsightly appearance and moral failure (Baker 2010). The most infamous of all disabled portraits in Early Modern literature was, as I have suggested, Shakespeare’s Richard III. He is worth f leshing out. Richard was ‘cheated of feature … deformed, unfinished, scarce half madeup’ (Richard III: 1.1. 19–21). He was a ‘lump of foul deformity’ (Henry VI: 1.2.57),

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as crooked in manner as in shape; withered, twisted, lame and halting. Richard was not only ‘the psychological victim of his deformity, he … becomes deformity’s theorist and manipulator, not only descanting upon it but projecting and displacing its characteristics onto others’ (Gaber 1988: 89). In the opening soliloquy of the play, Richard offered to the audience a stunning self-portrait in which he maps out the mutual nefariousness of limb and soul, bewailing his many stigmata in an outpouring of self-hatred: I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty, To strut before a wanton ambling nymph: I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time, Into this breathing world, scarce half made-up, And that so lamely and unfashionable, That dogs bark at me and I halt by them – Why I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun, And descant on mine own deformity. (Shakespeare 2015a: Act1 Scene 1) Richard gave voice to the ableist grammar of the day. Through him, Shakespeare held up to the Early Modern audience a mirror in which the non-disabled imaginary beheld the disabled other as bungled corporeality and crooked psyche. Richard was a metaphor for troubled polity. The vengeful cripple symbolised the deformity of the kingdom. His twisted f lesh is twisted history. As the play unfolds, we see Richard from the ‘inside out’ and the ‘outside in’; foul character oozing out from aberrant body like a wilful disease bent on the infectious corruption of the English state: ‘It is treachery … that Richard’s “deformed” body ultimately signifies’ (Baker and Murray 2018: 2). Caliban, in The Tempest, may not have descanted on his blackness, but he was also one of those Shakespearean ‘others’ whose ‘portrait’ was carved from the same stone of moral worthlessness as Richard: ‘Caliban is deformed, lecherous, evil smelling, idle, treacherous, naïve, drunken, rebellious, violent and devil worshipping’ (Greenblatt 2007: 35). We will return later in this chapter to the conf luence of ableist and racist representations in the Early Modern period. Portraits of disability as an invalid ‘condition’ penetrated the moral order of Early Modernity right down to its ragged edge in the ubiquitous, popular, nefarious figure of the rogue. He was the deformed antithesis of the gentlemen (Dionne and Mentz 2010: 1) who spoiled civilising dispositions at every opportunity. The most troubling rogue in Early Modern Christendom was the ‘false mendicant’ or ‘counterfeit beggar’ who used disguise and criminal deception

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to claim charity just as the system of charity was coming under moral pressure from the high priests of Reformation. The corporeally, cognitively and morally blighted underclass of rogues and vagabonds, subjects of many a popular pamphlet, fuelled the fear in the non-disabled imaginary, that impairment was a con-trick (Row-Heyveld 2018). The rogue was the scourge of civility, nefarious counterpoint to the wholesome changes in conduct, behaviour, bodily posture and deportment that spread through the social classes from their origin in the privileged spaces of the Medieval courts of Europe (Elias 2000). The moral economy of bodies was stylised by insistence on the moral character of bodily comportment, setting disability aside as a deficit of civility and propriety. Portraits of propriety mapped out in the popular Early Modern ‘guide books’ on manners and etiquette stand in stark opposition to the rogue pamphlets. The latter located disability in vice, while the former, in promoting ableist prescriptions for upright living, had deforming consequences: Erasmus advises boys that poor bodily habits may become ingrained and deform the natural posture of the body. Accordingly, those who through laziness have acquired the habit of hunching their bodies are ensuring for themselves a humpback which nature has not bestowed and those who have been used to holding their heads to one side grow fixed in that habit with the result that their efforts in later life are to no avail. (quoted in Vigarello 1990: 152–153) Neglect of prescriptions of posture and comportment was to court risk in the making of the moral failures that unfortunates experienced congenitally. As an adolescent, my parents warned me about the dire physical and moral consequences of a hunched posture. Time takes care to preserve many an ableist sentiment. Normate aesthetics are made into lasting moral lessons and powerful rebukes. Choices made in relation to posture and comportment become significant players in the habitus of good and bad in the Early Modern moral economy. Invalid conduct reduced to personal responsibility invoked the figure of deformity in an ableist behavioural pedagogy. Disability played a central role in articulating and representing how one should not conduct oneself. One further example should serve to illuminate this connection. Emblem books were popular across Europe in the sixteenth century. One of the most popular examples of this genre was produced by Italian iconographer Cesare Ripa (1560–1622). His Iconologia was an important source of moral information providing visual depictions of vice and virtue and narratives of propriety to the illiterate masses, presumably to help them stay on the ‘straight and narrow’. ‘Error’ in this form of didactic Renaissance art was depicted as a blindfolded man tapping his stick on the ground in order to make his crooked way in the world. Peter Goodrich (2014: xxiv) commenting on the message embedded in this portrait remarks that: ‘without sight we are lost, abandoned and condemned

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… blindness, the inability to see and the failure to look, signifies, incapacity, loss and radical limitation … Blindness and error were synonyms’. For Goodrich, the symbolic and normative power of the emblem tradition was judicial, not only insofar as it informed the law, but because of its import in the moral governance of everyday life. Interestingly, the blindfolded man re-appeared in Ripa’s Iconologia as a figure depicting ‘ furore’. In this guise, the figure represented madness and irrationality: ‘Furore’ depicts the worst kind of insanity; ‘aggressive force’; that is ‘exclusive, inexhaustible and self-generating’. Not only was the figure representative of ‘disrespect for decency and decorum’, but also exuded ‘an appearance of frightening brutishness’ (Kromm 2002: 28). There were positive images of melancholia in the Early Modern period, but these served to highlight, by contrast, the frenzy, vehemence and violence of madness as mania and furore. The emblem tradition excelled in moral didacticism, drawing on negative images of impairment – including blindness and insanity – to map the contours of acceptable conduct. It could, however, be more nuanced in its representation of normative conduct. For example, the blindfolded figure in Emblem Books was also used to portray the judge who refused to take bribes! We should note to conclude this section that ‘the aesthetic is not an alternative realm but a way of intensifying the single realm that we inhabit’ (Greenblatt 2010: 205). Aesthetic ableism intensifies the normate order, strengthening conviction about where good and bad abide; who is good to be good to and who is good to mistreat. Renaissance humanism provided secular aesthetic grounds for the misrecognition and invalidation of disability. Religious grounds for the negative moral representation of impairment, however, did not disappear. The intense religious conf licts of the Early Modern period invented new and highly charged emotional and social forms of disability invalidation that were intensified by the moral panics that arose around the ubiquitous presence of demons and witches. The world was saturated with bad magic. Disability – mired in the enduring Western myth of the pharmakos – could be mobilised to point the finger at the source of supernatural shenanigans.

Demons and witches Early Modern literature engaged extensively with demonology (Sapho 2012), announcing Satan’s unassailable residence in the midst of humankind. The devil’s presence grew as the sectarian divisions of the Reformation created diabolical enemies out of Christian differences of conviction. The female demonic, in the form of Lilith, appeared in Milton’s (1608–1674) Paradise Lost, as well as in the work of Marlow (1564–1593) and Shakespeare (Sapho 2012). Even Hephaestus, the ‘crippled’ Greek god who was cast down from Olympus, joined the cast in Paradise Lost, where his fictive biography is entwined with Lucifer’s fall from grace: Nor was his name unheard or unadorned In ancient Greece and how he fell

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From heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve… Dropped from the zenith, like a falling star On Lemnos, the Aegean isle. (Milton 2006: 1,738–47) In Reformation Europe, the devil – stalked by disability – popped up in all manner of disguises. The perception of people with disabilities as evil and sinister which has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition is reinforced through the Hephaestus myth. His trickiness becomes a sign of a malevolent nature; his limping gate becomes a symbol for the corruption of the soul. (Ebenstein 2006: 1) It would be wrong to think that Hephaestus would be out of place in the demonridden spaces of Reformation literature. Christian theology also plumped up the devil’s biography. He (sometimes she) was omnipresent and regularly in the company of disability. ‘In all grave illnesses’ wrote Martin Luther (1955–1986 Vol. 54: 53) ‘the devil is present as cause and author’. ‘Blows of the devil’ had rained down on those who were marked with sickness and impairment. Representations of the devil incited fear of disability: ‘From the twelfth century onwards scenes of the last judgement became popular in art, almost always including a representation of monstrous demons carrying off the souls of the dead into Hell’ (Russell 1972: 112). Satan was depicted as deformed and monstrous and in this malignant pseudohuman guise, he manipulated nature and employed its instruments to visit all manner of perfidious anomalies on a world that was only held back from annihilation – as Luther would have it – by faith in the saving power of God’s grace. The celestial battle between good and evil had a terrestrial counterpart which was marked by an obsession with moral purity (Monter 1987) and a predilection to moral panic, particularly about witches (Gaskill 2009). The f lames of panic were fanned by the pamphleteers of the infant media of the first information age (Lemmings and Walker 2009). There were a number of key forces and groups in the world contemporary with Luther that he considered demonic; the Muslim hordes of the Turk hammering violently at the fragile doors of European Christianity; the Jew, killer of Christ; the moribund Papacy and, last, but not least, the spectre of disability. These multiple threats to the integrity of Christianity were marked by the inf luence of the devil and his demonic tricks. They formed an imaginary network; an infernal cast of evil that burnt the blackened lands of fractured Christendom. Demonology and the perfidious practices of the witch occurred in the context of significant social change, religious wars and economic crisis; including the disintegration of the feudal system and the first experience for Europe – as traditional

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connections to the land began to unravel – of large-scale unemployment and social dislocation. The Proprium was in disarray. Relations of rank began to splinter (Beier 1985). The witch-hunts in England coincided with the enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade and the enactment of laws against the vagabonds. Witchhunts were an attempt to control surplus labour reproduction and control potential rebellion. (Skeggs 2014: no page number) Socio-economic crisis was exemplified by bouts of extraordinary behaviour in which the irrational took hold of collective life and tossed it around like a paper bag in a hurricane. Religious ecstasy and moral confusion were enhanced by the deep fractures in Christianity. The economy of affects was brittle: ‘That the passions were understood to be highly contagious supplies further evidence of the permeable boundaries of the Early Modern self ’ (Marshall 2002: 17). The witch hunts peaked in their intensity as demonic possession permeated the lands of Europe in the form of ‘dancing plagues’ (introduced in Chapter 5). They reached giddy heights in the sixteenth century. Insanity was collapsed into the narrative of demonic possession: ‘Not all accused of being witches and sorcerers were mentally sick but almost all mentally sick were considered witches or sorcerers or bewitched’ (Zilboorg 1941: 153). Collective ‘demonopathy’ (Bartholomew 1994): Was it ‘good’ or was it ‘evil’? Was it, at root, the curse or displeasure of God’s saintly emissaries, or was it the Devil’s work? How was it possible to distinguish one from the other? During these intense, extraordinary events, it was common for participants to experience ecstatic visions and hallucinations. Sinful nudity, obscenity and sexual promiscuity were involved. Lay epistemologies were stuck in a confusing vortex of incompatible explanations. Paradoxical religious interpretations of events such as these, fed an ‘ethics of anxiety’ in their bemused audiences (Goodey 2011: 259). Unshakable belief – the heart of the system of propriety was in crisis, its hermeneutic in tatters. Who was the author of events: Christ or antichrist? Were events immaculately conceived or the product of the coupling of a whore and a demon? The Early Modern moral economy was riven with fear: People were scarred of reprobate imitators and hypocrites; that you are not who you seem to be … not who you say you are … not the same person you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. This fear is focused on the creature who looks human but is not. (Goodey 2011: 259) New secular explanations for the signs of social crisis added to lay confusion. The religious explanation for demonic possession that had dominated understanding of the dancing mania in the Middle Ages was challenged. Paracelsus (1495–1541)

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who, having attended, for research purposes, the great dancing plague in Strasbourg in 1518 (Weller 2008), preferred an explanation based on the growing currency of scientific observation and medical symptomology rather than superstition: We will not, however, admit that the saints have power to inf lict diseases, and that these ought to be named after them, although many there are who in their theology laid great stress on this supposition, ascribing them rather to God than to nature, which is but idle talk. We dislike such nonsensical gossip as is not supported by symptoms, but only by faith, a thing which is not human, where on the gods themselves set no value. (Quoted in Hecker 2007: no page number) Science and religion began to clash, but religious reformers like Luther saw demonic forces through the tropos of impairment as the ‘monstrous’ forces of the day: Pope – in his view – the antichrist, Turk and Jew (for Luther’s anti-Semitism, see Marius 1999: 332–380 and Brecht 1999: 334–351). The discourse of evil was enacted through categories of alterity. Ironically, scientific secularism and the privatisation of religious belief championed by reformers contributed in equal measure to the growing ‘disenchantment with the world’ (Weber 1902/2002), though the scientific revolution and the process of desacralisation would be a long time in the making. However, during the reformation, theologians – Protestants and Catholics alike – piled-in against the Copernican revolution. Melanchthon, Calvin and the Roman Inquisition, attacked heliocentrism. Had not the Old Testament stated that Joshua at the Battle of Gibeon, commanded the sun – not the earth – to stand still so that his enemies could not attack his army at night? Opponents of geocentrism were censured. Galileo lost his freedom and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for the espousal of heliocentric heresy. With ‘truth’ and moral authority at stake, and error and false belief at large, accusations of witches and demons running riot on a daily basis were not uncommon. As meaning splintered, good and evil became almost impossible to disambiguate. The devil prospered from witchcraft. With the belief in witchcraft begins a new period in the evolution of mankind. The devil becomes greater and more respected than ever. Indeed, this is the classical period of his history and the prime of his life. (Carus 1900/2008: 282) Reformation mastered the art of persecution (Moore 1987) in the construction of the ‘possessed self ’ (Martin 2004), a category that was magnetically attracted to disabled people. They were frequently herded into danger by a divided normate culture bent on wiping out putative threats to goodness and truth. Kromm (2002: x) argues that; ‘visible madness was sometimes regarded as the root cause of demonic possession’. Impairment ‘aroused suspicion of being possessed or

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actively in league with Satan’ (Safford and Safford 1995: 20). The Renaissance fetish for the ‘upright’ body (Vigarello 1990) gave deformity an even more visibly accentuated moral locus as an embodied disposition in which a witch or a demon was likely to be found and to prosper. In the context, where the ‘possessed self ’ was part of the landscape of everyday social relations, the persecution of bodily, sensory and cognitive difference was always an option. There may have been a hiding place for disabled individuals in the midst of collective paroxysm, but beliefs about epilepsy, folly and insanity were bridges across which the ‘­possessed self ’ could be readily united with physical and intellectual difference. In the normate imaginary, disability became synonymous with the ‘possessed’ self. Demons, and especially witches, came into prominence in the moral landscape of the Early Modern period. The promulgation of laws against belief in witches in the early Middle Ages was unambiguous. For example, the Councils of Paderborn (785) and Frankfurt (794) made it clear that, since witches were a figment of the imagination, those who persecuted them would be punished. Augustine set the tone. He argued that witches were impotent, since only God possessed divine power. The Canon Episcopi, a church law of 906 also proscribed belief in witches. In the early Medieval church, magic and divination were associated with paganism and, therefore, belief in witches constituted a heretical stance. In the late Middle Ages, paganism was no longer a threat. However, as plague ravaged the peoples of Europe, the threat of the arts of divination and devil worship became constituted theologically as a threat to Christian belief. The devil began to dominate as the arch representative of sin and evil, and his ‘most common appearance came to be a deformed but recognisably human shape for in these distortions of the human body men could see, as in a mirror, the distortions that sin worked on the soul’ (Russell 1972: 112). The Catholic establishment became increasingly worried by the emergence of witches and heretics, by the growth in the number of worshippers of Satan and responded by establishing ‘inquisitors’ or judges in matters of faith at the Council of Tours in 1163. At the Council of Toulouse in 1229, ‘inquisition’ became an established institution of the church. The Catholic Church promoted inquisition as a mechanism and process for ridding society of many forms of foul play, including heresy and sorcery. As apocalyptic sensibilities spread with the devastating blows that the Black Death delivered to communities across the continent, Pope John XXII (1234–1334) sanctioned the prosecution of witches. Pope Gregory IX (c. 1145–1241) commissioned the Dominican and Franciscan orders to deal with heresy, a move that was buttressed by Innocent IV’s (1195–1254) Papal Bull – Ad Extirpanda – in 1252 that permitted the torture of heretics. Inquisition referred to the invocation of canon law in order to convict and punish heresy. Prosecution under inquisition was used not only to control heretical theology and those who adhered to it, but to punish sorcery, witchcraft, blasphemy, sodomy or those who strayed too close to Judaism, or Jewish people whose conversion to Christianity was considered insincere.

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Medieval witch hunts were tame, in comparison to events that unfolded in the Early Modern period when the Reformation brought a sustained and profound challenge to the power of the Catholic Church; a challenge unprecedented since its establishment as the official church of Rome. The witch and demonology became powerful and virulent forces in the Early Modern period (Clark 1997). The numbers accused and tried for being witches are disputed. So too, is the proportion of trials that ended in execution. The figure of 9 million trials bandied about in the 1970s is regarded as wildly inaccurate. Levack’s (2006) suggestion of a figure of 110,000 trials with about 60,000 ending in execution is probably much nearer the mark. Between 1480 and 1750, it is reasonably clear that in Europe, many tens of thousands of people were tried and executed as witches. It was capital punishment on a grand scale. The vast majority, perhaps upwards of 75 percent of the accused, were women and the legal apparatus that carried out the persecutions was patriarchal to the core: ‘Judges, ministers, priests, constables, jailers, judges, doctors, prickers, torturers, jurors and executioners’ were all men (Barstow 1994: 142). The numbers of disabled people who were accused is not known. What we do know is that misogyny and ableism played important roles in the trials and the slaughter of the ‘possessed’. The persecution and elimination of women ‘who were different’ was a regular occurrence in communities across Europe, and the Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic churches, supported by secular authorities, legitimised the persecutions. Dominicans – the ‘sleuth hounds of the lord’ – were given responsibility by the Catholic church, for matters inquisitorial (Carus 1900/2008: 308–331) – though the infamous Spanish Inquisition was conducted by secular authority with the blessing of the Papacy. The eristic violence of the late Medieval period that targeted heretical sects was carried over into the reformation: [D]eliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed through established governmental, judicial and social institutions against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion, or way of life and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying the attacks. (Moore 1987: 5) The Cathar belief in a supernatural battle between god and the devil was denounced by Pope Innocent III (1161–1216) in 1208 as heretical. The Catholic church and ‘right-thinking’ secular powers went to war with the Cathars; in a battle of good against evil, a distinction ironically, central to Cathar thinking. This led, through the persecution that followed, to a heightened repositioning of the satanic and the demonic in Catholic belief. Cathars were represented in Catholic orthodoxy as devil-worshippers, a charge that led frequently to accusations of sodomy (Cohn 2011); a trenchant, practical, sexualised example of their ‘deformed’ theology.

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The witch was redefined by the theological wars of the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity from a wrongly maligned innocent to an abominable agent of Satan, an earthy foe of goodness in the service of the devil. The church of God discovered demonology and a congregation of the devil. The Cathars made the grave error of introducing a second supernatural force into Christian monotheism. However, in its struggle against dualism, the profile of the devil within orthodox Catholicism was mightily inf lated. Russell (1972: 100) argues that the practice of witch hunting that exploded in the Early Modern period was founded on the campaigns against ‘demonology and Catharist Dualism’. The theology of the high Middle Ages was also inf luential in the construction and persecution of the ‘possessed self ’. Thomas Aquinas had argued that the world was drenched in evil, including demons that appropriated the sperm of men and sowed their evil seed far and wide amongst the female population. Aquinas developed the theory that ‘evil demons can have intercourse with human beings. Satan … serves first as succubus (or female devil) to men and then as incubus (or male devil) to women’. According to St Thomas, ‘Children begotten in this way ought to be regarded as the children of men whom Satan served as succubus’ (Carus 1900/2008: 289). Demons and witches get into the world because the devil interferes with our genitals. The possibilities for moral disgust and the politics of persecution were raised many-fold by the pulsating intercourse of sex and the devil. The perception of the growing and pervasive nature of demonic possession, particularly in sixteenth century Germany, was closely related to the rise of the witch hunts which were a response by orthodox religious and secular authority to the moral and spiritual collapse that demonic possession seemed to represent (Midelfort 1999: 70). The demons had to be exorcised. The deformity they represented had to be straightened out. The Reformation, by multiplying the guardians of truth, produced a confusing concert of accusations of demonic conduct. Possession and its abrogation became a central source of literary and cultural fascination (Kallendorf 2003). Exorcism was promoted as the solution to the deep malaise of the moral economy that was manifest in the ‘possessed self ’. Exorcism in the Catholic tradition was ritualised. It embodied a public demonstration of the victory of God in his struggle with Satan and his demonic hordes. The sacred ritual, mediated by an anointed ‘officer’ of His church, was witness to the presence of God’s power. Exorcism acted as a mirror of the struggle between good and evil that went on in every individual Christian soul (Van Dijkhuizen 2007); a struggle that was evident, in the causal canon of the day, in explanations of madness. It was a form of cleansing violence used to purge defective minds and bodies of the sinfulness to which they had succumbed. Protestants struggled with the idea and practice of exorcism. It was a papist practice, but it had scriptural authority and its lessons for individuals in their personal quests for spiritual purity were compelling. Puritans practised it, changing the name from exorcism to ‘dispossession’. They regarded it as an important weapon in the war against witchcraft, demonology and sin;

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all the corruptions of the f lesh for which impairment was not only a visible sign, but written into scripture as an i­ndelible narrative of God’s power over the errors of creation. Protestant religious exegesis, including the literal appropriation of the Bible, made ‘dispossession’ a necessary and pervasive practice of decontamination, not only in Europe, but in the New World. Some witch panics, including the famous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts, used execution to ‘dispossess’ the aff licted and drive out the demons. One cannot, argues Canizares-Esguerra (2006: 18), separate colonisation from the ‘satanization of the American continent’. Jesus drove out many demons, but never at the expense of the life of the possessed. His task was to heal the aff licted, expunge impairment from bodies that were gripped by its debilitating evil. The normate logic of his mission was appreciated on both sides of the reformation divide. We read in the Bible the story of Jesus driving out madness and sending demons of insanity into a herd of pigs that throw themselves off a cliff edge and drown in the waters below. The misfortune for another species is collateral damage. The norm of exorcism in the Bible is irenic rehabilitation, a happy ending: Jesus rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou, deaf and dumb spirit, I charge thee, come out of him and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried and rent him sore and came out of him; and he was as one dead, and insomuch as many said he is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up; and he arose. (Mark: 9: 25–27) Yet for many accused of witchcraft, the outcome was capital punishment. The Old Testament, notably Exodus and Leviticus provided scriptural authority: ‘A man also a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall be put to death; they shall stone them with stone; their blood shall be upon them’ (Leviticus 20: 27). In the cataclysm of Reformation, the eristic tradition was paramount and holy violence invoked. The Levitican consequence of being in league with the devil was re-iterated in Exodus (22. 18), ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was a clarion call that rang ominously across the beleaguered continent (Levack 2006). The Early Modern ‘gendercide’ was ‘prepared’ in 1484. Concerned by evidence of the devil’s work in contemporary events in the heartlands of Europe, Pope Innocent VIII (1432–1492) commissioned a report on the activities of witchcraft. As a consequence, two Dominican friars, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Krammer produced the Hammer of the Witches or Malleus Maleficarum. It proposed that it was the duty of Christians to seek out and destroy the evil of witchcraft. The Malleus Maleficarum was a handbook for the development of gruesome instruments of torture and execution. The tome justified death by burning, drowning and hanging of untold numbers of people. Its ‘baleful inf luence’ lasted for ‘over 3 centuries’ (Carus 1900/2008: 323).

