A Social History Of Disability In The Middle Ages Cultural Considerations Of Physical Impairment Irina Metzler by Irina Metzler instant download after payment.

For a long time, as Jacques Le Goff pointed out, historians used to believe the human body had no history since it belonged to nature and not to culture. More recently, historians have recognised that the body does indeed have a history, and is even an integral part of history to the extent of shaping it—much as economic or social structures as well as intellectual or spiritual representations do—so that the body is simultaneously both the product and the medium.
While my previous book provided a theoretical framework to set the scene for discussions of disability in the Middle Ages, the aim here is to tease out from the many disparate sources some inkling of the ‘lived experience’. Normative texts, such as the natural-philosophical, medical, theological and hagiographical material, may provide the intellectual theory and tell us how non-disabled people thought about the disabled, but the economic, social and even the legal texts collected, analysed and discussed here go some way further in presenting a picture of what challenges a medieval disabled person may have encountered.