Accommodation, Medieval Style

I got a question in response to my recent post on the visibility of impairment. I didn't forget about it; I wanted to give it more thorough discussion than a comment usually warrants.

The question was for an example of the accommodation of a medieval impaired person. The situation I was referring to actually seems fairly common, so I've picked a representative case from the calendar of the Patent Rolls.

Nov. 19, 1412. Westminster.
Commission, by mainprise of Peter de Pole of the county of Derby and Robert Suthwell of the country of Hertford, to John Leventhorpe, esquire, of the keeping of the body of John son and heir of John Petbrigge, knight, an idiot, and all his lands in the counties of Essex and Huntingdon with reversions, to hold so long as the lands are in the king's hands for that cause, rendering to the king of the same John be proved an idiot before the council by due examination 20l. and finding competent maintenance for the heir, maintaining the houses and buildings and supporting all other charges.*

John Jr. here is an idiot (or whatever the editors decided was an idiot). I said in the previous post that I did not mean "accommodation" the way we use it in modern discussions. There's no ADA here. But John Jr. is an unusual situation, and because of the possibility that he would "waste" his lands (squander them away or alienate them from the family inheritance), his abnormality demanded that he be treated abnormally.

Briefly, John Jr. was given into the care of Leventhorpe, along with all of his lands and property - things that he had a responsibility for according to the laws of inheritance. It sounds cold and cruel and far from "accommodation," but I find it sensible, in theory. (How do we treat our idiots today? Often they are put into homes before their parents die, and rarely do they inherit, and almost never do they retain control of any inheritance they come into.) In this case, John Jr. retains titular rights to his inheritance: it's still his, he just can't control it. He isn't cast into the streets, as the common myth would suggest. He is given a guardian and his care is ordered and he is to live comfortably.

Sadly, we have few records, if any, that discuss what happens after an idiot is taken into guardianship. We don't know how common it was for guardians to ignore care instructions or act abusively. Very rarely, an idiot or an idiot's family and friends will bring a case forward that the guardian is acting outside his jurisdiction, but it's always he-said-she-said and politics inevitably clouds the reality.

However, it remains that an idiot's social group had to find a way to deal with his presence. That is what I meant by accommodation. They didn't ignore him, kill him, or cast him out of town. They created rules governing the care of such idiots and legal mechanisms to enact the rules. There are occasionally cases where people tried to act outside the standard rules, but once found out, the investigation starts right from the beginning.

Instances of physical impairment being accommodated are somewhat different, because the situations are more varied. Hopefully this will explain the general gist of my point, though. When we speak of accommodation in the modern sense, we often conflate it with "accessibility." We have to be careful: accommodation, especially in reference to the Middle Ages, is simply the process whereby a society deals with the presence of abnormality in its midst.

And that's what's the most important thing, I feel, when we speak of medieval accommodations. Impaired people still existed in society. They had a midst to be in.

* Calendar of the Patent Rolls. Henry IV, Vol. 4, pg. 453.

What we see and what we don't see

An offhand comment from one of my supervisors a few weeks ago has really stuck with me. At first it seemed rather trivial, but the more I contemplate it, the more I think it is important.

How much do we see of impairment in the Middle Ages? Equally important, how much do we not see?

If you ask almost any medievalist about mental impairment (aside from the Enlightened Ones like yourselves, who read this high quality blog, or Greg's), you're likely to get a response along the lines of "I'm not sure there's enough source material to even study that." That's the first response I got, at least, and I've heard it many time since. If you ask a non-medievalist, you will almost certainly be regaled with horror stories of Bedlam, chains, abandonment, changelings*, sin, and violence. You might, as well, hear stories of court fools or especial holiness attributed to fools.

These two responses embody the questions I posed above. In many ways, mental impairment and abnormality in the Middle Ages is invisible. Lunatics and idiots do not tend to be powerful or noteworthy. There are exceptions, but on the whole, madness tends to preclude importance. It is also, simply, hard to see. Mental impairment isn't visual the way the loss of a limb is, or leprosy, or palsy. It exists in the brain and its only external signs are secondary characteristics.

It's these secondary characteristics that have caught the attention of so many previous historians. By "secondary characteristics," I mean the motley of a court fool or the travelling circus of the ship of fools. In the popular imagination, we also see the raving, chained, whipped madman in Bedlam Hospital. These are highly visual portraits: we can easily conjure the image in our mind's eye.** They are the portrayals that have dominated the histories, but they are severely limited.