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Witch hunts were used by both Catholic and Protestant churches, in league with their affiliate princes and nobles, to restore authority and to prosecute nonconformity and rebellion (Russell 1972). The Scottish establishment, for example, declared that rebellion was the mother of witchcraft and efforts to suppress it were signs of property and propriety trying to reassert itself and bring order to the chaos that vied for supremacy in the Early Modern period. The Scottish persecution of witches during the reign of James VI (1566–1625) inspired Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Misfortune, disease and social upheaval were blamed on witchcraft, on the devil’s agents running wild, subverting piety and moral order with fits of frenzied orgy. Impairment, oddness, deformity, insanity, old age and ugliness – a body or mind visibly scarred or blighted in any way – could be read as a sign of witchcraft; a mark of the hand of the demon. Folk healers, wise women, midwives and ‘crones’ were the ubiquitous targets for the witch hunters, for whom the brew of femininity, old age and disability became the most palpable, visible signs of creatures in the snare of Satan. The accused women, were, as a rule, as one commentator has noted ‘old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, full of wrinkles … lean and deformed showing melancholy in their faces’ (quoted in Quarmby 2011: 30). Impairment was used as a blueprint in the identification of the possessed self. Physical and intellectual difference provided key credentials in identifying demonic malignancy and in satisfying the lust for scapegoats in communities that had been plunged into a state of supernatural catharsis. For Puritans, ‘the body did the soul’s bidding; a weak body, unable to withstand the devil’s attacks or seductions, rendered the soul vulnerable to Satan’s extortion’. The weak body ‘manifested the soul’s acceptance of the diabolical covenant’ (Reis 1995: 15). Frail, submissive bodies were exposed to diabolical inf luences: ‘Puritans believed that Satan attacked the soul by assaulting the body. Because … women’s bodies were weaker, the devil could reach women’s souls’. It was easier to ‘breach those “weaker vessels” with greater frequency’ (Reis 1997: 93). Ideas such as these put disabled women in Puritan dissenter communities at risk from pious accuser’s intent on the work of community hygiene. On the Catholic side of the great persecution, the Malleus Maleficarum, was replete with both misogynistic and ableist terminology and bold alignments between ‘defect’ and femininity, including references to women as intellectually under developed much like children (1478/1971: 117). In The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous regiment of Women written by the Protestant Reformer John Knox (1513–1572) in 1558, the objects of his aim, Europe’s female rulers, were castigated in no uncertain terms by representation of their dominion in terms of invective in the register of impairment. Knox reprised Aristotle’s classical trick of using disability to undermine the authority and integrity of women; of using impairment to frame misogyny. How can women – sick, weak, blind, foolish, insane – rule over men? Man, I say, in many other cases blind, doth in this behalfe see verie clearlie. For the causes be so manifest, that they cannot be hid. For who can denie

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but it repugneth to nature, that the blind shal be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see? That the weake, the sicke, and impotent persones shall norishe and kepe the hole and strong, and finallie, that the foolishe, madde and phrenetike shal gouerne the discrete, and giue counsel to such as be sober of mind? And such be all women, compared unto man in bearing of authoritie. For their sight in ciuile regiment, is but blindnes: their strength, weaknes: their counsel, foolishenes: and judgement, phrenesie, if it be rightlie considered. (Knox 1558/2003: no page number) Ableist scripts were transferable. They appealed to normate sensibilities and in the Early Modern period, were drawn from the toolboxes of God and nature where they were in plentiful supply. The great spiritual divisions of Early Modernity turned calumniation into an art form and physical, intellectual and sensory difference were primary sources of scripts of vilification. Female sovereigns were not publicly accused of witchcraft – though Knox refers to many of the signs associated with it. This gross impropriety was reserved for women of much lower status who acquired fearsome powers by virtue of their covenants with the devil. The witch was thought to be a cause of impairment and disease. The Malleus Maleficarum made it clear that some ‘defects’ were caused by nature. Witchcraft was the source of some impairment: Although greater difficulty may be felt in believing that witches are able to cause leprosy or epilepsy, since these diseases generally arise from some long-standing predisposition to defect, none the less it has sometimes been found that even these have been caused by witchcraft. (Kramer and Sprenger 1487/1971: 297) A well-known witch hunter – no doubt following the iconic manual of his profession – declared that witches ‘aff lict people with all kinds of ills of the stomach and the head and the feet, with colic, paralysis, apoplexy, leprosy, epilepsy, dropsy, strangury, etc. And they do so easily with the help of Satan’ (Andreski 1989: 92). The hunt for witches mapped out the moral landscape, drew the lines between right and wrong, good and evil and provided the vitriolic and bloody apparatus of social control to govern and punish people who were regarded as marginal or different: It constituted women and disabled people as morally inferior and disposable, filled the coffers of the churches, helped to prosecute heresy and dissent, reinforced the power of the state and the sway of religion, identified scapegoats for misfortune and disaster and was a key weapon in the battle against Satan’s spawn. As Foucault (1977) argued, punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity was brutal, violent and public. It was a visceral display of power. The persecution of witches had all these hallmarks. The narratives that put disability, femininity and the demonic together in overlapping representations, lit the fire of normate righteousness and justified the torturous practices of

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persecution. Pain, humiliation and death for tens of thousands of people – many women ‘marked’ by impairment – was carried out zealously and ‘validly’ in the name of God. The reformers linked the devil, witchcraft and disability in an unholy triumvirate with no less zeal than their papist counterparts. For Luther, witches are emissaries of the devil, doing his work, particularly, the ‘old hags’ who target children with the ‘evil eye’ (1955–1986: Vol. 3: 245) and pernicious plans of despoilment, illness and deformity. The devil’s assistants are invariably women and he acts through them, particularly, in the corruption of youth. Through his witches, therefore, he is able to do harm to children, to give them heart trouble, to blind them, to steal them, or even to remove a child completely and put himself in the cradle in place of the stolen child. I have heard that in Saxony, there is such a boy. He was suckled by five women and still could not be satisfied. There are many similar instances. The idea of disability as a demonic counterfeit is embodied in Luther’s conception of the changeling. So too is his endorsement of the elimination of the counterfeit humans who take their place; though there seems to be some dispute about the method of disposal recommended by the German cleric. Both suffocation and drowning are mentioned in the literature. In twentieth century Germany, a similar technical problem arose from the modern form of anthropoemic disposal. In this case, the choice was between gas chamber and incineration. Coleridge (1993: 45–46) suggests that this parallel between the Reformation and twentieth century Nazism is a reasonable one to make. The violent anthropoemic disposal of disabled people rests on the dehumanisation of impairment. The narrative of the changeling is a clear example of a powerful process of ontological invalidation that strips the humanity from those charged with demonic status by ecclesiastical, or even self-styled lay, authority. Witchcraft studies in the 1970s developed through the examination of judicial documentation. Evidence supported the view that the trials of the unfortunates caught in the persecutions were best understood in terms of a sort of sociology of neighbourly accusations. These data suggested that everyday animosities and local jealousies were at the heart of the demonic conf licts that took place in communities. Levack (2006) argues that neighbourly disputes and accusations from below were by the far the most important source of witch trials. Charity and its refusal were central motifs and the least powerful were usually the losers (MacFarlane 1970: 158–170). Communities could demonstrate their religious orthodoxy and piety through scapegoating disabled people that were readily recognised as visible proxies for demons and witches. Simultaneously, the witch hunts were a means of regulating and controlling popular culture, particularly its traditions of festivity, healing, dancing and song; hitherto, an ungovernable space of rebellious activity that authorities, religious and secular, began to control by the use of persecution, torture and murder. This was another sphere in which

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the grotesque, uncivilised bodies could be disciplined and p­ unished. Property and propriety – employing local struggles that had developed in the climate of anxiety and resentment fostered by wider religious wars and the dislocations of enclosure, exploited the spectre of the diabolic and demonic as it festered ominously in the quotidian spaces of the poor. The ‘witches’ Sabbath’ was an invention of Inquisition and dispossession. Witchcraft – unlike Cathar belief – was never organised (Ginsburg 2011). State authority, however, extended its reach, on the back of the lie. In the Middle Ages, disabled people had been invalidated and dis-graced by repertoires of sin, and narratives of saintly celebrity and normate charity that represented them as instruments of moral disorder and its remediation in the good works of good people. Saints and charity were targets of reforming faith. The Reformation instituted ‘a critique of the miraculous’ (De Colle 2011: 240) and privileged faith over charity. Luther and Calvin elevated faith above miraculous revelation arguing that the miracles of the Old and New Testaments were sufficient evidence of God to sustain belief in Him. The reformers argued that the miraculous, superstitious, Catholic Middle Ages were over. As good deeds and saintly miracles were uncoupled from propriety during the reformation, the demon became the central associate of impairment. Witch hunts had a magnetic propensity to draw disability into their murderous scope and to legitimate eristic violence against disabled women. The other great figure of moral darkness that stalked the Early Modern period, the monster, was more a product of fear and fascination with defective and deformed bodies than terror based on the ubiquitous, neighbourly presence of the ‘possessed self ’. The demon and the monster did, however, in the great struggles of the Reformation meet and mesh in significant theological and practical conf luences. In the next section, I will discuss the tropos of monstrosity in the Reformation and suggest that its appeal to impairment reached its zenith in a conf luence with the demonic that produced the figure of the changeling. By the close of the Early Modern period, monstrosity had become a key metaphor for social and political instability.

Monsters As the discourse of demonology swept through the fractured moral landscape of Early Modernity, it did not do so at the expense of the narrative of monstrosity. This classical trope for disability appealed to both scientific and superstitious narratives and remained a powerful script in the contemporary unfolding of disability invalidation. Ambroise Pare, surgeon and philosopher combined religious and ‘scientific’ explanations for teras and the ‘crooked’ course of nature. Bodily impairments were the data of his world view: Monsters are things that appear outside the course of nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune) such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members

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over and above the ordinary. Marvels are things which happen that are completely against nature as when a woman gives birth to a serpent or dog or some other thing that is totally against nature. Maimed persons include the blind, the one eyed, the hump-backed, those who limp, or having six digits on the hand or the feet, or having less than five, or having them fused together; or having arms too short, or the nose too shrunken, as do the very f lat nosed; or those who have thick inverted lips or a closure of the genitals, in girls, because of the hymen; or because of more than natural amount of f lesh, or because they are hermaphrodites; or those having spots or warts or wens, or any other thing that is against nature. (Pare 1573/1982: 3) Augustine set the precedent for the Christian fascination with monstrosity in the early Middle Ages. The scholastic intelligentsia had engaged with it thereafter, in theological and philosophical debate. The normate obsession continued. It expanded exponentially in popular Early Modern print culture through narratives of teras in broadsheets and pamphlets. These popular media published highly sensationalised ‘real life’ accounts of ‘gross’ congenital deformity: Stories of bewildering and horrific births were a popular form of news in England and Wales over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They combined sensational detail of malformed bodies and horrified and distressed families with dire warnings of the need for all to repent. (Stagg 2006: 21) Print media was turned to ‘political’ ends, as religious enemies used them against one another in tit-for-tat propaganda (Knoppers and Landes 2004: 13). ‘In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, monstrous births were repeatedly associated with the papacy and Catholicism’ (Marshall 2006: 269). The Catholic establishment was equally ungracious in their representation of reformers. It used monstrosity as a rhetorical device to calumniate the convictions that opposed its hegemony. Luther was portrayed as a beast with seven heads. In the battle between parliament and monarchy during the English Civil War (1642–1651), both sides resorted to the trope of the ‘headless’ monster to register their political legitimacy (Cressy 2004). Radical Protestant sects like the Anabaptist attracted accusations of monstrosity from a variety of religious and secular authorities. Luther deplored their doctrine. He described it as blasphemous and heretical and suggested that the monsters who produced it should be executed (Oyer 2012: 135). Catholic and Protestant churches alike accepted Augustine’s advice about monsters. If they were descended from Adam, they had souls and should be baptised (Bates 2005b: 144). Where narratives of monstrosity and demonology met, they raised vexed questions about the boundaries of humanity – to which I will return at the end of this section.

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The burgeoning contemporary literature on Early Modern monstrosity (Bates 2005a; 2005b; Bildhauer and Mills 2003; Cohen 2006; Daston and Park 2001; Fissel 2004; Huet 1993; Hole 2000; Knoppers and Landes 2004; Park and Daston 1981; Stagg 2006; Todd 1995; Walsham 2001) is a ref lection on the insatiable curiosity – both scientific and superstitious – of the Early Moderns with the relationship between moral crisis and physical difference and with their speculations as to the portents that mediated these two phenomena. The Early Moderns placed monstrosity and unusual corporeality in a range of social and moral contexts that provided clarifications of normate order (Turner and Stagg 2006). For example, the Early Modern period established an elective affinity between deformity and sexual perversion that was played out in broadsheets and pamphlets. The ‘crookedness’ of a visible impairment or an aesthetically distorted countenance, could be explained as a product of sexually depraved practices, such as incest (Hole 2000). ‘Monstrosity focused on natality and reproduction … the link between corruption in seed or sinfulness in the act of coupling or maternal depravities … might be articulated as causes’ (Fissel 2004: 4). The fascination with congenital impairment manifest in popular art and literature was shaped by the depravity of sexual desire and its stark contrast with the pious asceticism promoted by religious nonconformity. On the other hand, religious non-conformity was accused by the Catholic establishment of sexual acts that produced monstrous births: ‘Associations of monstrous births with religion declared heretical, the power of the imagination’ to associate it with ‘lust or libertinism … were extremely powerful and prevalent in Renaissance and sixteenth century Europe’ (Marshall 2006: 270). Sex added spice to the sensationalism of the media, but the ideas of wonderment and prodigy continued to play an important part in the discourse of difference, both in its malignant and benign forms. Monster scholars in the Middle Ages, like Saint Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) had taken their lead from Avicenna (980–1037) a thinker from Baghdad who was, in turn, inf luenced by Aristotle and Pliny the Elder, as well as by Galen’s writings on embryology. The fascination with monstrosity in the late Middle Ages/Early Modern period culminated in the Prodigy Book of the sixteenth century and its seventeenth century sequel of the same name. Tales of monstrous prodigies were popular and as literacy increased across Europe, readership for this kind of material expanded. Monsters were also an important site of epistemological change. The prodigy – traditionally a wondrous ‘creature’ of the supernatural imaginary – became a touchstone for scientific and medical debate during the Renaissance (Daston and Park 2001). Debate about mythical monstrosity began to be replaced by bodies that were anatomically real. Though ‘the “Early Modern monstrous”’ called ‘attention to the rational and the scientific’, it also undermined ‘confidence in wholly rational explanations’ (Knopper and Landes 2004: 6), because it carried the momentous burden of ‘political, social, sexual’ and ‘religious’ association with ‘aberration or transgression’ (ibid.: 13) during a period of violent disorder and rapid social change including political centralisation and revolution.

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Global Western imperialism added to the epistemological burdens of ­monstrosity. As I will argue in the next section, it fuelled conceptions of monstrous ethnicities, and while it may have had the sobering impact of offering clearer empirical evidence that some of the more exotic monsters were mythical, it did not stop religious zealots from having ‘serious’ disputes over the hermeneutics of some bizarre creatures. Arnaud Sorbin, Bishop of Nevers (1532–1606) in his Tractacus de Monstris engaged in debate with Luther over the meaning of the ‘monk-calf ’, a (no doubt mythical) bovine-human hybrid evangelist that stalked the Reformation (or at least its imagination) in the latter part of the sixteenth century. In Sorbin’s (Catholic) view, the ‘monk-calf ’ was a sign of the sins of the evangelists and reformers, whilst for Luther, it was an embodied portent of the decline of the corrupt Church of Rome. Both theological antagonists use the monster politically to carve out the contours of their respective cases. Crushed in the middle of this worthy debate is the morally demeaned monstrous other – fictive, symbolic, but also real in its consequences for those who lived with ‘deformity’, ‘defect’ and impairment. They too were considered portents of evil; symbols of a world crashing into chaos, sin, vice, despair and decadence: The majority of ballads and pamphlets used monsters as emblems of social disorder and danger. They … offered sweeping denunciations of collective sinfulness though a few targeted more specific categories of transgression such as vanity or pride … or heretical and sectarian religious practices. (Stagg 2006: 26) The monster was, therefore, a symbol of the collapse of moral order and a tool in an epic propaganda war. If the moral economy was in a state of f lux, unhinged from its stable axis by the great religious struggles of the Reformation, then anyone considered defective by virtue (sic) of bodily or intellectual difference was a source of moral suspicion and potentially a victim of ‘holy violence’ (Gaddis 2005). Religious identity – or at least the sectarianism that followed from religious differences – made a monster of almost everyone, but people with visible impairments were marked with legible signs of monstrosity and responded to in a manner derived from popular lay interpretations of corporeal ‘defects’ and the terrible portents associated with them. The body disturbed by disease or disability was, in Luther’s view, a sign simultaneously of God’s punishment and the Devil’s work; a collusion of ‘good’ and evil. When plague arrived in his native Wittenberg in 1527, Luther promulgated the view that this foul disease was ‘God’s decree … his punishment to which we must patiently submit’. Moreover, it was ‘spread among the people by evil spirits who poison the air or exhale a pestilential breath’ (1968: 127). Park and Daston (1981: 26–28) point out that along with fellow reformer Melanchthon, Luther likened Catholic ecclesiastics, including the Pope, to monsters and beasts. Calvin attacked Nicodemites, a term of abuse for men of

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little faith, who were, at worst, part of the villainous band of anti-Christian ­rationalists that inf lamed monstrous heresy by the godless positions that they espoused. The rationalists had no God or were suspicious of his Majesty and as such were decried as ‘monsters’ by both evangelists and Catholics alike (Febvre 1982: 131). They were subjected to a double dose of invective for their monstrous vacillations. Monstrous impropriety was used ubiquitously as a didactic tool in religious propaganda against whosoever might disagree with the divinely revealed truth that almost every sect claimed as their prerogative. In the vicious battles over truth, monstrosity was a revelation of error and false conviction. Disabled people fell foul of the association of monstrosity with evil and moral corruption that Catholic and Protestant churches hurled at one another during their bloody and vitriolic sectarian wars. The narrative of monstrosity was used to reveal the genius of dissenting evil behind the carapace of truth that corrupted every expression of faith save, of course, one’s own. Every religious debate was a battle for propriety. In these debates, monsters were figurative cultural objects used prescriptively to identify moral truth and falsity. Baptism for monsters, however, was a debate that engendered widespread unanimity amongst magisterial reformers and Roman Catholics. Luther as an Augustinian accepted the theological status quo that monsters should be baptised, but that this should only be so if their humanity could be demonstrated. Luther did not dispute this with the ‘filthy and godless monsters of greed and superstition’ who argued that, ‘with regard to monsters, they should certainly be baptised’. However, ‘if the monster itself is not considered human, it ought not to be baptised, or if there is doubt, baptised under the condition, “if thou art a man, I baptise thee’” (Berns 2015: 177). Theologians were vexed by what constituted a human and regarded monstrosity and impairment as a boundary to which they could appeal to try to determine whether a creature was born with or without a soul. The devil’s spawn should not receive Baptism into Christ’s church since they were, in Luther’s view, without soul and, therefore, not descended from Adam (LW 54: 44–55). Furthermore, the monstrous form may not be a lesser species of ‘animal’, but perhaps, a f leshy shell infiltrated by a demonic presence. During the Reformation, intellectually and cognitively disabled children were sometimes – if interpreted through the supernatural hermeneutic of folklore – regarded as changelings: ‘for a child as young as nine, differentness’, if determined by this category, ‘could result in trial and execution’ (Safford and Safford 1995: 20). Changelings played a role in the construction of disability by the Protestant reformers. In Luther’s view, changelings were monstrous manifestations of the work of the devil. He noted that in the case of changelings, ‘the devil sits … where the soul should have been’ (quoted in Garland 2010: 16). The ‘changeling’ was a figure deeply embedded in European folk culture. Though ‘it’ varied dramatically in its representation in the different regions of the continent, the changeling was a fairy imposter that replaced a child with its malicious presence. Impairment was regarded as a sign of the presence of the imposter. Luther believed that a changeling was a child of the devil. It presented

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a difficult case, since it was not possible to tell, by appearance alone, whether the child was a monstrous prodigy, a soulless beast or the result of a deft and devious satanic exchange. In Luther’s view, the child/devil might become recognisable, either by sucking their mothers dry or through perfidious, beastly behaviour. Both signs of devilish monstrosity might appear too late to deny baptism (for this would have been only right for an inhuman child fathered by the prince of darkness). Luther argued that the ‘strange boy of Dessau’; a twelve year old that he is said to have encountered, was a changeling. He recommended that his life should be terminated (19551986: Vol. 54: 397). Luther offered up to posterity a stunning theological representation of a devilish monster in the form of a disabled child. The boy appeared to be limited in his abilities to basic animal functions. The child was a base, f leshy, asocial creature and, Luther concluded, an improper receptacle for a soul. He saw in the demeanour and comportment of the boy the work of the devil who had acted with characteristic malice and evil by putting ‘himself into the cradle in place of the stolen child’ (Miles 2001: 30–31). Luther suggests (1955–1986: Vol. 54: 397) that the strange boy from Dessau should be suffocated for he was, in essence, f lesh without soul. The devil had substituted himself for what would have been the soul of the boy. There was, in his view, nothing in this child to validate his humanity. His elimination was morally acceptable. The deeply rooted historical tradition of infanticide for disabled children was invoked by the reformer as the means to resolve the moral dilemma represented by the presence of the changeling: This was not an unusual position to take: In many cases, the alleged monstrosity of deformed infants led to questioning whether such infants had souls, and to the refusal of baptism. In some cases, … babies born with physical deformities were killed, either by the use of force or by withholding nourishment and in some instances such actions were justified by the church. (Marshall 2006: 270) In folklore, the elimination of the fairy monster was justified on economic grounds by the birth family who could not afford the keep of the interloper. The elimination of the demonised monster justified by religious argument might have appealed to impoverished peasant communities as legitimate grounds for constituting disabled people as good to mistreat. In the myth of the changeling, one witnesses the transformation of monstrous disability into a supernatural species. The changeling is a figure that plots the boundary of humanity by placing the disabled child in an ontological dimension inhabited by fairies, trolls and devils. The changeling is an imposter in the universe of men and women, an alien being from the world of the damned that relocates itself into a space occupied by a human form. It is a deception, a counterfeit human and, as such, evil incarnate, the demon made f lesh.

