#irina metzler

[dwellordream]

DISABLED CHILDREN: BIRTH DEFECTS, CAUSALITY AND GUILT

“In his book on intellectual disabilities, Chris Goodey draws illuminating parallels between the medical and psychological description of modern ‘coping strategy’. Parents in the contemporary Western world are informed by the experts (obstetricians, paediatricians and so forth) that their child is disabled. Almost as a reciprocal gesture, those experts expect parents to demonstrate a ritualised hierarchy of reactions (among others initial shock, followed by rejection of the child, leading to acceptance of the diagnosis). 

This is termed the ‘coping strategy’, and is comparable to the pre-modern version of such a ‘desanctification ritual’, in which supernatural agents such as devils, witches or fairies were blamed for producing the ‘wrong’ child. So, what caused the ‘wrong’ child according to medieval notions? Medieval thought has commonly used the imagery of the microcosmos, whereby the human body represents on the small scale the ordering and hierarchy of the wider world on the large scale. 

William of Conches (c.1090–c.1160) stated in his Sacramentarium that the body from head to foot is likened to all of creation. By analogy, what can go wrong with the macrocosmos, i.e., the corruption of the world through sin, can also go wrong with the microcosmos, i.e., the corruption of the body through illness. Refinements and additions were made throughout the high Middle Ages to this basic notion. 

In particular, the entire business of engendering children was focused upon in terms of the analogy of the corporeal and the spiritual. Of fundamental importance was the notion of sin, especially Original Sin. Augustine, writing in the late fourth century, had set the tone: though God had given humans the capability for sexual intercourse, and in essence the act was good, in practice every concrete act of intercourse was evil and therefore every child could literally be said to have been conceived in the sin of its parents.

Such ideas went a long way. By the thirteenth century a bestiary compiler could say that all new-borns, of all species, are ‘dirty’: ‘In fact, all recently born creatures are called “pulli”, because they are born dirty or polluted’, and only the act of baptism both metaphorically and literally cleans the infant. Given the fact that human beings only enter this world by procreation, one may then ask how, in medieval aetiologies, temporal factors and the actual practices of intercourse determined the appearance and character of the child. 

In a series of translations of writings known as the Pseudo-Clementines from Greek into Latin as The Recognitions around AD 410 by Rufinus, texts which were very popular in the Middle Ages and survive in numerous manuscripts, a passage states that sexual incontinence is accompanied by demons whose ‘noxious breath’ produces an ‘intemperate and vicious progeny … And therefore parents are responsible for their children’s defects of this sort, because they have not observed the law of intercourse’.

Here, in late Antiquity, we already have the main line of argument that was to be pursued throughout the Middle Ages, which can be summed up as follows: intercourse at the wrong time and in the wrong way will result in the birth of defective children. The Chronicon Salernitanum (chapter 14), written in the tenth century, mentions a woman who conceived by a priest and whose child was born without bones, which demonstrates, sneers the chronicler, that her repentance had not been stiffened with true contrition.

Gratian in the mid twelfth century cites a letter by Boniface suggesting that corrupt sexual unions would produce corrupt children. And in an early fifteenth-century sermon Bernardino of Siena links neglect of filial duty with the punishment of begetting crippled, ugly, foolish and corrupt children. However, a seemingly dissenting theory was proposed on the grounds of logical reasoning by Albertus Magnus, who turned the emergent notion of hereditary traits on its head. 

Possibly with a hint of irony Albertus claims that wise fathers beget foolish children, while foolish parents breed wise offspring: ‘wise men mostly produce defective, foolish (fatui) children … because he who is good at study is bad at sex (malus in venero acto)’, since ‘sex is the most foolish act a wise man commits in all his life’, therefore the reverse must be true as well, and ‘simple men’ have wise offspring.

Nevertheless, medieval notions of heredity were far from comparable with the modern Mendelian, never mind genetic, concept of heredity, despite occasional random similarities. Although mid sixteenth century, Ambroise Paré’s work on monsters is still pertinent for discussion of the Middle Ages, since he cites many medieval examples of monstrosities, but also in mindset he is not far from medieval understandings of the monstrous. 

In chapter 13 he cites examples of monsters that are created by hereditary diseases, where intellectual disability and epilepsy are mentioned in close conjunction: ‘also if the father and the mother are fools usually the children are scarcely if ever intelligent (similarly epileptics give birth to children who are subject to epilepsy)’. 