It's not possible that every mentally abnormal person could have lived such a life. Kings are not that plentiful, and the ship of fools and Bedlam Hospital are extremely late phenomena, and highly local. (In the case of the ship of fools, it's not even certain that it's a historical phenomenon at all.)

It is to the detriment of disability historians that they never looked beyond these manifestations. There are so many references to everyday men and women in various legal, ecclesiastical, medical, and literary sources that it would stun you. They are not particularly special men and women. They're not remarkable. Their impairments only warrant mention because they need accommodating.*** They are very difficult to visualise, and thus more difficult to empathise with. Less dramatic. More difficult to write about.

And yet, they are arguably the most valuable references we have. They represent an invisible majority. They are what is important if one wants to write about madmen and idiots. And the silence of the records is actually quite loud**** - they tell us that abnormality was not as abnormal as most assume. If idiocy was truly exceptional, it would be described in far more detail. What is unusual warrants discussion. What is commonplace needs only be mentioned in passing.

It is the commonplace, undramatic, everyday fool that I am concerned with. I want to know their history. Highly visual representations may have been easier for historians (and pseudo-historians) to write about, but the invisible needs a chance, now.



* The blame for this one belongs almost exclusively to Martin Luther. See: Goodey, C.F. and Tim Stainton. "Intellectual Disability and the Myth of the Changeling Myth." Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences. Vol. 37, 2001.
** I'm trying to vary the metaphors here, but I fear we are all going to be sick of them before the end.
*** Not in the modern sense, but simply that any abnormality requires special attention to ensure the smooth operation of a community.
**** I got tired of the visual metaphors and switched to aural.

Will our brave blogger commit to a series of posts?

Important matters first. I see that I have actually accumulated a small number of followers. Two of you I don't even know in real life! Hi! Thanks for tagging along on this intermittently-updated adventure!

There are two reasons I haven't been posting a lot of late. One, I've been kept quite busy with research and grant application writing (wish me luck). Two, I'm finding it hard to come up with witty and/or insightful things to say here that don't run me the risk of getting scooped. I can't afford that right now.

However, I still want to keep updating this thing, and I'm trying to work out a balance. So let's talk medieval disability.

Here I make the case for knowing Latin. If you want to study the Middle Ages, regardless of subject, I suggest you know Latin. I have been sufficiently indoctrinated by my time at Toronto that I believe this with my whole heart. And I would insist on it even more strongly for those studying disability.

Most of the published histories of mental abnormality have failed to accurately or even adequately represent the Middle Ages, and in no small part is this due to linguistic ignorance. (Another contributing factor is a complete unfamiliarity with the era in question, but that is a matter for another post.) These medical pseudo-historians and philosophical theorists simply did not have the skills to examine primary sources.

Part of what I've been exploring recently are the Close and Patent Rolls (private and public royal correspondence on various matters the king was interested in). I am hampered by the fact that the only published versions of these fascinating historical documents are calendars. Not the day/month/year sort: these calendars are edited translations of the original rolls. First (and this is something I will discuss in more detail), it forces scholars to rely on an interpretation. What any given word actually meant to the author of a medieval document is still a matter of some confusion. Second, they are edited versions - the editors only included what they thought was of import or interest. Both of these issues are compounded by the date the calendars were edited: the Victorian period.

The Victorian understanding of mental impairment was, to be blunt, childish. It was paternalistic and lacked nuance. There are scores of references in the calendars to "idiots." Which is helpful for identifying relevant cases, but tells us nothing of the medieval wording. All it tells a reader is that this case dealt with a person some Victorian editor thought fit his contemporary definition of "idiot." And it could mean anything. The other issue is that Victorian editors didn't blush at bowdlerising the text. Since I have not yet been able to visit the original manuscripts, I have no idea of knowing what scandalous, shameful, fascinating details were omitted from the calendars.

Now, I do not know of any text which discusses mental impairment and the Close and Patent Rolls (if you do, please tell me!), but the issue remains the same for nearly all histories of disability: reliance on translations. Previous attempts display only a rudimentary understanding of Latin, and to someone who is more capable, it is glaring and it can throw an entire book's scholarship into doubt.

Latin is important for this work. You can't assume that medievals used different words for different etiologies: they didn't medicalise disability in the modern way. Equally important, you can't assume that they used different signifiers indiscriminately, with no sense of differentiation between signifieds.* The only way to tease out some sense of meaning is to read it in its original language. There's simply no substitute.

And while we're at it, my life would be easier and my papers neater if I didn't have to translate every small passage.