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In the case of the changeling, the form attributed to impairment is n ­ on-human. Disability is the material appearance of an underlying ontology that hails from a brute, ignoble, satanic world that is conjured up in the gnostic dualism of an imaginary obsessed with war between good and evil. The changeling concept reclassifies impairment as a thing that is not commensurate – in its essence, in any ‘real’ way – with the human species. Disability is a mask or disguise for the diabolical. The non-disabled imaginary had finally found a way to make disability come from a place so nether and remote that no human could tread. Luther had postulated the final frontiers of disability invalidation: somewhere, way over the rainbow! In the journey from superstition to science fiction, the contemporary world reprises the trope – of the monstrous alien other – with a curious ‘secular’, cosmological equivalent, manifest in the space that autism sometimes fills in the non-disabled, neurotypical imaginary and indeed, in the minds of some commentators who are themselves autistic. The alien, the archetype of the contemporary monster in the genre of science fiction, is used with surprising regularity to represent the autistic mind and the difficulties of communication that exist between autistic people and neurotypicals (Hacking 2009), as if the mutual impenetrability refers to cognitive differences so great, so far removed from the possibilities of human empathy, that autistic people must belong to some kind of extra-terrestrial species. In this view, between people with severe autism and neurotypical persons, there can be no meeting of minds. An encounter with autism is depicted in this context as an encounter with a different and inexplicable ‘kind’; a meeting with insuperable contrariness, with a mutated subspecies. The changeling myth is reiterated: A ‘real child’ has been replaced by an alien imposter. The debate about neurodiversity in general and autism in particular has been used to encourage a general re-visioning of social ontology. Hobson (2002: 182) argues that, ‘autism forces us to think more deeply about what human perception or human relations, or human intelligence or human language or human creativity, actually are’. Luther sought to close the argument about children who appeared to be radically different through an appeal to dogma, but it is clear that the opportunities to expand the search for the meaning of the human mind, not to mention the possibilities for more meaningful empathetic encounters with human diversity, and therefore find ways to validate, rather than invalidate, neurodiversity, are there for the taking. A tired optimist might meekly suggest that such efforts are likely to chip away at the edifice of ableism and its discourse of monstrosity that was fortified by the ideas and events at the heart of the Reformation. In the eighteenth century, as Early Modernity commuted towards the Age of Reason, the monster trope was articulated in philosophical and political discourse as a means of understanding social disorder and the boundaries of humanity. Because of a want of rational capacity, the changeling for John Locke (1632–1704) was ‘something between a man and a beast’. Changelings and idiots exemplified, for Locke, ‘the universal limits’ of human understanding, ‘and the

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outer limits of what is recognisably human’ (Simplican: 2015: 22). Changelings and idiots may be human, but in relation to ability, they have non-human or animal capacity. Exclusion of intellectually disabled people from political membership or citizenship follows. Yet as Goodey (1996: 114) suggests, the liberal theory of rational consent that was born in Locke’s work is a normate revelation: ‘[A]t the strange birth of liberal England there are some other anomalous offspring emerging. Totally determined inhuman idiots, at the opposite end from liberty, are necessary to the theory of human consent’. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire (1764/2015) struggled to define monstrosity, but impairment – empirical and fictitious – provided him with the narrative sources to discuss the limits of the human. Diderot, approaching the monster from the perspective of natural f lux, appearance and disappearance in the metamorphosis of the human species, represents the monster as chaos and error. The monster is a self-contradictory being destined not to survive, but then again, who is? (Gregory 2017: 10–21). In his ref lections on gender relations, he argued that genius in women was a monstrosity (Feilla 2008). Edmund Burke (1729–1797) produced a ‘political teratology’ based on fear of the ‘monstrous multitude’ (Neocleous 2004). In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, disability provided the metaphorical landscape for social breakdown and moral collapse: Burke’s argument rested just as fundamentally on a rhetorical contrast between the natural constitution of the body politic and the monstrous deformity the revolution brought forth. Burke repeatedly referred to “public measures … deformed into monsters,” “this monster of a constitution,” “unnatural and monstrous activity”. (Baynton 2001: 35) In Burke’s view, the monster was the emblem of error, terror, destruction, and social ruin that invoked horror, disgust and the collapse of reason, virtue, property and propriety. It was a clear and present danger to the normate Proprium embodied in the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

Dark subjects: Savages and heathens Deutsch and Nussbaum (2000) argue convincingly that the discourse of monstrosity in the Early Modern period is discursively co-located with gender, disability and ethnicity in the normate imaginary. It is to the imbrications of disability and ethnicity that we turn in this section. In the sixteenth century, with European ‘adventurers’ from the mercantile nations navigating the globe and the Ottoman Empire threatening Christian hegemony in the East, consideration of the status of the ethnic or racial other came to the fore and began to trouble the core values of Early Modernity: Fear of the ‘Orient’ and the acquisitiveness of the privileged classes of aristocrats and merchants lay at the heart of the hierarchical

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classification of the peoples of the world including the inferiorising of those who lived as ‘savages’ and ‘heathens’ in exotic lands beyond the boundaries of Europe. The racialisation, feminisation (Hall 1995; McClintock 1995) and monsterising of the myriad peoples of the globe by the colonising forces that sought to become ‘lords of all the world’ (Pagden 1995) was the common currency of propriety in the heartlands of seafaring, Christian whiteness. The net of European expansionism was cast wide by Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and English traders, who at the behest of joint stock companies or wealthy backers – including the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies – scoured the globe to expropriate its riches, establish colonies and spread Christianity and ‘civilisation’. The means of so doing acquired the widest possible range of moral latitude. Dehumanising attitudes to ‘savages’ and ‘heathens’ – monsters all – provided legitimacy for ‘civilising barbarism’. Christian Europe’s use of advanced technologies of warfare and oppression, developed in the bloodcurdling religious wars of the Reformation, spearheaded Early Modern globalisation. At the discursive intersections of ableism and racism, millions across the planet became good to mistreat. The transatlantic slave trade – which began in the middle of the sixteenth century – was the most striking testimony to the expansionist western Proprium, in which the lives of savages and heathens mattered, not a jot. ‘It is’, as McClintock (1995: 8) argues, ‘precisely the inventedness of historical hierarchies that renders attention to the social power of violence so much more urgent’. Voltaire was blunt in his assessment of racial difference: ‘the negro race is a species of man different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from greyhounds’ (1764/2015). Physical and intellectual difference were rendered into natural hierarchies. White and black, non-disability and disability were enmeshed in the relations of power that were invented in the Western scramble for global dominion. Ableism played a significant part in re-imagining the world of binary worth. It provided scripts for the maritime imperialists to negotiate their relationships with the people of Africa and the ‘New World’. The Early Modern period came to terms with foreign threat and aboriginal otherness in (sometimes) nuanced, but (mostly) violent, ways that evolved as imperialism matured, but at its base were representations of others conceived as biological ‘truths’. The ancient tradition of eugenics and new forms of natural classification including divisive racial taxonomies emerged to justify European expansionism (Mignolo 2003). Fenton (2010) argues that the modern concept of race emerged in the Early Modern period, circa 1600. It proposed a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority to explain the moral degeneracy of the diverse peoples encountered by Europe’s expansionist states. Disability and race were drawn into mutually invalidating coexistence: a process that continued through to the nineteenth century and was most clearly manifest in the system of slavery that developed in the American South (Boster 2013). ‘Africa’, wrote Edward Long (1734–1813) – man of letters and colonial administrator – ‘is the parent of everything that is monstrous in nature’ (quoted

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in McClintock 1995: 22). Ideas of this order created a frame of reference for the moral judgement of others that served the economic ends of Western mercantilism. A common epistemological framework classified disabled and black people as inferior. It had clear uses in the legitimation of violence and oppression. White and ablebodied were corporeal characteristics thrown together in a symbiosis of superiority and propriety sustained by the ineradicable ‘truths’ of biological nature and Christianity. The ‘verities’ of racial science were constructed from the greed of the Occidental Proprium: Race theory, ideas about primitive origins and primitive classifications, modern decadence, the progress of civilisation, the destiny of the white (or Aryan) races, the need for colonial territories – all these were elements in the peculiar amalgam of science, politics and culture whose drift, almost without exception was always to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind. (Said 2003: 232) Classical revivalism played its part. Since Pliny in Antiquity, foreigners, barbarians, monsters – ‘real’ or imaginary – not to mention mutants and hybrids, were – in the representations that defined them – interchangeable others. Protoracism and ableism promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange: The value of the former was inf lated and the value of the latter disparaged. Physiognomy – embedded in Western consciousness – played a profound role in keeping the geographical other locked into scripts of monstrosity and deformity. ‘According to physiognomic reasoning and communis opinio’ argues Baumbach (2010: 591) in her ref lections on the revival of the pseudo-science by Renaissance humanists, ‘deformity and beauty’ were ‘reliable signifiers for identifying a wicked or virtuous soul at first sight and taking them at face value’. Even the stubborn scholastics of the Catholic establishment that had struggled against the classical revivalism of the humanists since Petrarch’s time, two centuries before, drew conclusions about savages that smacked of the ableist propaganda of classical physiognomy. In an Encyclical of 1537, Pope Paul III (1468–1549) forbade the enslavement of the aboriginals of the New World, on the advice of returning emissaries, yet described the indigenous peoples of the Americas as ‘dumb brutes created for our service’ whose want of a civilised tongue makes them ‘incapable of receiving the Catholic faith’ (quoted in Greenblatt 2007: 32). The formal decrees of popes and princes might have recognised the humanity and rationality of ‘savages’, but conquistadores and colonialists tended not to head them. Indigenous impairment, as it was conceived on the Atlantic Rim and understood in terms of deformity and monstrosity, formed a template for understanding the ‘barbari’ that were ‘discovered’ by imperial expeditions. Stefanie Kennedy (2014: 2) argues that, from a British perspective, ‘Atlantic slavery inserted black and African bodies into the emerging racialized world of transnational imperial relationships as “disabled bodies” – supposedly unfit for anything other than the

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most brutal forms of labour’. Despite the obvious paradox of impaired labour power being designated as appropriate ‘work-horses’, it seems clear that from a British perspective ‘African bodies were inherently prevented by deformity from full participation in the benefits of civilisation’ (ibid.) McClintock (1995) drawing on Mary Douglas (1966), argues that the relationship between Empire and colony was mediated by the moral binary of clean and dirty. In this hygienic, eugenic dichotomy, the spotless, well-born white coloniser stands in stark contrast to the dark genetic throwback that ’he’ subdues by virtue of superior moral force. The British Empire brought godliness and cleanliness, if not into the lives of the racial other per se, at least into the space of filth inhabited by heathen and savage. Savages were bound (sic) to learn from Occidental propriety – or were they? Brown (2009: 42) argues that: ‘a wellknown proverb of the Elizabethan period equated futility with efforts to “wash the Ethiop”’. This attitude crossed the Atlantic where ‘the equation of a white phenotype with cleanliness coincided with an emerging racial commentary on the filthy skin of “blackamoors”’. White skin was the manifestation of ‘good health’ (ibid.). The claim to cleanliness was derived from an able prototype of decency and respectability. In McClintock’s (1995) feminist, psychoanalytical reading of imperialism, the new worlds beyond Europe were painted on a canvas of lavish and monstrous erotica; a boundless, pornographic landscape that the white male exploited and violated to his heart’s content. The ‘potency’ of imperialism was grounded in gendered and sexualised representations of virgin territories and racialised submissive inhabitants who, as monsters and defectives, were a composite of inferiority. Early modern maps of the world, McClintock notes (1995: 27–28) are most interesting in what they substitute on the chart for lands that are yet to be explored and ‘discovered’: The failure of European knowledge appears in the margins and gaps of these maps in the form of cannibals, mermaids and monsters, threshold figures eloquent of the resurgent relations between gender, race and imperialism. Impairment was a pre-existing schema used to plot the margins of the global map and frame intersectional complexities. These ‘threshold figures’ were canonical in the non-disabled imaginary; wild extrapolations from the material bodies of the ‘crooked timber of humanity’. The fantasies of Early Modern cartography were mediated by disabled bodies. The liminal figures in liminal virgin spaces were sketches derived, not only from sexualised and racialised stereotypes, but also from a fictive collage of impairment, defectiveness and deformity. One cannot underestimate the f lexibility of repertoires of improper alterity, in Early Modernity. In the last two sections, we visited demonic and teratological ‘scripts’ as explanations and invalidations of embodied difference. They were supplemented in

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the period of European expansion by Christian, biological and physiognomic notions of racial defect in which a reactionary intersection of race with monstrosity and deformity combined to form a new repertoire of invalidation; a range of ideas about dark, defective strangers that disvalued them relative to the iconic white, ‘clean and proper’ body (Hall 1995). If Proprium was to gorge itself at the table of slavery, it needed to clear its conscience by making its African chattels and colonial subjects good to mistreat. How else could it convince itself of its civilising mission, other than by transforming monsters into disposable units of property or by introducing heathens to ‘truth’? Classical revivalism served yet another purpose. The Western powers convinced themselves that they were undertaking a ‘grand project’ that ‘justified colonialism’. It was a ‘means of redeeming the backward, aberrant, violent, oppressed and under-developed people of the non-European world by incorporating them into the universal civilisation of Europe’ (Anghie 2004: 3). It was impossible to argue with the propriety of such a noble mission! Kirby and Coleborne (2002: 12) distinguish between the ‘barbari’ who are not ‘sovereign, Christian and civilised’ and white European nations and peoples who possess these civilised qualities. Infancy in language and reason – like home grown ‘idiots’ – might, some suggested, be ameliorated over time, but such bases of individual sovereignty were not yet evident in primitives and savages. Besides, as David Hume (1711–1776) once quipped, a learned black man was probably a ‘parrot’. Sovereign people could not be backward, aberrant, violent, oppressed or undeveloped. Sovereignty came increasingly to refer to the independent, self-governing nation-states of Europe. Independence was the attribute that gave the Occident pride of place in the making of international law or jus gentium. Early Modernity brought to the fore through its ‘civilising mission’ the sovereignty of the cosmopolitan nation and the normate individual, each with authority over and responsibility for their morally defective, non-white antitheses. Slave law embraced a discourse of dependency and barbarism including ‘implicit connections between African-ness, heathen beliefs and … moral and physical deficiency’. Slave courts handed down punishment that ‘dismembered, disabled and disfigured’ (Kennedy 2014: 8). Aberrant dependency mutually constituted in punishments that disabled, black bodies represented, was enacted through Europe’s capture of jus gentium and through the judicial power of slave courts. The French introduced the Code Noir in their American colonies and the British in Virginia used statute to distinguish between white and negro, master and slave, Christian and heathen. Spanish held territories distinguished between the rights of people with Spanish, Indian and negro bloodlines. Concerns about inter-breeding were as much to do with the ‘improper’ dilution of superior by inferior blood as to do with keeping inheritable property in pure-white hands. The Early Modern nomos exercised a violent dominion that proved extraordinarily profitable for the ruling classes of the sovereign nations of the Atlantic Rim, even though they fought each other with bloody ruthlessness to secure access to the natural and human bounties of Africa and the New World.

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Early Modern sovereignty was complicated by the rise of the centralising nation state as a source of power and identity. Patriotic boundaries of ‘them’ and ‘us’ were drawn in the sand, though not too sharply, since property had bonds of dynastic and aristocratic blood that traversed the European nation states. Muscular, classical notions of excellence and imperial rule by domination and slavery were reawakened. Ethics and law were wedded to expansion and profit. Violence in the name of nation, territorial expansion and God was legitimated by a self-serving supremacism and the denigration of others. Empire used nation to give sharper focus to the use of power, particularly where mercantile competitors had their eye on the same prize. In the courtly capitals of seaboard Europe, aristocrats, merchants, senior ecclesiastics and military men were ready to reap the material benefits of conquest and dominion – be it in the form of gold, silver, potatoes, cotton or sugar. By deploying scripts of deformity, defectiveness and monstrosity to describe people in lands that they wished to colonise, the expansionist European nations justified their bellicosity and legitimated their maltreatment of indigenous peoples. Some elements in the lexicon of calumniation could be transferred to white national rivals on the Atlantic Rim during their frequent battles for supremacy abroad, but it lacked the vehemence associated with the civilising mission that the Western states had in common. Nationalism was in its infancy and did not develop in Europe as a full-blown source of identity and difference until the nineteenth century (Gellner 1997). In terms of the European civilising mission, the internal struggle between the Christian irenic and eristic traditions was solved, on the ground, in terms of the dominance of the latter; ‘[t]he conquistadors drew upon the words of Augustine and the deeds of the fourth century zealots to help in the legitimation of violence in the New World’ (Gaddis 2005: 338). If the response to witches and monsters in the belly of Christianity was marked by violence and atrocity, the response to those who were not of the faith and of a different colour took atrocity to new levels. Michel Foucault (2003b: 257) called it ‘colonizing genocide’. The enslavement of indigenous people was evident in, for example, the Spanish system of encomienda. The heathen savages of the Americas fell in untold numbers to the righteous swords of Iberian Christianity and to the new diseases that the Europeans introduced into a very different immunological environment. Conversion to the ‘one true faith’ was promoted as the way for savages to be saved in this world and the next. Nowhere was the struggle between the coercive and peaceful tendencies in Christianity more apparent than in the theological tussle between Bartolome De Las Casas and Juan Sepulveda (De La Casas 1992a; 1992b). De Las Casas, an opponent of the eristic tradition and the place of coercion in conversion to Christianity, provided, as a long-time inhabitant of the Indies, detailed testimony of the brutality of the Early Modern conquerors of the Americas. He argued that ‘holy violence’ was contrary to Christ’s message. Sepulveda provided the theological arguments to support coercion against

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heathen aboriginals. The two, in the hearing of a panel of judges, debated the issue at Valladolid in 1550. Sepulveda argued on behalf of the colonising forces that the Indians were natural slaves who would benefit from white, Christian civilisation. He was determined to put an end to religious practices of human sacrifice in the New World and to bring heathens into the Christian fold by whatever means. King Charles V of Spain, increasingly fearful of the power and wealth of the colonial elite and moved by the position taken by De Las Casas introduced ‘New Laws’ to curtail the excesses of encomienda. In practice, the atrocities continued. It is worth noting that Iberian conquistadors and (later) Anglo-Saxon puritans, on opposite sides of the Reformation divide, used similar justifications for violence against the indigenous heathens of the Americas (Canizares-Esguerra 2006). In a recent article, Chris Chapman (2014) drew attention to the political rationalities that legitimated violence against disabled people during Reformation and Counter-Reformation: [T]orture of criminalized Christians was narrated as working towards their confession, and so therefore working toward God’s forgiveness and the victim’s eternal salvation. Death through such torture was deemed morally righteous because the victim might confess her sins with her dying breath therefore achieving salvation. Violence against disabled people was also narrated within this moral economy; what we today call physical, intellectual or psychiatric disability was accounted for by explanations such as a punishment for sin, the mark of Cain, demonic possession or the work of the devil. (Chapman 2014: 26) Heathen, native or transported slave were, like disabled people who had switched allegiance from God to Satan, targets of eristic violence. There was no hope for those outside the faith, but violence might bring them to it and save them from eternal damnation. One could not find a better example of the end justifying the means. Eristic violence was cutting-edge ethics; just, holy war, perpetrated by the advanced technologies of torture, sword, musket and cannon and founded on able-centric, androcentric and ethnocentric logics. The irenic view outlined by De Las Casas presented Early Modern others as exotic innocents. They ‘do not bury their possessions or put fences around them’ and they ‘leave their gardens open, without laws, without books, without judges. But of their own nature they pursue what is just and deem evil and unjust one who enjoys doing harm to another’ (Quoted in Febvre 1982: 109). Columbus had found handsome, peaceful innocents on his arrival in the New World. Irenic white ‘pious universalism’ was a response to the bloody fragmentation of Christian ‘truth’ into many splinters of belief. It was an attempt to bolster the idea of a human community in which ‘noble savage’ and civilised humanity could find common ground; something like a religion of ‘all souls’ that would later inspire Leibniz and Saint-Simon. Irenic toleration of difference

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and diversity, despite support in privileged circles and official promulgations, however, bucked the trend. Columbus had also found people who practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice. Early Modern politics was based more on contemptuous resentment rather than hospitality. The stranger was feared rather than welcomed. How was it possible, in a historical context of internecine violence and apocalypticism to envisage difference as innocence? How could monsters, demons and heathens be innocents? An innocent ‘noble savage’ demanded leniency and the pure white gaze of anthropological curiosity. This was not a view that prospered in a context of religious civil war and colonial expansionism. Canizares-Esguerra (2006) argues that the eristic tradition dominated in the colonisation of the Americas because native peoples and transported slaves were situated, economically, theologically and politically, as black, demonic, sub-human chattels. One might brand the dark, foreign body as one would a beast (Kennedy 2014: 4). Accumulation of wealth depended on a belief system that eschewed the innocence of those it exploited by invalidating their human credentials. Carew (1988: 33) argues that the Renaissance created ‘new and insidious myths though a theology of racism, sexism and national chauvinism’. Biological inferiority, in an ‘outward looking’ Europe, was articulated as a proper basis for civilised conduct at home and abroad. The reduction of cultural to biological difference explained the rise of racism in Renaissance Europe (Delacampagne 1990: 85–86). Classic eugenic logic bolstered ableist sentiments and practices. Adventurers, who encountered and exploited biological difference in subSaharan Africa and the New World, legitimised their reaction to and treatment of these people on the basis of a view – made theologically credible by their unchristian ways and heathen beliefs – which involved the reduction of the ‘sociocultural to … somatic’ difference (Sweet, 1997: 45). The biologically inferior monstra of Antiquity were repositioned in Early Modernity to ref lect the values of Christianity and systems of racial classification: ‘Monstrousness, sin and blackness… constituted a rather different form of trinity in European culture’ (Miles 1989: 17) in the Early Modern period. Friedman (1981) argues that the ‘monstrous races’ were comprehended through two frames of invalidating reference. The first recognised monstra as bona fide human beings. They represented the will of God’s creation labours and were, therefore, factored into the divine plan. The second – like the first – had its roots in Augustine’s (1998) The City of God, Book 16, Chapter 8 entitled, ‘Whether Certain Monstrous Races of Men Are Derived from the Stock of Adam or Noah’s Sons’. Evil and monstrosity might have descended from Noah’s second son Ham who was cursed with black skin for revealing his father’s nakedness to his son Canaan. When the postdiluvian world was divided amongst Noah’s three sons, Ham inherited Africa, wherein black, wild and monstrous men were sired, and tribes lost to Christianity were formed. The lost tribe’s thesis and its lineage of darkened skin was also applied by some religious thinkers to the Indians of the Americas (Braude 1997).