By way of cultural comparison some evidence from the Islamic world may be useful, such as ideas from early twentieth-century Palestine cited by Dols: ‘Insanity could also be inherited; some people believed that coitus nudus, intercourse in the open, or during menstruation affected the mental state of the child.’

And in the hadith, the pious traditions in Islam, in treatises on Prophetic medicine the aetiology of mental disorder is sometimes mentioned, for instance by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya (d. 1350), The Medicine of the Prophet, who says that ‘a man who does not perform ghusl, or major ablutions, before sexual intercourse is responsible if his wife gives birth to a mentally retarded child’.

Most discussions in medieval treatises centre on the method used in intercourse. Any deviation from the one prescribed method (the so-called missionary position) was seen either to avoid the main purpose of the act, namely procreation, or if a child was conceived by any other method then it would ‘suffer deformities because of its parents’ aberrant practices’.

A popular work falsely ascribed in the Middle Ages to Albertus Magnus, De secretum mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), mentions three main reasons why defective children are born: firstly, if the woman did not lie absolutely still but actually moved during intercourse, the male seed ‘might be divided and a defective child conceived’; secondly, the woman should not let her thoughts wander during intercourse, but she should concentrate on what is going on, otherwise if at the critical moment she thought of something else, e.g. some animal like a cow, the child might turn out to resemble one; and thirdly, any non-standard coital position might result in birth defects in those children who were the results of their parents’ experiments in the conjugal bed.

Here we have an example of the immensely influential concept of the maternal imagination. During intercourse and/or pregnancy, the mother can be imprinted by images that she sees, which will affect the shape and nature of the unborn or even unconceived child. This belief can be traced back to at least the Old Testament, where in Genesis 30:25–43 Jacob placed striped branches in front of the sheep of Laban, so that all the offspring of that flock were born with striped fleeces, which Jacob claimed as his own. 

The topic is picked up in the early second century in a gynaecological text by Soranus, and again in Augustine’s treatise Against Julian, both of which tell the story of a disfigured Cyprian tyrant who had beautiful works of art placed in the bedroom, so that his wife would look at those during sex rather than him, and thus he would not father a disfigured child. 

Similarly, in the aforementioned thirteenth-century bestiary it is said that many people think that pregnant women should not look at ugly beasts such as apes and monkeys, in case they should bring children into the world who resemble these caricatures. For women’s nature is such that they produce offspring according to the image they see or have in mind at the moment of ecstasy as they conceive.

In the Renaissance, such classically-inspired ideas sustained and renewed their popularity; for example, in his astrological treatise Liber de vita of 1489, Marsilio Ficino mentions that ‘people who are making babies often imprint on their faces not only their own actions but even what they are imagining’, thus extending the maternal to a paternal imagination as well. In wealthy Italian households it became important to surround potential parents with desirable images, located strategically so that they could be regarded at key moments. 

Leon Battista Alberti repeated this belief in De re aedificatoria (1452) with regard to painted portraits in the bedchamber: ‘Wherever man and wife come together, it is advisable only to hang portraits of men of dignity and handsome appearance; for they say that this may have a great influence on the fertility of the mother and the appearance of future offspring.’ Additionally, astrological explanations were offered. 

An example can be found in the twelfth-century text Causae et curae by Hildegard of Bingen: though men know the proper time for agricultural activities yet they beget their own offspring at any time without regard to the proper period in their lives or to the ‘time of the moon’, and defective children are the likely outcome of such heedlessness.

In the more scientific work, as opposed to spurious texts attributed to him, Albertus Magnus (c. 1206–80) argues that deformed births could be a result of particular causes, which would be related to the paternal seed and the maternal reception thereof, while general causes could include the location and the relationship of the stars at the time of conception.

Albertus is not exactly certain which one of these causes is responsible, but he notes that some planetary conjunctions are recognised as particularly malicious, and points out that conception and birth should be avoided at such times. Specific problems might arise with regard to children born under a new moon, as they might be defective in sense and discretion.

 Albertus claims to have seen himself the results of astrologically mistimed conceptions on two occasions, where human beings were born with truncated arms and legs who ‘figuram corporis humani non habebit’ (will not have the appearance of a human body). 

For a popular expression of similar ideas one can look even farther back, finding them in Old English texts, which seems to indicate the antiquity and the persistence of these notions, whereby the characters and the fates of children are influenced by the position of the moon on the day they are born. We find that the food consumed by the pregnant woman could have an influence on the shape of the child as well, according to the same Anglo Saxon culture which produced such astrological treatises. 