I hope this short post has been informative, or at least thought-provoking. I have further issues with the state of disability scholarship in the twentieth century that I'd like to discuss, and perhaps I will. So if you don't see a post in the next week or so on seen and unseen disabilities and the primary sources employed, please do give me a poke and leave a comment to remind me.



* I better watch it, that is sounding dangerously deconstructionist. Kids, if someone offers you some Derrida, JUST SAY NO.

• SSHRC is on the move.
  
• The article Greg and I were writing on deafness has been pushed back because the scope of it got too big for us to give it an adequate treatment in the time allotted. But we're going to keep at it.
  
• I have to remember my other funding options.
  

I'm going to post a "Latin Tutor Available" sign in my house. There's a lot of beginners here this year, and I may as well see if I can come to an arrangement. Money is acceptable, but so is food or even trade in kind (any Anglo-Normanists out there?). I also really need to remember to submit my application to teach in the winter term.

As for research, I'm working with chronicles right now, and while I find them interesting, they're not particularly rich in the material I need. One reference here or there. Mostly they're more interested in calling opponents sinners and heretics rather than fools. But I do have two references so far, so maybe I will find more.

I'm not sure how I'm going to pull all this together. I've got my pastoral manuals and a heck of a lot of court cases, a couple chronical refs now, Margery, and Piers Plowman. Somehow this will all pull together into a single coherent thesis? I guess SSHRC is good practice for this.

Meanwhile, I really wish I had time to stop and do some secondary reading. There's a lot going around in the background that I need to sort out. I need to revisit my conceptual books. Time is such a fleeting thing. Perhaps I will beg an indulgence of my supervisors next meeting.

Language, Deafness, and Humanity

When we read medieval discussions on deafness, it's easy to judge. We are so used to knowing that deaf people are intelligent, rational human beings. We ask How could they have been so prejudiced?! How could they not realise people who can't hear are still people?!

Now imagine you're in a shop. In walks a tiny little Chinese woman (or a Filipino man, or a pair of Argentinian teenagers) and in broken English she asks you how much an item costs. You have a difficult time getting the answer through to her, and then she asks if you can hold it for her - but all you hear is accent and mumble. Your routine of ringing up items and moving the line along is broken. Be honest - what goes through your head?

If you're normal, you probably get kind of frustrated. And you wonder why she doesn't learn better English. You wish she'd just go away so you can handle the next customer. This person clearly wants something, but you have no idea what. You forget that back home, she was a trauma surgeon. How could she be, when she can't even make herself clear in a shop?

We all do it. All of us. It's a rare person who can endure a frustrating five minutes of garbled non-communication and at the end still have no pre-conceptions of the other person at all. Intellectually you know that the other person is a normal human being,* but the failure to communicate is so limiting that you forget.

Now imagine someone who cannot speak at all. Someone who has never spoken, and cannot hear you. Communication is made by awkward, goofy body language. To the best of your knowledge, no such person has ever learned language of any kind.

We take communication for granted these days. We have so many gadgets and resources, and we're used to the concept of sign language, at the least. Everyone can read and write, in a pinch. It's easy to forget the time when we had none of these modes of communication.


* And that if the situation was reversed, you'd look a right doofus, too. Probably worse.

Terminology

The most recent written work I've done (for a supervision) has left me with some odd thoughts.

I feel that in some way, we're re-writing the dictionary here. First, in the most simplistic way, those of us working on medieval disability are discovering nuances and usages that the dictionaries of medieval Latin never bothered specifying.*

Secondly, one of the more important mental adjustments we have to make is moving away from modern preconceptions and definitions. That means leaving behind all speculations that Leonardo da Vinci was autistic, and similar speculation, because it is simply not relevant, and makes it difficult to explore the actual medieval issues. When we label Leonardo as "autistic," we put him in a box alongside all the baggage that we carry with the diagnosis today. We automatically begin seeing his life in that lens, nevermind how he experienced his life, or how his contemporaries viewed him.

But that leaves a vacuum of terminology. What do we call people who displayed an abnormal mentality to their contemporaries? I have moved away from "fools," because that seems to be more of a literary/artistic term. More commonly, I come across "idiot" or "imbecile," idiota or imbecillens, but the problem is that those words carry modern-day baggage as well. A hundred years ago (even 50 years ago) they carried clinical connotations before moving into the common speech of pejorative. I have begun using them, generally as a strict translation of what's on my page.