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The missionary zeal of Early Modern Christianity found justification in this explanation. The ‘monstrous races’ could be brought to Christianity; saved by the ‘truth’ that the European seafarers – spiritually supported by cross-bearing ecclesiastics – would carry with them to the ends of the ungodly earth. If the devil was everywhere at work in Europe (Carus 1900/2008), he was established, root and branch, in all the dominions beyond it; in the heresy of Islam and the Ottoman Turks to the east (Daniel 1975) and in the naked aboriginals of the new world, far across the sea to the west. Flanked also east and south by the sexual voraciousness of Muslims, west and south by Indian savages and uncivilised Africans, Europe’s Christian mission embodied a war against the spiritual depravity and biological degeneracy of monstra or wild men or anthropophagi. It was a pious struggle against unrestrained sinful f lesh, utterly devoid of the requisite moral and spiritual sensibilities associated with civilised ‘Western’ propriety. There was a great deal of money to be made from piety. Travellers exploited the printing press to tell tales of monstrosity and savagery – some of it noble. Traders and colonisers related experiences of strange exotic people through a discourse of ‘civilisation’ set on a foundation of white, European superiority: ‘The complexity of European representations’ of the other ‘was hierarchically ordered around the view that that Europeans were superior by virtue of their ‘civilisation’ and achievements’ and the ‘condition of the Other was represented as proof of the interpretation’ (Miles 1989: 24). This superiority was considered to be both spiritual and biological and provided dual legitimacy for the violence against, and enslavement of, indigenous populations that accompanied colonisation in the new world or the more benign paternalism practiced in other contexts, particularly where trade (without slavery) was the primary mediator of social relations. While both physical and cultural-religious difference mediated the evaluation of the other, it was the former that drew most heavily on the historically ingrained negative tropos of disability. Conventions of embodiment and their relation to virtue drawn from classical Antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages were easily mobilised to twin the process of invalidation; to monsterise race and to racialise monstrosity. The beastly, ape-like, super-sexualised negro of Early Modern European folklore who mediated between the worlds of human and animal was a racist representation of the monstrosity of ‘colour’ that legitimated the human bondage of the global trade in slaves ( Jordan 1968; Boster 2013). The ontological invalidation – the stripping away of humanity – used against disabled people in preceding centuries of Western ableist praxis provided the back story to the invalidation of black people who were turned into work-horses and became the ‘beasts’ that drove the engine of capital accumulation. The Elizabethan Age was devoted to cosmic order; to a great ‘chain of being’ in which everything held together. Chaos was the great fear, for it might break the links of the chain. The colour and shape of chaos was dark and deformed. Milton’s words exemplify this: ‘The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness: the darkness and crookedness, is our own’ (quoted in Barker 1946: 68).

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The application of white face paint by noble and wealthy European women, in the manner of Queen Elizabeth, was a fashion that lauded ‘fair skin’ as a sign of beauty and moral purity. By contrast, ‘a dark complexion was equated with spiritual darkness and moral deformity’ (Charlton 2012: 87). The fair skinned queen demanded the expulsion of black people from England in 1569 and 1601. Dark defectives had no place in civilised streets or fields, far less in the fashionable enclaves of aristocracy … save, perhaps, as exotic servants. Light and dark intensified the aesthetic binaries of wholesomeness and crookedness, shaping the moral economy of everyday human evaluation, invalidating the former, while casting the spell of suspicion over the latter: ‘Description of light and dark’, deeply embedded in the classical ableist imaginary, ‘rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories became in the Early Modern period the conduit through which the English began to form notions of self and “other” so well-known in AngloAmerican discourse’ (Hall 1995: 2). Yet, there was a well-established modus operandi for othering that had deep roots in the disavowal of disability by ‘Western’ communities, classical and Christian. The racialised aesthetic of the Early Moderns that continued ‘to serve the interest of white supremacy and male hegemony’ (Hall 1995: 4) was connected in partnership and mutual backscratching with the politicised aesthetic that served normate supremacy. Whiteness and non-disability were plugged into the same socket. The other-within provided the stimulus for the representation and evaluation of the other from afar. The reaction to black skin as it penetrated white consciousness in early modern Europe was to reach for the script of deformity. It was a readily available way to explain the repugnant insidiousness of savage f lesh. To ‘wash the Ethiop white’ was a futile task. The idea of irreversible moral degeneracy built into black, barbarian pigment was central to one of Aesop’s fables and to Lucian’s view of what constituted the impossible. The idea was recycled in the Early Modern period (Korhonen; 2005). Black was an evil defect that was more than skin-deep. It could not be expunged because it was character determining. These salutary convictions portended great slaughter. The ‘tradition of knights slaying demons and of a false paradise guarded by monstrous animals … seem to have become commonplace among Early Modern Europeans as they sought to interpret the New World’ (Canizares-Esguerra, 2006: 168) and to decide how to live with and treat its established inhabitants. Conquistadors slaughtered ‘savage monsters’ like heroes of Greek mythology. The invalidated moral credentials of the other lent permission and nobility to the bloody, knightly task of dispatching darkness and deformity – the two-headed threat to civilisation. Like the Ethiop, the ‘Moor’ was a dark, demonic, monstrous threat to the moral integrity of the imagined community. The two were often conf lated in Early Modern texts. The ‘Moor’ on the English Renaissance stage was the villain who threatened the values of the f ledgling empire, who represented the dark forces that sought to stand in the way of Occidental ambition. The black

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hue represented monstrous and diabolical evil, lust and violent ­destructiveness (D’Amico 1991). Jones (1965) demonstrates that evil and black skin were woven into Early Modern English drama. Shakespeare, as master weaver, was ably abetted by Marlowe (1564–1593) and Fletcher (1579–1625). The lascivious black female servant, Zanthia in John Fletcher’s play The Knight of Malta epitomises corporeal and spiritual defect that is demonic in its trickery and salaciousness: And things in thy black shape, and blacker action, Being hell’s perfect character art delighted, To do what I, tho’ infinitely wicked, Tremble to hear (Quoted in Denmead 2011: 156) If Othello is a play about jealousy, why was Othello black? Why was he represented as an unusual, liminal, morally dangerous figure that haunted the dark fringes of Elizabethan England? Othello was a monster, a vicious ‘blackamoor’ who murdered his wife. Aristocratic, noble, exotic, though Othello might have been, he was the butt of racial abuse. He was the ‘lascivious moor’, the ‘old black ram’; a ‘malignant Turk’ with ‘thick black lips’. As the story unfolds, he is enclosed in a lexicon of aesthetic and moral dubiety. Was his character written and read through the context of imperial expansion and the denigration of the savage monsters that surrounded the heartland of white Christian civilisation? Was the same frame of reference brought to the production and reception of The Tempest? Prospero as coloniser; Caliban as colonised! Would this interpretation have been as unremarkable as the contemporary post-colonial reading that is writing back to Shakespeare from a critically imbued politics that represents people of colour? The Tempest contrasted white western superiority with ‘native’ monstrosity. It rubber-stamped the pedagogy of oppression that transformed white, parochial English blank verse into a universal literature. Shakespeare, ‘encoded his plays with arguments concerning the social perception of what Englishness was, not by tapping into xenophobic attitudes pertaining to the topic of England’s relationship with the non-European world’ (Eward-Mangiore 2014: 12). The privileged classes of Europe developed a sense of superior identity on the back of the non-European other, malignly constructed as the ambition to Empire proceeded. The same framework animated religious discourse. The debate between Thomas More (1478–1535) and William Tyndale (1494–1536) that hinged on the former’s support for the Catholic tradition and the latter’s Lutheran leanings was conducted in part by exchanges that paint the heathen Turkish east as the metaphorical territory of contestation (Schmuck 2010: 549). The literature of darkness and deformity was an expression of the fear of the other and – later – the ambition to empire that was smoothed in its bellicosity by the ideological conf luence of racist and ableist representation.

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Social dislocation: Vagabonds and beggars In 1536, alms-giving was banned in England. The informal, voluntary system of charity and works of mercy was dismantled. This ‘allowed reformers to circumvent the problem of charity by excusing lay persons from the work of personal charity and allowing the government to take on the responsibility in their stead’ (Row-Heyveld 2018: 7). Disabled people were defined as ‘the impotent poor’, because they could not work. Disability was, however, a potent referent of roguishness. In Early Modern England, the ‘dominant narrative about disability’ was that ‘people with impairments’ were ‘simultaneously pitiful and criminally deceptive’ (Row-Heyveld 2018: 1). The socio-economic changes that brought about the decay of the feudal system inspired a conception of disability as a scurrilous figure. It drew on repertoires of invalidated embodiment that were applied to the ‘idle poor’, rogues and counterfeit mendicants: In sixteenth century England a ‘theory of monstrosity’ was developed to legitimate the violence used against labour and the poor. People who had been thrown off the common land were identified as idle and monstrous, punished as vagrants and subjected to fast and slow death if they could not turn themselves into sources of value for the newly emergent capitalists. From 1509 75,000 vagabonds were whipped, had their ears cut off, or were hanged. From 1547 they had their chests branded with the letter V and were enslaved for two years. From 1558 they were imprisoned, later to be transported. (Skeggs 2014: no page number) The ‘sturdy beggar’ was the most monstrous character in this monstrous class of impoverished vagabonds. The beggar in the Middle Ages was an object of charity who embodied value for the elite in their search for salvation. In Early Modernity, the beggar became a source of suspicion, a nuisance, particularly in the overcrowded towns – swollen by migrants from the countryside – where they come to represent idleness, deceit and indiscipline. Where Reformation was victorious, the religious basis for the relief of disability through alms was undermined. Prohibition of begging and the institutionalisation of poor vagrants were introduced to regulate the new urban menace nurtured by the monstrous combination of poverty, disability, vagrancy and – worse of all – counterfeit beggary ( Jutte 1981). Below is the verdict on one such scoundrel: The Case of Nicholas Jennings (Alias Blunt) Before London’s Court of Alderman, on 13 January 1567 in the reign of Elizabeth I: At this Court it was ordered and agreed that Blunt being a sturdy vagabond who is lawfully convicted and attainted as well by good and sufficient witness as by his own confession that he has diverse and sundry times heretofore used and counterfeited himself to be a diseased person with

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the grievous disease of the falling sickness and has also of a set purpose ­d isfiguring his body with diverse loathsome spots and other filthiness in his face and other parts of his body to the only intent to be thereby the rather permitted to beg and still to delude (as he hath already of a long time done) the good and charitable people before whom he hath or might come, shall upon Wednesday now next coming being tied naked to the girdle stead at a cart’s tail be whipped throughout all the common market places of this city having a picture of his own personage deformed in the manner and form aforesaid as he was wont to use, the same carried before him upon a long pole and then to be re-committed to Bridewell there to be set to labour by the governors of the said house in such wise as they shall think mete and convenient, etc. (From the: Repertory of the Court of Aldermen, Vol. XVI, fol. 149a, Corporation of London Records Office. Spelling and dates modernized’: quoted in Beier 2003: 200) The monster in this case and in many others of the day, sprung from a discourse of ‘idleness’. This moral failing was, as Webber suggested, the rogue antithesis of the elective affinity between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of f ledgling capitalism. The devil finds work for idle hands! Idleness was a f law attached to people displaced by the enclosures and the fast fraying cloth of tradition. Worse still, the idleness of the mendicant was itinerant. The unemployed poor were cut-loose from close socio-geographical control by priest and gentry. In escaping the boundaries of paternalistic surveillance, they roamed the land or penetrated the swelling conurbations where rebellious ideas circulated as easily as infectious diseases. The settled traditions of feudal social relations were unravelling. Elizabethan poor laws made the distinction between the ‘settled’ and the ‘wandering’ poor. The former group was, in theory, accommodated locally in their parishes by either outdoor relief in the form of a ‘dole of money’ or indoor relief in institutional settings. The wandering poor were not territorially contained. It was assumed that they lived by theft and beggary. The notion that a ragged army of rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars was afoot in Britain and continental Europe troubled property and propriety. Moral panic was founded on the fear of a growing number of geographically mobile or urbanised ‘master-less men’ (Beier 1985) who would resort to banditry or fuel the fires of rebellion and disorder. The Great Peasants War in Germany (1524–1525) demonstrated the fragility of serfdom and traditional class relations in the Holy Roman Empire. It was viciously supressed by an alliance between magisterial Protestants, aristocracy and urban patricians abetted by the quiescence of the bourgeoisie (Engels 1850/1996). Luther raged against the murdering thieving hordes of peasants. In Early Modern England, riot and rebellion were commonplace and had been since the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. Rebellious and dissenting traditions of the lower classes found expression in anti-enclosure riots and in the radical doctrines

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of Levellers and Diggers who participated in the English Civil War with the Parliamentarians in the New Model Army. Peasant and plebeian sedition and the volatility of the rude illiterate mob troubled the nobility ‘who worried over reports of seditious speech in … alehouses’ (Wood, 2002: 2). The masters feared that their grip was slipping; that too many voices were being raised in support of the view ‘that all things should be held in common’. Itinerancy and mendicancy were daily reminders of vulgar disorder. Vast numbers of people were displaced from the land by enclosures. Sheep displaced peasants and millers. Property recognised that there was more profit in wool than in labour intensive grain production. Enclosure of common land made subsistence agriculture impossible and prevented access for the peasantry to supplies of coal and wood. In Tudor England, villages disappeared as a consequence of depopulation. As the price of grain and profit from wool increased the poor could not afford their daily bread and the rich treated themselves to the exotic products of the New World. E.P. Thompson (1966: 237) called the enclosures a system of ‘class robbery’. With the decline of agricultural opportunities and a significant increase in population, the ranks of the monstrous, wandering, regiment of itinerant poor faced no shortage of recruits (Beier 1985). Much was made, in the literature of the day, of the nefarious moral credentials of these vulgar legions. The privileged classes, fearful of the criminal potency of the wandering poor represented them as disruptive, immoral rogues. ‘Itinerancy and nomadism’ were portrayed as ‘the resort of the idle and feckless, the unproductive and master-less, the beggarly and parasitic’ (Mayall 1997: 62). Itinerancy was conceived, by the cosmopolitan land-owning classes of Early Modern Europe, as the antithesis of ‘civilised territoriality’. The ‘barbari’ of North America were nomadic. They did not own the land, but passed through it. Such precarious habitation was the hallmark of primitive economy and roughhewn ethnicity. Backward people failed to take possession of the land, to make legal claim to it, to subdue it, to enclose it, to make settlement on it and business out of it (Kirby and Coleborne 2002; 12–13). The domestic equivalent of the nomadic savage was the beggar vagabond who squandered settlement for a feckless, ambulatory life. There appeared to be little recognition in the Proprium that land enclosures by profiteering nobles and gentlemen contributed to the ranks of ‘gypsy’ legions nor that the vile impropriety that they railed against was their doing. The abject vulgar nature of this new itinerant, precarious, population was evident in the reputation that it acquired in the genre of ‘rogue literature’ inspired by it. It embodied ‘many of the new Early Modern concerns about policing the vagrant poor, including, ‘the fear and hatred of the able-bodied malingerer; the conviction that political disorder, moral decay, and eternal damnation will result from ignoring idleness’ and, not least of all, ‘a willingness to deploy a great variety of institutional strategies to police offenders’ (Beier 1985: 199). These included; incarceration in the newly founded Bridewell – Early Modern precursor to the prison – or transportation to the colonies, the latest and greatest policy

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sponge designed to soak up surplus labour and ameliorate the immoral presence of criminal itinerancy. The laws designed to curb and control vagabonds and vagrants ‘ref lected a conviction in the ruling elites that vagabondage was a hydra headed monster poised to destroy the state and social order’ (Beier 1985: 4). ‘Might these rogues “kill all the gentlemen”?’ was a troubling question on the lips of the privileged (Epsom 2018). The Medieval system of charity, as I argued in the last chapter, was not strongly grounded in the immoral status of the mendicant pauper per se, for the obligation to practice ‘Works of Mercy’ was morally advantageous to property and propriety. Poverty was ‘not a sign of evil’ in the Middle Ages. However, St Ambrose refused succour to healthy, idle beggars. Other than for the mendicant orders, impairment was considered a necessary trait of the legitimate beggar. In 1388, the English parliament, during the reign of Richard 11 (1367–1400) decreed that: And because many sound beggars do refuse to labour so long as they can live from begging alms, giving themselves up to idleness and sins, and, at times, to robbery and other crimes … let no one, under the aforesaid pain of imprisonment presume, under colour of piety or alms to give anything to such as can very well labour, or to cherish them in their sloth, so that thus they may be compelled to labour for the necessaries of life (Erikson 2013: 16–17) The sturdy beggar took advantage of a role that was reserved for the ‘impotent poor’, (a.k.a.) disabled people who were considered deserving recipients of charity. There was however amplification of the deviant status of the false mendicant in the Early Modern period and a moral blurring of the status of the deserving disabled beggar, particularly in Protestant countries, where any suspicion of idleness was considered ungodly. Martin Luther penned an introduction to and edited the thirtieth reprint of the exceptionally popular manuscript Liber Vagatorum (1528). It was a contribution to ‘rogue literature’, an Early Modern genre that presented a popular, savage indictment of begging and the mendicant way of life. He lampooned mendicant friars and positioned them morally alongside vagabonds, gypsies and Jews. He made no allusion whatsoever to deserving mendicancy. His view was the polar opposite of Calvin’s who advised that anyone who asked for help should be given it. Luther reduced begging to a nefarious tool in the dissolute lives of rogues and tricksters. The impotent ‘poor’ – as well as their fake counterparts – were represented as parasitical monsters. Work, not charity, was the proper, Protestant way to worship God and sustain his grace. ‘A new set of values’ derived from Reformation and Renaissance humanism celebrated the virtue not only of work but ‘of worldly activity and success’ (Beier 1985: 4). The licensing of begging by local parishes and Justices of the Peace in Early Modern England was testimony to a narrowing notion of ‘just’ mendicancy. The Victorian Poor Law embodied the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and

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‘undeserving’ poor. Disabled people belonged to the former, but a mendicant career became increasingly less ­attractive with the criminalisation of false mendicancy and the developing system of indoor parish relief that encouraged disabled people into institutional settings. As work became the measure of a life of propriety, the moral boundaries between the deserving and undeserving became porous. A sinister veil of suspicion formed around disability as the system of Christian charity that had sustained its meaning and place in society began to unravel. As the lens of charity competed with the lens of criminality, the non-disabled gaze re-evaluated the moral status of impairment. Begging, the traditional means of disability survival, was jeopardised by displaced itinerants who turned to false mendicancy because social change had made them economically superf luous. Moral panic around counterfeit disability made life even more difficult for authentic ‘impotents’, misgivings about whom have continued to persist and have re-appeared, to the enormous economic detriment of disabled people, in the contemporary context of neo-liberal austerity (Hughes 2015). The Early Modern normate community found it very difficult to distinguish between ‘cripple’ and criminal. This elision in the non-disabled imaginary had, and still has, profoundly negative consequences for the moral validity of disabled people. The idle vagabond and the sturdy beggar – feckless poverty and ‘fake’ disability – epitomised moral degeneracy in the Early Modern period. To take alms or swindle parish coffers for relief under false pretences, was audacious depravity. One might as well pickpocket a gentleman! The ‘counterfeit mendicant’ was a monster; a parasitical villain in a deserving disguise; a trickster, a con artist. The Elizabethan state braced itself against these criminal monsters with a series of brutal legal enactments: Slavery was introduced as the punishment for vagrancy in 1547. It was thought by some members of the legislature to be harsh, but it was reintroduced in 1598. The 1572 Vagrancy and Poor Relief Act introduced the death sentence for sturdy beggars who were repeat offenders on what we call today a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ basis. The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was a piece of landmark legislation that held sway until 1834. Poor Law legislation was designed in part to combat ‘counterfeit disability’. So too were the vagrancy laws. The legislature was determined to deal with social disorder as it was embodied in the growing legions of the morally contemptuous. ‘Counterfeit disability’, first amongst the gallery of rogues, was joined in the roll-call of disreputables by the idle, the itinerant, the alien, including gypsies, the Irish, ‘Blackmores’ (Mayall 1997) and the homeless (Woodbridge 2001: 22–23), as well as prostitutes and harlots. This cast of reprobates were represented in the highly popular, Early Modern genre known as ‘rogue literature’. It was a normate propaganda campaign; fiction dressed as fact; a gentleman’s guide to the prof ligate life of wretched sinners and criminals. Woodbridge (2003) warns that Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors – a work describing Early Modern vagrancy and the lives of beggars and vagabonds in England, published in 1566, is the work of a wealthy man – an

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esquire – with interests in providing a pejorative description of the ­criminalised poor. Woodbridge attacks Harman’s mythology and the historians that have swallowed it. It is full of tales of dummerers who feign dumbness as an aid to soliciting alms, counterfeit cranks who feign epilepsy, and jarkmen who forge begging licenses. But this professionalized system of criminal specializations stands in stark contrast to the improvisational, hand-to-mouth subsistence of real vagrants as established by nearly all modern historians of vagrancy …. Harman and his fellow writers of “rogue literature” insist that vagrants are jobless by choice, out of sheer idleness. (Woodbridge 2003: 203) This really is ‘rogue’ literature, she suggests! But the rogues were the authors, not the subjects of these normate fantasies! Woodbridge argues that there is scant evidence for the existence of a ‘rogues’ lexicon. The ‘cant’ or slang that was supposedly the means of communication in this criminal underworld was a product of the imagination of the magistrates who prosecuted the vagrants and the respectable classes who abhorred the idle, criminal, social detritus. She argues that historians should not take seriously Early Modern ‘rogue’ literature. She claims that, even though it presented itself as ‘social history’ or a work of criminal typology, it was a specialised form of the Tudor ‘Jest Book’. Rogue literature is not the genre it claims to be. It was unadulterated fiction. However, it was a popular genre that embodied potent powers of representation, and it was indicative of how poor people and counterfeit mendicants were perceived by the privileged classes. Luther in the Liber Vagatorum used the demonic as the register to represent rogues. In his book, Of Monsters and Prodigies, the respected surgeon, Ambroise Pare included a chapter entitled ‘Of the Cozenages and Crafty Tricks of Beggars’, in which he described how false mendicants used various artifices to imitate congenital deformities, diseases and mutilations in order to enhance their claims to alms (Stagg 2006: 21–22). Pare employed a register of criminal deceit. The term rogue became a legal epithet for ‘sturdy beggars’ and other poor vagrants in the Poor Law legislation of 1572 and ‘rogue’ literature shaped the representation of the displaced poor and disabled as a ‘monstrous class’ of drifters and malingerers. Disability may only have been a mediator of disreputability in rogue discourse, but how was the non-disabled gaze able to distinguish between embodied truth and falsity. Deserving and undeserving bodies were visibly inseparable, until the latter was unveiled and branded by the law. Even, however, if the mendicant was unveiled as legitimate, the class logic of rogue literature, presumed guilt. A fool revealed as a natural ‘idiot’ rather an artificial one was still the captive of invalidating representation and impropriety; still a rogue; still compelled to prove their innocence the next time a gentleman questioned

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their authenticity. Natural fools could not escape the normate brand. They were rogue by virtue of their insuperable vulgarity. Natural fools were written into ‘jest books’ and ‘rogue literature’. They ‘belonged’ to the pulp fiction that narrated their odious representational portraits and they lived in rogue spaces among vagrants, perhaps even alongside false mendicants who modelled themselves on their ‘natural’ associates. Intellectually impaired people may not have been at the very heart of rogue narratives: They may have been conceived as too dull of wit to trick or deceive, but they belonged to the same agenda of moral shame; the same shabby ruling-class narrative that cast ‘rogues’ as moral f lotsam and jetsam. ‘Low social rank’ relegated ‘beggars to a generic landscape to which jokes and tricks’ were appropriate. The ‘soliloquies’ and ‘eulogies’ (Woodbridge 2003: 210) of their artificial equivalents in the Early Modern theatre, were fictions of a rank order to which they did not belong. Yet artificial fools were also ‘counterfeits’ (McDonagh 2008: 138), whether they begged in the streets or played on the stage. They, too, were rogues, for no gentleman – the moniker of propriety – would pretend to be other than he was. In the wake of the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor, false mendicants were branded or whipped. They were figures of depravity, ugly portraits of the criminal stereotype of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Beier 1985). Counterfeiters were folk devils; part of the execrable landscape of itinerancy and disability in Early Modernity. They were associated with sexual depravity and monstrosity by contemporary commentators. Kevin Stagg (2006: 22) argues that Ambroise Pare offered ‘medical advice for the maimed … alongside accounts of monstrous births derived from demonic accounts of bestial intercourse and harsh judgements of the social practices of beggars’. Impairment was folded into the social and moral problems of the day as metaphor for deceit. In Early Modern Europe, it was not just the false mendicant, but all deformed and monstrous persons that were congenitally prone to artifice and fraudulent behaviour. The Christian legacy that associated disability with sin could not do other than obfuscate the distinction between authenticity and disguise. Moral negativity and socially transgressive behaviour were bonded together in representation by the scourge of deformity and sensationalised in the narratives of popular ‘rogue’ books, pamphlets and broadsheets. Impairment was a reference point for the social evils and ills of the day. Human anomaly was linked to ‘blasphemy, suicides; servants killing masters, infanticide and earthquakes’ (ibid.: 23). There were few deviant activities, natural disasters or disreputable practices that were not – in the narratives of Early Modern popular literature – sewn into contemporary conceptualisations of disability.