In a collection of medical, astrological and magical texts we find the notions that ‘if a woman is four or five months pregnant and she frequently eats nuts or acorns or any fresh fruit then it sometimes happens because of that that the child is stupid’; furthermore, if the expectant mother eats flesh of bull, ram, buck, boar or gander ‘or that of any animal which can beget, then it sometimes happens because of that that the child is humpbacked and deformed [?]’.

It is worth pointing out that all the meat the pregnant woman should avoid consuming is from male animals, and only the male of the species has the capability to beget, as we shall see. Here we also touch on concern with the very modern topic of maternal nutrition. 

Soranus, practising medicine under emperors Trajan and Hadrian, had already said in his Gynaecology that pregnant women should be challenged in their desires ‘for harmful things’, by telling them that what is harmful to the stomach is also harmful to the foetus ‘because the fetus obtains food which is neither clean nor suitable, but only such food as a body in bad condition can supply’.

If a parent was particularly blamed for inappropriate behaviour that negatively influenced the development of the baby, it was the mother. A handful of examples from both the very early and very late Middle Ages may illustrate this point. 

In the fifth century Nemesius, compiler of an influential tractate on the soul, also looked at child development, and with regard to the causes of unfavourable bodily temperament stated: ‘if the surroundings are dry, bodies become dry, if not all in the same way, and if a mother lives an unhealthy life and is luxurious her children will in consequence be born with a poor bodily temperament and wayward in their impulses.’

…Popularly disseminated notions on improper sexual conduct can also be found in religious literature aimed at what might be termed a mass-market: penitentials, preaching and sermon tracts. Here the argument based on sex and sin is expanded upon, and damaging factors such as pregnancy, lactation or menstruation are considered. 

Robert of Flamborough, in the Liber penitentialis (1208–13), warned that children conceived during pregnancy (disregard the biological impossibility for the moment), during menstruation, or before a previous child was weaned, would be lame, leprous, given to seizures, deformed or shortlived. Note that all three inopportune times Robert refers to are times that were believed to be infertile periods, in other words naturally contraceptive periods. 

With the absence of modern over-nutrition, in the past (as still in many traditional societies) the lack of nutrition influenced female fertility to the extent that the physical demands of breastfeeding on the body tended to prevent conception during that time. As we know from medieval childcare manuals, breastfeeding would ideally have continued until children were weaned at around two years of age. Conception during these two years was then unlikely. 

Many modern hunter-gatherer societies equally do not wean children until two years old, and have lower levels of calorific intake than Western women, so among such peoples births tend to be spaced out at two-year intervals. One could speculate that precisely because of the lack of conception during such times, which medieval people, especially women, may well have been aware of, they were forbidden by moralists, as intercourse then would have been for pleasure only and not for procreative purposes. 

In his Sermons, Berthold of Regensburg adds to such lists of physical deformities the dangers of deafness, mean spiritedness and demonic possession, again, potential disability and moral defectiveness in children is ascribed to their conception at forbidden times, to which Berthold adds the six weeks immediately after childbirth (yet another infertile period), and furthermore notes that nobles and burghers are less prone to such sins than the peasantry. In his sermon on matrimony, he writes: 

All the children who are conceived at such times you rarely will gaze at with a loving look; for it is either possessed by the devil, leprous, epileptic, humpbacked, blind, crippled, dumb, foolish or has a head like a mallet. … And this happens mainly to peasants and ignorant people. It does not happen to noble people and burghers in towns. 

A thirteenth-century French church synod proclaimed that the children conceived from illicit sex would be born humpbacked, crippled, or deformed in some way. From a fourteenth-century manuscript we have the usual prohibition of sexual activity during menstruation, lactation and pregnancy, and the prediction that children born from such unions would be leprous, lunatic or possessed.

 And an early fifteenth-century book of homilies, basing its knowledge on St Jerome, provides the full catalogue, stating that ‘children conceived during maternal menstruation would be lepers, maimed, unshapely, witless, crooked, blind, lame, dumb deaf and of many othre mescheues’. Of the three inopportune, even proscribed, times of conception, menstruation was singled out as particularly important to avoid if parents wanted to prevent the conception of impaired children. 

Menstruation was regarded as dangerous by scholastic authorities, using arguments in part derived from Aristotle. Aristotle had argued in Generation of Animals, IV, 3–5 that foetal aberrations should be blamed on a divergent movement of the female matter, and an imbalance of female matter with the formative sperm. 