These words have become so taboo in scholarship of disability, though. They have become the disability studies equivalent of "the N-word." (Fortunately I do not have to use the word "retard," because that might get too awkward, even for me.) It is a strange feeling, transgressing these lines we've drawn. Yet I see no other way to allow the texts to speak for themselves. It is easier among fellow medieval scholars, who understand the methodology we are stuck with, but quite tricky when facing modern disability scholars.

Sometimes there is a thrill in the transgression, in throwing a taboo word at someone, but sometimes it just feels weird.




* There is a LOT more to the word lunaticus than simply "madman," for example. Note the luna stem...

An Assortment of Odds and Ends

I think there's something of a shit-disturber in me. It's just a polite shit-disturber. I love the thought of publishing something that could get people all in a tizzy. I simply adore the fact that people have built a tenuous house of cards to house the history of disability in the Middle Ages, and we are taking it gingerly apart, card by card. Eventually someone will give a lecture or publish a paper and the whole thing will come tumbling down. And people will be aghast at what we've done.

Then - then - we can start building a new house in earnest. Those of us in the little niche understand each other, but until we can definitively enact a paradigm shift we will just be that group of weirdos in the corner.

We'll know the house is tumbling when people outside the community start getting disturbed by what we write. We'll know the cards are all on the floor when people stop asking us "Why bother?"

But I think that's enough of that particular metaphor. I just love the challenge. I love seeing it happen, helping make it happen.

The library at York has been helpful with this, especially the Minster Old Library (pre-1800 books). I'm surprised anew each time I go looking for an obscure fifteenth century text and it pops up in the catalogue system. I just wish I could get some photocopies or even digital pics. But the spines are sometimes delicate and the photos mean licencing issues, so I look forward to many days of transcribing. (One of my current projects has 11 folios dedicated to the topic! ELEVEN!)

In unrelated news, I booked my Christmas flights today. I found a very good price and good dates, and you just can't beat that!

I really am lucky

You know how people are always telling you to make sure you get a job you love? "Find something you love and then find someone to pay you to do it" is the best elucidation of the concept I've ever heard.

Well you know what? I do. I am head-over-heels in love with what I do. I can barely think of anything that excites me more. Here I am, making discoveries, thinking things no one ever has before, seeing texts history has just passed over... By pure chance (or perhaps divine providence, I am in the incredible position of being on the front edge of a whole new field of medieval studies. It's wide open spaces, baby.

On the professional activities front, I am in-process for actually publishing some stuff. Nothing is certain yet (except for the book review which I really ought to get my rear in gear about), but it's a good feeling. The pressure to publish, even when you're still a student, is intense. One item is a revision of the Margery Kempe paper I gave at the York-Norwich conference, and the other is shaping up to be a killer article for the Journal of Fifteenth Century Studies. I can't say more about it right now, so you will just have to take my word for it. But really, it's awesome. Greg and I have been geeking out about it for the past couple days, which is what spurred this post initially.

And while we're at it, I've gotten my first submission for my k'zoo 2009 session, which is cool. I should write something brief up as well, for form's sake. And also so that I know what I plan to do.

And that's about the state of the nation at the moment.

WOOHOO

Today: good supervision! Very good!

I made good points, I had LOTS of material. More than they expected, it seems (thank you!).

Also, I had a brainwave regarding the records, hospitals, care, and silence. I'm going to London today for a couple days, so remind me to share when I get back, Greg. Also, I was informed that there's an MA student here doing a thesis on idiots in the Patent Rolls. It's like pulling teeth, sometimes.

Have a good couple days!

What's Been Happening

In short form, "artistic differences" with my advisors. A large part of this is due to my own stubbornness, I admit. I have such a disinterest in the literary facet of things that is York's speciality (if you like Chaucer, this is a good place for you) that the dual-discipline gig here is rough on me. And yet, I don't really have the training for archaeology or art history, either. And I'm not "trained as a historian," so single-discipline is out.

However, it does appear that we have reached a compromise. I have been digging through a mountain of legal records for the past while (a workload drastically reduced by the kindness of my Colleague). I've also been doing a bit of reading into jurisdiction disputes - the Church and the State were constantly squabbling over who had jurisdiction.* The question of wills and testamentaries is an odd one - they appear in both sets of records. But I digress.

My attendance at the Leeds IMC was not unprofitable, as I scored a copy of The Sign Languages of Poverty and a CD-ROM version of The Parliament Rolls of England (fully searchable in BOTH official languages**), as well as attending a certain reception, wherein I found a reference to senile priests in a display volume and got to chat with a some very nice and informative people. Also, the coffee service is better at Leeds than Kalamazoo.