Fools and folly The ‘fool’, forerunner of the Modern medical category of intellectual disability, was an important narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000) in Early Modern literature. Sebastian Brant’s (1457–1521) Ship of Fools, like Erasmus’s (1466–1536)

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Praise of Folly, was an allegorical critique of secular and ecclesiastical corruption. Brant’s fool, though, was depraved, while the Erasmian fool was the embodiment of truth and wisdom (McDonagh 2008: 129–130). Goitre among the Alpine population, later categorised as a form of ‘cretinism’ in Enlightenment medicine, was regarded by Early Modern medical pioneers as a form of ‘foolishness’. The Latin lexicon for foolishness – embedded in medical discourse – included terms like stultitia, fatuitas and stupiditas. Fools strutted the stage as important characters and entertainers in Early Modern theatre. The fool in Early Modern discourse was a yardstick of many phenomena: Adamite degeneracy … satirical discourse, infancy or old age, diseases originating in parts of the body other than the brain, deafness and mutism, eccentric behaviour, the simulated or mercenary folly of the jester, mental illness and in particular melancholy, and the attributes of peasants and labourers beyond the doctor’s domain. (Goodey 2004: 306) Narratives of wisdom and foolishness embraced theology, medicine and entertainment. In this section, I will outline three repertoires of disability invalidation that invested the fool, in the Early Modern period, with cultural meaning. Theological fools: Associated in the Psalms with the blunt stupidity of atheism, the fool was regarded as a receptacle of sin. On the other hand, in the Christian tradition, the innocence of cognitive want could be read as a sign of grace (Billington 1984). In Medieval and Early Modern carnival, the fool was used as a mock proxy for power to lampoon ecclesiastical hypocrisy. In the Reformation, ‘folly’ was articulated to the same end by humanist intellectuals, but as a literary device to expose the vice and corruption of the Catholic church. It assumed a commanding position in the rhetoric of religious schism. Folly was a weapon in theological thrust and counter-thrust in the dispute for the hearts and minds of the people of Europe. It was used as a critical, satirical device to promulgate the limitations of wisdom, virtue, authority and power that had been invested for a millennium in the Church of Rome. Exemplary in this respect was the book entitled In Praise of Folly, penned by Erasmus in 1509 (Erasmus 1511/1971). Supplemented on several occasions thereafter, this work was seminal and popular. Erasmus heaped praise on a worthless subject; the worth of which was continuously reappraised as the narrative developed. In the text, ‘she’, folly, goes by the name of ‘Stultitia’; a figure convinced of her own deity, a braggart associated with disreputable characters. She represented drunkenness, ignorance, narcissism, wantonness, insanity and many other ‘vices’. But there were virtuous connections too: with happiness, youth and vitality. Erasmus strove brilliantly for an ironic ‘encomium’, in the style of the Roman satirist Lucien. Throughout the text, folly shifts shape; universalising, until, etched finally, in her most definitive form as a representation of everyman whose praise she deserves. She is a personification of the claim that we are

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all fools, most especially those who claim authority and celebrate their wisdom. ‘Folly’ qua Stultitia in the Dutch master’s text lampooned many sacred cows, not least princes and prelates. It was folly – at least in one of her many guises – and not intellectual systematisers that produced human coherence. Ultimately ‘folly’ was the Christian way; not a way that slavishly, without ref lection, followed the canons of the Christian church or the pedantry, moral systems and theological scaffolding of the scholastics, but the kind of folly – as St Paul put it – that goes to the cross: Pure folly is embodied in Christ’s ministry; the folly of humility and simplicity and sacrifice that stood in stark contrast to the corruption and stultifying superstition of the Catholic Church, trapped in Medieval tradition, ecclesiastical pretention and the supercilious piety of ordinary friars and supreme pontiffs; a corrupt behemoth imprisoned by stasis as the world moved to new settlements, new systems of exchange and new social relations of communication. ‘Folly’ spoke to order and authority in order to satirise ‘scholastic philosophers and theologians, degenerate monks, religious hypocrites, obsequious courtiers and bloodthirsty military leaders’ (McDonagh 2008: 130). Folly spoke truth to power. Erasmus’s gentle broadside had an enormous impact on Reformation theology. It embraced the allegory and the critique that folly represented. Yet the nuance, tolerance, good humour and irony that made folly the ambivalent, multi-faceted heroine of Erasmus’s extraordinary narrative disappeared into dogma. Practically, Reformation theology closed folly down around two meanings: Firstly, the critique of Catholic corruption – no longer tempered by gentle irony. This version of folly was the target of ‘praise’, though rarely expressed with tolerance and wit. It spoke in fiery tongues to the old power as to the most bitter enemy, through anger and vehemence and with a conviction that sealed truth hermetically into the enunciation of its reformed ‘catechism’. It reprised the folly it despised. The second form of folly that Protestantism embraced was not the Erasmian fool as everyman, but the fool as some men, that is, folly empirically embodied in the awkward improprieties or holy innocence of the ‘natural fool’, the rustic simpleton, the Arcadian idiot; a figure that represented irrationality and intellectual deficit. The anti-intellectualism of the Protestant intelligentsia was a baptism of innocence that did not survive the semantic brutality of its print populism in its battle with the anti-Christ. If folly leapt to the aid of propriety in Renaissance humanism, it is only as an allegory, as a moral tale. When Reformation came – rippling out from Wittenberg Cathedral – the moral tale had served its purpose and had no positive bearing, thereafter, on the moral economy of Early Modernity. The enigmatic Stultitia became a parody of her universalising self. The discourse of folly in the reformation that Erasmus inaugurated carried the terrible weight of everyman – of innocence and guilt, of piety and evil, of Christ and anti-Christ, of genius and idiocy. Reform buckled under the weight. The fool, as embodiment of humanity, had had ‘her’ moment in the sun. The ambivalent fool – both holy and evil – returned and the discursive accent was on the latter.

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The reformers appealed to the everyman, but not in the form of folly. They reached the common illiterate through the common literate by print or directly by proselytising in churches or streets or, where persecution was greatest, in remote areas of the countryside. They appealed to everyman with democratic slogans; a priesthood of all believers (Luther) and government in the hands of a number (Calvin). Populist reform doctrine encouraged souls away from the corrupting chains of papist orthodoxy with the universalising eloquence of the idea of equality before God. Who could not embrace the simplicity of faith as the foremost virtue? The thesis that the ‘fool’ in Early Modern Europe lived in the embrace of tolerance and embodied a validated or even celebrated status is thin on evidence and impossible to sustain (Chakravarti 2011). Goodey (2011: 41) argues that the celebration of the ‘fool’, by Erasmus, was a device to critique the ‘venality of ecclesiastics’ and because ‘the fool, who is void of rational thought’ is ‘wide open to divine truth’. But this was the end of ‘her’ utility. It was possible to conceive of the natural fool as a receptacle of natural goodness, but ‘she’ was far less amenable to the Protestant medium and message than the rational receptacle of divine truth. The fool joined the rearguard of Christ’s battalions, fell back to the peripheral space of rustic simplicity. The village idiot, partially rescued as a symbol of universal innocence by populist reformism, became once again an empty vessel, a witless wit, a repository of unthinking faith. She was a spent force as a propaganda device in Christianity’s internecine war. In practice, the ‘natural fool’ remained wed to the ridiculous and invited tendentious laughter by virtue of this union. Despite ‘her’ moment of celebrity, the ‘natural fool’ was easily drawn back into the cast of those considered sinful, demonic or monstrous (Chakravarti 2011). The Lutheran view of the fool or idiot as a corrupted mass of f lesh with no soul took hold in the reformation far more readily than Erasmus’s allegorical use of it. Folly as everyman may have lost its way, but it remained a general signifier of a ‘wide range of physical differences: hunched backs, dwarfishness, ugliness and so forth’. It was ‘not exclusively, or even necessarily, an intellectual condition’ (McDonagh 2008: 132). Medical fools: In the Early Modern period medicine had still not extricated itself from its classical humoral past, though the first shoots of Western medicine were evident in the growth of observational method and systematic classifications derived from natural philosophy rather than theology. Religion and classical medicine were still the climbing frames around which grew ideas about health, illness, disease and the body. In Paracelsus’ De Generatione Stultorum (On the Begetting of Fools), the fool was divinely determined, ubiquitous and, contrary to the reformers concept of the elect, redeemable by divine intervention (Cranefield and Federn 1967). Medicine found preternatural, particularly diabolical, cause in much that it investigated in the Early Modern period. The fool was such an all-encompassing metaphor that medicine found it difficult to gain jurisdiction over intellectual deficit, though for Paracelsus, there were people who could be separated off from the political folly of the age for they signified

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natural moral deficiency: ‘fornicators, gamblers, robbers, crippled children, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the lame, the timorous, fools, monsters the malformed’ (Paracelsus quoted in Goodey 2004: 293). This distinction was, however, difficult to maintain since for many, the natural fool was recognised, not just in want of reason, but in the moral deficiencies associated with physical and sensory impairment. Moral deficiency was the f ly-trap that pulled all impairments into a single cultural, classificatory system. Sources of expertise in relation to ‘fools’ were shifting as ‘medical men’ like Felix Platter, Thomas Willis and Paracelsus began to rework medical discourses to describe and explain ‘stultus, stupidas or fatuus’; the ‘clinical’ terminology associated with the Renaissance ‘fool’. Thomas Platter described the ‘fool’ as someone who exhibited ‘dullness, excessive languor and sluggishness’; the same ‘attributes’ – perhaps symptoms – that were antipathy to Protestant values and were derived from a ‘theological matrix’ in which the devil had a central place (Goodey 2004: 308–309). The ‘natural fool’ was, from the economic perspective of bourgeois Protestantism, fast becoming a waste of time and effort. The idiot was slow, slothful, congenitally predisposed to idleness. The Umanisti, placed great value on the ‘ingenium, with its connotations of speed’ and ‘quick-wittedness’ (Goodey 2011: 55). The growing demand for labour power – sinuous and astute – concentrated on the rhythms of the machine and the management of mechanics, signalled not only the economic superf luity of madness and folly but of physical disability as well. The new spaces of confinement and territorial exclusion that developed in the wake of the English Poor Laws, became magnets for lives that had at least, up to this point in history, not experienced the chains of incarceration. Medicine was not yet the guardian of blighted intelligence. However, by the end of the Jacobean period, ‘the image of the fool had become darker’ (McDonagh 2008: 149) and fools were being transformed from ‘marvels of nature into inmates of asylums’ (Von Bernuth 2006: 25). As these anthropoemic spaces of confinement became more numerous throughout Europe, medical professionals were drawn to them as experimental laboratories and therapeutic cages. Intelligence itself became a more f êted and prized attribute as a literate bourgeoisie began to find its economic feet and a place in the reformed world from which to challenge the hegemony of aristocratic rank and privilege. For Goodey (2011), the decline of the aristocratic virtues of honour and grace that coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie and secularising science provided a gap into which the virtue of ‘wit’ and intelligence f lowed and grew. Print capitalism and the increase in rates of literacy across Europe anointed learning and intelligence as a key virtue of modern ‘men’. The near universality of ‘ignorance’ in Medieval Europe, where ‘the fool’ was an integral part of the ‘rustic’ landscape, gave way to the energy and enterprise of learning; to a new world of books and ledgers; a world, supposedly, beyond the ken of the fool who in loosening the metaphorical dynamism of ‘her’ reputation became ‘the idiot’. The era of the confinement of the ‘idiot’ and those with scrambled reason – to invoke John Locke’s distinction between idiocy and madness – was upon us.

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Playful fools: The Early Modern fool was the pet playmate of humanists not only in the domain of religious and political thought but also in the theatre. Through the extraordinary strides in popularity made by Elizabethan theatre, ‘folly’ became stitched into the cloth of professional entertainment (McDonagh 2008: 135–149). The stage fool marks the transition from tradition to the shoots of modernity from carnival critique to the entertainment industry. The theatrical fool mimics the ‘natural fool’ in madness or intellectual impairment, playing out the absurdities associated with ‘his’ ‘natural’ counterpart in the name of social commentary. ‘Crooked’ nature – one might say – reprised as cultural counterpoint. The fool did not have to be foolish to play the fool. Impairments of all sorts counted as qualification. People ‘employed as fools … had a natural difference that constituted a prior qualification: achondroplasia, spinal curvature, unusual physiognomy, deaf-mutism, black skin, etc.’ (Goodey 2004: 295). Offstage, as satire and critique, folly, as I have argued, frolicked with philosophy, theology and literature blunting and sharpening the schismatic contours of the belligerent age of transformation. Foolishness was central to John Dryden’s (1631–1700) satirical poetry, particularly Mac Flecknoe. Those – few – fools who had the patronage of a ‘great person’ were safeguarded by their proximity to Proprium, yet constrained by its vicissitudes. The many living with the multitude and in material disadvantage, without the protection of privilege, pampering and power, struggled against the contingencies of whim amongst peers and masters. As Goldsmith (1968: 6) argues, in everyday culture, ‘natural fools’ were regarded with ‘mingled feelings of awe, amused contempt and something like pity. Out of this mixed attitude toward the fool grew his licence to speak freely and behave capriciously’. A precarious licence no doubt! Being a fool in a context where the identity was morally symptomatic of degeneracy, depravity and sinfulness was potentially a very dangerous status. The ‘fool’ in the Early Modern period was also a synecdoche for sensory disabilities that were associated with ignorance and deficit of knowledge. Despite the great debates into which the fool and folly were pressed in theatre and theology; disabled people, especially blind and deaf people, remained fools insofar as they were consistently presented as ‘objects of ridicule’ in the ‘Jestbooks’ of ‘Early Modern humour’ (Korhonen 2014: 27). The ‘natural fool’ was simple-minded; an ‘idiota’ associated with a deficiency of reason or judgement like Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing or Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The ‘artificial fool’ was the wise fool, famed for wit and repartee; the ‘cripped-up’, social commentator and critic who rose to the fore in Elizabethan England. In Shakespeare’s mature plays, the artificial fool was embodied in characters like Touchstone in As you Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, or the unnamed Fool in King Lear. The latter were subversives, platforms for social critique, disrupting order, hierarchy and the conventions of language (Mullini 1985). Folly was not, in this context, the baggage of the dim witted. On the contrary, it was the complex conceptual apparatus of the ‘artificial fool’. This figure was emphatically not a ‘congenital’ or ‘natural’ fool, but looked

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to (and down at) the ‘natural fool’ or ‘rustic idiot’ for professional inspiration in developing the art of slapstick, clowning and the ‘science’ of critique. The artificial fool was a career ‘player’. ‘He’ may have been physically disabled – like Robert Armin – a critic and playwright – who also played ‘the fool’ for Shakespeare – but not intellectually impaired. The ‘natural’ fool, by contrast had no intrinsic value or validity as a person. Ridicule for the disabled poor was not just a daily occurrence. It was mirrored by the confinement of the dispossessed – as I argued in the last section – to a debased literary genre that ref lected a lowly position in a rigid hierarchy (Woodbridge 2001: 102): Disabled poor and natural fools – both the ‘insane’ and the ‘idiotic’ – that belonged to the company of the deprived multitudes were banded together – at least by reputation – with the displaced itinerants, beggars and vagabonds that became the social detritus of the Early Modern period. Natural fools had a place in popular culture that ref lected their economic status as mendicants. Beggars behave with earthy merriment rather than tragic dignity partly because literary decorum dictates behaviour appropriate to their low degree. As real vagrants were put into places that denied them dignity – the stocks, Bridewell – so the poor were consigned to undignified literary genres. (Woodbridge 2003: 210) It was the ‘artificial fool’ who was more likely to enjoy the company of property and propriety or who was fêted by the audiences who f locked to the Renaissance theatre. The ‘natural fool’, socially located amongst rogues and vagrants or (even, on occasion) with court nobility was not the object of adulation. Despite difference in circumstances, naturals and artificials were literally ‘laughing-stocks’; locked into the apparatus of public punishment by mockery and derision. Stocks and pillory were forms of justice by public humiliation in which offenders were made fools of. In pillory – metaphorical or real – the Early Modern fool would have been unlikely to have fetched even the nebulous cultural capital of the Medieval jester (Southworth 1998). Courts across Europe employed both artificial and natural fools for their levity (Von Bernuth 2006). In sixteenth century Germany, for example, folly was an entertainment and an outlet for the ableist ridicule that gave so much cruel satisfaction to non-disabled masses and courtly elite alike (Midelfort 1994; 1999). ‘Natural fools’ were in some courts, considered ‘wonders’ or ‘marvels’ of nature by their aristocratic patrons. They were treated with the respect accorded to rare objects. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (1529–1595) regarded the marvels of nature in his vast collection of freakery, as peers, at least in their originality and rarity. They lacked his majesty and nobility, but were nonetheless worthy of a portrait to hang alongside his royal personage (Von Bernuth 2006). Disabled people ‘willing and able to turn their disability into comedy were sought after

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as prized belongings, and the laughter they incited was seen as useful for their spectator’s mental and physical health’ (Korhonen 2014: 29). The artificial fool was, however, a more likely companion of princes. Henry VIII (1491–1547) kept his beloved artificial fool Will Sommers alongside him, as a comfort, a sort of pharmaceutical device to soothe his depressive moods (Lipscomb 2011). The three fields of folly that I have discussed above brought intellectual impairment into the limelight. Fifteen minutes of fame for anomalies of reason and intelligence in the interregnum between tradition and modernity! As modernity superseded its youth, however, the allegorical virtue that had been identified in folly disappeared. The lighter, wiser side of the fool that was painted in blank verse in the Elizabethan period and in the prose of Erasmus, was generally not the ‘natural fool’ or ‘idiot’, but a character who served multiple purposes of political and moral didacticism. Once the philosophy of folly with its complex political and metaphorical shades declined, the celebration of innocent folly became a minority sport for romantics like Wordsworth (1770–1850). The ‘dangerous idiot’ that emerged in the latter part of the seventeenth century (McDonagh 2008: 149) was the prototype for murderous nineteenth century eugenics. The moral economy of folly shifted as its epistemological f lexibility withered on the vine of modernity. Folly felt, only for a brief moment, the paternalistic arm of the humanists around it. The Renaissance intelligentsia engaged fully with folly because the embodiment of ignorance served simultaneously as the antithesis of themselves – as ‘Renaissance men’. The natural fool served as a narrative devise for the intellectual elite, a blank canvass from which they wrought a complex picture of the woes and worries of a world in turmoil. Real fools inhabited a space of moral degeneracy in the company of rogues, vagabonds and beggars; in stock and pillory. Folly was pressed into service by able-centric intelligence as it wriggled free from the shackles of scholastic dogmatism. The use-value of folly lay in the epistemological void that it filled as a cloak for freedom of thought. The people who lived with intellectual impairment derived no benefit from their narrative role as a critical tool for the umanisti. Tim Stainton (2004: 240) has no doubt that the moral landscape for the fool became significantly more dangerous. ‘Idiocy’ was plotted, in the late Early Modern period, as ‘reason’s other’, bringing about a shift ‘from the’ benign ‘view of folly’ as ‘an attribute of everyman’ to a ‘direct representation and association between disability and depravity’.