While acknowledging that during the medieval period two competing and widely debated models of conception existed – the single-sex and the two-seed theories – it is, for the purposes of discussing medieval notions of birth defects, almost irrelevant to which theory a medieval authority subscribed. Misogyny was ingrained enough to find ample scope in both theoretical models for almost exclusive ‘blame’ on the woman. 

Broadly put, according to the single-sex model of natural science, the menses (or menstruum, female seed) accumulates gradually over each cycle as a kind of formless matter. Only the male seed has form itself and is pure maleness. The female simply receives the seed and nurtures it, but does not generate. By extension of this reasoning the female is of necessity defective; an idea that is theologically backed up by Genesis, where Eve’s creation out of Adam’s bent rib made Eve herself deviant from the male norm. 

The clearest expression of this kind of argument can be found in Albertus Magnus’ De animalibus, where, moving on from the premise of menses as formless matter, he reiterates the practical advice given by theologians and physicians alike that semen has the best chances of ‘forming’ the menses in the earlier part of the cycle. 

If conception takes place during a later stage of the cycle, however, there is a sliding scale of degradation and degeneration: having missed the ideal time for generating male offspring, the next best would be female children, hence only slightly deformed, followed by the severely defective (disabled) progeny, and lastly and worst no offspring at all – the horror vacui of medieval philosophy. It is worth just repeating this descending scale from perfect male, to slightly imperfect female, to certainly imperfect deformity, to nothing. 

Such notions are also apparent in medical texts, for instance the Lilium medicinae of Bernard de Gordon, where conception during menstruation is blamed for the birth of an epileptic child: ‘When a person is begotten during the time of menstruation or from unclean seed, or if the parents are epileptic, and if after his birth he falls into epilepsy, such a person does not seem curable.’ Another famous physician and Bernard’s contemporary, John of Gaddesden in his Rosa anglica, states similar things about the aetiology of congenital epilepsy.

 The effects of malconception could have a straightforward causal link, a rational explanation even. In discussing the origin of dwarfs, for example, Albertus Magnus describes a nine-year-old girl whom he had seen in Cologne who had not yet reached the height of a one-year-old boy. He followed the argument of Avicenna, which was perfectly scientific by the standards of the day, explaining that the lack of growth was due to the fact that at the moment of conception only a part of the paternal seed had reached the maternal uterus.

During the same century, writing c. 1276, Giles of Rome in his more general discussion of embryology De formatione corporis humani in utero holds a rather neutral opinion, stating blandly that although normally the male seed generates a male foetus from the menstruum, nothing in nature is so stable and fixed that things cannot go wrong sometimes, which is obvious from the fact that occasionally monsters are born with deformed members.

The medieval scientific approach was one that regarded all material creation as inherently imperfect, hence birth defects and congenital disability were not just individual markers on a sliding scale of imperfection, but also natural events to be expected.”

- Irina Metzler, Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture

[phoenixrisesoncemore]

Numenor, the Mighty and Frail

This Sunday The Tolkien Society (UK) is hosting an online seminar with the theme of ‘Numenor, the Mighty and Frail.’ Panels will begin at 6:30am EDT and last through early afternoon EDT. Each presentation has a 30 min slot and there are two 30 min breaks.

This seminar is FREE to attend. Go to: tolkiensociety(dot)org/events/seminar-2023/

Several of the scholars presenting on Sunday are people I know and who I know do very strong work (I’ve also gotten to see drafts or alternate versions of a few of these papers and am very excited to see the finished products!)

The Tolkien Society is also organizing another upcoming seminar, “Tolkien and Religion in the Twenty-first Century,” taking place in November of this year.

Presenting scholars and presentation titles for “Numenor, the Mighty and Frail” are below.