My digital camera has become my new research tool in the world of non-lending libraries. Naturally, I do not subject rare and delicate books to the camera, but for hardy year-2000 hardcovers? No guilt. It's cheaper than photocopying, if you have a decent hand.

I look up at my bookshelf, and I begin to understand where the professors get the huge shelves and shelves of books that fill their offices. Slow, gradual accumulation. It's neat, too. I am developing a rather good library of the history of foolishness and insanity.*** It's neat. I'm becoming my own library.

Oh, other good news! The Disease, Disability, and Medicine in the Middle Ages conference was a winner! It was simply fantastic. There were so many perspectives and subjects! I can't believe that anyone could ever say "Oh, there's nothing to say there." There is SUCH a glut of things to talk about in the field. The paper that was the most valuable in terms of my own research was "Bones of Contention: Some issues surrounding the use of human remains in the study of disease and disability," presented by postgrads L. Craig and K. Hemer. It reminded me (Oh how did I manage to forget??) that burial is a religious practice. Also, it was an excellent example of palaeopathology put to good use. P. Mitchell's paper, "Gastrointestinal Disease in the Crusades," made me glad all over again that I've gone vegetarian. Nothing spoils my appetite for meat like the thought of intestinal parasites. T. Jones' paper on distant-travel warefare and the limitations unfamiliar water and climate would have imposed on armies was extremely interesting. Really, all the papers that were presented were great.

I also connected with some great people. I got to meet Irina Metzler, who is GREAT conversation, and fun as well as brilliant. The grad student population was well represented, and it seems there may be another medieval disability PhD at York in the relatively near future (WOOT). I had coffee with a fascinating scholar from Oxford (he also taught in Canada!) after the conference officially ended. All in all, it could scarcely have been a cooler conference.

Plus, I had Turkish Delight ice cream. It's exactly as awesome as it sounds. (I had lavendar ice cream yesterday, and it was equally divine.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England and a glass of sloe gin and tonic.



* CSI: Canterbury, anyone?
** You know you're Canadian when...
*** Except I don't have a copy of Foucault. So sue me.

York-Norwich 2008

Well, as of tonight, I have finished with my conference paper for the York-Norwich Postgraduate conference. I've been wrestling with it for two weeks, but I think it has been whipped into a credible paper (with the help of certain editors).

I'm actually quite pleased with it, and I think it has the potential for wider dissemination than simply this minor conference. We will see what comes of it.

I feel like I have managed to find a place for Margery Kempe in all this. Things could be worse.

"The doctors told us you'd never amount to anything, Jane. But look around..."

I have realised some of the reason I am so intent on the specific project I want to do. Not just that it naturally combines all my nerdy interests. Not just that I'm happy to have a clear picture and am reluctant to go back to the drawing board.

Those who've been reading my blog for a while might remember the post I wrote for a friend who recently died, a woman named Alia. l'Arche, for those unfamiliar with it, is a network of intentional communities centred around men and women with developmental disabilities. You don't go to work at l'Arche. You go to live at l'Arche. Not just "live" in the sense of sleeping and eating there - you go to live life in all its complexities, joys, and sorrows. The point of l'Arche is to be a friend, to learn from the disabled core members, to allow yourself to simply be human. It is not a "job" you can leave unchanged.

I was only there at l'Arche Daybreak for two four-month terms, hardly any time at all in l'Arche terms. But those eight months sparked an interest in disability as a concept, a social force, an academic study. Some of the earliest books on disability I read, in the community's library, opened my eyes to the reality that people with intellectual impairments were (are) often treated differently, even prejudicially. I realised that it was (is) common practice (especially in certain protestant denominations) to deny baptism to mentally disabled children and adults.

I read A Place to Hold My Shaky Heart, a small book of mini-biographies of some of the core members in the community. In it was the story of Carol, a woman who I was living with at the time. When Carol was born, she wasn't baptised. She was placed in a large government institution instead. No one bothered to teach her to talk. When she came to Daybreak (in her 40s, I believe), she still could not talk. One of the other core members in her new house taught her to sing "Happy Birthday" (an excellent song for any occasion), and she learned a few other words. Eventually, the people living with Carol decided she should be given the opportunity to be baptised. I honestly do not remember how they discerned the answer, but I can tell you from experience that "non-verbal" people are perfectly capable of expressing themselves, if you know how to listen. Carol was baptised, and she was radiant. She had finally been welcomed into the community that should have been her birthright. She knew that she was no longer on the outside. Now, I've just paraphrased an entire chapter of a book, and if anyone was moved by my clumsy retelling, I highly recommend the whole book.