The closed Protestant body: Each to his own This chapter began with ref lection on Early Modernity as an interregnum, a period of transition. It also produced a re-formation of the body (Mellor and Shilling 1997). The Early Modern body ref lected; broader developments that have been the subject of investigation since the emergence of body history in the 1970’s … Although different terms have

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been used, Elias, Bakhtin and Foucault … all describe an older bodily matrix (uncivilised, grotesque, sovereign) characterised by turbulent passions and disruptive instincts. The unruly body was viewed as extending beyond the physical form to correspond to the natural order. Thus, in the Early Modern period the body did not simply constitute the individual self but was a site of cosmic intervention and divine retribution. (Turner 2006: 8) Corporeal volatility was commonplace in the Medieval world and habits of the f lesh could be wilfully expressive, disorganised and grotesque without necessarily drawing religious condemnation (Elias 2000). The relationship to the sacred was, in popular culture, profane, bawdy and carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968) and managed by sensual engagement in ritual, imagery, worship of icons and the pious ecstasy of monasticism and asceticism (Mellor and Shilling 1997). Disability mediated grace and dis-grace. As Renaissance and Reformation matured towards Enlightenment and modernity, perspectives on the body shifted. The relative decline of Catholicism compared to the relative rise of Protestantism(s) in postReformation Europe insured that the f leshy, volatile and baroque notions of embodiment that had characterised the lives of the lower orders in Medieval society were replaced by the managed, closed and civilised ‘modern Protestant body’ (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 41–42). The closure and asceticism of the Protestant body was vindicated by the risible failures of disabled people to govern themselves with appropriate comportment. Impairment was didactic. It taught the contours of the moral body and undermined the ‘charitable’ attitude to corporeal difference. With the subordination of f lesh to mind in Protestant and later, Enlightenment, narratives, the Catholic disposition to find instrumental value in disability and physical difference declined and ‘there was an upsurge in negative associations towards impairment’ (Hutchinson 2006: 17). Protestant attacks on the moral corruption of indulgences made it clear that privilege could not buy its way out of purgatory and into heaven. The religious incentive that made disability good to be good to became increasingly secularised. The Reformation made demons, monsters, rogues and fools out of impaired bodies; used them to signify the evildoing of women in the witch hunts and encouraged white, racial, Christian superiority in the brutal agenda of Western slavery and colonialism. Consequently, ‘the deviant bodies and capabilities of disabled people’ and their kindred others ‘were considered both natural instigators of laughter and targets of ridicule’ (Korhonen 2014: 28). Simultaneously, the normate body took itself very seriously. Ability was imagined as the alterity of corporeal deviance and ridiculous vulgarity. Korhonen (ibid.: 29) argues that Early Modern Jestbooks were ‘not just about bodily difference’ but also ‘about performing the cultural rules which governed the form of ideal bodies’. Invalidations of impairment mapped the normate body and Renaissance humanism hailed its beauty, symmetry, splendour and uprightness (Vigarello 1990).

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Puritans in the New World inf luenced by Calvin’s anthropology stressed the importance of a strong body – noting its empirical presence in men and absence in women. Corporeal strength was a sign of religious integrity, of a soul, less likely to be breached by the devil. Calvinism distinguished between body and f lesh. The former – in men at least – was a relatively durable shell. Clear, sensory windows were aligned with strong faith. Weak bodies submitted to appetite and desire. They were likely to raise the bed-clothes and let Satan slip in (Finch 2012: 6–9). Masculine ability and feminine disability were barely concealed in the distinction between body and f lesh. As the sensuality of the sacred Catholic community lost its unbridled hegemony in pre-Reformation Europe, the disciplined individual committed to faith and labour emerged as the normate icon of bourgeois individualism (Weber 1902/2002). The closed, Modern, Protestant body (Mellor and Shilling 1997) – sealed-off from vulgarity and ostentation in clothing and conduct – came to represent cleanliness and propriety. The Modern Protestant body was a priesthood of restraint obdurate in selfassured faith, moderate in all things, including the indulgence of human compassion. Luther’s celebrated doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’, or ‘sola fide’ did not go as far as Isaiah’s (64: 6) exclamation that: ‘All our righteous deeds are like filthy rags’. But it embodied anathema to penitent Catholicism, to throwing oneself prostate at the feet of an ordained representative of God in order to wriggle out of one’s direct responsibility to one’s maker. The doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’ privatised, individualised and personalised a communicant’s relationship with God. Ecclesiastical authority made way for self-reliant, industrious ‘men’. Monasticism served no-one but the monks. A proper vocation served neighbour and community. It was hardly surprising that Protestant soteriology – in its many variations – attracted the industrious bourgeoisie who had made their way in the world without the traditional advantages of rank of favour. The English crown and nobility may have shared the spoils of the dissolution of the monasteries (1536–1541) (Bryant 2017: 113–115), but magisterial Anglicanism helped to secularise and centralise the state, releasing it to manage the mundane material world into which the industrious bourgeoisie inserted itself. Luther believed that while good works were important for salvation, they were not the cause of it. One did not body-forth in pursuit of it. One did good as a consequence of faith. Faith and good works were not theologically uncoupled by the reformers, but the elevation of faith suggested the diminution of caritas and a consequent closure of the body to the needs of others. As faith dominated soteriology and indulgences become associated with moral corruption, charity lost some of its moral significance and disabled people become less important in the embodied – albeit instrumental ties – that made up community. In turn, the collectivism of community was undermined by the moral prominence of the atomised individual. The body that sat well alongside the values of upright and pious Protestantism was organised by individual restraint and asceticism; practices of rational control over temptation and emotion and by the labour of vocation.

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Hutchinson (2006: 17) argues that it is ‘the effects of the shift from Catholic to Protestant forms of embodiment, sociality and knowing that have a major impact on attitudes towards disabled people’. With the rise of an impersonal, Protestant approach to faith and charity, disabled people were pushed to the spiritual margins. They became strangers to Reformed sacred communities, for it was far less respectable to beg for membership and recognition (Hughes 2012). Protestant belief that ‘faith was more important than charity’ (Mellor and Shilling 1997: 117) justified prohibitions and licenses for begging. The ambiguous mendicant – trapped between hospitality and contempt – became much more likely to experience the latter. The altruistic selfishness of Medieval almsgiving lost its moral authority as the honest beggar became impossible to distinguish from the venal rogue. It did not profit a ‘man’ to give if ‘his’ generosity could be interpreted by the Almighty as nothing more than calculated indulgence. Disability was pushed out from the centre of the moral economy. The inward spiritual focus on ‘bodies of faith’ reduced the visibility and moral utility of disabled people. For the normate community, disabled people became less sacred and more secular. These processes enhanced the visibility of disability for the state apparatus of social control and governance that gained momentum with the growth of centralising sovereignty (Tilly 1994; Schwartzwald 2017) during the Early Modern period. The Protestant conception of charity that superseded alms as a means of private spiritual gain ushered in a new era of Poor Law provision and bourgeois philanthropy. Exacerbation of poverty and marginalisation by community, prepared the way for the confinement and incarceration of disabled people in ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1968). The anthropoemic exile of disabled people became more fashionable as modernity and industrial production exacerbated the differences between autonomous, industrious individuals and people compromised by dependency who were likely to slip into moral degeneracy. Calvin argued that, ‘the divine similitude in man and his original uprightness no longer exist’ (quoted in MacPhail, 2010: no page number). The doctrine of the elect, of predestination, suggested that some will go to God and some will not. The fall was not necessarily the preamble to redemption. Some are condemned to degeneracy. The doctrine of salvation was fractured. Human abjection was a fact of life from which some will not to escape. If the doctrine of the elect was a manifestation of the blurring of the ‘imago’, who might fall into the special category of God’s chosen creatures? Predestination was a soteriological manifesto for elite, hardworking bodies, a new narcissism of privilege, faith and conviction. One could not buy one’s way into heaven any longer, but surely there were earthly, cultural and embodied signs of election that could not be manifest in the crooked minds and corrupted bodies of lower brethren! One could not expect the ‘good folk’ of Switzerland or Scotland to take the message of Calvin or Knox to mean that the elect was comprised of people stuck in the mire of idleness and dependency. Surely physical and intellectual signs of ‘reprobation’ were symptomatic of creatures that God passed over and condemned to eternal damnation? Eternal life was embodied in the good life in the purity and piety

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of everyday existence. The divine plan was personified in individual journeys of faith and intelligence. The secularisation of Christianity from the Protestant Reformation onward was driven by the increasing literalness with which philosophers and theologians took the “devolution of the divine corporation” … It justified a transfer of sovereignty from the Pope, as the representative of God on earth, to individual churches, states and ultimately biological individuals who realise the divine plan through their spontaneously self-organising and mutually recognising exercise of intelligence. (Fuller 2011: 206) To the self-contained, rational individual went the spoils of the ‘devolution of the divine corporation’. Reward was the bounty of intelligent endeavour. Those who struggled to survive the demands of the modern world of industrial production and urbanised living had to settle for the harsh margins of modernity and whatever special arrangements might be made for their inability to contribute. In the splitting of mind and body, René Descartes announced the arrival of modern philosophy in which the mind was the ghost, hosted by the material contraption of the body. What the bourgeois body takes from Cartesian dualism is homage to the former as invention and to the latter as machine. Enlightenment fuses invention and mechanics. Brain guides hand. The privileged cogito is served by a mechanical container. The modern Protestant body is the vehicle of ref lective enterprise. The use of the machine metaphor for the body became central to Western scientific medicine as it developed over the next two centuries (Hobgood and Houston Wood 2018: 35–36). As impairment came under the jurisdiction of medicine, it was conceptualised in terms of an anthropophagic model of repair and correction. Under the jurisdiction of medicine, normal replaced natural as the central criterion of normate evaluation (Bearden 2017). The transformation of Europe from fragmented feudal societies with powerful nobilities to centralised states that gave comfort to the new propertied classes of merchants and manufacturers was simultaneously a transformation of conduct and embodiment (Elias 2000). National monarchies consolidated power under absolute rulers who claimed, like James I of Scotland and England, to be ‘Gods Lieutenants on earth’ (Schwartzwald 2017: 8). Protestant and Catholic nations wrested power from the papacy. Domestic tax collection, law, policy-making and the means of violence were also centralised. Print capitalism helped nationalism prosper (Anderson 1991), though it did not become a major force until the nineteenth century. The new culture of bodily discipline and self-restraint that ran parallel to deep social and structural change had a profound impact on personality and social relationships. The civilising process (Elias 2000) embodied widespread diffusion of sensibilities about emotional and bodily control over a long period of time. Norms of polite comportment and conduct – first developed in the late Middle Ages in courtly, aristocratic circles – spread to the middle

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classes where the ‘closed Protestant body’ received it with kindred appreciation. Whatever was associated with the animal in man became abject. The ‘clean and proper body’, epitome of good manners and hygienic conduct, became the baseline of everyday moral evaluation. The economy of affects turned on a low threshold of repugnance for bodily difference that created social distance between disabled and non-disabled people (Hughes 2012). The foundations were laid for the quotidian forms of ableism that excluded disabled people from participation in the banal interactions of Modern life.

Concluding remarks To despise a man for a disfigurement or the loss of a limb is counted as base and disfiguring, not to the man who is laughed at but to him who laughs, for foolishly upbraiding a man with something as if it were a fault which he was powerless to avoid. (Thomas More 1516–1518/1965: 193) Thomas More’s progressive view of the normate reaction to disability in Early Modern consciousness was unusual amongst the great religious figures of the period. Luther was more representative. He claimed that ‘a pure sacrifice requires a pure sacrifice’. This ‘is what God intended when he prohibited the blind, the lame and those having any defect at all from ministering at the altar’. God forbid that Christians ‘offer a worthless, blind, lame or false sacrifice’. Sacrifice must be ‘faithful and pleasing’ (1955–1986 Vol. 18: 396–397). It should not be despoiled by the presence of impairment. The normate Levitical view of disability was evident even in More’s repudiation of it. Impairment struggled for validity in a climate where surface appearance was testimony to character. Medieval conceptions of impairment had not withered away. Sin and diabolical intention were written on the deformed body, or palpably evident in want of wit. These representations of impairment were, however, exacerbated by the endemic crisis of interregnum. The renewal of the love of beauty exemplified by the Renaissance was an important factor in the resurgence of classical aesthetic ableism. The f lowering of aesthetic sensibilities invalidated deformity and defect. The ableist moral economy was refreshed by the partnership between beauty and virtue. Disabled people were entrapped in the killing fields of the witch hunts. They were drawn into its deathly snare by a world view steeped in demonological monstrosity and well-rehearsed normate fantasies about the perfidious nature of impairment. The great schism raised the profile of the devil and, in the battle against his terrifying ascendancy, disabled women became the cleansing pharmakoi for broken communities on both sides of the sectarian divide. Eristic Christianity applied its techniques of persecution, with terrifying consequences for disabled people. European colonialism mobilised ontologically, invalidating narratives about savages and heathens that were painted on a normate canvas in which disabled

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figures were the readily visible pentimento beneath. The slaughter and servitude of great swathes of foreign difference were legitimated by their somatic reduction to moral and spiritual infamy. The dark others of distant shores who could not live up to white civilised propriety were dehumanised by the scripts of monstrosity, deformity and defect that served the Christian moral order in its identification of sinners and outsiders within its own territories. By the late 1500s, secular authority felt compelled to control paupers displaced by aristocratic land-grabs that had ameliorated common law rights to subsistence. The idle and unemployed poor were subjected to violent punishment, incarceration and transportation to, and indentured service in, the colonies. The uprooted were redefined as vagrants, vagabonds, rogues and beggars. This plague of itineracy brought disability into disrepute. Disabled people or ‘impotent paupers’ were indistinguishable from counterfeit beggars. Suspicion of deceitfulness about disabled mendicants was central to the fantasy genre of rogue literature in which the privileged depicted an underworld sub-culture of deformed depravity. The fool was a critical paradigm mobilised by philosophers and dramatists that did not deconstruct the tendentious mockery that had followed ‘lusus naturae’ since Aristotle first coined the phrase. The fool was represented as the antithesis of reason; more so, perhaps, in the didactic allegorical literature that took this name in vain and used it as a mask to outline a manifesto of reform or deliver a message theatrically. The impaired antithesis to reason was used in a war of religious propaganda to propagate wisdom and promote rational solutions to religious and social problems. The people of the reformed European nations refined themselves with the new moral signature that was manifest in the emergence of the civilised, individualistic, hard-working ‘closed Protestant body’ (Mellor and Shilling 1997). Embodied practices of self-control and comportment were shaped by shame, embarrassment and disgust, to the considerable detriment of bodies constituted as corporeally or intellectually unruly. As the parameters of sound nature and social normality were narrowed by moralising expectations of conduct, stigma wrapped physical, mental and sensory difference in the rags of the f lowering invalidations of modernity that were inf luenced increasingly by bourgeois conceptions of propriety. In the repertoires of invalidation outlined in this chapter and summarised in this conclusion, disabled people were represented as good to mistreat. Where magisterial reformers were successful in their attempts to oust the papists, the Medieval system of charitable relief was restructured. Responsibility for the economic management of poor and disabled people was, in England, for example, transferred from church to parish. Parish was transformed into a secular body for local government. The ‘impotent’ or deserving poor were managed by a mixed economy of institutional confinement, family and community support. Charity did not disappear, but its ideological import had been significantly undermined by corrupt Catholic soteriology. The reformers insisted that faith trumped charity and that good works were inherent in vocation, rather than

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donation. Disabled people become less obviously good to be good to and their place in moral economy shifted from centre to margin as Early Modern ‘social welfare’ tried to escape its origins in a system of charity that served the redemption of privilege.

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CONCLUSION A banquet of indignities

Aristotle argued that we are social beings. Perhaps, as Hobbes, who rejected this premise suggested, it is fear that makes us so. The bonds that pull us together in concord and cooperation are based upon the ‘originary’ emotion. Is this the attraction of Leviathan; the bonds of fear that it salves with its myth of eternal order; its promise of a solution to the primal fear of death and the corporeal decay that reminds us of its interminable presence? Hobbes wrote in a time of fear. He was born into it. In 1588, his mother trembled at the prospect of Spanish invasion (Esposito 2010: 21). Hobbes’ ref lections on fear invoked the terrible yoke of a world in which certainty was torn asunder, meaning fragmented by imperial bellicosity and bloody sectarian quarrels as a schizophrenic deity promulgated incompatible dogmas in a bitter contest to ‘secure’ the troubled souls of Europe. The one true faith crumbled into many. People struggled with a menu of truth in which redemption or damnation were at stake. Any choice would be a gamble. Once made, best to inure it against doubt with zealous conviction to its fundamentals. Hobbes’ anthropological account of fear ignored its cultural origins. Fear materialises in many forms in life. Normate fear has been the subject of this discussion. It has shaped the relationship between disabled and non-disabled people in Western society. The latter has been troubled by the dread that the former represented. The former has been troubled, consequently, by a dangerous life of privation in the sphere of impropriety. The fear was rooted in classical Antiquity, in the belief that beauty, truth, reason, order and justice were the pillars of human integrity. Disability was the product of a mind-set that understood impairment as the catalyst that undermined the architecture of perfection. Disability was disavowed as weakness and abjection, wound and contamination; the antithesis of the good life embodied in beauty, truth, reason, order and justice.

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If fear offered the possibility of a social concordat, the normate community, acting fearfully, subverted its potential. It disavowed rather than embraced it; turned away from that part of its humanity that might have saved it from hubris. It dismissed a community based on the concordat of fear, dividing it in acts of othering that suppressed an uncomfortable, but reasonable, conception of existence. In the classical dawn of the West, rule by the ‘best’ was conceived vaingloriously through a lens of anthropocentric hubris. The common bond of fear was displaced by a myth of redemption. Belonging was reduced to an embodied telos of perfection by normate conceptions of property and propriety. When classical community looked into the mirror of fear, it felt compelled to look away. It relocated community in myopia – an emotional space in which the awesome temporality of human existence was obscured. Neither death, nor the signs of its calling, can be cancelled. Death and its associates are life’s saving grace. To annul inevitability is to choose life in bad faith and false gratification. Real community is replaced by an imaginary normate consolation founded on the redemptive powers of property and propriety. ‘We’ splits into the fault lines of ‘them’ and ‘us’. The validated who are enabled to f lourish and the invalidated who are offered a banquet of indignities. The naive optimism of hubristic Western belief systems serves as a rigid banner of propriety in which justice for disabled people is reduced to mistreatment. The illusion of perfection that haunts the redemptive imagination is a festering sore scratched by Western wealth and wisdom. It consistently fails to see the impact of its tyrannies. With every badge of worth handed out by property to propriety, the work of validation and invalidation is done. Western ableism is inured to the implications embedded in its moral economy of propriety. The conception of ‘good’ carries the seeds that diminish its grand pretentions. Dignity is a parody of itself. It is mounted on the shoulders of countless historical indignities that have gnawed away at inclusive conceptions of humanity and butchered civic sensibilities. Ableism is rooted in the grand obsessions about who we think we are and what we might become. It resides in the philosophical moments when humanity ponders the meaning of existence and places itself above all other things in a universe which is cosmologically ours by virtue of our genius or special relationship with its maker. Ableism is rooted in our torrid search for self-importance. We are all philosophers, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) argued. We all visit the ableist watering hole and drink from the virtuous ideals that well up in it. We do so to search for meaning, for the cleansing purity of its waters. Ableism breeds like bacteria in this well of well-being and self-satisfaction. As it wallows in the hubris of its high opinion of itself and in its imperial mastery over its dominions, humanity invents itself as civilised, decent, magnanimous, hospitable. The great virtues we use to identify and legitimise the glories and achievements of humankind are the same stone shoulders on which rest judgements about our fellows. The watering hole of meaning needs a system of sanitation. It has been corrupted by the poison of normate narcissism.

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Disability is a figure forced to huddle in the shadows of the statuesque d­ emi-gods of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. Ableism plunged disability into the shadows of the anchors of Western Proprium where it became the ‘most insidious form of rhetoric’; where it became ‘reified and … widely accepted as common sense’. Like all taken for granted, naturalised meanings, ableism ‘denies its own rhetoric’ (Cherney 2011: 2). It has become thoroughly embedded in the banal day-to-day of common sense as the unacknowledged habit of several millennia. Through sheer cultural ubiquity, ableism in Western civilisation has become a ‘self-authorising statement’ and the source of non-disabled ‘power and domination’ (Cherney 2011: 2–5). Ableism is the authority invested in the normate pillars of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. Drawing on a Weberian conception of authority, in his project to analyse ‘Orientalism’, Edward Said (2003: 20–21) defined his subject exquisitely as formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas that it dignifies as true and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces (italics in the original). Orientalism is the ideological high-water mark of the nomos of the racialisation and inferiorisation of non-white peoples (Kirby and Coleborne 2002), just as ableism is the nomos of cultures of normative embodiment. Their imbrications in historical forms of reactionary intersectionality are – as I have argued – deeply habituated in their implicit assessments of human validity. The imaginaries of ableism and racism are climbing plants entwined around the same lattice. Impairment is the evaluative tool in the ableist imaginary. It is the mirror of selfref lection for normate narcissism. Impairment habituates Western consciousness to scripts that demean and denigrate those who live without privilege, fortune or favour. Impairment is an able stand-in for ugliness, error, stupidity, irrationality, chaos, contamination, punishment, pain and suffering. Impairment’s f lexible lexicon of invalidation can be turned against woman, barbarian, savage, heathen, infidel, heretic, slave or serf. In the non-disabled imaginary, defect, deformity and monstrosity are the stock-in-trade of ridicule and the portents of catastrophe that undermine hope and joy. Idiot, cripple, blindness, deafness is a tropos used habitually to represent the woes of the world. Impairment is a signpost at the bleak intersections where the underprivileged and the undervalued gather to undertake the long tramp to justice. Impairment’s metonyms offer no crumb of validity, no moral respite, either to the disabled people to whom they become attached or to the other disparaged identities demeaned by association. Are monsters the original malignant other; the base classifying scheme that demeans all forms of bodily difference and strangerhood? Monsters are mythically opposed to gods and heroes (Kearney 2002), the normate hyperbolic figures upon whom we ref lect when we consider who we are and where we came from. Monsters are manifestations of fear and anxiety that have tenuous empirical roots

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in bodily difference and our potent relationships with non-human animals that become exaggerated and mythologised. In the fertile soil of the imagination, ‘reality’ grows wings and multiple other appendages including hybridised forms of fear and anxiety that are ominous, odious and terrifying. In myth, monsters are vanquished, and people gain control over a world made chaotic by their presence. Seth in ancient Egypt; Marduk in Babylon; Odysseus for the Greeks! All are famed as conquerors of monsters. They – spear-carriers of ableism – avenge us of that part of ourselves that we refuse to recognise. The ‘non-disabled imaginary’ is a template for multiple prejudices, including misogyny and racism. The other-within provides the key to unlocking the meaning of all forms of othering. Mortal failings, animal yearnings, corporeal ephemerality, want of reason, of civilisation, of propriety, of beauty get attached to the figure of the unseemly stranger. The normate community, estranged from its own frailty, projected these onto others who were ready-made repositories of their fears. The frailty and weakness that disabled people have come to represent are the blessings of humanity that have been confused by the normate community with the barbs of existence. The autonomy and dignity of ability is intensified by the diminished alter egos that the normate community imagines. The normate ‘we’ exaggerates its own invulnerability. By naming the other as abject, normalcy exemplifies its own purity. Anthropocentricity, the notion that humankind sits atop the ladder of cosmic value and is the fulcrum of moral sensibility, is a doctrine of extraordinary self-importance. Humanity is the vital link in the chain of being. Hubris is its primary emotion. A dialectic of inferiority and superiority is its system of evaluation. Humankind is superior, though in Western history, supremacy has been arrogated to deity – a supreme being that personifies humankind in image and likeness. All other species and resources are at its disposal, dedicated to its dominion. The invention of gods and an afterlife sustain the centrality of the species in a cosmos that serves its needs. Gods are sequestered into the anthropocentric fantasy. Western philosophy and religion are in thrall to, and seduced by, the mythos of a redemptive promise. The intrinsic value of humanity is contrasted with all other matter which are means to its ends. The Judeo-Christian tradition posits humanity as the axis of the universe. God created human beings ‘that they might rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground’ (Genesis 1:26). Anthropocentricity is a cultural construct that does not end in a hubristic taxonomy that elevates the human being above all other species or forms of matter. It breeds other forms of ‘centricity’ that ref lect power and status differences within human cultures. Some feminist scholars argue, for example, that anthropocentrism is androcentric (Plumwood 1997). In the cultural practices of the West, human-centricity is masculine. If the domination of nature and the oppression of women are connected, not only by the reduction of the latter to the former but by the ways in which masculinity has skewed culture to its