Putri Prihatini, “Sea Goddess Worship and the Power of the King: Parallel between Aldarion, Uinen, Mataram Sultanate, and Javanese “Queen of the Southern Sea””

Irina Metzler, “Dealing with the Dead: Nuances of ancient Egypt and medieval theology in Númenor”

Advait Praturi, “Darkness Alone is Worshipful: Discovering A Númenórean Theological Anthropology of Worship”

S.R. Westvik, ““I often dream of it”: Trauma and memory in the legacy of the Downfall of Númenor”

Sara Brown, ““Foretasting Death in Life”: Desire, the Fall, and Attempting to Return the ‘Gift’ of Ilúvatar”

Journeé Cotton, “‘All roads are now bent’: Ethical readings of the corporeality of Númenor”

Alpaslan Tandırcı, “Ecology of Imperialism: Environmental History for Númenor”

Erik Jampa Andersson, “The Akallabêth and the Anthropocene: Myth, Ecology, and the Changing of the Earth”

Kristine Larsen, “Monstrous (Im)mortality: Transhumanism and Ecocriticism in ‘Akallabêth’”

Tom Emanuel, “‘By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept’: Exilic Theology in the Akallabêth”

Chris Vaccaro, “‘And Númenor went down into the Sea’: the pleasure of self-dissolution and the masochistic jouissance of Westernesse”

Mercury Natis, “Seducer-Destroyer: Sauron’s Femme Fatale Sources and Their Role in the Númenor Narrative”

Clare Moore, “Elmar, the Experience of Captured Women, and Empires in Decline”

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

We need to expand our understanding of the medieval conception of what it means to be human and making space for disabled bodies allows us to do this. As Joshua Eyler explains, the lack of sources on disability in the Middle Ages has caused a gap in medieval sources, but that paucity is often overstated. Henri-Jacques Stiker argues that the real cause of this apparent lack is that scholars are looking in the wrong places. By viewing the Herdsman and Bisclavret’s wife as humans pushed into liminality by deformity or disability, we can begin to make space and find new places to explore disability in the Middle Ages. As Beth Tovey explains, “the visibility of sickness and impairment as a quotidian feature of medieval life … challenges the assumption that impaired bodies would automatically be conceived as separate and deviant.”  Approaching the current study in this way helps us to construct a more nuanced view of medieval humanity, in which there is a variety of ways to be a human and to inhabit a human body.

If one sets aside the terms “monster,” “beast,” or “animal,” there is no need to categorize these beings as representative of a single good or evil. And there is medieval precedence for understanding imperfect, or ugly, bodies as necessary parts of the universe. The first half of Augustine’s De natura boni, explains that all degrees of nature come from God and therefore are good. Augustine argues:

“In comparison with the greater beauty of the human form, the beauty of the ape is called ugliness. Now this deceives superficial observers as if the former were a good and the latter an evil; and they fail to notice in the body of the ape its proper limit, the equality of members on each side, the harmonious function of its parts.”

For Augustine, it is not a bad form, or a less handsome one, that causes problems but rather a form disordered in the universe, a form out of place. Ugliness is necessary in that it gives context to beauty; our understanding of goodness cannot exist without evil. Later in the tract he asks “who would be so foolish as to find fault with a creature of God?”

Augustine’s influence on medieval philosophers’ understanding of the world was profound, and most followed him in espousing differing degrees of beauty and goodness as integral to a balanced and harmonious universe. In her groundbreaking monograph, Disability in Medieval Europe, Irina Metzler sums up the core of this influence: “A universe which exhibits lower degrees of beauty and goodness is nevertheless a better universe than one which contained only equally good beings.” The existence of stratifications of good/evil and beautiful/ugly, regardless of their relation to each other, added to the medieval humans’ experience of the world around them.

From “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Disability and Deformity in the Writings of Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France,” Katherine Pierpont, Le Cygne, Fall 2018

[deagrad]

The Archaeology of Disability

Hi, my name is Dea, and I am a medieval archaeologist.

Hi, my name is Dea, and I am disabled in multiple ways.

Believe it or not, these two sentences do not preclude each other.

It’s 2013 and I’m at my first field experience.  For some reason, it comes up that I can’t drive.  “You can’t drive?” The lab manager stares at me.  “What do you mean, you can’t drive?”

“Well, I mean, I don’t really know how to.  I know the motions, I have driven, and have a driver’s license, but it’s not actually safe for me to drive in any place that has more traffic than the one-stoplight town I did my driving test in.”

“Well,” he says completely serious, “you have to learn how to drive.  If you really want to be a bioarchaeologist, you must know how to drive.”

During that same field experience, we’re chatting about grad school in bioarchaeology.  A couple of the students are already in or have completed graduate programs, but most of us are still in undergraduate programs.  “It’s really cut-throat,” the lab director says.  “You can’t show weakness.”

“Yeah,” the field director adds, “anyone who falls behind or shows some weakness is going to be pounced on, there’s no room for people who can’t handle the harsh and stressful environment.” 