Mike and Francis are two men I lived with as well. They, and other members of the Daybreak community, are the altar serves and Eucharistic ministers at the community chapel, the Dayspring. Services at the Dayspring are unlike any other. In a world where an autistic child can be barred from his church, people at the Dayspring are welcome to wander, to cry, to wail, to laugh, to dance, and to pray aloud as they see fit. They occupy places of respect and honour.

One final story. During my first term at Daybreak, I lived with a woman named Jane. She was stubborn, loud, opinionated, and she was my sunshine. She drove me nuts, many times, but I still consider her one of my dearest friends. There is not time or space here for me to describe how she changed my life. I remember her 59th birthday, though. In this house, it was customary that the food part of a birthday celebration be followed by an exodus to the living room, where everyone gathered would have a chance to celebrate the birthday person. A memory, a prayer, a story of how a person had been changed, anything was welcome. The room was packed, with people sitting on the arms of the couch, standing in the doorway, sitting on the floor, and after we'd been around the room, it was her father's turn to speak. He told us how when Jane was 4, the doctors had told him she would never amount to anything or be anything, and he would be best off sending her to an institution. Not knowing any better, and trusting the doctors, he did so. "But look around," he said. "Look at all the people whose lives you've touched, Jane. Look how important you've become."

These people made me who I am. Their lives and stories have been the inspiration for my academic ideas. It is their exclusion and marginalisation, followed by their inclusion and centring, that prompted me to ask "What happened in the medieval period? Carol, would you have been baptised, then? Would the Daybreak core members be offered the Eucharist, as they are now?"

This project isn't just academic curiosity, for me. It is answering a deeply personal, and even spiritual question. The story is important.

My dear Daybreak friends, this is just one more small part of your legacy.

Look, Ma, I'm famous!

Round Two in the exciting news of Alison's academic life: my own guest post at In The Middle.

Limbo - I can't go any lower!

More like, I refuse to go any lower. Raise that stupid bamboo pole higher, please!

Okay, enough with the metaphors. I've been having advisory issues. J and N are both wonderful people, but our interests, we have found, are just a tad too far apart.

My interests have always been in religion, and I've always found Church Law interesting, as much as I knew about it. Teenage exposure to catechetical debate matured with my interactions with David and our Berthold/Hermes/Thomas of York* project. Even the incomprehensible Philosophy of the Mind course added to it.

So to me it is rather natural that I be drawn to philosophy, Church law, and pastoral manuals. When I applied to York, I did not realise that the department had very little theological focus. That part is my fault - every grad student should be very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the schools they apply to. I was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of York - and medieval disability studies practically defines "interdisciplinary."

So today I met with P, who is both a wonderful fellow and quite knowledgeable about the things I need to learn. We need to have another meeting - one with J and N, most likely - and try and sort this out. In the meantime, I will be busily proving myself as a worthy student for P to supervise, as he is understandably leery about just accepting someone "off the street," so to speak.

So I'm still in limbo, which is not exactly a fun place to be. Hopefully we can sort this out. I hope that as we branch out into into a widely-accepted (or at least widely-known) discipline, fewer students of medieval disability will feel this misfit syndrome.

I hazard the guess that students of medieval disability have an extra struggle for acceptability. Those who come to the field later on, as established (or at least accredited) scholars only have to worry about publishers and peer-reviews. Negativity on those fronts can be damaging, but it likely won't derail an entire career. As students, our advisors aren't familiar with our background, goals, or methods, because they aren't disability scholars themselves, and they really haven't even encountered much in the way of literature. And that's nobody's fault - it's just a factor of an emerging discipline. But they are responsible for our degrees, and we need to struggle extra to make ourselves comprehensible. As more of us fight our ways through and become available to mentor or supervise our own students, I hope it will change. If there are any professors in the field reading this, I tip my hat to you. It's because of you that this isn't harder still - keep up the good work.


* Hey, guess what? I'm in York! It really doesn't lose its thrill.

It figures.

I'm off to return some library books today, but due to some post-travel confusion I found myself hungry and having a free hour on my hands. So I went down to Subway (very nice staff, and the best breakfast value hands down), and I decided while I was sitting there with my free tea I would look at the library books I was about to return.