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own, rather than universal ends, then other ‘subordinates’ are likewise bound to slide down the ladder of value. Inequalities in power, and the distribution of property and propriety promote other anthropocentric categories that envisage a ‘chain of being’ within humanity. Western ethnocentrism posits whiteness an ‘an unmarked category against which difference is constructed’ (Anderson 2003: 26). White is the ‘unexamined centre’ of Western social relationships (Doane 2003: 7). Racialised as privilege, white is the norm for social and moral comparison and the benchmark of judgement in the allocation of social propriety and validity (Garner 2010). Like androcentrism and ethnocentrism, able-centrism is based on a binary structure of self and other, centre and periphery, oppressor and oppressed. Propriety and validity cling to the first category in the binary; dis-value to the second. Able-centrism disavows and obfuscates. It prioritises – to the detriment of their supposed antitheses – reason, language, freedom, imagination, strength, autonomy, creativity: The qualities used to dominate nature and build ‘­civilisation’. The able-centric model of relationships produces normate bias in human projects and consigns disabled people to the economic and moral margins. Ability is a badge of superiority. It signifies fitness to rule, to achieve, to dominate. Able-centric perspectives are the ‘verities’ that populate the nondisabled imaginary; the largely hidden assumptions about who can do and who cannot, who should be and who should not. They are enshrined in Western discourse and institutions, informing the norms, values and practices that invalidate disabled people’s lives. The able-centric nature of Western social development requires a non-­d isabled self that is dis-associated from its ontological limits, from its nature, from the ephemerality, temporality and fragility of existence; alienated from its vulnerability and abjection. The sense of disassociation is constructed historically by the development of positive values that place able humanity, hubristically, at the centre of the universe. The dialectic of disability and non-disability is an internal schism that the latter uses to purify and strengthen its dominion. The disassociated self is disenchanted with the harsh reality of its embodied limitations. Nondisability – like whiteness – is an ‘unmarked category’, an ‘unexamined centre’, a supressed identity that attributes power to the ‘clean and proper’ bodies that represent the Western ideals of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. These ideals are the anchors of Western propriety and validity. They are the core ideas and ideals that sustain property and wed it to propriety; the bonding agents of Proprium. Beauty: The muse of spellbinding beauty is the bewitching soul of Western propriety and validity. It is the enemy of natural defect in look, proportion and harmony. Ocular-centric culture did not tolerate deformity or blemish, least of all on the human body where it was a sign of character defect. ‘Western humanity’ still looks to classical life for its bearings on the meaning of beauty. It is the myth of perfection that attracts contemporary sensibilities just as it undermines the tropos of difference. How far have eugenic sensibilities come since Olympian

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grandeur ruled? The eugenic aesthetic is alive and well, and the search for perfection that underpins it still pulses with ambition. Gymnasia are still doing good business and there are many gods in the Global North – some not Western – to compete for our attention. What is so unbecoming in any new-born infant that it must perish? With this question, we should understand that the classical aesthetic was also an ethic, just as clearly as eugenics was the ethic at the heart of Spartan law. It was proper to kill the invalid, not just in the name of beauty, but in the name of goodness. Roman beauty was invested in the spectacular pathos of power in which monstrous deformity was the ridiculous counterpoint to the violent grandeur of monumentalism. Christ was the vista of beauty in the Christian Middle Ages. The cathedrals and palaces of church and nobility were synonymous with the ownership of valuable art and sumptuous representations of the sublime. Sacred spaces pointed the way to the absolute beauty of heaven where defiling impairment had no place. Saintly beauty interceded to banish the moral taint of impairment. The beauty of moderation and ascetic self-restraint in Early Modernity was contrasted with the f leshy excesses of grotesque sinful embodiment and devils in the shape of disabled children. Classical revivalism refreshed the ethic of perfectionism and the invalidating tropos of impairment, holding it up for ridicule in the pamphlets, plays, rogue literature and jest books of the first information age. Truth: Truth brings integrity, gravity and honesty to the table of propriety and validity. It straddles the great institutions that speak for it through seats of learning and education, the law, science and systems of communication – wherever the able intelligentsia are found. Proprium speaks through truth that it might command it. It makes error of a multitude of sins. Truth is a great persecutor: We are habituated to consigning to conquest the errors that arise from it. Barbarians, heathens, savages, heretics, schismatics; anyone who does not submit to truth or embodies error, like the Greek pharmakos, the Roman devotio or the Early Modern witch! Christ’s word used impairment to evidence God’s miraculous presence in His earthly domain, to signify sin and build a moral economy around a system of charity that benefitted the redemptive desires of the privileged classes. Impairment grounded epistemologies of truth, moral decency and spiritual ambition while disabled people begged to survive. Their truth lay in malum poenae; in the inevitability of their suffering. Impairment was the will of God; a blessed punishment. Disabled people were condemned to suffering by theodicy and used in soteriology for the redemptive ends of the powerful who saw in themselves the insuperable truth of imago dei. Reformation splintered truth, and many disabled people paid with their lives in the storm of competing doxa. Normate truth produced slaves, heathens, savages, fools, rogues and vagabonds who were known for their monstrosity, deformity or demonic intent. Reason: Reason, the bedrock of truth for classical philosopher kings, routed all the other bastions of propriety. Reason grasped reality with a strong, steady hand, just as it grounded wisdom’s alterity in the unbalanced humours and the

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natural excesses and deficiencies of sensory impairment, madness and idiocy. Reason dictated the abandonment of lusus naturae and the essential disposability of whatever challenged its sovereignty. Roman law established the paterfamilias as reason’s curator. He was invested with the power to oversee the honour and normate credentials of family and entourage. In Christendom, theology was reason’s mentor; scholastic dogma its heir. Catholic ‘reason’ preached its own inerrancy and preserved the right to its eristic enforcement. Reason – seduced by superstitious pontifications – used impairment to mediate between grace and disgrace, saint and sinner, and as a platform to identify if behaviour had its origins in good or evil. The allegorical fool was a spark for Renaissance humanism and Reformation. Pejorative representational scripts derived from the tropos of impairment were used by Western expansionists to rationalise the dehumanisation of African slaves and the aboriginal people of the New World. Popular reason invested in the pseudo-science of physiognomy traversed Western millennia holding together in the everyday imaginary the imbrication of impairment and degeneracy. Early modern rationalism forwent superstition for philosophical clarity, scientific observation and classificatory approaches to human anomaly that prefigured enlightenment and the recasting of the idiot as reason’s other. Order: Greek cosmology began with a narrative of utter chaos that was tamed by the pantheon of gods and heroes who battled monsters to keep the world from ruin. Polity is the embodiment of corporeal harmony. Nomos guards against the erosion of civility by defective tyranny or barbarism. Classical empires crushed disorder, for weakness in muscle or mind was intolerable as much in everyday life as in the prosecution of imperial war. Congenital disorder was dispatched anthropoemically with the same clinical virility as barbarian hordes. The order of Christendom was embodied in the necessity of suffering, a specialist role for disabled people. The faithful were held together in communion by eristic violence and consent centralised in dogmatic decree from Holy See, parish homilies and the ecstatic collectivism of liturgy and worship in which disabled people were ambiguously included and excluded as objects of charity and symptoms of sin. The corruption and abuse of charity for the purposes of normate salvation brought reformation; a movement for a new order. It produced an interregnum of chaos in which diabolical impairment, fool and mendicant played important parts in the sacred schism and the desacralising tendencies that it inaugurated. The signs of a new order of Modernity in Enlightenment suggested a future in which the jurisdiction of impairment would be institutionally managed and epistemologically conceded to the handle of normality. Normality announced its claim as an orderly measure of human validity with the emergence of the civilised, closed Protestant body. The able body was externalised in Western culture as the epitome of law and order. Justice: Impairment as a metaphor for disorder finds rough justice in the Western journey. In the pharmakos myth, disability is the main protagonist in a story of crime and punishment. It is the story of the just disposal of the embodiment of

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an offence beyond the boundaries of community. Impairment is the offence, and it is impairment that brings a disabled person into the purview of candidature for the pharmakos role. In addition, impairment was already a punishment before the scapegoat was chosen. It was already a punishment imposed by the legislature of the gods, for it was an offence or crime against community at birth and portended, in its congenital state, catastrophe and disaster. Impairment is always already both offence and offender, crime and punishment. Impairment need not do anything, need not offend to become an offence, for it is always already just to punish it. In matters of just desert, impairment has no agency for it is always already guilty. Ancient law could come knocking on the door of a disabled person whenever it felt like it, for it knew, in advance, that there was guilt within. Impairment needed no trial to be found guilty, for it was an offence per se. Impairment as both crime and punishment was beyond the scope of justice, for it constituted – by its very being – a loophole in the law that obviated due process. The disabled body is ‘unintelligible’ (Butler 2004) in the classical system of justice. It is right and righteous for the community to punish the offence of impairment and secure a peaceful future at the expense of it. It is proper and valid to punish impairment from the perspective of normate Proprium. It is, of necessity, ‘just treatment’. Cruelties committed in the name of community are not harsh, for they are legitimate and valid. From the perspective of disabled people, however, normate justice was founded on the sovereignty of a sacrifice that inverted ‘natural’ justice by confusing just desert with cruel mistreatment, moral legality with victimisation. It is for this reason that I have tried to chronicle in this book, the invalidating cultural processes that make disabled people good to mistreat. As an omen of disaster, impairment does not bode well for itself, for it portends its own maltreatment as scapegoat, chattel, play-thing, mendicant, or member of the ‘impotent poor’… spaces where the light of justice is dim and easily extinguished. It is worth revisiting Titchkosky and Michalko’s claim (2012: 113) that disability is ‘always already a problem’. I have suggested a concrete form for this problem that arises from the pharmakos myth. Disability is always already an offence and, therefore, always good to mistreat. Moral economy in Western culture embraces impairment as a figure that legitimately attracts the contempt, anger, hatred, disgust – in short, the vengefulness – of the non-disabled community. I have also argued that impairment has been conceptualised by the normate community as good to be good to. This, however, translates not even into a figment of justice in the classical world where the anthropoemic abandonment of impairment is intrinsic to moral order. The doctrine of Christian compassion is the spiritual platform for the conception of disabled people as good to be good to. Yet even in this realignment of the Western normate relationship to disability, just outcomes for disabled people are conspicuous by their absence. The system of Medieval charity is not based on a compassionate settlement for needy neighbours. It serves the institutional and spiritual needs of normate Proprium. In practice, self-serving pity was its emotional template. Charity expropriated disabled people’s suffering and vulnerability. It expropriated, therefore, the cultural

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representations of impairment through which disabled people had come to be ­recognised in the privileged Christian community that had already interpreted disability as suffering and vulnerability. Disabled people had no intrinsic value in the system of moral exchange that underpinned Christian charity. Though, in the system, disabled people earned, albeit precariously, an element of ‘­deservingness’, the good deeds of the normate community were heavily overdetermined by redemptive self-interest. In the Reformation, the element of deservingness spun out into secular jurisdiction for disability welfare. The system as it developed was curtailed by the ethical dubiety of its origins and by its consistency in pegging just reward to a pittance. Disabled people’s moral invalidity in Western culture is based on an historical process of their just moralisation as both good to mistreat and good to be good to. ‘Clean and proper’ subjects concerned for their ontological security shaped the experience of the disabled subject in history. The normate community has used impairment as the measure of human propriety as it has been collated in the cultural ideals of beauty, truth, reason, order and justice. Disabled lives have been lived in Western culture at the dusty, barren edge of ontological validity. What other group of social actors can claim a history of agency so inextricably tied to such a testing agenda? On this view, validity for disabled people is not simply a matter of celebrating difference through the promotion of participative democracy as civil republicans and some feminists (Young 1990) suggest. Left critically uninterrogated by this view, is the ableism of the non-disabled imaginary in which recognition of validity of impairment is an emotional step too far for ‘clean and proper bodies’ that are psychologically unable to recognise their own vulnerability and abjection. Left untold – in this history and any other – is the tale of how disabled people, represented as ‘eternal victims’, have been quite the opposite. They have been agents against the odds; history’s high achievers given the grinding nature of their circumstances as practical symbols of moral negativity in the Western Proprium. Impairment has been accused of offending cultural routine and habit, of upsetting ingrained ways of comportment and being-in-the-world. The community that distributed the existential plaudits of collective life acquired this ‘sacred’ role by abandoning impairment to poverty and impropriety. The harvest of community in which the common bonds of belonging rejoice was invalidly reaped. In displacing its mortal fears, Western community used the disavowal of its originary other as the basis of moral life. Impairment was conceived as disrupter of praxeological comfort, spoiler of faith in embodiment, the antithesis of the reward of ‘social recognition’ (Bourdieu 1977). The normate agent, standing before a mirror of well-formed bodies and minds, was seduced by the comforting sensibility that, at the core, everything – on ref lection was clean and proper. I have noted elsewhere, the pressing need for the development of a ‘critical social ontology’ for disability that requires, in the first instance, the analysis, historical and contemporary, of the ‘pathologies of non-disablement’ (Hughes 2007: 683). These ‘pathologies’ operate at a number of different levels and embody

352  Conclusion

injustices that do violence to impairment – actual and symbolic – undermining disabled people’s social presence, credibility and standing. A ‘critical social ontology’ for disability is a deconstructive tool designed to expose the invalidating sensibilities of ableism. In the bowels of the normate, imaginary meanings of disability are produced. It is to this unsavoury place that one must go in order to examine the bilious processes and practices of validity and invalidity. We have not yet learned to live in comfort with what we are and what we will become. We live in fear of our future, more so now than perhaps at any other time in history (Bauman 2006). This is why when we ask the question ‘how do we want to live?’ – the same question we have asked since Antiquity – we are seduced by vainglorious fantasies of human perfection that have been held up by Western culture as role models. Eudemonia; Christian salvation; utopias of the deserving; heroes and saints; at one with infinity, omnipotence, the almighty. Hubristic fantasies provide soil and seed from which grow the invalidating strategies, repertoires and practices that have damaged disabled lives. Perfection is a tyrannical aspiration. Our attitude to our own humanity is precisely what we need to unlearn. Montaigne (1588) provides a starting point: I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself. A foundation of collective, sceptical self-knowledge, including scepticism about the cherished principles and beliefs of the hubristic Western ego, should help all of us to begin to appreciate how to extricate ourselves from the bad faith of the delusional ontology of human validity and invalidity.

References Anderson, M. (2003) Whitewashing race: A critical perspective on whiteness, pp. 21–34 in A. Doane and W. Bonilla-Silva (Eds.) White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear, Oxford: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Cherney, J. (2011) The rhetoric of ableism, Disability Studies Quarterly, 31(3). Online at: http://dsq-sdsorg/article/view/1665/1606 (Accessed 22/10/2014). Doane, A. (2003) Rethinking whiteness studies, pp. 3–20 in A. Doane and W. BonillaSilva (Eds.) White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, London: Routledge. Esposito, R. (2010) Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Garner, S. (2010) Racisms: An Introduction, London: Sage. Gramsci, A. (1971) Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Conclusion 

353

Hughes, B. (2007) Being disabled: Towards a critical social ontology for disability studies, Disability & Society, 22(7): 673–684. Kearney, R. (2002) Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, London: Routledge. Kirby, D. and Coleborne, C. (2002) Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Montaigne, M. (1588) Essays, Book 3: Of Cripples. Online at: http:​//www​.aber​.ac.u​k /~jm​ cwww/​Monta ​igne/​essay​105.h​t ml (Accessed 20/10/08). Plumbwood, V. (1997) Androcentrism and anthropocentrism: Parallels and politics, pp. 327–355 in K. Waren (Ed.) Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Said, E. (2003) Orientalism, London: Penguin Books. Titchkosky, T. and Michalko, R. (2012) The body as the problem of individuality: A phenomenological disability studies approach, pp. 215–240 in D. Goodley, B. Hughes and L. Davis (Eds.) Social Theories of Disability: New Developments, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

INDEX

Abberley, P. 88 ability, validity 107 able-centrism 347 ableism 26, 32, 59, 89–95, 125–8, 158, 344–5 ableist aesthetic 273 Act for the Relief of the Poor (1601) 319, 321 acts of mercy 244–6 Adam 202; ‘the fall’ 211–12 ADL (Anti-Discrimination Legislation) 52 Aesop 174 aesthetic ableism 286 aesthetics: Antiquity 122–5; Early Modernity 271–86 affirmative model 61 African bodies 306–8 Agamben, G. 155, 162 agape, Christian Middle Ages 253 agathos (virtue) 125 Agesilaus 150 Alberti, L. B. 275 Alexander the Great 133 Allport, G. 99 almsgiving 251; England, Early Modernity 315 alms-houses, Christian Middle Ages 250–1 ambiguity, Christian Middle Ages 217–18 Ancient Greece see Greece Anderson, B. 94 anthropocentricity 346–7 anthropoemic strategy, invalidation 103 Anthropophagi 133

anthropophagy 103 Anti-Discrimination Legislation (ADL) 52 Antiquity 119, 122; ableism 125–8; aesthetics 122–5; arete 120; monstrosity 131–4; physiognomic consciousness 163–4 Apocolocyntosis 117–19 Apollo 165 Aquinas, T. 192–3, 201–2, 207, 237, 251, 292 arete 119, 175; Greece and Rome 120–35 Aristotle 14, 94, 122, 124, 128–30, 133, 139, 148, 152; blindness 160; deafness 158; infanticide 138; sight 168; virtue ethics 173 art, Christian Middle Ages 234–42 artificial fools 327 Asclepius 142 askesis (mastery of self ) 121 asylums, Christian Middle Ages 249 Atherton, C. 125 athleticism, Greek and Roman 125–7 attitudinal barriers 57 Augustine 137, 186, 188, 199, 201–2, 204–5, 220; monsters 236; monstrosity 298; original sin 211; witches 290 autism 65 Avicenna 299 Bacon, F. 281–2 bad to meet 224 Baker, N. 272

356 Index

Bakhtin, M. 231, 234 banishment 162 baptism for monsters 301 barbari 308 barbarism 23 barbaros 159 Barker, C. 69 Barnes, C. 42, 54, 231 Barney, R. 120 barriers for the disabled 56–59 ‘barriers to being’ 57–8, 67 Barrow, R. 125 Barton, C. 123, 171 Bauman, Z. 103, 268 Baumbach, S. 306 Baynton, D. 22, 304 beauty 124, 347–8; Christian Middle Ages 207; Early Modernity 277 beauty surgery 276 beggars, Early Modernity 315–21 belonging 69 Benjamin, Walter 23 Bernidaki-Aldous, E. 169 bestiary 238 Bethlem Hospital (London) 249 Bildhauer, B. 235, 272 Billington, S. 234 Bishop of Hippo 224 black skin 313–14 Blemmyae 133 blind people, Rome 149 blindness 234; Christian Middle Ages 228; Early Modernity 281, 286; Greece and Rome 160, 163–72 Blunt, A. 315–16 bodily habits, Early Modernity 285 body regimes, Middle Ages 241 Bordo, S. 98 Borsay, A. 42 Bosch, H. 278–81 Bourdieu, P. 85 Braddock, D. 243 Bragg, L. 198 Brant, S. 321 Brewer, E. 61 Bridewell 317 Brisson, L. 149 British Empire 307 Brock, B. 187, 204 Brown, K. 307 Bruegel, P. 281 Brueggemann, B. 159 Bryant, C. 283 Burke, E. 304

Burkert, W. 157 Butler, J. 6 Bynum, C. W. 206 Caesar, Augustus 147 Caesar, Julius 142, 170 calamity 4 Calhoun, C. 33 Caligula 118 Calvin, J. 331 Calvinism 330 Calvinist 269 Campbell, F.K. 3, 24, 65, 89 Canguilhem, G. 44 Canizares-Esguerra, G. 293, 311 capitalism 42, 62; industrial capitalism 98 Caravaggio 244 cardinal sins 213; blindness 234 Carew, J. 311 Caring for the Sick 247 caritas, Christian Middle Ages 242–54 Carlson, L. 44 carnal knowing 227 Carson, A. 30 Carus, P. 234, 289 Cathars 291–2 Catholicism 254, 268; baptism for monsters 301; Early Modernity 269; exorcism 292; inquisition 290–2; monstrosity 298 CDS (Critical Disability Studies) 61–5, 70 Cessario, R. 191 changelings 296, 301–4 chantries, Christian Middle Ages 251 Chapman, C. 310 charitable institutions, Christian Middle Ages 249 charity 7, 28, 183; Christian Middle Ages 242–54; Protestantism 331 chattel slavery 136 Christ incarnate, Christian Middle Ages 206 Christendom 7, 349; Medieval Christendom see Medieval Christendom Christian Middle Ages 184; ambiguity 217–18; art 234–42; charity 242–54; comedy 229–34; eristic tradition 185–9; God, church, and state 189–98; heresy 187; humankind 203; imago dei 199–200; irenic tradition 189; masculinity 202–3; moral economy 218–23; original sin 203; parental sin 192; reason 204; sin 210–18; slavery

Index  357

191; theological invalidations 198–210; theomorphism 203–4; wonders of God 224–9 Christianity 8, 348; eristic tradition (Middle Ages) 185–9; European expansionism 305; missionaries 312; slavery 309–10; women 201–3 chronology 32 Chrysostom, J. 224, 230 Cicero 121, 136, 158, 167, 170 circumcision, Greece and Rome 131 Cistercian Order 242 citizen insider 23 citizenship (Greece and Rome) 117–18 The City of God 204, 220, 311; monstrosity 236 civic virtue 247 classic revivalism, Early Modernity 271–86 ‘Classical Centuries’ 24 classical revivalism 348; Early Modernity 306 Claudius 117–19, 146–7 Clement of Alexandria 201 cloak of validity 95 Code Noir 308 Cohen, J. 235 Coleborne, C. 308 Coleridge, P. 296 collective self-realisation 86 ‘colonizing genocide’ 309 Columbus, C. 310–11 comedy, Christian Middle Ages 229–34 community (Proprium) 7–9, 35–6; invalidation 100 compassion 152 conceptual proliferation 59–61 confession 225 confinement 98–9 Conrat, T. 232 Contemporary Disability Studies (CDS) 42, 61–5, 70 contest culture, Rome 123 Copernicus 268 Corker, M. 100 Corporal Works of Mercy 245–6 Corporealities 64 correction 4 corrupted virtue 203 counterfeit disability 319 Covey, H. 166 cripistemologies 64 cripping 63 cripples 193

