Fools and idiots?: Intellectual disability in the Middle Ages

by Irina Metzler, Walton Schalick (Series Editor), Irina Metzler

This is the first book devoted to the cultural history in the pre-modern period of people we now describe as having learning disabilities. Using an interdisciplinary approach, including historical semantics, medicine, natural philosophy and law, Irina Metzler considers a neglected field of social and medical history and makes an original contribution to the problem of a shifting concept such as 'idiocy'.
Emphasising the issues with imposing modern definitions of what has variously been called cognitive, intellectual or mental disability onto the past, this book analyses a wide range of medieval and modern material. In order to explore how the names and words used to describe people also influenced their social and cultural treatment, this book looks at what the medieval equivalents to our modern scientific or psychiatric experts had to say about intellectual disability, and by uncovering how medieval normative texts shaped ideas of idiocy and folly, this study reconstructs what the legal and social implications of such concepts were. The book demolishes a number of historiographic myths and stereotypes surrounding intellectual disability in the Middle Ages and suggests new insights with regard to 'fools', jesters and 'idiots'.
Fools and idiots?: Intellectual disability in the Middle Ages will be required reading for anyone studying or working in disability studies, history of medicine, social history and the history of ideas.

Genres: Disability

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2016

About the author

Dr Metzler is a Research Fellow in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Swanswa, Wales.

Metzler studied at Reading University for all three academic qualifications, from BA via MA to a PhD thesis on disability in the Middle Ages (kindly supported by a bursary from the Department of History at Reading). After that she was honorary research fellow at the university of Bristol, first in the Department of History, then three years in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, which were followed by an honorary research fellowship at Swansea's Centre for Medieval and Modern Research, MEMO. After she secured a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship (2012-14) and subsequently a Wellcome Trust University Award (2014-19), Irina became a full-time research member of staff at Swansea. Her interests lie primarily in physical, sensory and intellectual disability in the Middle Ages, but also in perceptions of the natural world in medieval culture, medieval travel and exploration, with knowledge of geography and anthropology. She is also engaged with the knowledge economy in medieval and modern times, interactions between history of ideas and history of education, and concepts of heritage in the past.

Reviews

[bird]

a lot of research-- as always, i wish there was more coherent and connected cultural analysis of what we know and don't know, particularly leading up to some big swings in the "reconsiderations" final section. i think it could have used more research NOT specifically on legal or medical understandings of ID but instead on medieval cultural norms/expectations and how they COULD have affected people with ID. occasionally uses the r-word as medical terminology and at one point contradicting a medieval belief that people with ID are "harmless except to themselves" cites the dsm 5's description that particularly people with "severe IDs" can be "aggressive and violent"-- wild, particularly in light of how deliberate it is at other times that our modern conceptions of ID are within our modern contexts & treatment! didn't love it.