Barbara Swain's Fools and Folly was about what I would expect for a book published in 1932, and does have a number of interesting sources in the endnotes. I especially appreciate the citations from the Patrologia Latina, because that is not a beast I want to just start wading through. Nevertheless, the book suffers from the classic "disability = sin" problem, and it seems to me that Swain got the causal relationship backwards: one is not declared a heretic or sinner because one is seen to be a fool, one is a fool because one is a sinner. I.e., only an idiot (in our modern figurative sense) would act contrary to God's Law. I think this usage of the word "fool" is indeed highly figurative. She also discusses the Ship of Fools and the Feast of Fools, generalising quite a lot from a small handful of sources.

The other book, Ronald Finucane's Miracles and Pilgrims is quite excellent, and I sincerely wish I didn't have to give it back to the library today. He addresses the issue of the plurality of the medieval church, and that the small little parish of St. Margaret in Little Tiny Village is not the same Church as the Vatican. Catholicism has never been completely "top down", despite the importance of the hierarchy. There is an element of "bottom up" as well, and a great many people somewhere in the middle. This "middle Church" is where I find myself the most intrigued when it comes to disability.

There are important "top down" texts which treat with disability (Gratian's Decretals, for example, or the Fourth Lateran Council); and there are the "bottom up" parish rolls which recorded the active life of a particular religious community; and then there are the "middle" texts of the penitentials, which draw on Church Law, academic philosophy influenced by Plato, Aristotle, and Muslim philosophers, and the practical concerns of pastoral work. Perhaps that is why I am so interested in them. They're the middle ground of the discussion. I think I am going to cut this off here, because I want to develop these ideas further before committing them to the public space.

It figures (to go back to the title) that I would have these awesome thoughts the day I go to return the book. Hello, photocopier!

Meanwhile, I am now actually employed, and I have my first real shift on Saturday! Go me!

Also, watch this space for exciting news* in the world of Alison's academic career!

* YMMV.

Kalamazoo Round-up, Day 1!

I slept in.

The book sales start at 8am Thursday morning, and since I did not intend to buy much this year (AHAHAhahaha...) I decided not to get up and fight my may through the crowds of people angling for the display-copy discounts. At 10am, though, I headed off to my first session, (Ab)normal Societies, which was pretty good. Before this, I had never seen a lecture delivered via sign language, and watching how that worked was pretty cool (though I felt bad for the interpreters who didn't know the Latin terms we were throwing around). I'm glad I was actually paying attention to the presider when she introduced the first speaker, because I heard her say he was going to be attending the University of York soon. Hey, that's my school! I am usually very quiet during Q&A, because I am shy, but afterwards I introduced myself to the speaker, Greg (who I have already introduced to you), and to another scholar in the audience. (We had a nice discussion of insanity and Judaism, and I'm eagerly awaiting translation of his book, because it sounds fascinating.)

Lunch was all kinds of fail. The vegetarian entree was half of a strawberry-nut-maple wrap, and even though I was annoyed that they were serving me dessert and not a proper meal, I made sad eyes at the serving lady and she snuck me another half. The soup was good, though. Somewhere around lunch time, I was making my way around the book rooms, when David came running up to me with a copy of Sandra Billington's A Social History of the Fool: "Alison, look what I found! There was only one, and I grabbed it right away! Here! I'm not telling you how much it cost, and anyway I get reimbursed by the university."* This is why he is called Excellent David.

After lunch we went to an awesome presentation on catapults, put on by three high school students and their teacher. They had spent the past two years researching and constructing a miniature medieval catapult. I have to say, those kids had guts. They were presenting to a roomful of the people whose books they'd used as research. And even though it was obvious they didn't know how to pronounce all the words they used (tree-tises and tray-buckets), they used them correctly. I was already feeling pretty exhausted, so partway through, I left and had a nap. I'm told that the rest of the presentation was just as good, and by the end everyone was trading tips and problem-solving back and forth.

I slept through the next session, too. It had been a busy week, I guess.

I made it back downstairs in time for the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages. We are reaching critical mass, people. Medieval disability studies is beginning to organise itself and by next year's k'zoo, we will be out there kicking down doors and demanding to be considered a legitimate field of our own. It was very refreshing, being in a room full of scholars who cared about the same thing. Validation is a marvellous thing.

Dinner was better than lunch, I think.