“Unless you’re always on top of things, you shouldn’t even bother applying.”  The lab director then launches into a story about one of his MA students who had a family emergency one fall semester and wanted a letter of recommendation from him.  “I couldn’t write her a good one,” he confesses, “because I didn’t support her going on to a PhD program.  She nearly failed out during that semester, what if that happened during a PhD program?  There’s no place for people like that in PhD programs.”

“But it wasn’t her fault,” I timidly say.  I may not have family emergencies, but I am well-acquainted with the general feeling of getting lost during a semester.  “It was a family emergency.  And what about disabled people?”  What about me, was my unspoken question.

“Well, that’s not an excuse.” He shrugs, “They just shouldn’t be archaeologists.”

They just shouldn’t be archaeologists.

There were fifteen of us during that field program.  For some of us, it was their first time traveling abroad.  For many of us, this was our first field experience.  A couple of people weren’t planning on making careers in archaeology, but in other subjects where gaining experience in osteology would be helpful.  Some of were planning on applying to grad school that coming fall, some of us had a ways to go.  There were eighteen and nineteen year-olds to people over thirty.  We were atheists and Jewish and Christian students.  Some of us spoke other languages; some of us were monolingual. Most of us were American, though one was Australian.  We had a lot of different backgrounds and abilities, but there were two things that set me apart from the others.

1. I am a first-generation, low-income college student

2. I am disabled

The archaeology or bioarchaeology of disability is a growing field.  Back in 2013, Lorna Tilley had published a bit in the field, E. A. DeGangi was starting her career and stated (and still states) her interest in “the bioarchaeology of impairment”, and even the lab director himself had co-authored one of DeGangi’s papers on bioarchaeology and disability.  There was the origin of the field, Dettwyler’s “Can Paleopathology provide evidence of compassion,” and Irina Metzler had published The Disability in Medieval Europe in 2011.

In 2017, even more work is being done, combining the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history and disability studies.  But every time I read an article or book, there’s a tiny voice in my head that goes “if you don’t want disabled archaeologists, what gives you the right to talk about our experiences?”

There are articles, such as this one, that talk about the relationships between changelings and autistic children.  Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind talks about the construction of blindness in the Middle Ages.  Mental disorders such as ADHD have only existed officially since the 20th century, but people have been described with ADHD traits much earlier.  There is always the fear of anachronism, and people hesitate to label past people (including famous people) with various disabilities.

It’s not surprising, to be honest, for even modern Disability Studies seems to change its model every few years: is there a medical model of disability or a social one? Am I disabled because I have an impairment, because I am missing something “normal” people have? Or am I disabled because of the society I live in?  If I lived on a farm, would I be as impaired as I am as a graduate student?

Modern Disability Studies give us certain terminology, such as “able-bodied” that are troublesome themselves: physically, my body is in the range of normal, yet I am multiply disabled.  “Ableism” is a good, inclusive term in my opinion, because it doesn’t rely on physical or mental ability.  Functioning labels should be generally avoided, and there are certain communities that claim they are not disabilities at all, such as the Deaf Community and the growing trend in the Autistic community

The important criterion of modern Disability Studies is the fact that most Disability Studies scholars self-identify as disabled.  Just as it is increasingly rare to see cis men as Woman Studies scholars or cis, heteroromantic, and heterosexual scholars in Queer Studies, finding an abled Disability Studies scholar is a challenge.  (I should, however, point out that there is a big difference between Special Education and Disability Studies: the former in my experience is full of abled and often ableist scholarship.)   But when it comes to Disability Studies in the past, none of the main authors show any indication of being disabled.    

Of course, no one is required to out themselves.  However, I do find it interesting that so many historical disability scholars show absolutely no indication in their blogs, websites or work that they are disabled, that they chose this topic because it’s important to them as disabled academics, and not because they want to perform drive-by anthropology.

Anthropology and archaeology are full of decade long debates of privileged academics studying disadvantaged communities.  Our discipline was created by White European and American scholars who went into Native populations and studied them...and often completely misjudged or misinterpreted their cultures, which led to the continuing misinterpretation of these cultures that we are only now, in the last couple of decades, trying to fix.

So pardon me if I am a bit skeptical of the entire field of the (bio)archaeology of disability, particularly when people use “impairment” and disability interchangeably.  After all, disabled people just shouldn’t be archaeologists.

[medievaliz]

Hardcover copies of Irina Metzler’s Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100-c.1400 (2006) are selling (new) for $17.41 on Amazon.