Metzler, Irina. (2006). Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about physical impairment during the high Middle Ages, c. 1100-1400. New York: Routledge. Hardcover 0-415365-03-1, 355 pp., $150.

Reviewed by Edward Wheatley, Loyola University Chicago

This meticulously researched, theoretically informed book focuses on an era of European history that has received almost no scholarly attention in disability studies. Metzler, a research fellow in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Bristol (U.K.), sets out to write "an outline of medieval cultural attitudes toward physical impairment," limiting herself to somatic and sensory conditions. Her work disproves many of the assumptions that non-medievalist disability studies scholars have made about the Middle Ages and provides a far more nuanced picture of medieval disability history.

Although initially Metzler's first chapters may appear to cover only familiar theoretical material (e.g.,, Goffman, Girard, Foucault), she actually analyzes and challenges many of the "presentist" notions that have become accepted in the field, modifying them to suit her medieval subject matter. She espouses the definitions of "impairment" as physical phenomenon vs. "disability" as social construct that are integral to the social model, mainly because the constructionist view of disability as a culture's response to impairment is most clearly operative under the medical model of disability, which did not exert hegemonic control over impairment in the Middle Ages as it has during the past two centuries. Metzler is wisely cautious about searching for disability in a largely pre-clinical era when impairment was much more a part of everyday life.

In Chapter 3, "Medieval theoretical concepts of the (impaired) body," Metzler demonstrates that medieval Christians did not necessarily equate disability with punishment for sin; in New Testament episodes of Jesus miraculously curing impairments, he makes this connection less frequently than not, and such ambiguity also informs medieval religious discourse. Existing alongside this discourse were medieval medical writings and natural philosophy, the subjects of Metzler's fourth chapter. Medieval medicine included "religious, metaphysical, or supernatural elements" alongside some nascent "scientific" theories about impairments, many of which were originally derived from Galen. Metzler reaches the conclusion that on the whole, "textbook-derived medieval medicine" had less to offer people with impairments than "social medicine and alternative medical practices" that related to particular occupational impairments or general public health.

Although Metzler does not claim to be writing a social history of disability, she comes close to doing so in her lengthy final chapter, "Medieval miracles and impairment." Hagiographic literature may strike modern readers as an odd place to find representations of impairment, but in fact the texts provide relatively detailed representations of people with a wide variety of impairments, details that were paramount in proving that the cures qualified as miracles. Metzler states that she "treat[s] the descriptions of people's impairments as reflecting 'real' lived experience, while being aware that the narratives of their cures may be part of the 'use of miracle stories as metaphor'" (emphasis hers). She uses accounts of miracles at the shrines of eight saints in locations from England to St. Gall (and she reproduces synopses of the miracles in various forms, some more helpful than others, in the appendix). Metzler devises taxonomies that cut across the groups of miracles: for example, she compares the transportation and guidance used by impaired people to reach different pilgrimage sites; discusses the percentages of types of impairment that were cured at certain sites (physical and visual impairment were generally the most common); points out the frequency with which people with impairments were called "defective" (only rarely) or a "burden" (also rarely); and summarizes instances in which the saints' relics punish sinners by giving them impairments. And yes, she even discusses impairments as disabilities when texts specifically mention activities that an impaired person could not undertake. The inability to work tops this list, and thus Metzler demonstrates that even in pre-capitalist culture well before the Industrial Revolution, the perception of lack of productivity played a role in the construction of disability.

For all its accomplishments, this 60-page chapter—a third of Metzler's text, and the heart of her book—does not reward the efforts of readers who follow it from beginning to end: it simply contains too much information in its lists of examples, and it is also repetitive inasmuch as a miracle can reappear (justifiably) in several of Metzler's taxonomies. The value of the chapter lies both in the taxonomies themselves as ways to consider various aspects of impairment, and in the possibility of gleaning numerous examples of a particular impairment by using the book's very thorough index. In the latter case, readers can then turn to the appendix to read a description of the impairment or to find a complete bibliographic reference to it elsewhere.

Disability in Medieval Europe is a unique, indispensable resource for students and scholars searching for a comprehensive overview of disability and impairment in medieval western culture.