After dinner, I am sure I went to a session, but it slips my mind. Then it was time for the open bars - and the Congress specialises in open bars. If you want to, you can drink for free from about 5pm until the booze runs out at 10 or 11. The University of Toronto's reception is especially popular, and it was there that I ran into Greg again - and this time, we had a long and hilarious discussion. Rachel, the scholar who had organised the session that morning, helped to translate for us, but it got difficult as we got drunker and more voices joined in. Still, she did an admirable job, and I think the highlight for me was trying to explain Screech and its customs.

At some point I wandered off to ask David if we were going to be playing Latin Scrabble that night (so I could invite Greg and Rachel, if they wished), but I got waylaid by an interesting discussion with a scholar from Saskatchewan and by the time I made it to David, almost everyone else had gone to bed.

We still played Latin Scrabble, though, and I kicked everyone's butts. We discovered the next morning that I had actually won the Wednesday night game as well, on a technicality because I went out first. But then I went to bed.

* Why won't someone reimburse me for my book purchases? Sigh. I suppose I have to get a degree and a job, first.

Good news, everybody!*

I promise I will put a Kalamazoo Roundup post up soon. I just got back to England yesterday, though, and I already had my first orientation shift at my new job and I have an advisor meeting tonight - cross your fingers and hope we can work things out, people! I really like it here and I don't want to either leave or give up on the dissertation I want to do.

But, on to the good news! I got back and in my mailbox was the results from the University of Toronto's PhD-level medieval Latin exam. And I passed!

I PASSED!!

And now, back to the Plan of Study, and I really will fill you all in on the exciting things happening in the world of Medieval Disability Studies soon.


* It's a funny title if you imagine it said with Professor Farnsworth's voice.

A new and emerging field!

While I have a TON of things to write, seeing as Kalamazoo and pre- and post-Kalamazoo have been just wild, I don't have time at the moment because I am still at home. Frankly, seeing my family, friends, and fiancé is far more important to me than the Internets.

However, I will use this opportunity to introduce you all to Greg, who is an excellent fellow I met at Kalamazoo. Greg is also studying medieval disability, and has just started a blog of his own. He's a cool guy, go check it out!

End/Beginning of Term

Tomorrow marks the end of Week 1 of the summer term here at York. This week and next week feature no classes, but all the exams from the previous term. I'm not sure why they don't do them right after term, when it's all fresh. Either way, I wrote my palaeography exam today (because I promised I would), and I think that's the last exam for me. I have more fun studying to research than to take an exam.

However, this means I can now set up another advisory meeting, and I'm not feeling too bad about it. I should have ~4,000 words to say about St. Katherine of Alexandria, ~3,000 words to say about the vocabulary of foolishness in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin, a lecture abstract about Margery Kempe submitted to an upcoming conference, and newly-revised arguments about why I want to move away from literary studies. I'd like to think that's not too shabby.

I will probably make a visit to the library in Toronto one day while I'm home, since it's orders of magnitude bigger than the library at York. I may be on vacation, but I owe it to myself not to pass up the opportunity.

Kalamazoo is fast approaching, and I'm as excited as ever. I do hope Irina Metzler's book on medieval disability can be ordered from Routledge at the conference discount, but we'll just have to see.

Philosophia siue sapientia?

Today I'm sitting down to write my abstract for my Margery Kempe paper. All I have to do is bang out 200 words of what I plan to write, and then I can forget her for a month or two. Longer, if I decide to go with the long-established custom of writing a paper the week before it's due to be presented.

I'm also starting to assemble my thoughts on St Katherine of Alexandria, of whom a half-dozen vitae were written in late Medieval England. She was pretty popular, and remarkable for passages where she asserts her right to rule in her own right. Relevant to me, she gets into an argument with Emperor Maxentius, who waxes "wroth and wod" several times. The language used to describe Katherine's wisdom and the emperor's great anger is very interesting.

In the Legenda Aurea version, there is a fascinating digression on the types of wisdom and how they all apply to Katherine. It's almost Scholastic in tone and the way is neatly divides and categorises the species. All of a sudden, I feel the need to consult with David, and I'm blessing the times in the past we've talked about Scholastic philosophy, and also the Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers, which this passage also reminds me of.

It's strange. As much as I despise doing philosophy, I'm absolutely drawn to it in contexts like this. I'm far more interested in what this passage is doing here than I am by the rest of the story. Given the context of 13th century English hagiography, what the heck is "Philosophia enim siue sapientia diuiduntur in theoricam, praticam et logicam" doing in a life of an early-Church martyr? Why? Now I'm actually excited to have read these stupid vitae.

And finally, I'm a couple days late on this one, but check out this strip from the awesome comic Get Medieval. It's totally about my research! Woo!