Cripples (Bosch) 279 Critical Autism Studies 65 Critical Disability Studies (CDS) 42, 61–5, 70 Critical Race Studies 66 critical race theory 63 ‘critical social ontology’ 351–2 Croce, B. 29, 31 “culpa” 191 cultural model of disability 62–3 Cynocephali 133 da Vinci, L. 273–4 dancing plagues 240, 288–9 dangerous idiots 328 Dante 240, 272 dark subjects, Early Modernity 304–14 darkness 168 Daston, L. 300 Davis, L. 93 D/deaf community 40 De Architetura 273 De Clavasio, A. 226 De Las Casas, B. 309–10 deafness 158; Christian Middle Ages 224–7 death 27–8 deficit of credibility, invalidation 100–2 ‘deformed discourse’ 241 deformity, Early Modernity 271–2 Dejeuner, T. 61 Della Casa, G. 271 Demiourgos 124 Democritus 160 demonopathy 288 demons: art in the Middle Ages 235–42; Early Modernity 286–97 Demosthenes 159, 174 Denery, D. 227 Descartes, R. 332 Deutsch, H. 304 devil 286–7; Middle Ages 238–9 devotio 157 Diderot, D. 304 Diotima 124 disabelism 89, 97 disability aesthetics 273 disability bioethics 43 disability history 21–5, 83 disability invalidation 71, 85 disability ontology 44 disability perspective 3 Disability Studies 41, 50–2 disability theology 254–5

358 Index

disabled ‘entertainers’ 145 Disabled Peoples International 54 Disabled People’s Movement 41, 50–2 disabled scapegoat (Greece and Rome), pharmakos 155–62 disablement 97 DisCrit 63 disgust 280 disposable bodies 136; legal invalidations 142–5; leisure invalidations 145–50; medical invalidations 140–2; military invalidations 150–2; political invalidations 136–42; religious invalidations 152–4 dispossession 292–3 disvalue 97 Dollimore, J. 151 Dolmage, J. 44, 158, 161 Domitian 170 Donatello 283 Douglas, M. 204, 212, 242, 250 DPM (Disabled People’s Movement) 50 Drake, H. 187 Duffy, E. 244 Durkheim, E. 72 ‘dustbin of disavowal’ 5 dwarfs 148, 170, 230 Early Modernity 266–7; aesthetics 271–86; classic revivalism 271–86; dark subjects 304–14; demons and witches 286–97; fools 321–8; interregnum 268–71; monstrosity 297–304; Protestant body 328–33; social dislocation 315–21 Ebenstein, W. 287 Edwards, M. 172 Eiesland, N. 214 Elias, N. 99, 193–4 emblem books, Early Modernity 285 Emperor Claudius 117 Emperor Vitellius 123 Enders, J. 233 Engels, F. 98 Epicurus 122 epilepsy 142 era of ridicule, Christian Middle Ages 229–34 Erasmus 321–3 Erevelles, N. 64 Erikson, F. 318 eristic tradition 184; Christian Middle Ages 185–9; Reformation 293; violence 310

Eros 124 eternal life, Protestantism 331–2 Ethiop 313 ethnicity, Greece and Rome 134 ethnocentrism 347 Eucharist 227 eudemon 121, 136 eudemonia 118–19 eugenic aesthetics 348 eugenic Atlantic 14 eugenic politics, disposable bodies (Greece and Rome); legal invalidations 142–5; leisure invalidations 145–50; medical invalidations 140–1; military invalidations 150–2; political invalidations 136–40 eugenics, Early Modernity 278 European expansionism 305 Evans, E. 163 Eve 202–3; ‘the fall’ 211–12 exile 162 exorcism 292 eyes, culture of appearance (Greece and Rome) 163–72 ‘the fall’ 211–12 Fancis of Assissi 253 fear 343–4 Featherstone, M. 88 Febvre, J. 269 Feeding the Hungry (Master of Alkmaar) 247 Felton, D. 132, 133 femininity 98 Fenton, S. 305 Feuerbach, L. 91 Fiedler, L. 231 first wave radicalism, social model of disability 52–9 Fletcher, J. 314 f lyting 230 Fogen, T. 168 folly, Early Modernity 321–8 fools: Christian Middle Ages 230–4; Early Modernity 321–8 forced sterilisation 2 Foucault, M. 32, 121, 295, 309 Franciscans 253 Fraser, Nancy 87–8 Fredal, A. 159 Freeman, D. 255 Friedman, J. 311 Fuller, S. 332 furiosi 144 furore 286

Index  359

Gabel, S. 61 Gaber, M. 283 Gadamer, H.G. 31 Gaddis, M. 185 Galen 133, 142, 165, 171 Garden of Earthly Delight (Bosch) 279–80 Garland, R. 118, 122, 143, 147, 163 Garland-Thomson, R. 24, 60, 69 Giving Drink to the Thirsty (Master of Alkmaar) 247–8 Gleeson, B. 187 globalisation, Early Modernity 305 God, church, and state, Christian Middle Ages 189–98 gods, Greece and Rome 153–4 ‘God’s penny’ 251 God’s tease, Christian Middle Ages 218–23 The Golden Legend 222 Goldsmith, R. 326 good to be good to 84, 350–1; invalidation 100 good to mistreat 8, 84, 122, 305; African chattels 308 Goodey, C. 304, 322, 324 Goodley, D. 2, 3, 90 Goodrich, P. 285–6 graciosi 209 Gramsci, A. 87, 268, 344 Grand Seigneurs 249 Great Peasants War (Germany) 316 Greece: arete 120–35; blindness 163–72; citizenship 118; disabled scapegoat (Greece and Rome) 155–62; disposable bodies 136–54; medical invalidations 140–2; military invalidations 150–2 Greenblatt, S. 31 Guinea-Bissau, Papel people 13 gymnasia 121, 126–8 Hadrian 139 Hagglund, M. 200 hagiographies 222 Harman, T. 319–20 harmonious representation 275 Hartsock, C. 164, 166–7, 169, 228 hate 101 hate crimes 1 heathens, Early Modernity 304–14 Hecker, J. 240 Hegel 70, 85 Heidegger, M. 65 Helios 168 Henry VIII 269, 328 Hephaestus 154, 160–1, 287

Hera 160–1 Heraclitus 129, 167 Hercules 117–19 heresy 290; Christian Middle Ages 187 Herndl, D. 98 Herodotus 118–19, 133 Hippocrates 142, 167 history of disability 39–44 Hobbes, T. 269, 343 holy matter, Christian Middle Ages 206–8 holy violence 267; Christian Middle Ages 186–9 Homer 132 Honneth, A. 88 Horace 137 hospitality, Christian Middle Ages 250 Hughes, B. 53, 93, 96–7, 162, 281 Huizinga, J. 194 human corporeal perfection 122 human wholeness, Christian Middle Ages 204–5 humanism 270; Renaissance 267–8 humankind, Christian Middle Ages 203 Hume, D. 103, 308 humiliation 146–7 humor, Christian Middle Ages 229–34 Hutchinson, N. 331 Hyde, M. 120 Hypatia 186 ICIDH-2 (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) 65 idea normate 92 idiots 231–2 Iliad 126, 155, 160 imago creationis 202 imago dei 199–200; Christian Middle Ages 197 Imitatio Christi 222 impairment 6; history of, 39–44 impairment effects 65 impairment groups 40 imperialism, Early Modernity 305 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 322 ‘incapacity through confinement,’ invalidation 98–100 indigenous impairment 306 industrial capitalism 98 infanticide 2; Greece and Rome 136–8; legal invalidations 142–5; medical invalidations 140–1; Papel people (Guinea-Bissau) 13; religious invalidations 152

360 Index

inferiority, representation of 276 Innocent III 221, 224, 291 Innocent VIII 290, 293 inquisition, Catholicism 290–2 insane persons 144 inter alia 174, 199 International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICIDH-2) 65 interregnum, Early Modernity 268–71 intersectional considerations 63–7 invalidation 24, 87, 95–107; legal invalidations 142–5; leisure invalidations 145–50; medical invalidations 140–2; military invalidations 150–2; political invalidations 136–42; religious invalidations 152–4 iran (non-human) 13 irenic tradition 184; Christian Middle Ages 189; colonisation 310 Isaac, B. 172 Isadore of Seville 236 itinerancy 317–18 Jamroziak, E. 242 Jay, M. 168 Jenks, C. 163 Jesus, removal of demons 293 Jewish law 224 Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 65 justice 349–50 justice of suffering, Christian Middle Ages 252 Juvenal 129 kalos (physical beauty) 125 kalos kagathos 172 Kennedy, S. 306 Kennell, N. 125 Keres 130 kingship, Christian Middle Ages 191 Kirby, D. 308 Kleege, G. 166 Knox, John 294–5 Kolakowski, L. 190 Kramer, H. 295 Krammer, H. 293 Kromm, J. 289 Krotzl, C. 30 Kuuliala, J. 30 Kuusisto, S. 96

‘ladder of love’ 124 Laes 163 Lash, S. 88 laughter 167; Christian Middle Ages 230–1 lay morality 36–7 legal invalidations, disposable bodies 142–5 leisure invalidations, disposable bodies 145–50 Levack, B. 291, 296 Levick, B. 147 Lévi-Strauss, C. 103 Leviticus 215 Liber Vagatorum (1528) 318 Life 27–8 light, Greece and Rome 166–72 light skin 313–14 Linton, S. 29, 92 Literary Disability Studies Book Series 65 literature: Renaissance 281–2; rogue literature 319–20 liturgical drama 233 Long, E. 305 Longmore, P. 96, 282 love, Christian Middle Ages 253 Luther, M. 226, 266, 287, 296, 318, 320, 330; changelings 301–4; monsters 298; monstrosity 300 Lycurgus 142 ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’ 244 MacCulloch, D. 266 mad people: asylums 249; Christian Middle Ages 251 madness 289 Malleus Maleficarum 293–5 Malory 220 malum culpae 191–2 malum poenae 191–2, 217, 222 Marshall, J. 268, 302 Martin, R. 148 masculinity 98; Christian Middle Ages 202–3; Greece and Rome 139–40 Massacre of Verdun 189 Master of Alkmaar 246–7 Master’s polyptych 248 mastery of self (askesis) 121 material barriers 58 Mauss, M. 242 McClintock, A. 305, 307 McIntosh, M. 250 medical fools, Early Modernity 324–5 medical invalidations, disposable bodies 140–2

Index  361

medicine 28 Medieval Christendom 182; original sin 203; redemption 184 Medusa 132 melete 121 Mellor, P. 227, 229, 241 Meltzer, I. 41–2 Mendelssohn, M. 173–4 mercy killings 2 meta-narrative of impairment 104 methodological self-consciousness 25–9 Metis 161 Metzler, I. 187, 222 Michalko, R. 3–4, 161, 350 Middle Ages, Christian Middle Ages see Christian Middle Ages Mikton, C. 2 military invalidations, disposable bodies 150–2 Miller, S. 120 Miller, W. 280 Mills, C. Wright 5, 43 Mills, R. 235, 272 Milton, J. 125, 286–7, 312 Mintz, S. 255 miracle of chastisement 222 miracles, Christian Middle Ages 218–23 missionaries, Early Modernity 312 Mitchell, D. 2, 14, 22–3, 31, 167, 193, 282 Modern Protestant body 330 Monasticism 330 Monopods 133 monster paraphernalia, Rome 170 monsters 145, 345–6; art in the Middle Ages 234–42; Early Modernity 297–304 monstrosity 138; Antiquity 131–4; Christian Middle Ages 206; Greece and Rome 131–4; vagabonds and beggars, Early Modernity 315–21 monstrous races 311 Montaigne, M. 283, 352 ‘Moor’ 313–14 Moore, R. 291 moral deficiency 325 moral economy 8–9, 36–8, 82; Christian Middle Ages 194, 218–23; Early Modernity 288; recognition 85–9 Moral Letters to Lucullus (Seneca) 130 moral precarity 83 moral regulation 35 More, T. 314, 333 Moses 215 Muller, A. 64

Murphy, R. 68 Murray, S. 69 Mustakallio, K. 30 nationalism 309 natural fool, Early Modernity 325 natural fools 326–7 need 53 new historicism 29–35 New Social Movements 63 newborns, medical validations 141 Nicolaides 160 Nietzsche, F. 128, 174–5 ‘night of the world’ 270 nomos 90, 134; Early Modernity 308 non-disability 7, 26, 34, 93–4, 347 non-disabled imaginary 71–2 Nordic ‘relational model’ of disability 61 normal 7 normality 62 normate fear 343 normative violence 6 not quite human 102 Nussbaum, F. 134, 139, 304 Nussbaum, M. 65, 99 Oberammergau Passion Play 233 Occidental Proprium 306 ocular-centric culture, Greece and Rome 163–72 Oedipus myth 157, 165–6, 172 Oedipus Tyrannus 165 Of Monsters and Prodigies (Pare) 320 Old Testament 215 Oliver, Mike 52, 54, 60 Olympians 126 O’Neil, J. 252 order 349 Orientalism 345 original sin, Christian Middle Ages 203, 211–12 ostensive self-definition by negation 5 Othello (Shakespeare) 314 O’Tool, M. 211 outsider-insider 24 Oylan, S. 206 Papacy, Christian Middle Ages 190 Papel people (Guinea-Bissau) 13 Paracelsus 288–9, 324 Paradise Lost (Milton) 286 Pare, A. 276–7, 297–8, 320 parental sin, Christian Middle Ages 192 Parish, S. 243

362 Index

Park, K. 300 paterfamilias 143–5 Paterson, K. 59 Paul 201 peering normalcy 71 Pelagius 211 perfection 92, 123–4, 272–3 personal tragedy 59 perspectival dualism 87 perspectivism 272, 275 pharmakos 349–50; disabled scapegoat (Greece and Rome) 155–62 Philip of Macedonia 150 Philo of Alexandria 208–9 philosophy, Greece and Rome 129–30 physical beauty (kalos) 125 physiognomic consciousness, Antiquity 163–4 physiognomy 122, 163–7 physiogonmic consciousness, Christian Middle Ages 208 pillars of disability invalidation 85 Plato 124, 130, 133, 136, 143, 152; blindness 160; infanticide 136–7; sight 168 Platter, T. 325 playful fools, Early Modernity 326–7 Pliny the Elder 133–4 Plutarch 121, 164 “Poenae” 191 Polemon 164–5 political invalidations, disposable bodies 136–42 Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius 273 Pope Gregory 213 Pope Gregory IX 290 Pope Innocent III 221, 224, 291 Pope Innocent VIII 290, 293 Pope John XXII 290 Pope Paul III 306 Pope Urban II 241 portents, Greece and Rome 153–4 Porter, R. 202 portrait sculpture, Renaissance 283–4 positive eugenics 137 possessed self 289–92 posture, Early Modernity 285 power, Christian Middle Ages 189–98 prayer, deaf people 225 predestination 331 prepuce (foreskin), Greece and Rome 131 Prodigy Book 299 propriety 21, 89, 344; moral economy 85–9

Proprium (community) 7–9, 35–6; invalidation 100; slavery 308 Protestant body, Early Modernity 328–33 proto-racist 172 punishment, Christian Middle Ages 193 Puritans: dispossession 292–3; Satan 294 purity, Christian Middle Ages 212–13 Pythagoras 165 Quarmby, K. 145–6 queering 63–7 queery theory 63 Quem-Quaertis (Who Do You Seek?) 233 race 305–6 racial difference 305–7 radiance, Christian Middle Ages 207 radical atheism 200 radicalism: conceptual proliferation, Critical Disability Studies, and growth of cultural model of disability 59–73; social model of disability 52–9 rank, Christian Middle Ages 193 Raphael, R. 203 real utopias 86 Real Utopias Project (Wright 1995) 86 reason 129–31, 348–9; Christian Middle Ages 204 recognition 84–9 redemption, Medieval Christendom 184 redistribution 87 Reformation 266; Catholicism 269 see also Early Modernity rehabilitation 103 relics, Christian Middle Ages 221 religious invalidations, disposable bodies 152–4 Renaissance 266, 267, 270; humanism 267–8; literature 281–2; portrait sculpture 283–4 see also Early Modernity repertoires of invalidation 104–5 resistance theories of disability 61 revivalism, Early Modernity 271–86 Reynolds, T. 199 Richard the Third (Shakespeare) 281–4 Ricoeur, P. 212 riots 37–8 Ripa, C. 285–6 rogue literature 319–20 Rome 118; arete 120–35; blindness 163– 72; citizenship 118; disabled scapegoat 155–162; disposable bodies 136–54 Romulus 143, 153

Index  363

Roper, A. G. 172 Rose, A. 214 Rose, M. 29–30, 166 Roulstone, A. 14 Rowe, C. 129 ‘Rule of Benedict’ 250 Runswick-Cole, K. 2 Russell, J. 292 Said, E. 104, 345 Saint Albertus Magnus 299 Saint Augustine 137, 199, 201–2, 204–5; monsters 236; monstrosity 298; original sin 211; witches 290 Saint Francis of Assisi 228 Saint Jerome 226 Saint Marie d’Oignies 220–1 Saint Simeon 205 saints, Christian Middle Ages 218–23 salvation 249; almsgiving 252 Samama, E. 151 Saracen 235, 241 Sartre 93 Satan 286 savages, Early Modernity 304–14 Sayer, A. 83 scapegoats, pharmakos (Greece and Rome) 155–62 scathed 200–1; 213–14 Schillmeier, M. 21, 44, 62, 67–8 Schlegel, F. 122 Schlegel, R. 64 Sciopods 133 scoliosis 141 Scully, J. L. 43–4 second wave of radicalism, conceptual proliferation, Critical Disability Studies, and growth of cultural model of disability 59–73 Selene 142 self-government 173 self-knowledge 173 self-loathing 89 Sen, Amartya 65 Seneca 117, 118, 137, 143, 148 sensory impairment 228 Sepulveda, J. 309–10 The Seven Works of Mercy (1607) 244–8 sex, monstrosity 299 Shakespeare, T. 2, 5, 68, 106, 146 Shakespeare, W. 281–4 Shapiro, A. 230 ‘shared facticity,’ ableism 91 Shildrick, M. 67, 202

Shilling, C. 227, 229, 241 Siebers, Tobin 2, 65, 68, 71–2, 122, 273, 276, 278 sight 160 sin, Christian Middle Ages 210–18 Singer, P. 138 sinners, Christian Middle Ages 218–23 Sittlichkeit (ethics) 88 Skeggs, B. 288, 315 slave trade, Early Modernity 305–6 slavery 306–8; Christian Middle Ages 191 slaves, 136, 140 Snyder, S. 2, 14, 22–23, 31, 167, 193, 282 social dislocation, Early Modernity 315–21 social exclusion 87 ‘social imaginary’ 94 social invalidation 96 social model of disability 50, 52–9 social rejection 88 Socrates 122, 128, 143, 174–5 soldiers, military invalidations (Greece and Rome) 150–2 Sommers, W. 328 Soranus of Ephesus 141 Sorbin, A. 300 sovereignty, Early Modernity 308–9 Spartan Council of Elders, infanticide 142–3 Spartans 125–6 ‘speaking tools’ 136 speech impairments 158–9 Spenser 272 spiritual marriage, Christian Middle Ages 208 Sprenger, J. 293, 295 St Albertus Magnus 201 St Ambrose 318 St Benedict 222 St Francis 253 St Thomas 292 Stagg, K. 40, 298, 300, 321 Stainton, T. 30, 173, 204–5, 328 ‘stairway to heaven,’ Christian Middle Ages 242–54 Stiker, H.J. 4, 24, 32, 103, 130, 194, 235, 243 Stobart, J. 123 Stoics 122 strange boy from Dessau 302 strategies of invalidation 102–3 Suetonius 146–7 suicide, military invalidations (Greece and Rome) 151

364 Index

Summa Angelica 226 symbolic violence 231 symmetry 275 syphilis 276 Sznaider, N. 152, 252 Tagliacozzi, G. 276 Taylor, C. 85, 225–6 Teiresias 165, 169 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 314 Tertullian 201 thauma 125 theater, Middle Ages 233 theological fools, Early Modernity 322–4 theological invalidations, Christian Middle Ages 198–210 theomorphism 200, 203–4 theory of monstrosity 315 Thersites 155 Thomas, A. 213 Thomas, C. 57–8, 65, 67 Thompson, E.P. 37–8, 50, 89, 317 Titchkosky, T. 4, 70, 91, 120, 350 Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1357) 235 Trentin, L. 166, 170 tropos 37 truth 348 Turner, D. 40, 270, 329 Tyndale, W. 314 ugliness 124, 275 Umanisti 325 Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) 54 United Nations Children’s Fund 2 the unscathed 200 UPIAS (Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation) 54 use-value 145–6 vagabonds, Early Modernity 315–21 Vagrancy and Poor Relief Act (1572) 319 validity 7, 82–3; abililty 107 Van Lommel, H. 151 Vandeventer Pearman, T. 98–9, 202, 244–6 vassalage, Christian Middle Ages 190

Verstraete, P. 24 Victorian era, femininity 98 Victorian Poor Law 318–19 Vigarello, G. 277, 285 violence 1–2; holy violence 186–9, 267; normative violence 6; symbolic violence 231 virtue 123; civic virtue 247; corrupted virtue 203 virtue (agathos) 125 virtue ethics 173 Vitellius 123 Vitruvian Man (da Vinci) 273–4 Vitruvius, M. 273–4 Voltaire 304–5 vow of silence 226 Vulcan 154 Vulgate 217 Wallerstein, E. 266 Watermeyer, B. 26 Welcoming Strangers 247 well-born 136 Wendell, S. 12 wergild (man-price) 193 Western civilisation 14 Wheatley, E. 24, 216, 222, 228, 233 white 347 White, H. 5, 34, 200 Williams, D. 241 Winkelmann, J. J. 123 Winzer, M. 144–5, 149, 195, 214 witch hunts 294–5 witches, Early Modernity 286–97 women: Christianity 201–3; Greece and Rome 139–40; witches 294 wonders of God, Christian Middle Ages 224–9 Woodbridge, L. 319–20, 327 The Works of Mercy 246 Wright, A. 132 Wright, E. O. 86 Yong, A. 255 Young, I. M. 86 Zola, I. 95